Effects of Talkers, Listeners, and Vowel Types in the Perception of English Vowels

Abstract

This study explored speech intelligibility of native English listeners and Korean listeners in the perception of English vowels, taking into consideration talker-, listener-, and vowel type-related factors. To that end, 10 English listeners and 41 Korean listeners identified 11 English vowels produced by 2 native English talkers and 21 Korean talkers in a forced-choice identification task. The results showed that the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for talkers (the ISIB-T) was manifested in the vowels [i, eɪ, u] while the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for non-native listeners (the ISIB-L) was witnessed in the vowels [u, ɛ, ʊ, ʌ]. Thus, the results indicated that the ISIB-T and the ISIB-L showed different patterns depending on talkers, listeners, and vowel types, rather than demonstrating uniform patterns in terms of the presence and absence of matched vs. non-matched vowels between English and Korean. Implications for the findings were further discussed in terms of L1 vowel categories, acoustic-phonetic dimensions of the vowels, and shared properties of Korean-English interlanguage.