The aim of the thesis is to investigate how children in primary school can apply two phonological rules, i.e. lateralization of nasal sounds and nasalization of lateral sounds, to the sequences of /l+n/ and /n+l/generated by morpheme concatenation. To...
The aim of the thesis is to investigate how children in primary school can apply two phonological rules, i.e. lateralization of nasal sounds and nasalization of lateral sounds, to the sequences of /l+n/ and /n+l/generated by morpheme concatenation. To measure children's ability to apply the two rules, this thesis carried out an experiment in which children read target words with the presence of these two sequences contained in carrier sentences. The findings of the experiment are as follows:
First, with respect to /l+n/ sequences in which the nasal is realized as [Ⅰ] in standard pronunciation, e.g. /pal + nj□n/ [pallj□n] 'principle' the pattern of phonetic realization exhibits that the ratios of the application of the lateralization rule to spelling pronunciation are almost equal among the fourth grade students. This result contrasts with the experiment on the identical sequences for adults in which 90% of subjects pronounced as [Ⅱ] (Kim 2006). This implies that the fourth grade students do not adequately exploit the application of the lateralization rule. On the other hand, the application of the nasalization rule to /n+l/ sequences, e.g. /kj□al + tan + lj□k/ [kj□lt'annj□k] 'determination', shows a better result in that only 20% of the fourth grade students read them as [nl]. The rest pronounces them as either [Ⅱ] or [nn], This indicates that the fourth grade students can achieve the application of lateralization or nasalization rules in the same way as the adults can. Second, this thesis measures the frequency of the application of phonological rules between the first and the fourth grade students. The result illustrates that the latter attain better scores than the former, which suggests that older students have more adequate ability to apply phonological rules to these two types of sequences. Finally, in terms of gender, there are no significant differences regarding the ability of rule application to these two consonant sequences.
The experiment conducted in this thesis illustrates various aspects of phonological awareness with respect to how ill-formed consonant clusters are phonetically manifested. The results of the experiments can provide basic data for the test of reading ability and phonological processing.