Effects of dialectal differences in the use of native-language acoustic cues on the production and perception of second language stops

Abstract

The present study investigated whether the relative importance of specific acoustic properties in native language dialects affects the extent to which acoustic properties are used in the production and perception of a second language. The case at hand centered on acquisition of English voiced and voiceless stops by two groups of Korean dialect speakers, Kyungsang and Seoul Korean. Both dialect speakers use the same acoustic cues for the Korean stops, but their relative importance is different: Specifically Seoul speakers employ VOT and F0, and Kyungsang speakers primarily use VOT due to their use of F0 for lexical tone contrast. Given such dialectal differences, this study explored whether Kyungsang and Seoul Korean speakers made distinct use of these two cues to signal the word-initial stops in English where VOT and, less importantly, onset F0 are additionally used for stop contrast. The results showed that in production, both dialect speakers showed a parallel pattern for VOT and F0; however, in perception, Kyungsang listeners had greater reliance on VOT but less on F0 compared with Seoul listeners. These results partly support the feature hypothesis (McAllister et al., 2002) and provide new insight into the relationship between speech production and perception.