Phonetic category formation refers to the processes by which bilingual or second language (L2) speakers come to distinguish phonetic details of shared phonemes in each language (Flege, 1995). For example, Spanish and English share the phoneme /p/, but /p/ in each language is produced with different voice-onset-time (VOT) values. Thus, it is an interesting question whether bilingual or L2 speakers exhibit accurate phonetic realizations of Spanish /p/ and English /p/ when speaking the two languages. While phonetic category formation has been investigated extensively in adult bilingual and L2 speakers, little research has been carried out with bilingual children. The main goal of this presentation is to address how phonetic categories are formed and developed in Korean-English bilingual children and to evaluate developmental patterns of speech production in the bilingual children. Stop and vowel production of four different age groups (3, 5, 7, and 10 years of age) of Korean-English bilingual children in the US were examined. The findings provide novel information that reports the developmental processes of phonetic category formation and its underlying mechanisms in bilingual children. This study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (RHD061527A).
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