Hwang, Injah. (2015). An acoustic Analysis of English Vowels produced by Korean University Students. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 23(1), 65-90. This paper investigated Korean university students' production of English /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʌ/, and /ɔ/ vowels in minimal pair settings of /ɪ/ & /ɛ/, /ɛ/ & /æ/, and /ʌ/ & /ɔ/. Thirty female freshmen (15 higher- and 15 lower-proficiency group) were recruited and their production was analyzed in terms of acoustic values such as F1, F2, and duration. The results indicated that both groups differentiated the vowel contrast between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/, but they did not produce the vowel /ɪ/ accurately. Also, most of the participants had a great difficulty differentiating between /ɛ/ & /æ/, and /ʌ/ & /ɔ/ in terms of F1 and F2 values although higher-proficiency group outperformed lower-proficiency group. In particular, all of the subjects had the most difficulty producing /ɔ/ accurately. As for duration, the length of /æ/ and /ɔ/ vowels produced by both groups was much shorter compared to native norms whereas the duration of /ɪ/, /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ vowels was similar to native talkers.
Keywords
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L2 phonological acquisition #
L1 transfer #
acoustic analysis
