Non-native acquisition of prosody: Learner speech by Korean and English speakers

초록

To understand the process of acquisition of non-native prosody, this study presents an acquisition model comprising two modules arrayed for contrastiveness and progressiveness, along with the full panoply of non-native representations of prosodic properties. The process of acquisition of non-native prosody is examined by three experiments to determine contrastive speech rhythm in terms of pitch and duration variability in typologically contrastive languages: English learners of Korean and Korean learners of English. In the read speech of 96 learners and 27 native speaker controls, learner speech showed progressively larger duration or pitch variability in comparison with native speech values in accordance with the prosodic typology. Our results support the contrastive speech rhythm based on the prosodic prominence alternation of duration and pitch as noted in learner speech. Learner speech did not show as much contrast between the prominent syllable and the adjacent non-prominent syllable as did native speech in the given prosodic property (duration or pitch). Nearly all learners of different proficiency levels retained the duration and pitch of their native speech but moved in the designated direction toward achieving target-like speech.

키워드