Variation in Korean Speakers' Production of English Stop-Nasal Sequences

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper accounts for second language (hereafter, L2) phonological variations which has been problematic in constraint-based theories, based on Korean learners’ production of English stop-nasal sequences. We use several constraints and their rankings to account for phonological variations in L2 production of the relevant sequences and perform a comparative analysis of two approaches. One of the two approaches, the Rank-Ordering Model of Eval, however, does not account for L2 learners’ developmental process of pronunciation from nasalized and epenthetic pronunciations to native-like pronunciations. In order to deal with L2 learners’ developmental process, we re-rank the low-ranked constraints. We propose another cut-off (i.e., a double line) between the relevant constraints to represent the flexibility of constraint ranking. This implies that L2 learners’ developmental process of pronunciation is the change of unranking to partially fixed ranking at an upper level.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Stop-nasal Sequences in Korean and English
• 3. L2 Data: Park (2005)
• 4. Constraint-Based Approaches
• 5. Concluding Remarks
• References