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An Experimental Study of Vowel Epenthesis among Korean Learners of English

한국인 영어학습자의 모음삽입현상에 대한 연구

  • 신동진 (한국외국어대학교 음성언어연구센터) ;
  • Received : 2014.05.01
  • Accepted : 2014.06.11
  • Published : 2014.06.30

Abstract

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.

Keywords

References

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