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Oh, Eunjin. 2010. The Coronal Stop Places of Early Korean-English Bilingual Speakers. Korean Journal of linguistics, 35-1, 155-181. The coronal stops of Korean and English differ subtly in places of articulation; denti-alveolar in Korean and alveolar in English. This study investigated how the coronal stop places are structured in early bilingual speakers of Korean and English. The main question was whether early bilinguals maintain one place or two independent places for the coronal stops. Nine native speakers of American English, seven Korean-English bilingual speakers, and nine native speakers of Seoul Korean (who also served as late learners of English) participated in this study. The coronal F2 locus values were estimated using locus equation parameters, i.e., "y-intercept" divided by "(1 - slope)." The native speakers of Korean and English demonstrated statistically significant language-specific differences in the slope (0.45 vs. 0.35, respectively), y-intercept (1041 Hz vs. 1289 Hz), and locus values (1907 Hz vs. 1990 Hz) for the coronal stops. The F2 onsets for Korean were influenced by the F2 vowels to a larger extent than for English. For the early bilinguals, the coronal places were Korean-like, but the patterns of anticipatory coarticulation were English-like for both Korean and English. For the late learners, the loci for English were native-like, but the patterns of coarticulation were Korean-like. Overall, the early bilinguals in this study were not better than the late learners in distinguishing between the fine differences in the coronal stop places of each language. It appears to be the case that where two languages are used on a daily basis, subtle articulatory differences such as those between the coronal stop places of each language tend to be merged. It is true that the merger of similar categories and the variation in their formations can be modeled in terms of the speech learning model, the perceptual assimilation model, and/or the exemplar-based model. However, those models cannot explain why greater amounts of English experience did not correlate with greater ability to formulate separate categories in our subjects. Since there were no clear signs of divergence between the two similar categories for the early bilinguals who had acquired two independent places, no evidence was found for the adaptive dispersion theory, either. (Ewha Womans University)