The production of Korean coronal obstruents by inexperienced English-speaking learners of Korea

Abstract

English-speaking learners of Korean often experience difficulty in learning Korean laryngeal categories (i.e., fortis, lenis, and aspirated). We examine whether the degree of difficulty in producing these laryngeal categories generalizes across the whole coronal obstruent system (i.e., stops and fricatives) and two different prosodic locations (i.e., CV and VCV). In our experiment, English-speaking college students taking first semester Korean course read a list of Korean frame sentences with target stimuli. The target stimuli consist of three coronal stops /t t’ th/ and two coronal fricatives /s s’/ combined with the vowel /a/ in CV and VCV. To assess production accuracy, native speakers of Korean are asked to identify the consonants from the learners’ productions. Results indicate that lenis categories are the most difficult across stops and fricatives in the two prosodic locations, suggesting that the learners develop production skills for laryngeal contrast applicable across the entire obstruent system. However, the degree of difficulty patterns are not similar in CV and VCV: the learners were more accurate producing /th/ in VCV than in CV. Thus, these findings suggest that the learners develop the production skills separately for different prosodic locations.