Abstract
The present study investigates why Korean learners of Japanese produce the Japanese voiceless stops in intervocalic position as geminates. The results of the present study demonstrate that the Korean learners matched the Japanese voiceless consonants in intervocalic position as Korean tense consonants, for which they resyllabified the preceding syllable as closed, and shortened the vowel in that syllable. This rendered the closure duration of the consonant in the following syllable enlarge up to that of the geminate. The results of the present study clearly show that the Korean learners' production of the Japanese voiceless consonants as geminates is a direct consequence of the presence of the tense consonants and an epenthetic 's' in Korean phonology, indicating that the L2 sound acquisition is greatly influenced by the first language (L1) phonological system.
