A Positional Effect in the Perception of English Anterior Obstruents

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Lee, Shinsook and Cho, Mi-Hui. 2006. A Positional Effect in the Perception of English Anterior Obstruents. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 6-4, 849-867. This paper investigated a positional effect in the perception of English anterior obstruents by 40 Korean EFL learners, through an experiment in which nonword target consonants occurred in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, final coda position, intervocalic position before a stressed vowel, and intervocalic position after a stressed vowel. The result showed that the correct percentage of the target sounds in intervocalic position before a stressed vowel was highest (72.2%), followed by that in initial onset position (68.76%), which in turn followed by that in intervocalic position after a stressed vowel (53.36%). The correct percentage of the target sounds was lowest in final coda position (41%). It was shown that the observed pattern was attributable to positional markedness and acoustic salience. Within the same prosodic position, however, there were no statistically significant effects of factors such as place/manner of articulation and voicing in perceiving the target consonants. Nonetheless, the overall results across the 4 different prosodic locations followed the segmental markedness hierarchy, in that stops were more target-appropriately perceived (62.6%) than fricatives (55.6%), as coronals (63.7%) were than labials (54.5%). Similarly, voiceless consonants (65.3%) were also better perceived than voiced consonants (52.9%).

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