Abstract
Discriminative difficulties of seven English consonant minimal pairs were investigated in terms of learners' actual performance and self-evaluation. The results show, for example, that /l/-/r/ is not the only difficult minimal pair for Japanese learners of English and that they feel it more difficult to discriminate the pair /d/-/dz/ than /l/-/r/. Gaps between learners' actual performance and self-evaluation in discriminating the consonant minimal pairs were also investigated. The results show, for example, that /s/-/θ/, /dz/-/z/, /∫i/-/si/ and /f/-/h/ are minimal consonant pairs which have relatively great gaps while /b/-/v/, /l/-/r/ and /n//η/ have relatively small gaps.
