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Stop consonant productions of Korean–English bilingual children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2011

SUE ANN S. LEE  and
GREGORY K. IVERSON
SUE ANN S. LEE*
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
GREGORY K. IVERSON
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language & University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
*
Address for correspondence: Sue Ann S. Lee, PhD, Dept. of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, 3601 4th Street, Stop 6073, Lubbock, TX, 79430, USA. [email protected]
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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to conduct an acoustic examination of the obstruent stops produced by Korean–English bilingual children in connection with the question of whether bilinguals establish distinct categories of speech sounds across languages. Stop productions were obtained from ninety children in two age ranges, five and ten years: thirty Korean–English bilinguals, thirty monolingual Koreans and thirty monolingual English speakers. Voice-Onset-Time (VOT) lag at word-initial stop and fundamental frequency (f0) in the following vowel (hereafter vowel-onset f0) were measured. The bilingual children showed different patterns of VOT in comparison to both English and Korean monolinguals, with longer VOT in their production of Korean stop consonants and shorter VOT for English. Moreover, the ten-year-old bilinguals distinguished all stop categories using both VOT and vowel-onset f0, whereas the five-year-olds tended to make stop distinctions based on VOT but not vowel-onset f0. The results of this study suggest that bilingual children at around five years of age do not yet have fully separate stop systems, and that the systems continue to evolve during the developmental period.

Keywords

bilingualismstop consonantKorean−English bilingual children
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 275 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

The first author was formerly called Soyoung Lee. This study has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5R03HD061527-02) to the first and second authors. The authors thank the children who participated in the study, the parents who gave their consent and the childcare centers and schools at which the data were collected. We also thank Dr Ja Hyung Lee at Ewha Womans University for her help with participant recruitment.

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