Discrimination and perceptual assimilation of French vowels by native Korean listeners

This study aimed to investigate whether vowel discrimination in a foreign language (FL) can be predicted from perceptual assimilation patterns of FL to native language (L1) vowels (Best, 1995; Levy, 2009b). As such, native Korean listeners with no experience in French discriminated between French vowels, with the results compared to those of the perceptual assimilation (Oh, 2023). Neither the cross-language assimilation overlap scores nor the fit-indexbased PAM (perceptual assimilation model) types explained the discrimination results. The perceptual assimilation tasks require forced identification with an L1 category; however, for learners without FL experience, discriminating FL sounds may serve as a test of perceiving the acoustic differences between the sounds.