earticle

영어

The aim of this study is to investigate production of consonant clusters by Korean young children from three to six years old. Fifty-three Korean children participated in an imitation production task and their speech productions were transcribed. In order to examine the process of acquisition their speech errors were analyzed and divided into 5 types: consonant deletion, epenthesis, substitution, coalescence and combination. The results of transcription and error analysis are as follows: 1) As the children are getting old, the number of consonant deletion in consonant cluster is decreasing. 2) Among the five different error types, vowel insertion is the most frequent, and it is more frequent in the voiced stop and liquid clusters than in the voiceless stop and liquid clusters. 3) Velars, the first consonant in the clusters, tend to replaced by bilabials, whereas the second consonant, liquids are likely to be substituted with glides. 4) /p/and /r/ can coalesce into /ʃ/. 5) More than one types of errors can be combined and produced in the consonant clusters. Based on the results of this study, some implications for the acquisition of consonant clusters were drawn.