This study investigates Korean learners’ perception and production of English liquids /l/ and /r/, attempting to find which of them is perceptually similar to the Korean liquid /ㄹ/. It has been proposed by the Speech Learning Model that the more d...
This study investigates Korean learners’ perception and production of English liquids /l/ and /r/, attempting to find which of them is perceptually similar to the Korean liquid /ㄹ/. It has been proposed by the Speech Learning Model that the more distant an L2 sound is from the closest L1 speech sound, the more learnable the L2 sound will be. This hypothesis was evaluated in this study by investigating whether Korean speakers will have more success acquiring English /l/ or /r/ because it has been assumed from a theoretical perspective that the Korean liquid is phonemecally /l/. Korean learners’ proficiency, speech context, and three different word position are accounted as factors affecting the perception and production. Three experiments are conducted. The first experiment examines the foreign accent of Korean participants. The second one is perception experiment with two different Korean groups and the last one is production experiment with the same Korean groups.
The total experiments’ results are as follows. First, unlike the experiment with Japanese listeners(Aoyama et al., 2004), the results showed that Korean learners’ accuracy of English liquids perception and production was not significantly different between /l/ and /r/. This suggests that Korean liquid /ㄹ/ is not similar /l/ or /r/. Second, word position was important factor for Korean learners to perceive /l/ and /r/ but this factor was not significant factor for production /l/ and /r/. For both perception and production experiment, context and proficiency factors were important for Korean learners. Two experiments found that both groups of Korean learners performed better in word context than in segment and the higher proficiency was, the higher accuracy was in both contexts.
* Keyword: L2, Speech Learning Model, liquid, proficiency, word position, context.