Production and Perception of the Spanish Diphthong-Hiatus Contrast by Korean Learners

Abstract

This study examines how Korean learners produce and perceive Spanish diphthongs and hiatuses. Acoustic properties, including total duration, proportion of the transition segment, and rate of F2 transition, were measured and compared across speaker groups (i.e., Korean learners of Spanish, native Spanish speakers, and native Korean speakers). The results indicate that while both the Korean learner and native Spanish speaker groups used durational cues to distinguish diphthongs from hiatuses, learners showed a slightly stronger contrast between the two compared to native Spanish speakers. Moreover, the comparison of F2 slopes between the learners and native speakers revealed similar patterns to those observed in the cross-linguistic comparison between Korean and Spanish. Specifically, both the Korean learner and native speaker groups produced steeper F2 slopes for the vocalic sequence /oi/ and flatter F2 slopes for the vocalic sequence /ua/ compared to the Spanish native speaker group. This suggests that the Spanish vocalic sequences produced by Korean learners were strongly influenced by their L1. In the perception experiment, learners performed best on rising diphthong tokens, likely due to a combination of L1 transfer and frequency effects.