Production of Stop-Nasal Sequences by Korean Learners of English: An Optimality Theoretic Approach

Abstract

This study investigates how Korean learners of English produce stop-nasal sequences in English words/phrases like Batman and a good neighbor, and explores how their interlanguage phonology can be accounted for within the Optimality Theoretic framework, which characterizes a grammar as a set of violable universal constraints. In Korean, a stop is assimilated to its following nasal and becomes a nasal. The results show that Korean learners of English transfer Korean constraint ranking, which results in nasal-nasal sequences (like those of Korean) replacing stop-nasal sequences in L2. Vowel insertion also occurs; this appears to occur in perception (Park, 2002), and it results from a phonological constraint which rules out stop-nasal sequences at the phonetic level. This insertion gives rise to alternative input representations. Factors such as stress patterns, place of articulation, word boundary, or voicing play a role in stop nasalization and vowel insertion. The variations may be accounted for by some constraints proposed by Davis and Shin (1999) and a constraint proposed in this paper, and by adopting a model of floating constraints (Nagy and Reynolds, 1997) which yield the variable rankings apparent in L2 speech.