Speech Production and Perception of Heritage Speakers of Korean A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction ! of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Linguistics

Childhood exposure to heritage language has been found to be beneficial when relearning the language as an adult. However, it is not known whether the exposure to heritage language affects the dominant language of the heritage speaker. This study investigates if there is any influence of heritage language (i.e., Korean) on the dominant language (i.e., English) of second-generation Korean-Americans based on their production data, and if there is, whether the Korean-American English " accent " is perceptible by native speakers of English. Two groups of Korean Americans and two groups of monolingual speakers were recruited: nine Korean Americans who were exposed to Korean in childhood (i.e., ! ! iii! childhood speakers), three Korean-English bilinguals, ten monolingual English controls and six monolingual Korean controls. The results show that English and Korean vowels produced by the childhood speakers were different from that of the bilinguals and that of the two monolingual control groups, suggesting that incomplete exposure to heritage language in childhood affects one's dominant language. However, the analysis of voice quality measures did not suggest any systematic pattern among the speaker groups. For the perception study, fifty-eight listeners were recruited and were asked to judge the speakers' ethnicity after listening to ten English words produced by either Korean Americans or monolingual English controls. The results revealed that listeners were not able to reliably judge the childhood speakers as Asian Americans, indicating that the acoustic differences are subtle. However, the bilingual speakers were consistently rated as Asian Americans, suggesting that bilingual speech might be what native speakers perceive as " Korean-American English. " ! ! ! iv! The thesis of Eun Hwa Lee is approved.