Acquisition of Korean Stops by Native Speakers of Mandarin Chinese

This study examined the production of the Korean stops (lenis, fortis, and aspirated) by Chinese learners over a one-year period following their first exposure to Korean. The main goals of the study were to investigate the learning trajectory of adult learners of second-language (L2) segmental acquisition and to determine whether L2 learners could make use of the multiple acoustic cues associated with the L2 segments. In Experiment 1, the voice onset time (VOT) and vowel-onset fundamental frequency (onset F0) were measured for each type of stops in Korean produced by the Chinese learners. The results indicate that L2 phonetic learning progresses gradually instead of following a pattern characterized by rapid initial learning and a subsequent plateau within a few months. The Chinese learners also learned to control the VOT quite easily but not the onset F0; this result suggests that L2 learners have difficulty producing the multiple acoustic correlates for L2 phonetic contrasts. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the asymmetry in the development of controlling VOT and onset F0 had a direct impact on the intelligibility of Chinese learners’ utterances to native Korean speakers.