Tonogenesis in Seoul Korean and L3 Production of Korean stops by Cantonese- English Bilinguals

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate how tonogenesis in Seoul Korean affects non-native language acquisition in a multilingual context with L1 Cantonese, L2 English and L3 Korean. We are also interested to examine the source and direction of crosslinguistic influences in the acquisition of VOT and F0 patterns which are used for the stop contrasts. Sixteen L3 Korean learners differing in proficiencies (beginning vs. intermediate) were recorded reading a list of words embedded in carrier sentences in the three languages. Results from acoustic analyses found that the learners did not merge VOTs for the Korean lax and aspirated stop contrast, but they showed the tendency for tonogenesis, such as their heavy use of f0 in producing different Korean stops. Furthermore, comparison between the beginners and the intermediate learners revealed various cross-linguistic influences: regressive transfer of f0 on L1 and L2, bidirectional interaction of f0 values between L2 and L3, and L1 influence on the production of VOT in L2 and L3. These findings suggest that L3 transfer happens in a cue-by-cue manner, i.e. VOT and f0 need to be accounted for separately.