Variation in the Korean Integration of English Word-Final/s/

Abstract

The adaptation of English word-final /s / in words that are borrowed into Korean presents an interesting perceptual match-up inasmuch as Korean contrasts two types of voiceless fricatives, “lax ” /s / and “tense ” /s’/, either of which, depending on context, may serve as the rendition of English /s/. Which of these is selected appears to correlate with the familiar durational difference between lax and tense consonants in Korean. In particular, Kim (1999) showed that English words are borrowed consistently with tense /s’ / when the fricative is not in a cluster in the source language (where it is phonetically longer), whereas the result is lax /s / when the fricative (phonetically shorter) does form part of a consonant cluster in the source language. Hypothesizing that Koreans are sensitive to this durational property, Kim concluded that positional sub-phonemic length differences in the English fricative are apprehended directly by Korean listeners (and so presumably are contrastive in the language; cf. Iverson & Lee 2006). Davis & M. Cho (2006), on the other hand, maintain that the phonetic length correlation is not robust, noting specifically that Kim was troubled by the