The Effect of Acoustic Correlates of Domain-initial Strengthening in Lexical Segmentation of English by Native Korean Listeners

The current study investigated the role of acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening in lexical segmentation of a non-native language. In a series of cross-modal identity-priming experiments, native Korean listeners heard English auditory stimuli and made lexical decision to visual targets (i.e., written words). The auditory stimuli contained critical two word sequences which created temporal lexical ambiguity (e.g., 'mill#company', with the competitor 'milk'). There was either an IP boundary or a word boundary between the two words in the critical sequences. The initial CV of the second word (e.g., [$k_{\Lambda}$] in 'company') was spliced from another token of the sequence in IP- or Wd-initial positions. The prime words were postboundary words (e.g., company) in Experiment 1, and preboundary words (e.g., mill) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, Korean listeners showed priming effects only in IP contexts, indicating that they can make use of IP boundary cues of English in lexical segmentation of English. The acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening were also exploited by Korean listeners, but significant effects were found only for the segmentation of postboundary words. The results therefore indicate that L2 listeners can make use of prosodically driven phonetic detail in lexical segmentation of L2, as long as the direction of those cues are similar in their L1 and L2. The exact use of the cues by Korean listeners was, however, different from that found with native English listeners in Cho, McQueen, and Cox (2007). The differential use of the prosodically driven phonetic cues by the native and non-native listeners are thus discussed.