한국인의 몽골어 마찰음에 관한 음성 인지 연구

Speech perception of Mongolian fricatives by Koreans

The main purpose of this article is to examine Korean students’ perceptual ability to discriminate Mongolian fricatives. First of all, we should note that Mongolian has a rich fricative system in which there are several kinds of phonemes varying in terms of the place of articulation, which is different from the Korean fricative system. According to Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), learning L2 sounds by L2 learners can be facilitated when a sound is present in both L1 and L2, whereas a lack of an L2 sound in an L1 phonemic inventory may inhibit L2 learners’ perception and production of that sound. Thus, it is predicted that Korean students will have some difficulties in perceiving the contrast between Mongolian fricatives, especially when the contrasting sounds are absent in the Korean phonemic inventory. In order to test this prediction and observe which pair of Mongolian fricatives is most or least difficult for Korean students to discriminate, two different kinds of speech perception test are conducted: AX discrimination task and 4I-oddity task. Both of the tasks reveal that Korean subjects show a poor performance in discriminating [s] from [ʃ], but they show a better performance in discriminating [s] from [x] as well as [x] from [ʃ]. These findings from the tasks can support Prator’s (1967) claim that the most difficult situation in learning L2 is the one where one phoneme in L1 phonemic inventory is split into two corresponding L2 phonemes. In Korean /s/ is realized as an allophone [ʃ] before a vowel /i/ and a glide /j/, which means /s/ and /ʃ/ are not different phonemes in Korean. When Korean students learn Mongolain fricatives, /s/ in L1 is split into /s/ and /ʃ/, which makes Korean students fail to discriminate [s] from [ʃ] in Mongolian.