Insertion preferred to deletion in learner speech: A study of Korean English.

Abstract

Do language learners prefer insertion or deletion, when they are forced to produce the target speech that is not permissible in native phonology? To answer this question, we analyzed the speech data from 6,887 word data of L1 English, L2 English, and L1 English loanwords, which were elicited from 11 native speakers of American English, 181 Korean adult learners of American English, and 11 native speakers of Korean. We measured the acoustic features that are relevant to insertion and deletion in English. We focused on whether non-native English evidence effects of the native Korean more in the deletion of a consonant, as in [kansep] for the English loanword concept; or in the insertion of a vowel, as in [kanseptㅁ]. The results indicate that the learner speech manifests significantly more insertion errors than deletion errors, in both word-level and sentence-level production. The error rate drops drastically after instruction to support that explicit instruction is effective in phonological acquisition of the learner speech.