5 results
AGE MATTERS, AND SO MAY RATERS: Rater Differences in the Assessment of Foreign Accents
- Becky H. Huang, Sun-Ah Jun
-
- Journal:
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition / Volume 37 / Issue 4 / December 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 29 October 2014, pp. 623-650
- Print publication:
- December 2015
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners’ foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who differed in their native language background and language experience participated in the study: inexperienced native English speaker (NES) raters, experienced NES raters, and advanced nonnative English speaker (NNES) raters. All raters evaluated 64 speech samples taken from both NESs and NNESs who varied in their age of arrival in the second-language-speaking country. Results from the study showed that experienced NES raters were better than the other two rater groups at distinguishing NESs from NNESs. Although no rater group differences were found in scaling speakers’ foreign accents or in their interrater reliability, inexperienced NES raters were stricter in their ratings than both experienced NES raters and advanced NNES raters. Implications for research on age of learning effects are discussed.
Early childhood language memory in the speech perception of international adoptees*
- JANET S. OH, TERRY KIT-FONG AU, SUN-AH JUN
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Child Language / Volume 37 / Issue 5 / November 2010
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 December 2009, pp. 1123-1132
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
It is as yet unclear whether the benefits of early linguistic experiences can be maintained without at least some minimal continued exposure to the language. This study compared 12 adults adopted from Korea to the US as young children (all but one prior to age one year) to 13 participants who had no prior exposure to Korean to examine whether relearning can aid in accessing early childhood language memory. All 25 participants were recruited and tested during the second week of first-semester college Korean language classes. They completed a language background questionnaire and interview, a childhood slang task and a Korean phoneme identification task. Results revealed an advantage for adoptee participants in identifying some Korean phonemes, suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse, and that relearning a language can help in accessing such a memory.
33 - Prosody in sentence processing
- from Part II - Language processing
-
- By Sun-Ah Jun
- Edited by Chungmin Lee, Seoul National University, Greg B. Simpson, University of Kansas, Youngjin Kim, Ajou University, Republic of Korea
- General editor Ping Li, Pennsylvania State University
-
- Book:
- The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 13 August 2009, pp 423-432
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Prosody refers to a grouping within an utterance and the prominence relations between the members within the group. Groupings within an utterance, called prosodic units, are hierarchically organized so that a prosodic unit can include one or more smaller prosodic units. Since the grouping and the prominence relations between the members are often marked by intonation, the terms ‘intonation’ and ‘prosody’ are often used interchangeably. Intonation, though traditionally defined as the global changes in pitch over the course of a sentence or a phrase, has an internal structure. Some pitch events mark the boundaries of groupings, either small or large, while others mark the prominent members within a group. In this way, an intonation contour marks a hierarchy of groupings and reflects the metrical structure of the group. The pitch events marking the internal structure of intonation can be represented by two distinct pitch levels, High (H) or Low (L) and their combinations (e.g. HL for falling and LH for rising). This view of intonation is known as an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation or intonational phonology, started in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the seminal works of Bruce (1977) on Swedish intonation and Pierrehumbert and her colleagues on English intonation (e.g. Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Liberman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990).
This model of intonation has been applied to Japanese (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988) and Korean (Jun, 1993), and has been expanded to many other languages including German (Grice & Benzmüller, 1995) and Greek (Arvaniti & Baltazani, 2005; see S.-A. Jun, 2005 for a similar analysis of eight other languages).
The Accentual Phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy
- Sun-Ah Jun
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
A universal characteristic of speech is that utterances are generally broken down phonologically into smaller phrases which are marked by suprasegmental features such as intonational events and/or final lengthening. Moreover, phrases can be further divided into smaller-sized constituents. These constituents of varying size, or ‘prosodic units’, are typically characterised as performing the dual function of marking a unit of information and forming the domain of application of phonological rules. However, there is less agreement about how prosodic units are defined in generating an utterance. There are at least two different approaches (for a general review, see Shattuck-Hufnagel & Turk 1996). One approach posits that prosodic constituents are hierarchically organised and that prosodic constituents larger than a word are derived indirectly from the syntactic structure by referring to the edge of a maximal projection (Selkirk 1986), to the head–complement relation (Nespor & Vogel 1986) or to the c-command relation (Hayes 1989). This position, which I call the SYNTACTIC APPROACH, has been called the Prosodic Hierarchy theory, Prosodic Phonology or the Indirect Syntactic Approach (Selkirk 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986, Hayes 1989).
