Abstract
In this paper, based on Korean vowel qualities measured in the production experiments, I point out that /o/-stems are also actively participating in the decay of Korean vowel harmony, and their speed of decay is much faster than /a/-stems' speed. How the late-starter /o/-stems could have the faster speed in the decay of Korean vowel harmony? The role of phonetic naturalness in language learning is the key. Measured vowel qualities show that /o/ is acoustically much closer to /ʌ/ as “disharmonic” pair than to /a/ as “harmonic” pair. In addition, in terms of articulatory, the raising of /o/ and the backing of /ʌ/ make them more similar. In the production experiments, 14 Seoul-Korean speakers participated (7 males, 7 females). Onset and coda of stems are controlled. For each condition, 1 existing word and 2 nonce words are used. Participants are asked to make a natural conjugation form of a given stem and to produce it three times. Unlike previous corpus and production studies reporting that /o/-stems show no disharmonic forms, the current experimental results show that quality of selected vowels after /o/-stems is similar to /ʌ/, not /a/. Compared to /a/-stems, /o/-stems' suffix vowel qualities are clearly closer to /ʌ/.
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