• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.226-233
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• 2019

Given that English grapheme is realized as five different American English vowels [ʌ, ju, ʊ, u, ə], the purpose of the current study is to examine Korean learners' perception and production of English grapheme and training effect on words with . Thus, the current study conducted pretest, training, and posttest for 31 Korean university students on 24 English words with . The overall results showed that the participants' perception and production accuracy was significantly improved in the posttest, thus indicating training effect on both perception and production. However, it was not the case that all five different vowels demonstrated training effect. In perception the accuracy rates of [ʌ], [ju], and [ə] were improved after training whereas those of [ʊ] and [u] were not. In production [ʌ], [ʊ], and [u] did not show training effect. These results indicate that the Korean participants had difficulty distinguishing between tense [u] and lax [ʊ] both in perception and production. In particular, the Korean participants tended to replace lax [ʊ] with tense [u] in production. This is because tense [u] is the best match to Korean [u] in acoustic measurements, so that tense [u] is easy for the Korean participants to pronounce than lax [ʊ]. Also, English [ʌ] tended to be mispronounced as [u]-quality vowels such as [u] and [ju], which is due to the spelling . The Korean participants also showed errors which insert [j] after alveolars [t, d, n, s], which runs against yod-dropping in American English. They also deleted [j] after labials and velars, which is due to the absence of orthography in the target words. Finally, pedagogical implications were discussed based on the findings of the current study.