Korean Stop VOT Production by Heritage Speakers in the Language Classroom

Korean Stop VOT Production by Heritage Speakers in the Language Classroom Public Deposited

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Johnson, Melinda
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics

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Heritage speakers of Korean were recorded producing Korean and English stops and compared to the results of those produced by their non-heritage speaker peers in order to better understand the roles of first language attrition and language transfer, as well as the validity of the permanence hypothesis proposed in the Native Language Neural Commitment theory. The permanence hypothesis weighs age of first language acquisition as highly important in that after acquiring their sound categories, native speakers will persist in using those parameters throughout their lives. This study found that while the permanence hypothesis does have some credence in the participants’ Korean aspirated stops, which were produced like their childhood input (i.e. their parents’), it also encountered signs of first language attrition in the form of their ∆VOT, which was not produced like their parents’, and language transfer from Korean to English in the voiceless aspirated stop category, which was produced like a Korean stop in both languages. These results demonstrate the complexity of language acquisition, retention, and language transfer in bilinguals, and in heritage speakers in particular.

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	Johnson_unc_0153M_15649.pdf	2019-04-09	Public	Download