재미 동포 한국어의 단모음 체계와 공간 구조

초록

This study aims to investigate how the monophthong system and vowel space of Korean Americans’ Korean vary according to immigrant generation and age. A word-reading experiment was conducted with first-generation, 1.5-generation, and second-generation Korean Americans, and the phonetic and acoustic characteristics of their monophthongs were analyzed. The results show that /y/ and /ø/ were generally produced as diphthongs similar to native Korean pronunciation, but exhibited significantly longer glide components due to the influence of English phonotactics. Additionally, second-generation speakers displayed greater variability in the realization of these vowels, likely reflecting incomplete underlying phonological knowledge of /y/ and /ø/. The front vowels /e/ and /ɛ/ were not distinguished across generations, except for some elderly first-generation speakers. While younger mainland Korean speakers have shown a fronting tendency of /ɨ/, second-generation heritage speakers exhibited a backing trend, likely due to its mapping to the English vowel /ʊ/. The vowel /ʌ/ retained high vowel features in some elderly speakers, though the length-based spatial distinction had disappeared. The /u/ and /o/ showed variation patterns similar to native Korean speakers depending on age, but only the second generation formed these vowels primarily along the F1 dimension. This is interpreted as a spatial adjustment to avoid articulatory overlap with the backed /ɨ/.

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