“No” versus “Aniyo”: Back vowel diphthongization in heritage Korean

Abstract

The effects of a second language on a speaker’s first language phonology are well documented (e.g., Chang, 2013), and much has been done work specifically for heritage language speakers (Polinsky and Kagan, 2007; Montrul, 2010, 2015), who may be bilingual to some degree but are dominant in the majority language. Bilingualism research has identified “separate but nonautonomous phonological systems” (Paradis, 2001) in bilingual children, but few studies address heritage speakers’ phonological systems in relation to ongoing sound change (Konopka and Pierrehumbert, 2010). The current study examines F1 and F2 of the back vowels /o/ and /u/ in samples of read Korean speech from a population of Korean American Californians who identified as natively bilingual and/or heritage speakers of Korean. Forty speakers read short conversational passages in Korean during a bilingual interview. Preliminary results indicate that the heritage speakers’ /u/ vowel shows influence from California English, with greater F2 on average than their central /a/ vowel. The /o/ vowel also has a much lower F1 than expected given Korean’s canonical five-vowel system. Ongoing analysis examines the trajectory of both vowels to determine the influence of California English diphthongized back vowels on Korean monophthongs, and accent perception of the speakers’ Korean.The effects of a second language on a speaker’s first language phonology are well documented (e.g., Chang, 2013), and much has been done work specifically for heritage language speakers (Polinsky and Kagan, 2007; Montrul, 2010, 2015), who may be bilingual to some degree but are dominant in the majority language. Bilingualism research has identified “separate but nonautonomous phonological systems” (Paradis, 2001) in bilingual children, but few studies address heritage speakers’ phonological systems in relation to ongoing sound change (Konopka and Pierrehumbert, 2010). The current study examines F1 and F2 of the back vowels /o/ and /u/ in samples of read Korean speech from a population of Korean American Californians who identified as natively bilingual and/or heritage speakers of Korean. Forty speakers read short conversational passages in Korean during a bilingual interview. Preliminary results indicate that the heritage speakers’ /u/ vowel shows influence from California English, with greater F2 on aver...