LAUSR

The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of English vowels by Korean native speakers. It focuses on difficulty levels of perception for English vowels in relation to the sound environment. The sound environment is determined by differences in the manner of articulation of consonants following vowels. The experiment consists of 24 test words formed with six American English vowels(/i, ɪ, ɛ, ae, ɑ, ʌ/) embedded in four different sound environments (/hVt/, /pVt/, /pVn/, /pVl/). The experiment compares two words paired for each sound environment, examining judgment accuracy for each combination and the influence of sound environments. Twenty Korean native speakers in their 20s or 30s participated in the experiment. The results found that participants could rarely differentiate /i/ and /ɪ/, and /ɛ /and /ae/ in all sound environments. Moreover, judgment accuracy was lower overall for the /pVn/ and /pVl/ environments. For /pVl/, in particular, Korean native speakers misjudged /ʌ/ as /ɑ/, confirming t...