국어 모음 습득의 첫 단계에 대한 연구

Abstract

The aims of this paper is to provide an account of the initial stages in the acquisition of Korean vowels, and to reveal the order and age of mastery of phonemic contrast in vowels of Korean. Particularly, we focus on segmental correspondences between the child and adult language. We also demonstrate how an Optimality-theoretic approach can account for the fact that vowels are realized by 22 children in Korean. For this purpose, we made an observation of the correspondences between the sounds produced by children of 6-23 months and the target sounds produced by adult. The provisional order and the age of contrast acquisition shown from the results of this study are as follows: 1) The differential production of vowels by the place of tongue is accomplished before 12 month. 2) As for the differential production of vowels by the roundness, the contrast between of round vowels and unround vowels is first established in the age of 18 month. And We argue that different stages arise through the gradual increase in minimal constraint demotion of Optimality Theory. We furthermore show that the same set of constraints and the mechanism of constraint demotion can be used to explain different stages in the acquisition of Korean vowels.