14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

The Production of “New” and “Similar” Phones in a Second Language

Hyeon-zoo Kim (1,2)

(1) Department of French language & literature of Dankook Uniersity, Seoul, South Korea
(2) Institut de phonétique de Strasbourg - USHS, Strasbourg, France

Acoustic measurements were made of the voice onset time (VOT) and vowels in French and Korean words spoken by native Korean subjects who were highly experienced in French, and by native French subjects. The speech of monolingual subjects was also examined to estimate the phonetic norms of French and Korean. A series of experiments is presented, in which identical stimuli are used to examine similar cue-trading relations in the perception of voicing contrast in word stops in Korean and French. Do Koreans who speak French use the Korean system when uttering French phonemes? Or are they mimicking the French system in the stressed intervocalic position?
   Predicted cross-linguistic differences are found in the basis category boundary and in the case of cue trading between VOT and aspiration. The results are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that adult learners of a second language may establish new phonetic categories for phonetic segments not found in the native language.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kim, Hyeon-zoo (1999): "The production of “new” and “similar” phones in a second language", In ICPhS-14, 1137-1140.