earticle

영어

Although a focused element is widely known in many languages to attract prosodic prominence through modulation of duration, pitch, and intensity, it is less commonly understood whether and why the amount of modulation driven by prosodic focus actually varies or shows little variance across different languages. This study examined the production and perception of corrective focus in English and Korean with 10-digit phone number strings in the format of (NNN)-(NNN)- (NNNN), in order to determine whether “purely” prosodic marking of focus is stronger in one language than in the other. We found a striking difference between English, where prosodic focus was clearly marked in production and accurately identified in perception (about 97%), and Korean, where prosodic focus was not clearly marked in production, resulting in poor identification in perception (about 37%). The results of this study imply that prosodic marking of focus does not behave similarly across languages. Therefore, we hypothesize that these results signal an important typological difference—strength or weakness of purely prosodic focus—that merits further study.