The purpose of this study is to investigate how Korean Glottalization is acquired for Chinese advanced Korean learners. For the purpose, this study is based on the contents of <12-2> and <23-28> presented in the < The Standard Pronunciation of Korean >, which divideds the glottalization into seven categories, which are 1) becoming glottal sound after obsturent, 2) becoming glottal sound after pleonastic stem-final ‘ㄼ, ㄾ’, 3) becoming glottal sound after pleonastic stem-final ‘ㅁ(ㄻ), ㄴ(ㄵ)’, 4) becoming double consonant after an adnominal ending form ‘-(으)ㄹ’, 5) becoming double consonant after compound word ‘ㅅ’, 6) becoming double consonant after Sino-Korean word ‘ㄹ’, 7) becoming ‘ㅆ’ after ‘ㅎ’. The experiment consists of three stages, which are 1) Phonological Rules Acquisition Test which is for checking the level of learners'' knowledge about the environment in which the glottalization occurred, 2) Perception Experiment and 3) Production Experiment which are composition of words and sentences.
The results of this study are summarized into two as below. First, the result of 20 subjects on Phonological Rules Accuisition Test has shown the error rate was 66%, which is higher than the Perception Experiment and Production Experiment.
Second, errors can be categorized into three types, which are 1) errors caused by pronouncing the spelling, 2) spelling errors of the trailing syllable, and 3) phonological substitution errors. The most common cases of pronunciation errors were spelling. Among the seven types of glottalization, except type 1(becoming glottal sound after obsturent) truffle back truancy, requires form and syntactic information as a prerequisite. the rest, six types requires form and syntactic information as a prerequisite. In terms of some particular glottalizations, which require the application circumstances of several information, learners should have acquired it in and out classroom. An assumption could be projected that due to a lack of education on the application circumstances, learners have failed to achieve competence how to apply it to glottalization properly.
A comprehensive analysis of the three experiments on the glottalization in this study has revealed that the learners haved more difficulty with type 4(becoming double consonant after an adnominal ending form ‘-(으)ㄹ’) than the other types. On the other hand, it seems that the learners have learned well about type 1 (becoming glottal sound after obsturent).
This discussion needs being expanded and analyzed in depth for other phonological phenomena that are not discussed in the study. In addition, since the subjects of the study are limited to the native speakers of Chinese, it is difficult to generalize the experimental results to the acquisition of Glottalization by all foreign Korean learners. It is hoped that the limitations can be complemented by the accumulation of research results targeting earners of other language speakers.