• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1191-1210
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• 2010

This article claims that English liquid consonants are characterized by the presence of complex place nodes, regardless of dialectal varieties. The primary difference between rhotic and laterals can be pursued in a phonological sense. The level of subbranching nodes is in charge of the disparities among two types of liquids: the branching immediately below the Coronal node with laterals, while branching at the secondary sublevel with rhotics. In this context, the processes of rhotic deletion and lateral vocalization can be understood as those motivated to get rid of complex place nodes. That is, those processes take place as part of phonological attrition. Next, the onset/coda asymmetry regarding liquids stems from the dispreference of vocoid at the onset position, which is readily accounted for by the series of constraints on the well-formedness on the onset, namely Harmonic Onset. The rationale of gradualness and harmonic improvement proposed by Harmonic Serialism is useful to separate the attested outputs from unattested ones across the whole gamut of English varieties. All in all, the primary benefits of our analysis can be found in the consistence in the explanation for the operations running through the sounds regarded as belonging to liquid consonants, comprising the whole range of rhotic and lateral consonants.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.1-13
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• 2001

This paper deals with non-rhoticity of Korean and Cantonese in English loanword adaptation. These two languages have quite different cultural and historical backgrounds with respect to English. The influence of the American accent prevails in Korea while in Cantonese the influence is British. However, the treatment of coda-/r/ from English illustrates that both languages are the same in that they use a non-rhotic accent. The main point of this paper is to show that the non-rhoticity of these two languages must be accounted for by their native phonological systems rather than extralinguistic factors such as historical. social and / or cultural backgrounds.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.321-331
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• 2000

This paper deals with non-rhoticity of Korean and Cantonese in English loanword adaptation. These two languages have quite different cultural and historical backgrounds with respect to English. The influence of the American accent prevails in Korea while in Cantonese the influence is British. However, the treatment of coda-/r/ from English illustrates that both languages are the same in that they use a non-rhotic accent. The main point of this paper is to show that the non-rhoticity of these two languages must be accounted for by their native phonological systems rather than extralinguistic factors such as historical, social and / or cultural backgrounds.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2022

The English word-final /rl/ cluster poses a particular problem for Korean learners of English because it is the sequence of two sounds, /r/ and /l/, which are not contrastive in Korean. This study compared the similarity distances between English and Korean speakers' /rl/ productions using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The words with /rl/ (pearl, world) and without /rl/ (bird, word) were recorded by four English speakers and four Korean speakers, and compared pairwise. The F2-F1 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of velarized /l/, and F3 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of /r/, were examined. Formant analysis showed that English speakers lowered F2-F1 values toward the end of a word, unlike Korean speakers, suggesting the absence of /l/ in Korean speakers. In contrast, there was no significant difference in F3 values. Mixed-effects regression analyses of the DTW distances revealed that Korean speakers produced /r/ similarly to English speakers but failed to produce the velarized /l/ in /rl/ clusters.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.203-211
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• 2020

Given that American English and British English show differences for several vowels and that Korean students have mainly been exposed to American English, this study examined 27 Korean university students' identification of American and British English vowels. The results showed that Korean students' identification accuracy of American English vowels was higher (64.7%) than that of British English (54.7%), thus indicating that Korean students' familiarity with American English affected the students' identification of English vowels. However, vowel variation also affected students' identification of English vowels in that only the American English vowels in the words beat, bat, but, burt, bart, bite were better identified than the corresponding vowels in British English. Among the vowels which exhibit differences between American English and British English, the students' identification accuracy of the American English vowels in burt, bart, bat was significantly higher than that of British English and the error patterns for these vowels were also different. The analysis of vowel error patterns indicated that Korean students had much difficulty with non-rhotic vowels and [a] in bat in British English. Further, the vowels in bot and boat demonstrated a similar [ɑ]-[ɔ]-[ʌ] confusion and also a confusion between rounded vowels in spite of the differences of these vowels between American English and British English. Some pedagogical implications for teaching of English vowels were discussed based on the findings of the present study.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.287-304
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• 2002

Truncated forms (truncata) in English hypocoristic words have been argued to be faithful to their bases. This means that “ ... the base of truncation is an output form"”(Benua 1995:6,12). For example, in some non-rhotic dialects where syllable-final [r]s are deleted, the [r]s of truncated names such as Gar [gær] (truncated form of Garry [gæri]) are not deleted although they are syllable-final. This is an example of base-truncatum identity. That is, the syllable-final [r] is retained to make the truncatum more faithful to its base. However, there are many English hypocoristic names which are not faithful to their base forms. For example, Letty [equation omitted] (hypocoristic form of Latitia [equation omitted]) is not faithful to its base; the first vowel and the second consonant of the truncatum are not identical to the corresponding segments of the base. It will be argued, therefore, that some truncated forms are more faithful to the inputs than the bases. It will also be argued that McCarthy and Prince's (1995) Full Model is needed to deal successfully with all the phenomena related to truncation.