earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the not surface-apparent opacity resulting from the acquisition of English coronal fricative [s] by Korean learners of English. According to Cho & Lee (2001), Korean learners of English are likely to produce English target /s/ in the prevocalic position as tense alveolar fricative [s’]. Moreover, they palatalize [s’] before /i/, producing palatalized tense [ʃ’]. Palatalized tense [ʃ’] by Korean learners of English shows the not surface-apparent opacity because of the tense feature which is not in the phonemic inventory of English. In this paper, I attempt to resolve the opacity problem by employing OT-CC (McCarthy 2006a-d, 2007), which incorporates the derivational information with PREC(A, B). Based on OT-CC with Prec(A, B), this paper examines and analyses the opacity problem of palatalized tense [ʃ’] before /i/ for English target /s/. By doing so, I support the superiority of OT-CC.