earticle

영어

Chung, Young-Hee. 2013. Effects of EFL Learners' L1 Prosodic System on the Perception of L2 Stress. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 38-3, 771-787. This paper investigates the effect of L1 prosodic system on the perception of English stress by EFL learners. For the purpose, an English perception experiment is conducted on Chinese EFL learners. The results of the experiment on Chinese speakers are compared with those of two groups of Korean EFL learners, speakers of Standard Korean and speakers of the North Kyungsang dialect of Korean. The comparison reveals both cross-linguistic similarities and language-specific features. First, Chinese speakers rely heavily on pitch, rather than duration or intensity, when identifying English stress; Chinese speakers rely on pitch significantly more than Standard Korean speakers, while they show no significant difference from the speakers of the North Kyungsang dialect of Korean. Second, unlike speakers of Standard Korean or the North Kyungsang dialect of Korean, Chinese speakers exhibit tendency to associate contour tone, falling or rising, with stress. I argue that Chinese speakers' reliance on pitch and contour tones is an effect of the prosodic system of Chinese which uses tone extensively at the lexical level. (Sejong University)