The Journal of Studies in Language 27.3, 487-504. This paper concerns the question of how the default vowel [i] in Korean is realized within internal consonant clusters in English loanwords. The main focus of this paper is to see to what extent loanword phonology is different from native Korean phonology. In the Optimality Theory literature on loanwords of English, the general consensus is that loanword phonology has a distinct component separated from native phonology and so it has a different constraint hierarchy. In this paper, I argue that constraint-based approaches disregard the fact that the morpheme-internal distribution of the vowel [i] in loanwords is identical to that of native words. In other words, loanword phonology is not completely different from native phonology. This paper will justify an approach that the occurrence of the internal [i] of loanwords can be treated in the same way as the internal [i] of native lexical items. (Chungnam National University)