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Kim, Jong-mi. “Non-native Acquisition of Phonological Weight: A Learnability Problem for English Vowels Produced by Korean Learners.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 41.2 (2015): 157-180. We explored the vowel quality in learner speech to see if the phonological weight of a foreign language is learnable. To do this, we collected speech data from 83 learners’ speech data whose native language is Korean and the foreign target language was English. Learner difficulty of phonological weight was expected to be seen, because English is known to be a stress-timed language and Korean a syllable-timed language. Two experiments were conducted to see how the learners acquired the target vowels with different phonological weights, namely, tense and lax vowels. For the first experiment, the first and second vowel formants of 40 learners’ speech were measured in Hz, and compared to target formant values collected from 18 native English speakers as a control group. For the second experiment, the pronunciation accuracy of 43 learner’ speech was evaluated by 11 native speakers. Three interesting results were found. First, the dispersion from the F1 and F2 values of native vowel centroids was greater for lax vowels than for tense vowels. Second, the native speaker listeners gave higher points for pronunciation accuracy of a tense vowel than a lax vowel. Third, statistically significant improvement after instruction was demonstrated for tense vowels, but not in many lax vowels. These results indicate that phonological weight of a foreign language is hard to learn. In particular, a lax vowel is harder to learn than a tense vowel. (Kangwon National University)
