독일어화자들의 한국어 습득 시 나타나는 인지상의 전이와 간섭현상연구

Phonological Transfer and its Hierarchy: L2 Perceptual Acquisition Process of Korean Plosives by German Native Speakers

In this study, we investigate L2 acquisition process of Korean onset plosives by 8 monolingual German native speakers with no prior knowledge on the target language. We suggest that the acquisition process of Korean words by Germans takes place not in a random, but in a hierarchic way, reflecting the perceptual difficulties in learning certain phonological features. It is found out that German native speakers, faced with absence of voice distinctions in the stop system of the target language, tend to distinguish synthetic counterparts of lenis-aspirated minimal pairs more readily than lenis-tensed fortis, given the minimal trios of lax, aspirated, and tensed plosives in Korean. The findings from this research tell us that the presence of aspiration [ph, th, kh] in surface, but not lexical or phonological representations /p, t, k/ in German aids in the eventual acquisition of ‘lenis-aspirated’ and ‘tensed fortis-aspirated’ minimal pairs in Korean. Besides, the consistent better performance for the acquisition of lenis-aspirated minimal pairs compared to tensed fortis-aspirated ones indicates that the VOT difference does not actually contribute to the acquisition of Korean plosives by German speakers.