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

This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that prosodic learning is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French–Korean) than if they are phonologically different (English–French/Korean) (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis; Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). This study provides another test of this hypothesis. Korean listeners and French-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of Korean in Korea completed an eye-tracking experiment investigating the effects of phrase tones in Korean. All groups patterned similarly with the phrase-final tone, but, unlike Korean and French listeners, English listeners showed early benefits from the phrase-initial tone (signaling word-initial boundaries in English). Importantly, French listeners patterned like Korean listeners with both tones. The Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis is refined to suggest that prosodic learning difficulties may not be persistent for immersed L2 learners.