한국 고등학생들의 /b/와 /v/의 변별 : 단어 내 위치와 학업 성취도에 따른 차이

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate how high school students perceive and discriminate English consonants /b/ and /v/, which are not phonemically contrastive in Korean. Specifically, I examined whether and how the position of sounds in words and the grades of students affect the recognition of /b/ and /v/. For this purpose, I selected 44 minimal pairs in which /b/ and /v/ are contrastive word-initially, word-medially, or word-finally. 24 female high school students participated in the perception experiment, where they listened to each word and responded with /b/ or /v/. Accuracy and response time were measured and subject to (generalized) linear mixed-effect model in R. Results were as followed: First, high school students in Korea tended to recognize /v/ more accurately than /b/. Subjects discriminated phonemes with an accuracy of 53.9% for /b/ and 61.0% for /v/. In particular, /b/ was best recognized in initial positions, but /v/ was better recognized in medial and final positions. This is accounted for by the fact that oral stops like /b/ have robust acoustic cues before vowel, while fricatives like /v/ is well recognized when they are lengthened. Second, grades and accuracy showed a positive correlation, as expected. The higher the grade was, the more accurately /b/ and /v/ were recognized. Third, students with low grades were relatively fast in recognizing /b/ and /v/. In the interviews, it was found that students with high grades attempted to retrieve the lexical items, while those with lower grades were only attentive to sounds. With the recent emphasis on communication in the field of English education, rhythm, stress, and intonation have become the main parts of pronunciation education. However, this study shows that the pronunciation of consonants and vowels are still necessary in schools, since the recognition of words is essential in the understanding of English, and ultimately, in the communication.