The present study examines the extent of crosslinguistic influence from English as a dominant language in the perception of the Korean lenis–aspirated contrast among Korean heritage speakers in the United States (N = 20) and English-speaking learners of Korean as a second language (N = 20), as compared to native speakers of Korean immersed in the first language environment (N = 20), by using an AX discrimination task. In addition, we sought to determine whether significant dependencies could be observed between participants’ linguistic background and experiences and their perceptual accuracy in the discrimination task. Results of a mixed-effects logistic regression model demonstrated that heritage speakers outperformed second language learners with 85% vs. 63% accurate discrimination, while no significant difference was detected between heritage speakers and first language-immersed native speakers (85% vs. 88% correct). Furthermore, higher verbal fluency was significantly predictive of greater perceptual accuracy for the heritage speakers. The results are compatible with the interpretation that the influence of English on the discrimination of the Korean laryngeal contrast was stronger for second language learners of Korean than for heritage speakers, while heritage speakers were not apparently affected by dominance in English in their discrimination of Korean lenis and aspirated stops.
Previous work has established that speakers are able adjust the acoustic properties of their speech in order to mimic their interlocuter or speech model with whom they share a native language (e.g., Pardo, 2013). However, it is less clear whether convergence to accented speech and/or unfamiliar languages is also a possibility. The goal of the present study is to investigate acoustic convergence between two groups of native English speakers (N = 15 in each group) and a speaker of Russian-accented English versus a speaker of Russian. The study consisted of four experimental phases: baseline, exposure, shadowing, and post-test. Participants in both groups shadowed acoustically identical material, although one group was informed that they were hearing Russian-accented English words (ACC-ENG condition), while the second group was told that they were shadowing Russian words (RUS condition). Initial analysis of the VOT durations of participants’ voiceless stops indicated that only participants in the RUS group converged towards the models’ shorter VOT during shadowing, although this convergence did not generalize to participants’ pronunciation of English words during the post-test. Additional data analysis is ongoing. This presentation will also discuss results with respect to their implications for theories of speech accommodation and non-native speech learning.
Onset f0 – pitch at the onset of the vowel following the consonant – is an important cue to laryngeal stop distinctions in Korean, especially the lenis-aspirated contrast, while in English onset f0 plays only a secondary role in distinguishing voiced and voiceless stops. The current study investigates to what extent Korean heritage speakers (n = 29) who are English dominant can perceptually discriminate Korean lenis and aspirated stops differing acoustically only in terms of onset f0, but not in terms of VOT. Heritage speakers’ performance is compared to that of Korean-immersed native speakers as a control group (n = 29). We hypothesized that heritage speakers would experience more difficulty than Korean-immersed speakers in using onset f0 as the sole cue to laryngeal contrast, due to the influence from English, where VOT dominates onset f0 as a cue to voicing. The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression model confirmed that heritage speakers were less accurate in the lenis-aspirated discrimination task than Korean-immersed speakers, providing support to the hypothesis that bilinguals’ perception of their first language speech can be subject to crosslinguistic influence from their second language.
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