Stress and vowel reduction by Korean Learners of English

Abstract

Having a foreign accent is unavoidable for late second or foreign language learners. The reason is that physical changes in the brain influence learning a variety of aspects in a new language system (Flege, 1987; Patkowski, 1990). In other words, a well-established first language mediates the acquisition of a second language. The mediation can be called cross-linguistics influence or negative transfer (Sharwood Smith and Kellerma, 1986). In terms of suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, vowel reduction occurring in stress-timed languages such as English but lacking in syllable-timed languages is noteworthy to understand the cause of nonnative accents. The present work aims to explore patterns of vowel reduction in Korean accented English, with the goal of finding pronunciation issues in the English of Korean learners that might be due to transfer effects from an acoustic-phonetic standpoint. English speech samples from native English and Korean speakers of the Wildcat Corpus were used for data analysis. The vowel qualities, the duration ratios, and formant values of unstressed vowels produced by Korean and English speakers were analyzed. Results show that the Korean speakers tend not to reduce English unstressed vowels, assimilate them into similar vowels in their vowel inventory, and produce them as full vowels.