The Relationship between Prosody and Reading in English Utterances

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the relationship between prosody and reading tasks in Korean English learners. The main research question is whether Korean English learners benefit from the reading tasks serving as pronunciation practice in terms of speech fluency and intelligibility. Although it is controversial to define speech fluency and intelligibility respectively, this study attempts to address this question by examining speech rate and pauses. Ten Korean college students and three American college students voluntarily participated in this study and were asked to read the given script. After the first recording session, Korean speakers were provided with audio files of three English native speakers, and were directed to listen and repeat the audio files. They were asked to return and participate in the second recording session. This study examined speech rate, pause frequency, pause location, and pause duration, and compared the results collected before and after the listen-and-repeat practice. This study found that speech rate increased with practice in most of the Korean speakers. In addition, it turned out that the absolute pause frequency and duration did not correlate with speech rate. More importantly, the reading tasks seemed to help Korean speakers to recognize prosodic phrasing and to utilize phrasing and pauses more appropriately, which guarantees more fluent speech. It implies that appropriate pausing may improve speech fluency and intelligibility in L2.