Comparison of English and Korean speakers for the nasalization of English stops

Abstract

This study compared English and Korean speakers with regard to the nasalization of the English stops /b, d, g, p, t, k/ before a nasal within and across a word boundary. Nine English and thirty Korean speakers participated in the experiment. We used 37 speech items with different grammatical structures. Overall the English informants rarely nasalized the stops while the Korean informants generally greatly nasalized them though widely varying from no nasalization to almost complete nasalization. In general, voiced stops were more likely to be nasalized than voiceless stops. Also, the alveolar stops /d, t/ tended to be nasalized the most, the bilabial stops /b, p/ the second most, and the velar stops /g, k/ the least. Besides, the closer the grammatical relationship between neighboring words, the more likely the stop nasalization occurred. In contrast, the Korean syllabification - the addition of the vowel /?/ to the final stops - worked against the stop nasalization. On the other hand, different stress (accent) or rhythm effects of the two languages are assumed to contribute to the significantly different nasalization between English and Korean speakers. The spectrum of stop nasalization obtained from this study can be used as an index to measure how close a certain Korean speaker’s stop nasalization is to English speakers’.