The Acquisition of L2 English Focus by Korean Learners

Abstract

The Korean Journal of Language, 37-1, 1-23. It has been suggested that the duration of stay in an L2 environment has some influence on the L2 acquisition. This study investigates the effect of Korean duration of stay in an English-speaking environment on their production of focus features such as pitch accent patterns, pitch range, and duration of focused words. It was hypothesized that the Korean speakers who had been immersed in the English-speaking environment for over 3 years at the level of university would show prosodic features of English focus more similar to those of native English speakers than the Korean speakers who had been immersed in the same environment for less than a year. Thirty subjects in three groups―Korean adults with the long immersion experience, Korean adults with the short immersion experience, and native English speakers―took part in the experiment. The result showed that the long immersion group produced more native-like prosody such as a greater number of pitch-peak patterns, wider pitch ranges, and a longer duration. However, in some measurements, both groups exhibited difficulty in producing the correct pitch-peak patterns. Also their prosody was affected by the semantic types of sentences: both groups showed some difficulty in setting up native-like pitch-peak patterns in unergative sentences. These results suggest that the acquisition of L2 focus is highly tied with the semantic types of sentences.