|
KMID : 1022420130050020043
|
|
Phonetics and Speech Sciences
2013 Volume.5 No. 2 p.43 ~ p.51
|
|
|
The Effect of Strong Syllables on Lexical Segmentation in English Continuous Speech by Korean Speakers
|
|
Kim Sun-Mi
Nam Ki-Chun
|
|
|
Abstract
|
|
|
|
English native listeners have a tendency to treat strong syllables in a speech stream as the potential initial syllables of new words, since the majority of lexical words in English have a word-initial stress. The current study investigates whether Korean (L1) - English (L2) late bilinguals perceive strong syllables in English continuous speech as word onsets, as English native listeners do. In Experiment 1, word-spotting was slower when the word-initial syllable was strong, indicating that Korean listeners do not perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Experiment 2 was conducted in order to avoid any possibilities that the results of Experiment 1 may be due to the strong-initial targets themselves used in Experiment 1 being slower to recognize than the weak-initial targets. We employed the gating paradigm in Experiment 2, and measured the Isolation Point (IP, the point at which participants correctly identify a word without subsequently changing their minds) and the Recognition Point (RP, the point at which participants correctly identify the target with 85% or greater confidence) for the targets excised from the non-words in the two conditions of Experiment 1. Both the mean IPs and the mean RPs were significantly earlier for the strong-initial targets, which means that the results of Experiment 1 reflect the difficulty of segmentation when the initial syllable of words was strong. These results are consistent with Kim & Nam (2011), indicating that strong syllables are not perceived as word onsets for Korean listeners and interfere with lexical segmentation in English running speech.
|
|
|
KEYWORD
|
|
|
strong syllable, word onset, lexical segmentation, gating paradigm, isolation point, recognition point
|
|
|
FullTexts / Linksout information
|
|
|
|
|
|
Listed journal information
|
|
|
|