The Journal of Studies in Language ISSN:1225-4770(Print) 2671-6151(Online) 언어연구

The purpose of this study is to confirm whether Korean students can perceive the difference in duration between singleton and geminate types of words in English and Korean and articulate distinctly. Through acoustic analyses, we want to identify the duration of geminate structures, which are categorized into two classes, tautomorphemic and concatenated, the latter subdivided into morpheme-boundary and word-boundary geminates. Thus, the current study tested some words which are associated with geminate structures and singletons on American and Korean speakers. This study showed that, concerning the Korean words, most of the Koreans who participated in the study were aware of the spelling of the words and articulated them carefully. However, with the English words, they were affected by morphemic and word boundaries without recognizing sound variations according to their specific contexts. Koreans markedly perceived the intervocalic /l/s as ambisyllabic, and there were no differences in the duration between geminates and singletons in the /l/s. In conclusion, the Koreans’ articulation deeply relied on the spelling of words and was greatly affected by their mother languages’ speech sound system.