A Study of the use of allophonic cues in the perception of English word boundaries by Korean learners of English

한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 단어 경계 인지 시 변이음 단서 사용 연구

  • 장수영 (숭실대학교 영어영문학과) ;
  • 박한상 (홍익대학교 사범대학 영어교육과)
  • Received : 2011.08.23
  • Accepted : 2011.09.21
  • Published : 2011.09.30

Abstract

This study investigates how Korean students employ acoustic-phonetic cues in perceiving word boundaries of near-homophonous English phrases. For this study, 60 Korean college students participated in the experiment of discriminating word boundaries for 42 pairs of stimuli comprising the allophonic cues of aspiration and glottal stop. Results were analysed in terms of the correctness of responses and the correlation between correctness and confidence. Results showed that stimuli pairs of the glottal stop cue give a higher correctness but those of aspiration a relatively lower correctness. Comparison of the results of this study with those of the previous studies of English and Japanese speakers showed that Korean and Japanese speakers of English give a substantially lower correctness than native speakers of English, while Korean learners of English as a foreign language provide a lower correctness than Japanese speakers of English as a second language.

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