Conditional Entropy and Deflected Contrast for Epenthetic Vowels in Korean Loanwords

Abstract

In either Korean loanword phonology or second language acquisition, the affricate consonant system is quite notable in its behavior of invoking vowel epenthesis. Contra our expectation that as default or unmarked vowel, a mid-high vowel /□/ emerges as usual, a high front vowel /i/ arises in this specific context. In this article, we try to prove that this type of divergence comes from Korean-specific dependency between preceding affricates and accompanying vowels. In other words, for the bigrams consisting of affricates-vowels, a certain degree of conditional entropy therein is believed to make a difference in Korean. The transfer effect of the L1 sound patterns proves to be valid under the condition that a threshold level of probability or entropy for the concerned sequence in L1 should be met. Another factor contributes to the nature of anti-homonymy by differentiating the /z/-ending stimuli from the affricate-ending as part of deflected contrast. (Daejeon University)