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Effects of age and experience on the production of English word-final stops by Korean speakers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2010

WENDY BAKER
WENDY BAKER*
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
*
*Address for correspondence: Wendy Baker, PhD, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University, 4057 JFSB, Provo, UT 84601wendy_baker@byu.edu
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Abstract

This study examined the effect of second language (L2) age of acquisition and amount of experience on the production of word-final stop consonant voicing by adult native Korean learners of English. Thirty learners, who differed in amount of L2 experience and age of L2 exposure, and 10 native English speakers produced 8 English monosyllabic words ending in voiced and voiceless stops. These productions were presented to 10 English listeners for perceptual judgment and subjected to acoustic analyses to determine how well learners produced vowel duration and closure (stop gap) duration, two cues to stop consonant voicing. Results revealed that even learners with 10 years of L2 experience did not always produce stop consonant voicing accurately, that learners' age of acquisition influenced their production of both cues, that vowel duration was easier to learn than closure duration, and that English listeners used both these cues in their judgments of production accuracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 263 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

This research was partially supported by research grants from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Brigham Young University. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Cancun, Mexico. The author gratefully acknowledges Pavel Trofimovich and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

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