The study of the relationship between Koreans' English proficiency and vowel insertion after word-final stops in English

Abstract

Vowel insertion is one of the utterance errors that Korean learners of English commit frequently. Based on this fact, the purpose of this research is to determine whether the Koreans' English proficiency affects the phenomenon of vowel insertion. To achieve it, the study investigated the relationship between the Korean speakers' English proficiency and vowel insertion in their English read speech. For analysis, Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC, made in 2004) and rated K-SEC (made in 2017) were used where 32 Korean elementary school students from Seoul and Gyeonggi province had pronounced the 6 target items that are minimal pairs (e.g. cap-cab). The speakers in these speech corpus data were also classified in one of the three different groups according to their English proficiency—Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced. It turned out that the speakers who are in the advanced level showed a tendency of the least chance of inserting a vowel after word-final voiced stops (7%) whereas 35% of the speakers who are in the novice proficiency level did so. For voiceless stops, the result was similar; the advanced group had the lowest tendency of inserting a vowel after word-final voiceless stops (4%) while novice group made 18% of vowel insertion. From these finding, it is concluded that the more proficient the Korean speakers in English, the less they are likely to insert a vowel after word-final stops.