Anna Marie Schmidt
Dept. of Biocommun., Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB Station VH 503, Birmingham, AL 35294
Presently available acoustic and perceptual data do not make it possible to evaluate the degree of phonetic similarity between vowels and consonants found in Korean and English. Recent models of second language acquisition [e.g., J. E. Flege, Q. J. Exptl. Psychol. 43A, 701--731 (1991)] require the availability of such phonetic measures for the formulation of specific testable hypotheses. One purpose of the present study was to expand the limited data set of Korean acoustic measures. Another purpose was to formulate hypotheses about which sounds native Korean speakers will use when learning English. Acoustic measurements were performed on six Korean consonants (/t/) lax, tense, aspirated, /s/ lax, tense, and /l/) in five vowel contexts. Measurements included vowel dimensions such as duration and format structure as well as consonant dimensions such as VOT and amplitude rise time. Similar measures were performed on comparable English consonants and vowels. Observations will be made of the relative degree of phonetic similarity of the Korean stop series to the English /t/ and /d/ and of the Korean fricative series to the English interdental, alveolar, and palatal fricatives. [Work supported by NIH.]