The Perception of Korean Boundary Tones by First and Second Language Speakers

This paper reports an experiment which investigated the perception of prosody in Korean or non-word utterances by native Korean speakers and English learners of Korean. Listeners rated the degrees of positivity and excitement of resynthesized utterances with different pitch ranges and durations. The results revealed no significant differences between the two groups of listeners. The variations in pitch range and duration had systematic effects on the ratings. However, the interactions between various factors suggest that the mapping between prosodic shapes and their paralinguistic meaning is not straightforward.