The effects of prenasal raising of American English /æ/ on the identification of American English vowels by native Japanese and Korean listeners

This study attempts to investigate the effect of prenasal raising of American English /æ/ on the identification of the vowel by native Japanese and Korean listeners by comparing the identification accuracy of /æ/ in preplosive and prenasal context by these two listener groups. Native Japanese speakers generally equate /æ/ with Japanese low vowel /a/ whereas native Korean speakers identify /æ/ with Korean mid front vowel /e/, and /æ/-/ɛ/ is one of the most difficult English vowel pairs for Korean speakers to discriminate (Ingram & Park 1997, Frieda & Nozawa 2007). It was expected that Korean listeners would identify raised /æ/ in prenasal context as /ɛ/ or /eɪ/, but they mistakenly identified /ɛ/ and /eɪ/ as /æ/ far more frequently than /æ/ as /ɛ/ or /eɪ/. The results revealed that while Japanese listeners' identification accuracy of /æ/ is significantly lower in prenasal context than in preplosive context, Korean listeners' identification accuracy of /æ/ is unaffected by the raising of /æ/. Korean listeners far more often mistakenly identify /ɛ/ as /æ/ in preplosive context than the other way around, and this tendency stays the same even when /æ/ is raised in prenasal context.