This study examines the patterns of prosodically induced variation in the English stop contrast produced by Korean learners of English. The acoustic realization of the laryngeal contrast in English stops is observed in utterance-initial, -medial, and –final positions either with or without contrastive focal accent. The speech data in English collected from 4 adult male Korean speakers are compared with the result of a previous study by 6 adult male speakers native in American English (Choi, 2005). Overall, statistical results show that Korean adult speakers do not specify variation conditioned by focus and position. Focus-induced acoustic variation in the stops, observed in the speech by native speakers of English, is not significantly replicated in the speech of the Korean learners in the present study. Additional difference in using the acoustic correlates to mark the contrast is detected in the Korean adult speakers. It suggests the adult learners have problem in specifying the postlexical prosodic structure and segmental variations, and thus, rather active instruction of the phrasal prosody is also needed in educational settings.

Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
III. METHOD
IV. RESULTS
V. DISCUSSION
VI. CONCLUSION
REFERENCES

• Hansook Choi(Haskins Laboratories)