The Production of English Voiceless Sibilants /s/ and /ʃ/ by Young Korean Children

Abstract

This study explored the acquisition of English voiceless sibilants /s/ and /ʃ/ by young Korean children by conducting production experiments. For this purpose, 30 male and 23 female Korean children aged 3 to 6 years produced 32 English nonce words either beginning or ending with /s/ and /ʃ/ in two vowel contexts /i/ and /u/. The results showed that English /ʃ/ showed early acquisition relative to English /s/ across all the age groups, similar to the results obtained by Smit et al. (1990) for English children. There was an age effect in that the difference in mean accuracy between 3-year olds and 6-year olds was statistically significant even though there was no gender effect. Further, there was a partial positional effect as Korean children's production of English /s/ was poor in onset compared to coda but their production of /ʃ/ was much better in onset than in coda. Although there was no effect of adjacent vowels, the children's production of the target sound /s/ showed the lowest percentage correct in the context of the vowel /i/. Importantly, the results were partly attributed to the effects of Korean s-palatalization and coarticulations between the target sounds and neighboring vowels on the basis of the children's error patterns. Implications for the acquisition of English voiceless sibilants by young Korean children were also drawn.