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Article published In:
Korean Linguistics
Vol. 16:2 (2014) ► pp.188–206

Processing of English /s/ in Korean

The role of duration

| Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea
| University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, USA

The single English phoneme /s/ can be borrowed into Korean as either of two different phonemes — lax /s/ or tense /s*/. The present study investigates how Korean native speakers process English /s/ by testing the role of the duration of English /s/ in determining the choice of phoneme in Korean. Two production experiments were conducted with twenty-eight participants, who were asked to repeat English pseudo-words in Korean. The results suggest that (1) the split borrowing pattern is indeed regular and systematic, and (2) while duration of English /s/ is certainly one factor in determining the split borrowing pattern, it may not be the key factor.

Keywords: Fricatives, Korean, loanword adaptation, production, duration, English
Published online: 26 January 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.16.2.04cho
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