Perception of Korean Nasal Sounds by Chinese Learners of Korean

Abstract

Perception of Korean Nasal Sounds by Chinese Learners of Korean Chong-Woon Kim School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, Griffith University In recent years increasing number of Chinese students are taking up the Korean language at tertiary level in Australia, and as such there is an emerging need to describe their inter-language development to gain a better understanding of L2 acquisition difficulties and to generate an optimal learning strategy pertaining specifically for this new learner group. The present study examines the perception of the Korean nasal speech sound by the Chinese learners of Korean. Although nasal sounds are present in both languages cursory observations in the classroom reveal that Chinese students seem to have some difficulty both in perception and production of the Korean nasals. Two perception experiments were conducted with two subject groups (i.e. native Chinese speaker group and native Korean speaker group). The first experiment focused on the identification performance while the second one targeted the discrimination performance of the subject groups. A main purpose of the study is to map accurately which Korean nasal sound in which context causes the apparent difficulty and to investigate how much of the difficulty can be attributed to L1 transfer.