Doctoral Dissertation Research: Native-Language and Native-Dialect Effects in Learning to Perceive a Difficult Phonetic Contrast in Korean

人们在学习外语时，往往会出现难以辨别的发音对。例如，许多学英语的日本人在听和发音“r”和“L”之间的区别方面有困难，因为只有一个日语音与这两个英语音接近。这个项目研究的是学习外语的人如何发展辨别难发音的能力。具体地说，它考察了在首尔参加强化语言课程的以汉语、日语和英语为母语的人是如何学习两个很难发音的韩语发音“S”的。它探索了这两个韩语发音的线索(区别的物理特征)与不同母语中最相似的声音的线索之间的关系。这种探索中使用的主要方法是一系列感知实验，韩语学生将在他们广泛学习韩语的第一年每隔6个月进行一次感知实验。这些实验的结果将被统计分析，以跟踪不同学习者在不同阶段使用的线索。同样的实验也将被用来测试来自三个不同方言地区的以韩语为母语的人使用了哪些线索，这些线索对这些类似S的声音的暗示是不同的。这项研究的结果将增加我们对为什么学习第二语言与学习一种新方言如此不同的理解。这应该会改善韩语、阿拉伯语和汉语等难学语言的第二语言教学方法。

When people learn foreign languages, there are often pairs of sounds that are difficult to differentiate. For example, many Japanese learners of English have difficulty hearing and pronouncing the difference between "r" and "l" because there is only one Japanese sound that is close to both of these English sounds. This project studies how people who are learning a foreign language might develop the ability to differentiate difficult sounds. Specifically, it looks at how native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and English who are enrolled in intensive language courses in Seoul learn the difference between two difficult "s"-like sounds of Korean. It explores the relationship between the cues (the differentiating physical characteristics) for these two Korean sounds and the cues for the most similar sounds in the different first languages. A primary method used in this exploration is a series of perception experiments that the Korean-language students will do at 6-month intervals over their first year of extensive study of Korean. Results from these experiments will be analyzed statistically to track which cues different learners use at different stages. The same experiments will also be used to test which cues are used by native speakers of Korean from three different dialect areas, where the cues to these "s"-like sounds are not the same. The results of the study will increase our understanding of why learning a second language is so different from learning a new dialect. This should improve second language teaching methods for difficult languages such as Korean, Arabic, and Chinese.