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ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF THE PRODUCTION OF UNSTRESSED ENGLISH VOWELS BY EARLY AND LATE KOREAN AND JAPANESE BILINGUALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

Borim Lee ,
Susan G. Guion  and
Tetsuo Harada
Borim Lee
Affiliation:
Wonkwang University
Susan G. Guion
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Tetsuo Harada
Affiliation:
Waseda University
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Abstract

The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native speakers (NSs) of English as well as less of a difference in duration between the two types of vowel than the NSs. The Japanese speakers, whose native language has a phonemic length distinction, produced more nativelike durational patterns. Finally, the vowel quality (first and second formant frequencies) of unstressed vowels was different from the NS group's for the late bilinguals, for whom unstressed vowels were widely dispersed in the vowel space according to their orthographic representations, and from the early Korean bilinguals, who substituted the Korean high central vowel. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of the phonological status of first language phonetic features and age of acquisition.This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation (KRF-2003-042-A00048) and partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (DC05132). A draft of this research was presented at the English phonology workshop division held for the 50th anniversary of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (June 2004). The authors would like to thank four anonymous SSLA reviewers and Jonathan Loftin for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 487 - 513
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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