Phonological Development of Korean: A Case Study

Studies on child phonology suggest that there exist phonological universals in the timing of phonological events and the order of acquiring phonological categories. According to Jakobson (1941/1968), voiceless (unaspirated) stops are acquired earlier than voiced or aspirated ones, and front consonants are acquired earlier than back consonants (i.e., bilabial > alveolar > velar). With regard to the manner of articulation, stops are claimed to be acquired before nasals, nasals before fricatives, fricatives before affricates, and affricates before liquids. These universals have been supported by data from many studies, but not always (see Vihman 1996, ch. 2). Studies on cross-linguistic data have found that the acquisition of speech sounds is influenced by the language-specific aspects of the ambient language and the frequency of the sound in child-directed speech (Macken 1980, Macken & Ferguson 1981, Lust, Flynn, Chien, & Clifford 1980, Vihman 1996, Vihman et al. 1998, Beckman et al. 2003; also see Zamuner et al. 2004 for phonotactic probability data arguing for the importance of considering the input in children’s acquisition of phonology). Though there are many studies on the acquisition of Korean, most of them are on the acquisition of morpho-syntax (e.g., acquisition of case markers, relative clauses, negation, word order, pronouns, wh-questions; see Y.-J. Kim 1997 for detailed reviews), and only a few are on the acquisition of phonology, especially the sound pattern of a child and the acquisition of phonological rules (e.g., Kang 1991, Cho 2002; see Yoko 1997 for detailed reviews). To my knowledge, no studies so far have examined the order of acquiring consonants and vowels and the acquisition of prosody based on instrumental investigations. The goal of this paper is to investigate the phonological development of a Korean child based on acoustic analysis of naturalistic data. Special attention is given to the acquisition of the Korean three-way manner contrast (tense, aspirated, lenis) and the acquisition of prosody.