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

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