Korean EFL learners’ production and perception of English stress differences and word recognition

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to see how subtle stress degrees in English is realized by Korean of English and to explore whether stress and auditory stimuli size affect the accuracy of identification or restoration of the source words for Korean learners of English. First, results of production experiment showed that primary- and secondary-stressed vowels were different only in vowel-durational cue for Korean learners, whereas vowel duration, F0, and amplitude were differently realized as indicators of stress differences for native of English. Second, perception tasks revealed that stimuli with primary stress were restored more accurately than those with secondary stress and longer fragments were more accurately restored to the source words than shorter ones. However, it took the similar amount of reaction time to judge both two types of stress stimuli. The results indicate that Korean L2 speakers mental lexicon includes representation with prosodic information as well as segmentalinformation, lending support to prosody-based word recognition model both for L1 and L2 speakers.