The effects of second language experience on the perception of native language prosody

Abstract

The effects of second language experience on adult learners’ perception of native language prosody were investigated. A total of 39 sentences produced in Korean, Mandarin, Japanese by three female speakers were low-pass filtered and presented to three groups of 10 participants with different language backgrounds: Native Korean speakers with no L2 experience (NK group), native Mandarin speakers (NM group) and Korean learners of Chinese (KC group) with an average LOR in China of 1 year. The participants were instructed to listen to each stimulus and decide whether it was Korean or not based on the suprasegmental features. Overall, the NK group (76%) revealed significantly higher discrimination accuracy than the KC (65%) or the NM group (57%). However, the NM participants with extensive Korean experience showed significant improvement in accuracy for both Korean (75%) and Chinese (84%). The results, on the one hand, support the significant effect of L2 experience on the acquisition of L2 prosody. The KC group’s lower accuracy for Korean, on the other hand, suggests that too much attention may have been directed towards acoustically salient L2 cues (e.g., F0 range) in the perception of L1 prosody.