Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
권호 표지
DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Word class information in perception of prosodic prominence by Korean learners of English

  • Im, Suyeon (Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
  • Received : 2019.07.30
  • Accepted : 2019.12.11
  • Published : 2019.12.31
Download PDF
⟨ Previous Next ⟩

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how prosodic prominence is perceived in relation to word class information (or parts-of-speech) by Korean learners of English compared with native English speakers in public speech. Two groups, Korean learners of English and native English speakers, were asked to judge words perceived as prominent simultaneously while listening to a speech. Parts-of-speech and three acoustic cues (i.e., max F0, mean phone duration, and mean intensity) were analyzed for each word in the speech. The results showed that content words tended to be higher in pitch and longer in duration than function words. Both groups of listeners rated prominence on content words more frequently than on function words. This tendency, however, was significantly greater for Korean learners of English than for native English speakers. Among the parts-of-speech of the content words, Korean learners of English were more likely than native English speakers to judge nouns and verbs as prominent. This study presents evidence that Korean learners of English consider most, if not all, content words as landing locations of prosodic prominence, in alignment with the previous study on the production of prominence.

Keywords

References

  1. Bates, D., Machler, M., Bolker, B. M., & Walker, S. C. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1-48.
  2. Beckman, M. E. (1986). Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Fortis.
  3. Breen, M., Fedorenko, E., Wagner, M., & Gibson, E. (2010). Acoustic correlates of information structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7-9), 1044-1098. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.504378
  4. Buring, D. (2007). Semantics, intonation and information structure. In G. Ramchand & C. Reiss (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces (pp. 445-474). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  5. Calhoun, S. (2007). Information structure and the prosodic structure of English: A probabilistic relationship (Doctoral dissertation). University of Edinburgh.
  6. Chodroff, E., & Cole, J. (2018, September). Information structure, affect, and prenuclear prominence in American English. Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1848-1852).
  7. Cole, J., Mo, Y., & Hasegawa-Johnson, M. (2010). Signal-based and expectation-based factors in the perception of prosodic prominence. Laboratory Phonology, 1(2), 425-452. https://doi.org/10.1515/labphon.2010.022
  8. Cutts, M. (2011, March). Try something new for thirty days [Video file]. TED. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days
  9. Hirschberg, J. (1993). Pitch accent in context predicting intonational prominence from text. Artificial Intelligence, 63(1-2), 305-340. https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(93)90020-C
  10. Im, S. (2019). Information status and prosodic prominence as perceived by Korean learners of English. Language Research, 55(2), 413- 429. https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2019.55.2.413
  11. Im, S., Cole, J., & Baumann, S. (2018, June). The probabilistic relationship between pitch accents and information status in public speech. Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 508-511).
  12. Lee, G. G., Lee, H. Y., Song, J., Kim, B., Kang, S., Lee, J., & Hwang, H. (2017). Automatic sentence stress feedback for non-native English learners. Computer Speech & Language, 41, 29-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2016.04.003
  13. Liberman, M. Y. (1975). The intonational system of English (Doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  14. Mahrt, T. (2013). Language markup and experimental design software [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://www.timmahrt.com/lmeds.html
  15. Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation (Doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  16. Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 271-311). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  17. R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org/
  18. Sityaev, D. (2000). The relationship between accentuation and information status of discourse referents: A corpus-based study. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 12, 285-304.
  19. Taylor, A., Marcus, M., & Santorini, B. (2003). The Penn treebank: an overview. In A. Abeille (Ed.), Treebanks: Building and using parsed corpora (pp. 5-22). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
  20. Um, H. Y., Lee, H. S., & Kim, K. H. (2001). Korean speakers’ realization of focus and information structure on English intonation in comparison with English native speakers. Speech Sciences, 8(2), 133-148.
  21. Xu, Y. (2013, August). ProsodyPro: A tool for large-scale systematic prosody analysis. Proceedings of Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody 2013 (pp. 7-10).