Grace E. Oh

Children's Abstraction and Generalization of English Lexical Stress Patterns

The current study investigated school-aged childrens internalization of the distributional patterns of English lexical stress as a function of vocabulary size. Sixty children (5;3 to 8;3) participated in the study. The children were asked to blend two individually presented, equally stressed syllables to produce disyllabic nonwords with different resulting structures in one of two frame sentences. The frame sentences were designed to elicit either a noun or verb interpretation of the nonword. Childrens receptive vocabulary was also assessed. The results indicated that children more readily blended syllable pairs that resulted in trochaic-compatible word structures than in iambic-compatible structures. This effect was strongest in young children with large vocabularies. As for stress placement, all children were sensitive to the effect of word structure, but only children with the largest vocabularies were sensitive to the biasing effect of grammatical category (noun = trochee; verb = iamb). The study results are discussed with reference to the observation that speech motor skills develop in tandem with lexical acquisition and the hypothesis that phonological knowledge emerges in part from abstraction across lexical representations.

The Effect of Age of Acquisition and Second-Language Experience on Segments and Prosody: A Cross-Sectional Study of Korean Bilinguals' English and Korean Production

The effect of age of acquisition and amount of experience on the segmental and prosodic production of the first‐(L1) and second‐language (L2) was investigated. Forty Korean learners of English varying in age (adult versus child) and amount of experience (6 months versus 6 years) as well as 20 age‐matched native English speaking adults and children participated. In the segmental domain, spectral quality and duration of eight English and seven Korean vowels were compared. In order to examine prosodic aspects of production, English words containing stressed and unstressed syllables and Korean four‐syllable phrases were elicited. Results for adult groups revealed that the production of Korean vowels, but not English vowels, was influenced by the L2 experience, indicating plasticity in the L1. For prosody, small effects of experience on English production were found. As for the children, production of both English and Korean vowels and prosody varied by group. The 6‐year‐experience child group was native‐like in English vowels but not in unstressed syllables. The results suggest that there is a dynamic interaction between L1 and L2 in segments as well as in prosody.

The effect of boundary recoverability on geminate length in English.

[Payne (2005)] argues that fake geminates are longer than true geminates, and [Ridouane (2007)] shows that their preceding vowel duration is also significantly longer. These effects are likely due to the boundary that distinguishes fake from true geminates. If this is correct, then we might expect that boundary strength will also affect geminate realization. We investigated this possibility by comparing the absolute and relative durations of assimilated and concatenated word‐internal and cross‐word boundary fake geminates in English (e.g., immoral versus unnamed versus fun name). Eight speakers produced five repetitions of 32 stimuli (four types: three geminate, one singleton) in two speech styles. The results showed that although cross‐boundary geminates were longer than word‐internal concatenated and assimilated geminates in absolute terms, both types of concatenated geminates were shorter than assimilated geminates in relative terms. A follow up experiment, comparing geminates in compound words to those emerging across words showed no differences in relative duration between the two. These results suggest that boundary strength may be less important than boundary recoverability in production. Overall, we argue that boundary recoverability impacts the phonetic implementation of geminates and likely does so whether these are true or fake.

Effects of L2 experience on L2 vowel production and L1 speakers' perception of the improved vowels

