The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp. 528-546
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 25 Apr 2022 Revised 10 Jun 2022 Accepted 29 Jun 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202206.528

Against Intrusive r Strategy in English Vowel Hiatus: Evidence from the Buckeye Corpus and L2 Speech
Gwanhi Yun ; Minkyung Lee
(co-first author) Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Daegu University, Tel: 053) 850-6025 (ghyun@daegu.ac.kr)
(co-first author) Professor, Department of English Education, Daegu University, Tel: 053) 850-4122 (milee@daegu.ac.kr)


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract

As phonologically-documented, in vowel-vowel (VV) sequences within words or across word boundaries, when the first word ends in one of the non-high vowels such as /ǝ, ɑ, ç/ and the following vowel gets unstressed, intrusive r is added intervocalically. This paper attempts to examine and analyze whether such /r/- epenthesis takes place to avoid vowel hiatus in the speeches of Korean L2 English speakers (KS) collected from the production task compared to those of English native speakers (ES) extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of spontaneous conversational speech. As stimuli for both KS and ES, VV sequences across word boundaries are mainly targeted based on the possible anti-hiatus strategies, i.e. r-intrusion, glottal stop insertion and vowel deletion as well as canonical variant. Interestingly but strikingly, r-intrusion is hardly observed in both groups. For the tokens of ES, vowel hiatus predominantly arose and vowel elision was second-best. For the KS’s tokens, no r was embedded, either. However, Korean L2 English speakers behave differently given their English proficiency. For KS with low proficiency (LP), a pause between two vowels results in glottal stop insertion but a canonical form is the most favored with no pause. However, for KS with high proficiency (HP), a pause is hardly placed in hiatus contexts and canonical variants predominantly surface. Unlike LP KS, a pause does not play a key factor to apply any other anti-hiatal strategies and further the effect of vowel height is quite significant, i.e., hiatus is more tolerated in V1-non-high than in V1-high. Contrary to the phonological claims of intrusive r as a hiatus breaker, vowel hiatus remains intact with no r intruded.

Keywords: vowel hiatus, intrusive r, glottal stop insertion, Buckeye Corpus, variation, L2 speech
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