Phonological systems in bilinguals: age of learning effects on the stop consonant systems of Korean-English bilinguals

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.