Perception of Korean Plosives by L2 Learners of Korean

Korean plosives have a rather uncommon three-way contrast (i.e. normal, tense and aspirated) and this apparently causes some initial learning difficulty for many L2 learners of Korean both in perception and production. The primary aim of the present study is to confirm empirically that the problem is real and to describe systematically the nature of the difficulty involving the Korean plosives using experimental data (identification test on Korean plosives presented in a CV carrier frame). The subject group includes both non-native and native speaker of Korean. The non-native subject group comprises mainly of Chinese and Japanese L1 speakers. The results from the identification experiment provide concrete evidence for the apparent difficulty for the L2 learners of Korean regarding the Korean plosives. On the basis of the results from recent studies in first language acquisition and language learning impaired children, a number of promising avenues in tackling the L2 speech sounds acquisition were sketched. 1