Developmental pathway of phonetic fine-tuning of phonological contrast in reference to information structure: The case of three-way contrastive stops in Korean.

This study investigates the acquisition of three-way stop contrast (lenis, aspirated, fortis) in Korean and phonetic modulation of the phonological contrast driven by information structure. VOT and F0 of the stops produced by children (4-5, 7-8, 10-11 year-olds) and adults in broad, narrow, and contrastive focus conditions were measured. Results indicated that only the 7-8 year-olds showed the three-way distinction using VOT under (phonemic) contrastive focus, while the other two children groups and adults did not. As for F0, adults made a three-way distinction using F0 in all focus conditions, while the 7-8 and the 10-11 year-olds did so only under limited focus conditions. The 4-5 year-olds did not show the three-way distinction in any focus condition. The results suggest that children build up their phonological awareness and fine-tune phonetic realization in their developmental pathway in conjunction with different functions of information structure