Effect of Prosody on the Phonological Processing of Korean Words

Choi, Ji-Yeon; Cho, Hye-Suk; Nam, Ki-Chun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2011;16(4): 614-626.

Ji-Yeon Choi^` , Hye-Suk Cho^` , and Ki-Chun Nam^`

최지연(Ji-Yeon Choi)| 조혜숙(Hye-Suk Cho)| 남기춘(Ki-Chun Nam)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
The present study investigated whether the accentual phrase was the unit which listeners segmented sentences into and how pitch information, an important factor to mark the accentual phrase, was used for speech comprehension.
Method
Two experiments were conducted using two monitoring tasks. Experiment 1 tested whether detection of words generated by local lexical ambiguities differed based on the type of boundary (accentual phrase boundary, phonological word boundary, etc.) using a word monitoring task. In Experiment 2, a syllable monitoring task was used to determine the interaction between the two conditions that might have been missed in Experiment 1 due to the task.
Results
Experiment 1 showed that the reaction time in the accentual phrase boundary condition was longer than that in the phonological word boundary condition. There was a significant main effect of pitch information. However, there was no interaction between the two conditions (types of boundary and presence/absence of pitch information). Experiment 2 showed a significant effect of boundary type as shown in Experiment 1 but no effect of pitch information or the interaction of the two conditions.
Discussion & Conclusion
Findings from the present study showed that segmentation of continuous speech according to accentual phrase boundary was easy compared to segmentation within the phonological word boundary and suggested that pitch information contributed to early processing and comprehension of speech sounds.