Stress assignment rules in Korean English

초록

Although literature on second language pronunciation has thus far focused only on the difficulties of acquiring the target sound by adult learners, we argue that some target phonology rules are apparently as easy to acquire as instantaneous. We compared the F0 slope of stress assignment rules in English as spoken by 25 native speakers and by 46 Korean learners. The learners had an average of 10-minute instruction with less than a week of practice period. The stimulus words, sentences, and paragraph contrast the compound stress rule and nuclear stress rule in compound nouns and noun phrases such as the 'White House' and 'a white house.' We measured the F0 values of the speech data and normalized them by the average pitch of individual speakers. The result indicates that both the native speakers and the learners had an F0 drop (p < .01) for the compound nouns but an F0 rise (p < .01) for noun phrases. We also observed that the learners showed a more characteristic (p < .05) F0 slope than the native speakers did. We thus conclude that Korean learners easily learn stress assignment in English, which is realized as pitch.

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