The other position, which I call the INTONATIONAL APPROACH, also assumes a hierarchical prosodic structure, but defines the prosodic units larger than a word based on the surface phonetic form of an utterance by looking at suprasegmental features such as intonation and final lengthening (e.g. Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988, Jun 1993, Beckman 1996). Both approaches assume a prosodic hierarchy in which prosodic units are hierarchically organised and obey the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986; a prosodic unit of a given level of the hierarchy is composed of one or more units of the immediately lower prosodic unit, and is exhaustively contained in the superordinate unit of which it is a part). The prosodic units which are higher than a word, and which are commonly assumed by proponents of the syntactic approach, are the Phonological Phrase and the Intonation Phrase, while those assumed by the intonational approach are the Accentual Phrase, the Intermediate Phrase and the Intonation Phrase. The prosodic units below the Phonological Phrase, i.e. the Syllable, Foot and Prosodic Word, do not differ much in the two approaches, since these units have more fixed roles vis-à-vis syntax or intonation.
The intonational unit corresponding to the Phonological Phrase is the Intermediate Phrase in English (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986) or the Accentual Phrase in Korean (Jun 1993), in that these are the units immediately higher than a Word. The Phonological Phrase is defined based on the syntactic structure, but the intonational units are defined by intonational markers. The Intermediate Phrase in English is the domain of downstep, and is delimited by a phrase accent, H- or L-; the Accentual Phrase in standard (Seoul) Korean is demarcated by a phrase-final High tone. The next higher level, the Intonation Phrase, is much more similar in the two approaches. Even though the proponents of the syntactic approach define this level in terms of syntax (e.g. a sister node of a root sentence), they claim that this level is the domain of the intonational contour and is sensitive to semantic factors (Selkirk 1980, 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986). In this paper, we will focus on the prosodic level corresponding to the Phonological Phrase.
17 - Asymmetrical prosodic effects on the laryngeal gesture in Korean
-
- By Sun-Ah Jun, University of California, Los Angeles
- Edited by Bruce Connell, University of Oxford, Amalia Arvaniti, University of Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- Phonology and Phonetic Evidence
- Published online:
- 03 May 2011
- Print publication:
- 14 September 1995, pp 235-253
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
It is well established that prosody conditions segmental and suprasegmental features. In English, for example, segments are lengthened at the end of a phrase (e.g. Oiler, 1973; Beckman & Edwards, 1990), and the “gestural magnitude” of /h/ is weakened word medially or in deaccented words (Pierrehumbert & Talkin, 1992). Additionally, Keating, Linker & Huffman (1983) show that many languages have different allophones for voiced or voiceless stops depending on position within the word or the phrase. However, such effects are often not symmetrical with respect to the edges of a prosodic unit. For example, in German, voiced stops often become voiceless word initially as well as word finally, but this causes neutralization only word finally, where the contrasting voiceless stop is not aspirated.
Korean also has such prosodically conditioned strengthenings and weakenings of laryngeal features, and asymmetries between word initial and word final position. In syllable initial position, there is a three-way contrast among aspirated, tense, and lenis voiceless obstruents, but this contrast is preserved only in the initial position of a word in isolation. In word medial onset position, the lenis stops are voiced between sonorants. In syllable final position, the distinction is neutralized completely to an unreleased lenis stop. The weakening processes in word medial and syllable final position have been described by phonologists (e.g. Cho, 1987; Kim-Renaud, 1974; Kang, 1992) as Lenis Stop Voicing and Coda Neutralization, respectively.