Effects of L1 Prosodic System on the Perception of English Stress : a Case Study of Korean EFL Learners

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of L1 prosodic system on the perception of L2 stress. For the purpose, an English stress perception experiment is conducted on two groups of Korean EFL learners with different L1 prosodic systems, namely, speakers of Standard Korean, with a non-stress, non-tonal language background, and speakers of the North Kyungsang dialect of Korean, with a tone language background. The results of the experiment suggest that cross-linguistically both groups rely heavily on prominence in pitch, rather than other phonetic correlates such as duration and intensity, when identifying English stress. Languagespecifically the North Kyungsang Korean group relies significantly more on pitch prominence than the Seoul Korean group. Based on both cross-linguistic and language-dependent features, the conclusions reached (1) that the heavy reliance on pitch is a feature of L2 stress perception by EFL learners with either a tonal background or a non-stress background, and (2) that the degree of reliance on pitch varies in relation to the extent of the language-specific phonological use of pitch at the lexical level.