Articulatory Variability of Phonological Rules by Korean EFL and Indian ESL Speakers

• Published in: 영어학 Vol. 22; pp. 1465 - 1493
• Main Authors: Gwanhi Yun, Jae-Hyun Sung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 한국영어학회 01.12.2022
• Subjects: 영어와문학; English; foreign language; phonological variation; place assimilation; second language; palatalization; word-final coronal deletion; ultrasound imaging technique
• ISSN: 1598-1398; 2586-7474
• DOI: 10.15738/kjell.22..202212.1465

The present study investigates how Korean EFL speakers (KS) and Indian ESL speakers (IS) apply their L2 English phonological rules to their production of coronal consonants. To this end, ultrasound imaging experiments were administered for both groups of L2 speakers with three English phonological rules: palatalization, place assimilation and word-final coronal deletion. First, the results showed that most of KS did not palatalize the target alveolars across word boundary. It was also found that place assimilation occurred for the half of the stimuli, showing phonological variations with three major variants. Additionally, word-final /t/ deletion was not common, amounting to only 36%. Second, the results from IS showed that palatalization was applied less than 50%. However, the likelihood of palatalization exhibited interspeaker variation. Additionally, IS applied place assimilation more frequently, compared to KS (56% vs. 50%). Like KS, IS also favored coronal-to-velar assimilation over coronal-tolabial assimilation (81% vs. 31%). Finally, IS showed a similar pattern in the likelihood of word-final /t/ deletion to KS, inducing deletion at 36%. Like KS, deletion occurred more frequently when the following consonant was a labial than when it was a velar. In summary, the gestural patterns from KS and IS suggest that both KS and IS produce English phonological rules gradiently, not in a categorical fashion. Furthermore, it is indicated that place assimilation is more frequent for IS than for KS conceivably due to more exposure to English as SL than as FL. In addition, it was observed that hyperarticulation or gestural overshoot is adopted for both speaker groups. Overall, the articulatory patterns from this study imply that phonological variation is quite common for EFL and ESL speakers like native English speakers. It is also suggested that the way speakers produce L2 phonological rules varies markedly according to individual phonological rules as well as across speaker groups, and the likelihood of occurrence of each of phonological variant differs in accordance with phonological rules, context or English-speaking groups. KCI Citation Count: 1