earticle

영어

It has been established in the literature that pronunciation of a letter or letter sequences in English is affected by the surrounding context. Specifically, it has been suggested that in many cases of English vowel graphemes, the potential candidates of their actual pronunciation could be significantly narrowed down if one knows the consonant that follows and/or precedes the vowel graphemes. The purpose of the current paper is to ask whether the same type of effect can also be found from Korean EFL learners in their reading English nonsense words. This study shows that Korean learners of English make use of certain amount of context information in mapping letters to sounds in reading in their target language. The current results additionally indicate that Korean learners of English are also sensitive to the overall frequency of graphemes’ pronunciations in the English words in general. Based on these findings, we suggest that Korean learners of English may pick up the statistical regularities governing letter-to-sound correspondences as a part of their second language learning process and use this implicit knowledge in processing L2 nonwords.