Table 4 3: Transliteration of Korean stop consonants in the Yale, McCune-Reischauer. and Revised Romanization systems. nakes them similar to English voiced stops. Furthermore, in medial position Korea enis stops are usually more similar in VOT to English voiced stops, with voicin luring closure or a short-lag VOT (Silva 1992, among others). It could be that—wit <orean fortis stops linked to English voiced stops and Korean aspirated stops linke o English voiceless stops—Korean lenis stops are the odd category out, constitutin . “new” L2 category in the framework of the Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995 Towever, the findings of Schmidt (2007), which show that English speakers perceiv <orean lenis stops as more similar to English voiceless stops than to English voice tops, but as less close to English voiceless stops than Korean aspirated stops a1 yerceived as being, suggest that, to L1 English learners of Korean, Korean lenis stor nore likely constitute a marked version of English voiceless stops than a “new” sto ype—in the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995), assimilabl o an Ll category via Category-Goodness Difference type assimilation, rather tha imply being Non-Assimilable. Nevertheless, it is not clear that Korean lenis stor ire linked to English voiceless stops, at least in the same way that Korean aspirate tops seem to be. By showing only modest changes in VOT and fo limited to short ag productions, Korean lenis stops in this study do not pattern quite like Englis voiceless stops (which show substantial changes in both VOT and fo) or like Englis yoiced stops (which show a significant change in fp, but not VOT). Thus, it appeat hat Korean lenis stops either escape linkage with an English category or are s nconsistently classified by learners that no clear group pattern emerges. Future wor should attempt to distinguish between these two possibilities. As the first study to document early phonetic drift in adult L2 learners, the cu