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KMID : 0917520040110020071
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Journal of Speech Sciences
2004 Volume.11 No. 2 p.71 ~ p.87
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The Korean Fricatives in Acquisition: A Case Study
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Kang Kyung-Shim
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Abstract
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Korean has a pair of voiceless fricatives, whose laryngeal manifestation comes in parallel to stops and affricates with a three-way lexical contrast. Prior phonetic studies by Kagaya (1974), Iverson (1983), and Kang (1999, 2000) point out /s/ is associated with multiple characteristics of the larynx shared with not only the lax but also the aspirated series, whereas /s’ / carries a laryngeal distinction typical of the tense consonants. The complex dual nature of /s/ is again supported by a psycholinguistic study by Kang (2004), as /s/ was found to interact with // (17% of the time) as well as /c/ (57%) in speech errors. In addition, a recent work by Cho and Lee (2003) notes an interesting chain shift case in the acquisition of the fricatives. Although they observed a significant phonological pattern between child English and Korean, Cho and Lee’s description of acquiring fricatives is far from being precise from the perspective of phonetics. From a longitudinal study of recorded tapes by two children at 1;7-3;8 and 1;7-2;1 respectively, I found that /s’ / was usually substituted into tense noncontinuants in young children’s early production as predicted, whereas /s/ having both lax and aspirated-like glottal properties revealed a complicated pattern of substitutions into lax, tense, and aspirated noncontinuants with a varying degree of preference relative to the subjects. The current acquisition study supports the previous claims concerning fricatives in other languages, showing that their acquisition comes after stops. Besides, it also notes that Korean fricatives are subject to a series of phonological processes called stopping, affricating, tensifying and palatalizing during the transitional period of phonological development by young children. Moreover, between the two voiceless types, /s/ was acquired earlier than /s’/ as the unmarked segment.
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KEYWORD
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Korean fricatives, lax fricative, tense fricative, acquisition
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