Perception of syllable-initial and syllable-final nasals in English by Korean and Japanese speakers

Abstract

In both Korean and English, /m/ and /n/ contrast syllable-initially and /m/, /n/ and /&rhookn;/ contrast syllable-finally. In Japanese, /m/ and /n/ contrast syllable-initially while nasals do not contrast syllable-finally. Experiment 1 of this study investigated Korean and Japanese speakers’ perception of English nasals to examine how learners’ L1 influences the perception of L2 segments. The Japanese speakers had considerable difficulty distinguishing /&rhookn;/ from /n/ syllable-finally. Final /m/-/&rhookn;/ and /m/-/n/ were not particularly problematic for the Japanese speakers, although these contrasts do not exist in their L1. Experiment 2 examined the perceived relation between English /m/, /n/ and /&rhookn;/ and Japanese categories to investigate why final /n/-/&rhookn;/ was especially difficult for the Japanese speakers. In order to examine which Japanese categories are used to represent final nasals in English, Japanese speakers were asked to write English words used in Experiment 1 with the Katakana orthography. It was found that syllable-final /m/ was assimilated to one Japanese category, (see PDF for character), whereas two or more categories were used to classify /n/ and /&rhookn;/. There was a relatively high degree of overlap in classification between /n/ and /&rhookn;/ since both /n/ and /&rhookn;/ were classified with (see PDF for character) /N/ and yH (see PDF for character). The three final contrasts, /n/-/&rhookn;/, /m/-/&rhookn;/ and /m/-/n/ were classified as one of the assimilation types of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), based on the results from Experiment 2. The syllable-final /m/-/&rhookn;/ and /m/-/n/ contrasts were classified as Uncategorized-Categorized (UC), and the syllable-final /n/-/&rhookn;/ contrast was classified as Both Uncategorizable (UU). PAM expects discrimination to be very good for UC, but poor for UU if the two non-native categories are relatively similar to each other. The results from Experiment 1 for the Japanese speakers were consistent with the PAM prediction.