Phonetic convergence and sound change in Heritage and L2 Korean speech

Previous research on phonetic convergence suggests that L2 speakers of a language may be more malleable in their pronunciation of vowels and converge across more variables than L1 speakers. While these differences have been observed between native and non-native speakers, it is unknown whether heritage speakers would show comparable levels of convergence to either group, considering their first language experience notably differs from that of both homeland L1 speakers and L2 speakers. This study comparesphonetic convergence rates in heritage Korean speech with homeland and L2 learners across reading and shadowing tasks. Participants first completed a baseline sentence reading task and then were exposed to speech containing a vowel shift underway in Seoul Korean in which /o/ raises (via F1 lowering) and /u/ fronts (via F2 raising). They were then instructed to repeat the words that they heard out loud in a shadowing task. While data collection is ongoing, preliminary analysis suggests differences in rates of convergence across the three groups, with L2 speakers (p 0.05) and heritage speakers (p 0.02) showing significant changes in F1 and F2 of /o/, whereas the homeland speakers do not (p = 0.6).