A Study of Korean Learners' Perception of Plosives and Affricatives (Focusing on Uzbek Learners)

Abstract

This study aims to provide basic data on Korean plosives and affricates pronunciation education by examining the perception and characteristics of Uzbek learners of Korean plosives and plosives according to their learning period. In order to identify Uzbek learners' perception of Korean, we examined the phonetic correspondence between Korean and Uzbek and conducted an experiment on learners' perception. We also examined the cognition of Uzbek learners who had never been to Korea before, and the cognition of Uzbek learners who started learning Korean after entering university. The results showed that Uzbek learners' perception of plosives and affricates was as follows: fortis (58%), aspirated (52%), and lenis (43%). Overall, lenis sounds were the least recognized, and there was a strong tendency to recognize word-initial sounds as aspirated sounds. The highest recognition rate was for fortis sounds. When it comes to the perception error patterns of aspirated sounds, they were more often recognized as fortis than lenis. When it comes to the recognition errors of fortis sounds, the learners were slightly more likely to recognize them as aspirated than lenis. When the learners were divided by learning period, the recognition rate of lenis and fortis improved significantly as the learning period increased, but the recognition rate of aspirated tended to decrease in learners with more learning experience.