Research
Here you can learn more about my projects.
Compound tensification in Korean - Bridging phonology, phonetics, and morphology
This is part of my dissertation project studying the phonetic realization of a morpho-phonological process in Korean called sai-sios, or compound tensification. It causes a plain obstruent in the initial position of the second noun to become tense in a noun + noun compound. Compound tensification is interesting since it's not entirely predictable when it occurs and what happens to the pronunciations when it does. I examined corpus data to answer questions of how compound tensification is manifested in actual speech and whether there is a categorical distinction between tense stops derived from compound tensification and underlying plain and tense stops, as described in the traditional literature. Currently, I'm working on publishing results from a production experiment and running a perception experiment.
The prosodic patterns in English production by L1 speakers and Korean L2 speakers of English
I examined the prosodic patterns exhibited by Korean L2 speakers of English compared to English L1 speakers. Since Korean and English are prosodically distinct languages, I expected unique patterns to arise for Korean L2 speakers from L1 influence. Specifically, I hypothesized that the difference would stem from a Korean prosodic property in which phrase edges are highly prominent. This hypothesis is supported by the result that shows that L2 speakers are more consistently affected by boundary effects. It further indicates that specific prosodic characteristics of L1 shape the realization of L2 speech, which helps us understand why L2 speech sounds distinct from L1 systematically.