Doctoral Dissertation Research: Native-Language and Native-Dialect Effects in Learning to Perceive a Difficult Phonetic Contrast in Korean

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

When people learn foreign languages, there are often pairs of sounds that are difficult to differentiate. For example, many Japanese learners of English have difficulty hearing and pronouncing the difference between "r" and "l" because there is only one Japanese sound that is close to both of these English sounds. This project studies how people who are learning a foreign language might develop the ability to differentiate difficult sounds. Specifically, it looks at how native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and English who are enrolled in intensive language courses in Seoul learn the difference between two difficult "s"-like sounds of Korean. It explores the relationship between the cues (the differentiating physical characteristics) for these two Korean sounds and the cues for the most similar sounds in the different first languages. A primary method used in this exploration is a series of perception experiments that the Korean-language students will do at 6-month intervals over their first year of extensive study of Korean. Results from these experiments will be analyzed statistically to track which cues different learners use at different stages. The same experiments will also be used to test which cues are used by native speakers of Korean from three different dialect areas, where the cues to these "s"-like sounds are not the same. The results of the study will increase our understanding of why learning a second language is so different from learning a new dialect. This should improve second language teaching methods for difficult languages such as Korean, Arabic, and Chinese.