2021.09.06 20:26
Do, Youngah and Jae-Young Lee. 2021. The
effect of pragmatic cues on phoneme perception in real word recognition. Studies in
Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 27.2. 193-213. This
study explores the maximum distance of knowledge integration across different
domains of linguistic subfields. We explore the integration of linguistic cues between the top-most and bottom-most levels of
linguistic subdomains in their hierarchy, namely, pragmatic and phonetic cues.
Specifically, we test the extent to which Korean listeners’ phoneme perception
is influenced by pragmatic cues which they
infer from
sentence structures involving
implicit causality verbs. The results revealed a significant effect of
pragmatic cues on phoneme perception. In a forced choice test involving
/k/-initial and /tʃ/-initial names, participants were more likely to perceive
/k/-initial names when implicit causality verbs provided a pragmatic bias toward /k/-initial ones in the following causal clause, and the same
pragmatic bias was found for the perception of /tʃ/-initial names. These
results suggest that integration of linguistic
knowledge can occur across maximally distant domains within the hierarchy of
linguistic subdomains. Our work is the first demonstration of pragmatic effects
on phonetic perception in real word recognition. (University of Hong Kong, Assistant Professor; Seoul National
University, Professor)
Keywords:
linguistic subdomains, phonetics, pragmatics, perceptual bias, implicit causality [pdf]