Phonetic Categories of English and Korean Stops in 3-year-old Sequential Korean-English Bbilingual Children

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine phonetic categories of stop consonants produced by 3-year-old sequential Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children (n=12). Methods: Voice-Onset-Time (VOT) and vowel-onset fo (fo) of Korean and English stops were acoustically examined in each language separately. Then, their English and Korean stops were compared cross-linguistically. Results: KEB children produced English voiced and voiceless stops as well as Korean fortis distinctively at all three places of articulation. However, they distinguished Korean lenis and aspirated stops with fo value, but not with VOT. In terms of English and Korean stops across languages, only English voiced and Korean fortis stops were distinctively produced whereas the other stops with long lag VOT were produced with similar VOT and fo values. Conclusions: The findings of the current study suggest that sequential bilingual children possess two linguistic systems similar to simultaneous bilingual children.