Acoustic Properties of Korean Stops as L1 Produced by L2 Learners of the English Language

Abstract

Objectives: The present study examines whether Korean children and adults who have learned English as a second language (L2) produce Korean stops differently from Korean monolingual (KM) children with respect to voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) and whether the age of L2 exposure is a critical factor in determining the L2to-L1 influence. Methods: Eighteen Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children and adults and eighteen KM children produced nine monosyllables /p h ε, pε, p * ε, t h ε, tε, t * ε, k h ε, kε, k * ε/ twice in a row. A total of 1,890 tokens were acoustically analyzed with Praat to obtain VOT and F0 values and were subjected to statistical analysis for group comparison. Results: Two threeway ANOVAs and follow-up statistics revealed that the VOT values of aspirated and lenis stops were significantly longer in KEB children and adults than in KM children and that normalized F0 values of lenis stops were significantly higher in bilingual than in monolingual individuals. Nonetheless, no significant group difference was found between KEB children and adults. Conclusion: The acquisition of L2 English appears to disturb a tertiary contrast of Korean stops in terms of VOT and F0, in a way that bilingual individuals produc ed lenis stops more aspirated-like, with increased VOT and F0 values, and aspirated stops with increased VOT values. The L2-to-L1 influence may not be significantly different between early and late L2 learners, if their length of residence in a L2 speaking community is similar.

Language change and linguistic inquiry in a world of multicompetence: Sustained phonetic drift and its implications for behavioral linguistic research

“…Recent L2 experience, however, has an effect that is modulated by learners' prior familiarity with the L2, as shown in longitudinal work on L1 English learn-ers of Korean (Chang, 2012(Chang, , 2013; for related research on L1 Mandarin learners of Korean, see Holliday, 2015). Korean is a language that, unlike English, has a three-way stop laryngeal contrast distinguished in terms of VOT and f 0 (Yoon, 2015;Bang et al, 2018). In Chang's results, both of these properties in the L1…”

“…Fowler et al, 2008). With respect to f 0 , L2 experience in Greek influences peak f 0 alignment in L1 Dutch (Mennen, 2004), while L2 experience in English is correlated with higher onset f 0 values following lenis stops in L1 Korean (Yoon, 2015). As for vowel formants, early-onset L2 experience in Spanish is linked to lower F 1 values in L1 Quichua vowels (Guion, 2003), while late-onset L2 immersion in English is linked to higher F values in most L1 Dutch vowels (Mayr et al, 2012).…”

Language-independent talker-specificity in first-language and second-language speech production by bilingual talkers: L1 speaking rate predicts L2 speaking rate

“…First, there is a wealth of research demonstrating L1 and L2 interactions at various levels of speech production and perception (for a review, see Davidson, 2011). These cross-language interactions manifest throughout the phonetic system at the segmental and supra-segmental levels, including vowel systems (e.g., Guion, 2003; Chang, 2012, 2013; Mayr et al , 2012), F 0 level (e.g., Yoon, 2015), and F 0 alignment (e.g., Mennen, 2004). The present study aims to complement these data and models by looking for L1-L2 interactions in the long-term acoustic features (i.e., utterance—rather than sublexical—or lexical levels) that do not directly convey linguistically meaningful, contrastive information, but that may instead convey indexical information for language, group, and talker identification.…”

Crosslinguistic Influence in the Discrimination of Korean Stop Contrast by Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners

“…On the flip side, as a result of English affecting Korean, several studies reported that bilinguals (HSs in particular)' Korean productions of the lenis-aspirated contrast exhibited a greater reliance on VOT and a lesser reliance on F0, in contrast with monolingual speakers of Korean (Cheng 2017;Kang and Nagy 2016;Oh and Daland 2011; see also (Lee and Iverson 2012;Oh 2019;Yoon 2015), for evidence from bilingual children). Unfortunately, to our knowledge, no previous work has examined cue-weighting in perception of Korean stops among Korean-English bilinguals in order to determine whether their perceptual reliance on VOT was also greater than in Korean monolinguals.…”