Repair Strategies Employed by Korean Speakers in Producing English Final Consonant Clusters

Abstract

This study attempted to investigate how Korean speakers produce English final consonant clusters by using repair strategies. Based on the preservation principle in interphonology, three main points were examined. The first point focused on the most used repair strategy by Korean speakers, such as deletion, insertion, and substitution. The second point was whether any age difference existed in using repair strategies when pronouncing various final consonant clusters. The third point concentrated on the specific patterns of repair strategies used in certain syllable structures. For the production test, twenty-four target words were pronounced by eight Korean speakers and the data were statistically analyzed by 3-way mixed ANOVA to see if there were any variable interactions. The major findings of the study were exhibited as follows: First, most Korean speakers employed deletion for repair strategies, and the highest error rates were presented in fricative-fricative combined clusters. Second, the younger group made fewer errors in stop-# and nasal-# combined clusters. Third, all kinds of the repair strategies were used in fricative-fricative clusters, and insertion was primarily used by the older group in fricative-stop clusters. According to the findings, it could be assumed that productions of English clusters by the younger group have been in progress by maintaining certain English phonetic features.