Phonetic and phonological effects of tonal information in the segmentation of Korean speech: An artificial-language segmentation study

Abstract

This study investigates how the fine-grained phonetic realization of tonal cues impacts speech segmentation when the cues signal the same word boundary in the native and unfamiliar languages but do so differently. Korean listeners use the phrase-final high (H) tone and the phrase-initial low (L) tone to segment speech into words (Kim, Broersma, & Cho, 2012; Kim & Cho, 2009), but it is unclear how the alignment of the phrase-final H tone and the scaling of the phrase-initial L tone modulate their speech segmentation. Korean listeners completed three artificial-language (AL) tasks (within-subject): (a) one AL without tonal cues; (b) one AL with later-aligned phrase-final H cues (non-Korean-like); and (c) one AL with earlier-aligned phrase-final H cues (Korean-like). Three groups of Korean listeners heard (b) and (c) in three phrase-initial L scaling conditions (between-subject): high (non-Korean-like), mid (non-Korean-like), or low (Korean-like). Korean listeners’ segmentation improved as the L tone was lowered, and (b) enhanced segmentation more than (c) in the high- and mid-scaling conditions. We propose that Korean listeners tune in to low-level cues (the greater H-to-L slope in [b]) that conform to the Korean intonational grammar when the phrase-initial L tone is not canonical phonologically.

Re-examining the effect of phonological similarity between the native- and second-language intonational systems in second-language speech segmentation

“…These tonal effects manifested themselves early on in the word-recognition process, suggesting that listeners make rapid use of this tonal information to distinguish between the target and competitor words. These results replicate the finding of earlier research that the AP-final H tone and the AP-initial L tone enhance Korean listeners’ speech segmentation (Kim et al, 2012; Kim & Cho, 2009; Tremblay et al, 2019). These findings suggest that listeners compute the prosodic structure of a given utterance by exploiting tonal patterns before and after a hypothesized lexical boundary, with the AP-final and AP-initial tonal cues affecting listeners’ target-over-competitor fixation and modulating lexical access.…”

“…Similarly, using an artificial-language learning paradigm, Kim, Broersma, and Cho (2012) showed that Korean listeners’ learning of statistical dependencies among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream was enhanced by the presence of both an H tone on the word-final syllable and an L tone on the word-initial syllable (compared to when tonal information did not signal word boundaries). Finally, also in an artificial-language learning paradigm, Tremblay et al (2019) found that Korean listeners’ learning of statistical dependencies among syllables benefited from the presence of a word-final H tone if the scaling of word-initial L tone was sufficiently low. These results suggest that Korean listeners may pay closer attention to the phonetic realization of the AP-initial L tone than to that of the AP-final H tone, possibly explaining Korean listeners’ inability to use a late-peaking F0 rise to locate the end of phrase-final words in French (in Tremblay et al, 2016, this rise was not followed by an AP-initial L tone closely aligned with the beginning of the AP).…”

“…English-speaking L2 learners of French also showed this effect but later in the word recognition process, indicating that they needed time to integrate this cue. By contrast, Korean-speaking L2 learners of French did not show a facilitative effect of the F0 rise cue, indicating that they were unable to use the phrase-final F0 rise to locate word boundaries in French (e.g., Kim & Cho, 2009; Tremblay, Cho, Kim & Shin, 2019, discussed below). It was on the basis of these results that Tremblay et al (2016) proposed the Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis.…”

Reflection in Speech of the Individual-Typological Features of Language Personality

“…Следует заметить, что отечественными и зарубежными психолингвистами активно изучаются такие важные и интересные проблемы, как психосемантика (Бутакова, 2018;Jet et al, 2019;Shen et al, 2019); особенности дискурса (Калмиков, 2017); становление детской речи (Мисан, 2017;Калмикова, 2016;Седов, 2008;Bahramlou & Esmaeili, 2019;Kamal, 2019); овладение различными языками (Tremblay et al, 2019;Salim Abu Rabia, 2019;Makhoul & Sabah, 2019;Rodríguez-Ortiz, 2019;Ke et al, 2019), в том числе вторым языком (Zhang & Wen, 2019;Koval, 2019;Zhang, 2019); особенности раннего двуязычия (Hopp et al, 2019;Sierens et al, 2019); связи речи и нарушений психического развития (Pezzino, Marec-Breton & Lacroix, 2019;Bååth et al, 2019;Gullhaugen & Sakshaug, 2019;Zhou, Zhan & Ma, 2019;Pereira, Sampson & DiCola, 2019).…”

The use of tonal coarticulation in segmentation of artificial language speech: A study with Mandarin listeners

“…Korean is thought to have a prosodic constituent called accentual phrase (AP), which frequently begins with a low (L) tone and ends in a high (H) tone (Jun, 1998) and Korean listeners tend to perceive H-L tone sequences as cueing an AP boundary (Kim, Broersma, & Cho, 2012;Kim & Cho, 2009). Moreover, Tremblay, Cho, Kim, and Shin (2019) suggest that the way in which the tone sequence is acoustic-phonetically realized affects how well it can be exploited for segmentation purposes. They found that Korean listeners' segmentation improved as the L tone in the tonal sequence became phonetically lower and more closely resembled the canonical realization of the AP-initial L tone in Korean.…”