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The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native speakers (NSs) of English as well as less of a difference in duration between the two types of vowel than the NSs. The Japanese speakers, whose native language has a phonemic length distinction, produced more nativelike durational patterns. Finally, the vowel quality (first and second formant frequencies) of unstressed vowels was different from the NS group's for the late bilinguals, for whom unstressed vowels were widely dispersed in the vowel space according to their orthographic representations, and from the early Korean bilinguals, who substituted the Korean high central vowel. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of the phonological status of first language phonetic features and age of acquisition.

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of phonologically similar words were investigated for their effect on the placement of stress in English nonwords. Both bilingual groups--like the native English controls--showed extension of stress patterns from phonologically similar real words. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers, and late bilinguals showed more reduced effects. Unlike previous work with Spanish-English bilinguals, Korean-English bilinguals demonstrated a nonnativelike effect of lexical class, most pronounced in the late bilinguals. This difference might be due to Koreans' low sensitivity to word-level statistical distributions because of early exposure to a phrase-level prosodic system.

Guion, Clark, Harada and Wayland (2003) found that three factors affect English speakers' stress placement on bisyllabic non-words: syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. The current replication and extension included three groups (N = 30): native English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Participants produced and gave perceptual judgments on 40 non-words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. A regression analysis used the three factors to predict stress placement in production and perception. All three groups showed significant effects from stress patterns of phonologically similar real words and lexical class. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers and late bilinguals showed greatly reduced effects. Late bilinguals exhibited more initial stress overall, possibly due to L1 transfer. These results run counter to the prediction made by Long (1990) about age effects on phonological acquisition.

Interaction of Korean and English stop systems in Korean-English bilinguals as a function of age of acquisition (AOA) of English was investigated. It was hypothesized that early bilinguals (mean AOA=3.8 years) would more likely be native-like in production of English and Korean stops and maintain greater independence between Korean and English stop systems than late bilinguals (mean AOA=21.4 years). Production of Korean and English stops was analyzed in terms of three acoustic-phonetic properties: voice-onset time, amplitude difference between the first two harmonics, and fundamental frequency. Late bilinguals were different from English monolinguals for English voiceless and voiced stops in all three properties. As for Korean stops, late bilinguals were different from Korean monolinguals for fortis stops in voice-onset time. Early bilinguals were not different from the monolinguals of either language. Considering the independence of the two stop systems, late bilinguals seem to have merged English voiceless and Korean aspirated stops and produced English voiced stops with similarities to both Korean fortis and lenis stops, whereas early bilinguals produced five distinct stop types. Thus, the early bilinguals seem to have two independent stop systems, whereas the late bilinguals likely have a merged Korean-English system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stop systems of adult Korean (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were studied through acoustic analysis of Korean and English stop productions. The interaction of the first and second language stop systems was investigated as a function of age of exposure to English. The main goals of the investigation were to examine the extent to which early and the late bilinguals produced a given stop category in a native-like way and the extent to which the two stop systems were held independent from each other in the phonological systems of the bilinguals. Two specific questions were asked: whether early bilinguals were more native-like in the production of English stops and thus were more likely to establish L2 phonetic categories than late bilinguals, and whether the Early bilinguals maintain a greater extent of independence between the Korean and English stop systems than the late bilinguals. For this purpose, productions of Korean and English stops were analyzed in terms of three acoustic-phonetic properties, VOT, H1-H2, and f0. The results suggested that fine-grained phonetic information is crucial to investigation of bilingual phonological systems and they were discussed in terms of the role of perceived phonetic distance between L1 and L2 phonetic categories in L2 speech learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]