earticle

영어

This study attempts to investigate effects of L2 learners’ lexical familiarity on the production of the four L2 phonological rules (stress shift, vowel reduction, vowel laxing, and consonant coalescence), applying to morphological derivatives including -ity and -ion. In English, stress shift and vowel reduction interact while vowel laxing and consonant coalescence do not interact. This study also examines the influence of L2 learners’ lexical familiarity in terms of whether the rules interact or not. For this, the production and lexical familiarity tasks were carried out to forty-six Korean college students. It was found that the accuracy rates of the vowel laxing, consonant coalescence and stress shift rules were higher than the familiarity rates of the related words. As for the three rules, the participants tended to generate correct alternations more in known words than in unfamiliar words. The participants also appeared to generalize the rules and extend the application of the rules to the unfamiliar words. In contrast, vowel reduction showed a significantly lower accuracy rate than the familiarity rate of the associated words. The participants tended to pronounce the expected reduced vowel incorrectly both in the familiar and unfamiliar derivatives. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications for L2 pronunciation were made.