Perceptual category mapping between English and Korean prevocalic obstruents: Evidence from mapping effects in second language identification skills

Abstract The current study develops an approach to quantify the extent to which native language (L1) categories are used in second language (L2) category identification, and uses this approach to examine the identification of a set of English obstruents by Korean learners of English as a foreign language. Forty native Koreans listened to nonsense English CV words consisting of /p b t d f v θ ð/ and /a/, and were asked to identify the consonant with both Korean and English labeling. They also gave gradient evaluations of the goodness of the Korean labels to the stimuli. The results of the Korean labeling task were analyzed to predict what confusion patterns would be expected if listeners used L1 categories and probabilistically mapped them onto L1 category responses. Results show the perceptual patterns of L2 stops can be successfully predicted by use of L1 categories alone if the listeners’ goodness rating scores were used to weight the probabilistic mapping from L1 to L2 in the predictions. Accuracy for other segments, such as /p/ and /f/, was higher than predicted. In general, this increase in accuracy over what is predicted from the L1 mapping data was negatively correlated with the average goodness-of-fit to the Korean. These results provide quantitative corroboration of acquisition models claiming that some L2 categories can function by using existing L1 categories alone while others must be indicative of the addition of a new linguistic category.