Stress Processing Sensitivity in Reading Korean and English Words

Stress Processing Sensitivity in Reading Korean and English Words* Yongsoon Kanga, Seunghyun Baeka, and Mira Yima aDepartment of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University 53 Myungryun 3-ga, Chongno-gu, Seoul, 110-745, Korea E-mail: yskang@skku.edu; sh3940@hanmail.net; yimmira@hanmail.net Abstract. The present study explored the sensitivity to stress patterns of sixty-four ninth- graders learning to speak and read in Korean as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2) concurrently. Students’ productive stress processing abilities were assessed in reading Korean real words, English unfamiliar real words, and English pseudo- words. Results unveiled that the Korean-speaking English language learners (ELLs) performed differently between Korean and English in terms of number of syllables and stress placement within a syllable structure. More specifically, their stress processing performances between the two languages clearly differed when the number of syllables increases and their stress assignment differences across the two languages were much larger on dissimilar stress patterns than similar ones. These findings suggest that unfamiliar L2- specific prosodic information such as stress may present additional challenges to L2 learners, especially when their L1 is not stress-based. Keywords: stress processing sensitivity, prosodic information. 1. Introduction Spoken words can be characterized in terms of suprasegmental or prosodic features, markedly stress, determined by acoustic frequency, intensity, and/or duration. Such a stressed-syllable is relatively louder and longer than other syllables in the same word or phrase (Ladefoged, 2001). In some languages such as Korean, French, and Czech, stress pattern of words is somehow predictable and syllable-based. For example, in Korean, stress mostly falls on the first syllable, otherwise on the second syllable, displaying no significant linguistic difference (Lee, 1990; Park, 2004). In French, stress dominantly falls on the final syllable with a full vowel, with no distinctive minimal pairs of words differed by its stress pattern and in Czech, stress almost always falls on the first syllable of a word (Jannedy, Poletto and Weldon, 1994). These syllable- based languages do not show meaning and grammatical differences influenced by their stress patterns. In other languages such as English, although the placement of stress is less predictable, stress can involve in lexical contrasts, causing a difference in meaning (i.e., TRUsty-truSTEE). In addition, it can change grammatical functions of words. For example, the word progress functions as a noun when the stress is placed on the first syllable, whereas as a verb when the stress is placed on the second syllable. The other stress-based languages in which speech sounds is controlled by stress are Spanish and Dutch (Goetry, Wade-Woolley, Kolnsky and Mousty, 2006). These languages do also illustrate lexical contrasts defined by their stress patterns. Current understanding of the stress pattern across languages suggests that the linguistic role of stress pattern widely differs with respect to lexical and grammatical functions and the rule of stress assignment is language specific. Recent studies on first-language (L1) stress sensitivity have demonstrated that L1 speakers of stress-based languages (i.e., English, Spanish, and * First author: Yongsoon Kang, Correspondence Author: Seunghyun Baek. This research was supported by Sungkyunkwan …

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