Adaptation of English word-final stops into Korean: Effects of English exposure

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 131; no. 4_Supplement; p. 3272
• Main Author: Kwon, Harim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-04-2012
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4708228

In Korean, word-final stops are never released. When borrowed into Korean, English stop-final words are sometimes, but not always, adapted by epenthesizing /ī/ after the stop. Epenthesis is most frequent for words with coronal stops, that is, words whose stops are arguably most often released [Kang, Phonology 20, 219-273 (2003)]. This study investigates Korean listeners' attention to this sub-phonemic cue in borrowing. Korean listeners are predicted to attend to release cues, but their attention should decrease with their L2 exposure to English. Korean monolinguals, late-bilinguals, and early-bilinguals were tested on English non-word stop-final stimuli with and without releases. Their task was to add a suffix to the novel form; of interest was whether epenthetic /ī/ was inserted during the task. Overall, released stops were twice as likely as unreleased to trigger epenthesis; however, monolinguals were nearly twice as likely as early bilinguals to insert /ī/ after a released stop. This result accords with the “phonological” adaptation of proficient bilinguals [LaCharité and Paradis, Ling. Inquiry 36, 223-258 (2005)]. More proficient bilinguals “know” that English stop release is not contrastive and ignore stop release when adapting English words.