The Perception of Word Boundaries by Korean College EFL Learners

Abstract

Um, Hye-Young. 2006. The Perception of Word Boundaries by Korean College EFL Learners. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 14(3), 51-70. This paper investigates the perception of English word boundaries by Korean college EFL learners and compares it to that of English native speakers. Thirty five Korean speakers and 10 English native speakers participated in an English perception task in which the subjects were asked to choose whether they heard, e.g., keep stalking or keeps talking. The stimuli include three types of phrases: 1) aspiration of stop consonants, 2) glottal stop and/or laryngealization and 3) allophones of lateral phoneme 'l' as well as glottal stop serve as word boundary cues. It was found that Korean speakers had difficulty segmenting the stream of speech on the basis of the kinds of acoustic-phonetic cues available to native English speakers. But it was also found that some stimuli were easier than others for participants to segment. In addition, there was a correlation between the perception of word boundaries and speakers' English proficiency level, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception.