Effects of EPG treatment for English consonant contrasts on L2 perception and production

Abstract

Links between perception and production were investigated for two adult native speakers of Korean who participated in electropalatographic (EPG) treatment designed to teach phonological and articulatory contrasts between English /s/ - /ʃ/, /z/ - /ʤ/, and /l/ - /ɹ/. Participants were successful in learning to produce the English contrasts. Perception of English consonants was tested pre- and post-treatment. Post-treatment perception improved somewhat for treated consonants but not for untreated consonants, although perception was not directly trained.

Keywords:

• electropalatography
• speech perception
• speech production
• Korean
• L2
• multilingualism

Acknowledgments

Some of the data in this paper were presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting, New Orleans, November 1994 and at the November 1994 meeting of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association in New Orleans. Gratitude is extended to Sherry Sutphin for manufacture of the pseudopalates, to G. Todd Downs for help in analyzing palatometric patterns, to Cheryl Rogers for help in conducting the listener study, and to In Ok Han and Eok So Oh for their participation in the experiment. Thanks to Hyunjoo Chung, Rachel Theodore, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Declaration of Interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest.

Data collection was supported by National Institute for Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders grant DC00257 to the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.