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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Korean learners, English, German, second language

College

Humanities

Department

German and Russian

Abstract

Numerous articles have examined the difficulties Korean speakers have learning the English /l/ and /r/ sounds (e.g., Borden et al 1983; Smith, 2001; Han, 2002). Most Korean learners of English hear and produce no distinction between English /l/ and /r/, because no surface contrast exists in Korean between these two liquid sounds (Iverson & Sohn, 1994). The English retroflex /r/ does not exist in Korean; Korean only has a phoneme /l/ with three distinct allophones: an apical flap [ɾ] in the initial position (as in atom in English), a lateral [l] in the coda position, and a geminate [ll] in the intervocalic position. Thus, in Korean, /l/ and /r/ are in complementary distribution and may be viewed as possible variants of one liquid sound. German is another language in which Koreans find it difficult to contrast the two liquid sounds for the same reasons as in English (Song & Lee, 1995; Park, 2011). Like English, German also has a two-way contrast between /l/ and /r/ sounds. However, the actual pronunciation of German /l/ and /r/ is different from English. For instance, the articulation of German /r/ is typically a uvular fricative, produced by several contact of the uvula and the tongue (Hall, 2003).

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