Abstract
The present study investigated pronunciation elements of Korean speakers' Maritime English that are likely to hinder successful English communication between Japanese and Korean speakers working in maritime sectors. Contrastive analyses of English, Japanese, and Korean yielded descriptions of phonological/phonetic characteristics in Korean accented English and predictions of difficulties Japanese listeners may encounter. This was followed by the analysis of Maritime English data pronounced by eight students of a maritime institute in Korea and accent judgment by Japanese listeners. The Japanese listeners were predicted not to perceive accent in sound pairs such as /l/ and /r/ since the two sounds are not distinguishable in Japanese in the first place, while it was expected voiced sounds pronounced as voiceless in certain environments due to Korean phonology would be judged accented. Also, where realization of a sound deviates from the value expected by Japanese listeners, e.g., /æ/ realized as [e], /f/ realized as [p], it was expected Japanese listeners would point out foreign accent. Although the majority of the results were consistent with what had been expected, some of the results, e.g., perception of syllable-final consonants and consonant sequences, did not match the predictions made by contrastive analysis.
