[link: 10.17959/sppm.2022.28.3.443]

[본문: 파일]

The production of English word-level prominence by Korean learners of English

Goun Lee (Dankook University)

Abstract

Prominence refers to the relative emphasis that may be given to a syllable in a word (word-level prominence) or to one or more words in a phrase (phrase-level prominence). Korean has been claimed to have phrase-level prominence (Jun, 1996), but not word-level prominence (Lee and Jongman, 2019). Based on this claim, this study aims to investigate whether the same speakers from Lee and Jongman (2019) produce English stress pairs, and if they can, whether their production of word-level stress is expressed in a way similar to native speakers of English. Tokens produced by Korean L2 learners of English and native speakers of English were acoustically analyzed in terms of their duration, intensity, and F0 of the first and second syllables. The results indicate that Korean learners were able to use all three suprasegmental cues to indicate lexical stress in English, but were not able to acquire a new cue (i.e. vowel reduction) in expressing word-level prominence in L2. These results indicate that L2 learners are not able to acquire a new cue that does not exist as an L1 phonological category, but the L1 phonological feature will facilitate the perceptual system of the L2 learners and help them acquire L2 phonetic features.

Keywords

Word-Level Prominence, Cue-Weighting Model, Freqeuncy of Occurrences, Lexical Stress, Vowel reduction