한국언어과학회

We investigated factors contributing to transferring an L1 allophonic change in L2 speech of 20 Korean learners of English. Realization of the Korean obstruent nasalization rule depended on the segmental environment. Stops underwent greater nasalization when the following nasal was homorganic (e.g., /ʃɪpmənt/ → [ʃɪmmənt]), compared to non-homorganic sequences (e.g., /kwɪknəs/ → [kwɪŋnəs]). The L1-transfer was also conditioned by prosodic factors. As a prominence effect, more nasalization occurred when the target word/phrase was elicited to be unfocused by context, compared to focus-driven utterances. This effect was found exclusively in the advanced learner group (N=10) but not in the intermediate group (N=10), suggesting that fluent L2 speakers better inhibit the L1 phonological process particularly in attended speech. Further, a boundary effect showed that visually-presented word boundary helped inhibit nasalization for both groups, but that even advanced learners experienced difficulty in inhibiting word-internal nasalization, particularly in unattended speech.