Files
Abstract
Vowel epenthesis is an essential strategy in the adaptation of English loanwords into Korean. Despite its importance, epenthetic vowels remain relatively underexplored across diverse linguistic contexts. This dissertation therefore investigates epenthetic vowels in both production and perception to deepen our understanding of how these processes contribute to the patterns of vowel epenthesis observed in Korean loanword adaptation. In production, the study explores how bilingualism and speech rate affect the phonetic features of epenthetic and lexical vowels. Results show that Korean monolinguals produce epenthetic and lexical vowels with similar F1, F2, and duration. However, Korean-English bilinguals produce epenthetic vowels with a higher F2 than lexical vowels, due to the influence of English [ɨ]. Bilinguals may apply L2 sounds to L1 loanword adaptation (Kadenge & Mudzingwa 2012; Zellou 2011), suggesting that English [ɨ] with higher F2 may replace Korean /ɨ/ in the Korean speech of bilinguals. The study also compares vowel production at normal and fast speech rates. At each rate, epenthetic and lexical vowels exhibit similar phonetic features. However, while both epenthetic and lexical /i/ show centralization at faster speech rates, epenthetic and lexical /ɨ/ do not. This may relate to vocal tract inertia (Jaworski 2009), where peripheral vowels like /i/ are more affected than central vowels like /ɨ/.
In perception, the study examines factors influencing the identification of epenthetic vowels. For /ɨ/ epenthesis, it is more frequently perceived when the final consonant is released, voiced, and alveolar or velar. Although the pre-final vowel’s tenseness and English test scores were not individually significant, listeners with higher English scores perceived epenthetic /ɨ/ more often when the pre-final vowel was tense. For /i/ epenthesis, native Korean listeners were more likely to perceive epenthesis when the final consonant was voiced and had longer noise duration. No significant effects or interactions were observed for vowel tenseness or English test scores.