미국 재외동포 아동의 한국어 장애음 지각 연구

A Perception Study on Korean Obstruents by Heritage Korean Children in the United States.

The study investigates how heritage Korean children perceive Korean obstruents. Twenty seven children who are either six or seven year old participated in the study. Each participant is in a beginning level class in a weekend Korean language school in Southern California, USA. The children were classified into two groups, K or E, on the basis of their dominant language usage during their early childhood (0-5 years). For the perception experiment, 56 tokens that consist of one consonant (stop, fricative, or affricate) and one vowel [a] were used. The participants were asked to select a letter on the laptop screen after they listened to each token whether it was a lenis, aspirated, or fortis stop or affricate (or a lenis or fortis fricative). First, we found that a pattern of heritage Korean children’s perception on Korean obstruents is similar to that of Korean native children’s obstruent acquisition. Second, we found that the children in the K group showed higher percentage of correctness than the children in the E group in all cases. Therefore, we conclude that if heritage Korean children are more exposed to Korean than English during their early childhood, their perception on Korean becomes more similar to Korean native speakers than those who are more exposed to English than Korean.