Use of tonal information in French and English listeners’ segmentation of Korean speech

(Seoul) Korean has been analyzed as having an Accentual Phrase (AP) with a L(HL)H tonal pattern for APs beginning with a lenis segment (Jun, 1998). This tonal information modulates Korean listeners’ speech segmentation (Kim & Cho, 2009; Tremblay, Shin, Kim, & Cho, 2018). This study investigates whether French- and English-speaking late learners of Korean can also use this tonal information. French has similarly been analyzed as having an AP with a L(HL)H tonal pattern (Jun & Fougeron, 2002). In contrast, English words are often stressed initially (Cutler & Carter, 1987), with nuclear-pitch-accented words beginning with a H tone (Beckman, 1986). French, English, and Korean listeners completed an eye-tracking experiment. They heard sentences containing a temporary ambiguity between an AP-initial target (saesinbu-ga]AP[masul-eul ‘the-new-bride-subj magic-obj’) and a disyllabic competitor spanning the AP boundary (gama"palanquin"). Stimuli were resynthesized to orthogonally manipulate the AP-final and AP-initial tones (H/L). Results show that learners eventually used the AP-final and AP-initial tones like Korean listeners, but French listeners made earlier use of both tones than English listeners, even if the AP-initial tone is less crucial to French speech segmentation (Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin, & Choi, 2016). Speech segmentation is thus very adaptive, even among late learners.