Perception and production of English fricative sounds by advanced Korean EFL learners

Abstract

This study explored the perception and production of English voiceless fricatives among advanced Korean EFL learners by conducting on-line experiments. Thirty two college students who had overall high English proficiency participated in the experiments and nonce words beginning with one of the voiceless fricatives /f/, /th/, /s/, and /š/ were used in the experiments. In particular, 48 pairs of English nonce words, 24 identical (e.g., findert-findert, thomber-thomber) and non-identical pairs (e.g., findert-thindert, thomber-fomber) each, were employed in the perception test and the same 24 nonce words (e.g., findert, thimbert, simbert, shipkin; fomber, thombul, sombul, sholtem) were used in the production test. The results showed the precedence of perception over production but no correlation between them, indicating that the learners’ perceptual deficiency of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their production defect of those sounds or vice versa. Importantly, the results from the perception test revealed that the participants had a great difficulty with the /f/-/th/ contrast, as opposed to the /s/-/š/ contrast. The participants’ ability to contrast between /th/ and /s/ was relatively good, unlike findings of previous studies (Joh and Lee 2001). As for production, the participants had most difficulty with the interdental fricative /th/ followed by /f/, but they did not have much difficulty with /s/ or /š/. Even though the results of the production test are overall consistent with those of the perception test, some discrepancy was found especially in the perception and production of /f/ and /th/. Further, replacement patterns in production were analyzed in terms of phonetic and/or articulatory properties of the target sounds and the L1 phonemic inventory. Some implications for the teaching of fricative sounds were also drawn.