Use of tonal information in Korean lexical access

Abstract

Prominence in Seoul Korean is realized at the level of the Accentual Phrase (AP), with the AP-final High (H) tone signaling prosodic word-final boundaries and the AP-initial Low (L) tone signaling word-initial boundaries [1-2]. Using word-spotting experiments, Kim and Cho [3] showed that Korean speech segmentation benefits from both the AP-final H and AP-initial L tones, but it is unclear whether (and if so, how) tonal information also constrains lexical access in Korean. The present study investigates this issue using a visual-world eyetracking experiment. Native Korean listeners heard sentences containing a temporary lexical ambiguity between a disyllabic target word in AP-initial position (e.g., [saesinbu-ga]AP [masul-eul]AP ‘thenew-bride-subj magic-obj’) and a disyllabic competitor word spanning the AP boundary (e.g., gama ‘palanquin’). The auditory stimuli were resynthesized to create four tonal boundary conditions: H#L, H#H, L#L, and L#H, where # represents an AP boundary. Listeners’ eye movements to the printed target and competitor words were monitored as they heard the auditory stimuli. The results showed independent effects of the AP-initial and AP-final tones on lexical access, suggesting that the intonational system of Korean modulates lexical activation and highlighting the importance of languagespecific tonal cues in lexical access. © 2018, International Speech Communications Association. All Rights Reserved.