This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of English to determine the accuracy of coda consonants. The results showed that in both Chinese and Korean languages, the mean proportion of L2 forms was consistently ordered across all groups of different proficiencies: Substitution > Insertion > Deletion. Our results support the Natural Order Hypothesis that non-native phonology has the same general order, no matter what might be the language proficiency of the learners or the learners’ native language. However, the results do not support the view that this order is the acquisition sequence or the difficulty order. Other findings include that non-native phonology operates according to recoverability rather than transfer or markedness.

1. INTRODUCTION
  1.1. Natural Order of Acquisition
  1.2. Syllable Coda Differences in English, Korean, and Chinese
  1.3. Universals of Non-native Phonology: Markedness and Recoverability
  1.4. Research Questions
 2. EXPERIMENT 1: KOREAN ENGLISH
  2.1. Participants
  2.2. Speech Materials
  2.3. Data Collection
  2.4. Analysis
  2.5. Results
 3. EXPERIMENT 2: CHINESE ENGLISH
  3.1. Participants
  3.2. Speech Materials
  3.3. Data Collection
  3.4. Analysis
  3.5. Results
 4. DISCUSSION
  4.1. Natural Order of Non-native Phonology
  4.2. Learnability of L2 Phonology: Recoverability over Transfer
  4.3. Universals of Non-native Phonology: Recoverability Over Markedness
 5. CONCLUSION
 REFERENCES

• Jong-mi Kim(Kangwon National University) Corresponding author
• U-ri Go(Kangwon National University)