• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.186-191
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The overall result showed that the proportion of perception accuracy of the target consonants was rather low, amounting to only 55%. There was also a positional effect since the accuracy rates for perceiving the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate of the target consonant identification was higher in intervocalic position before stress (70%) and initial onset position (67%) than in intervocalic position after stress (45%) and final coda position (36%). Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except intervocalic position after stress. The perception patterns were accounted for by the markedness and perceptual factors in conjunction with stress location.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.788-791
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations. The results showed that there was a strong positional effect since the accuracy rates of the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate for the target consonants was higher in the stressed intervocalic position and initial onset position than in the unstressed intervocalic position and final coda position. Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except the unstressed intervocalic position. This is unexpected in markedness theory given that fricatives are assumed to be more difficult to learn than stops.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.455-464
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• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.