음성음운형태론연구 18집 3호 Hong, Soonhyun

Hong, Soonhyun. 2012. The relative perceptual easiness between perceptually assimilated vowels for university-level Korean learners of American English and measurement bias in an identification test. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 18.3. 491-511. 

Korean learners of American English have difficulty differentiating between [iy] and [i], [e] and [æ], and [uw] and [u]. Perceptual Assimilation Model might say that the three vowel pairs are “assimilated” to Korean [i], [e] and [u], respectively. Even though these vowels are perceptually difficult, there might be some difference in Korean learners’ perceptual performance in identifying these vowels. A forced-choice identification test with spoken hVd stimuli was conducted and resulting confusion matrices were built. Then, accuracy was computed to see if there might be any perceptual performance difference between perceptually assimilated vowels on the one hand, and between perceptually assimilated vowel pairs on the other. It was found that accuracy turned out to be problematic due to accompanying bias. F-score in information retrieval was proposed as a better measure. It was found that high vowels were easier than non-high vowels and [iy] and [e] are easier to perceive than [i] and [æ], respectively. (Inha University)