Effects of L2 experience on the production of L2 vowels were investigated and the perceptual accuracy of the L2 vowels by native speakers was tested to examine whether an improvement in vowel articulation leads to higher accuracy. A total of twenty Mandarin Chinese differing in the experience (6 months vs. 2 years) were compared to ten native Korean speakers in their production of seven Korean vowels, /i,ɛ,ɨ,ʌ,o,u,a/. More experienced Chinese speakers were expected to have acquired new Korean vowels, /ɛ,ɨ,ʌ,o/, in a more native-like manner than the inexperienced group. The results showed that Chinese learners were able to produce the three similar vowels, /i, u, a/ in a native-like manner even before any exposure to Korean. After 2 years of experience, they have shown to produce the new mid vowels, /ɛ, ʌ/ with greater height distinctions (F1 values) from adjacent high vowels. Although the two high back vowels, /o, u/ were deviant from the native norm, the Experienced group learned to distinguish the vowels with a distinctive F2 frequency, which has become a critical cue for the distinction of the two merging vowels by young Seoul speakers. When native Korean speakers were asked to identify the vowels produced by Chinese speakers, not only new mid vowels but also similar vowels were more accurately identified for the experienced group. The greatest improvement in perceptual accuracy was shown for the categories that were newly established by the inexperienced learners. Effects of L2 experience on the production of L2 vowels were investigated and the perceptual accuracy of the L2 vowels by native speakers was tested to examine whether an improvement in vowel articulation leads to higher accuracy. A total of twenty Mandarin Chinese differing in the experience (6 months vs. 2 years) were compared to ten native Korean speakers in their production of seven Korean vowels, /i,ɛ,ɨ,ʌ,o,u,a/. More experienced Chinese speakers were expected to have acquired new Korean vowels, /ɛ,ɨ,ʌ,o/, in a more native-like manner than the inexperienced group. The results showed that Chinese learners were able to produce the three similar vowels, /i, u, a/ in a native-like manner even before any exposure to Korean. After 2 years of experience, they have shown to produce the new mid vowels, /ɛ, ʌ/ with greater height distinctions (F1 values) from adjacent high vowels. Although the two high back vowels, /o, u/ were deviant from the native norm, the Experienced group learned to distinguish the vowel...

Effects of experience on the production of Korean stop consonant contrasts by Mandarin Chinese learners

The effect of L2 experience on the segmental and prosodic production of second language was investigated. Thirty two Chinese learners of Korean varying in the amount of experienced (3 months vs. 2 years) were compared to sixteen age-matched native Korean speakers in their production of three-way contrastive stops (aspirated, lenis, and fortis) in Korean. To examine both segmental and prosodic aspects, Korean four-syllable phrases (i.e., Accentual Phrase) beginning with each stop type in word-initial position were elicited. VOT, f0, H1-H2 were analyzed and compared across groups (native Korean, experienced, inexperienced groups). For further analyses of the prosodic domain, f0 of the first two syllables (High-High for aspirated, fortis and Low-High for lenis) was compared. The results revealed that the experienced Chinese learners showed an early mastery of fortis stops, producing more native-like VOT and H1-H2 than the inexperienced group. Also, Chinese groups were able to produce a sequence of AP with a ...

Loudness trumps pitch in politeness judgments: Evidence from Korean

Politeness is a vital aspect of everyday life that is receiving increased attention in sociophonetic research. The current study investigated how deferential and intimate stances, examples of politeness-related expressions, are conveyed by phonetic cues in Korean. Previously, we found that Korean listeners can distinguish these stances based on speech acoustics alone. The current study manipulated fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of spoken Korean utterances to investigate the specific role of these cues in politeness judgments. Across three experiments with a total of 63 Korean listeners, we found that intensity reliably influenced politeness judgments, but F0 did not. An examination of individual differences revealed that all listeners interpreted deferential stances to be associated with low intensity: quiet utterances were perceived as deferential. On the other hand, the interpretation of F0 varied across listeners: some perceived high-pitched utterances as deferential and others perceived low-...

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

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 grou...

A longitudinal study of English and Japanese vowel production by Japanese adults and children in an English immersion setting.

The effect of age of acquisition on first‐ and second‐language vowel production was investigated. Eight English vowels were produced three times in two different words each by 16 native Japanese (NJ) adults and children as well as 16 age‐matched native English (NE) speaking adults. Productions were recorded shortly after the NJ participants’ arrival in the United States and then 1 year later. In agreement with previous investigations [Aoyama et al., J. Phonetics 32, 233–250 (2004)], children were able to learn faster, leading to higher accuracy than adults in a year’s time. Based on acoustic measurements, NJ adults had more accurate production at Time 1 but made no changes across time. The NJ children, on the other hand, showed significant differences from NE children’s productions for /ɪ/, /e/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/, and /U/ at Time 1, but produced all eight vowels in a native‐like manner at Time 2. A follow up examination of NJ children’s productions of Japanese /i/, /a/, /u/ revealed significant changes for Japanes...