Perception of English Vowel Categories by Korean University Students

Abstract

The paper examined Korean university students' perception of English vowel categories /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʌ/, and /ɔ/ using English minimal pairs designed for the study. Thirty female freshmen recruited from a university in Seoul took part in the discrimination and identification tests. The results showed that most students did not have much difficulty discriminating the vowel contrasts between /ɪ/ & /ɛ/, /ɛ/ & /æ/, and /ʌ/ & /ɔ/. However, they had a great difficulty identifying target vowel categories in the identification test, although students in the high-proficiency group outperformed those in the low-proficiency group. The overall results indicated that the students' perception of English vowel categories was affected by task types, students' L1 vowel categories, and their English proficiency. However, the results of the experiments showed that the students' familiarity with the target words was not correlated with their perceptual accuracy. The findings of the study were further discussed in terms of task effects, vowel category variance, error patterns, EFL learners' phonetic category representation, and L2 speech perception models.