Oh, Eunhae. 2017. The effect of L2 experience on the perception of L1 prosody. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 23.2. 243-259.

The effects of second language experience on adult learners’ perception of native language prosody are investigated. Three sets of 13 sentences produced in Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese, respectively, by three female speakers were low-pass filtered and presented to three groups of 10 participants with different language backgrounds: Native Korean speakers with no L2 experience (NK), native Mandarin Chinese speakers (NC) and Korean learners of Chinese (KC) with an average LOR in China of 1 year. The participants were instructed to listen to each stimulus and decide whether it was Korean or not based on the suprasegmental features. Overall, the NK group (76%) revealed significantly higher accuracy than the KC (65%) or the NM group (57%). However, the NM participants with extensive Korean experience showed a significantly high accuracy for both Korean (75%) and Chinese (84%). The results indicate a significant effect of L2 experience on the acquisition of L1 prosody, yet the KC group’s lower accuracy for Korean, on the other hand, suggests that too much attention may have been directed towards acoustically salient L2 cues (e.g., F0 range) in the perception of L1 prosody. (Konkuk University)