Factors Affecting Korean Learners" Perception of English Sibilants

Factors Affecting Korean Learners" Perception of English Sibilants

  This study explores the perception of English sibilants by Korean learners. According to Schmidt (1996) and our pilot study, Koreans usually map all three English voiced sibilants (e.g., /z, ？, ？/) to one Korean sound (e.g., /ㅈ/) while perceiving voiceless counterparts (e.g., /s, ？, ？/) as several different native sounds (e.g., /ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅊ/). The study conducted an experiment of identifying English minimal pairs with sibilants to investigate the influence of such mapping relations between English and Korean sibilants and that of proficiency levels. In addition, positions of sibilants were included as another variable. The results showed that learners performed better in the identification task of English voiceless sibilants by showing higher accuracy and shorter reaction times than in distinguishing voiced ones. Learners" perception of sibilants was also influenced by positions of sibilants within words. Thus, the general pattern was that word-final sibilants caused less difficulty in the identification task than intervocalic or word-initial sibilants due to longer duration of word-final sibilants over word-initial or intervocalic ones. Learners" accuracy and reaction times did not improve according to their overall proficiency.