The Effect of Dialect Experience and Talker Variation on Korean EFL Listeners’ English Vowel Identification

Abstract

The study examines whether Korean EFL listeners’ identification of English vowels might vary according to the listeners’ different levels of experience with two English regional dialects (General American English [GAE], Standard Southern British English [SSBE]) and also by talker variation (native English talkers, native Korean talkers, i.e., Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB)-talker effects). An English vowel identification test was administered to native Korean listeners, in which 12 English vowels were produced by native English and native Korean talkers of GAE and SSBE. The results indicate thatthe Korean listeners’ experience with the two regional dialects had a great impact on the identification accuracy of English vowels, but the Korean listeners’ English proficiency did not affect their identification accuracy. ISIB-talker effects were observed only for GAE but not for SSBE, especially for the English vowels with similar counterparts in Korean. Further, vowel confusion matrices indicate that the Korean listeners showed low accuracy for the characteristic SSBE vowels (bot, Burt, Bart, and bat) and they also exhibited diverse error patterns for the vowels. The findings of the study are discussed in light of pedagogical implications for L2 learning.