Processing advantages for focused words in Korean
Citations Over Time
Abstract
In Korean, focus is expressed in accentual phrasing. To ascertain whether words focused in this manner enjoy a processing advantage analogous to that conferred by focus as expressed in, e.g, English and Dutch, we devised sentences with target words in one of four conditions: prosodic focus, syntactic focus, prosodic + syntactic focus, and no focus as a control. 32 native speakers of Korean listened to blocks of 10 sentences, then were presented visually with words and asked whether or not they had heard them. Overall, words with focus were recognised significantly faster and more accurately than unfocused words. In addition, words with syntactic focus or syntactic + prosodic focus were recognised faster than words with prosodic focus alone. As for other languages, Korean focus confers processing advantage on the words carrying it. While prosodic focus does provide an advantage, however, syntactic focus appears to provide the greater beneficial effect for recognition memory.
Related Papers
- Whence and Whither Prosody in Automatic Speech Understanding: A Case Study.(2001)
- Study of prosody model on Chinese speech synthesis based on the classification of syllabic prosody features(2003)
- → Evaluating prosody of Mandarin speech for language learning(2006)1 cited
- Researches on Prosody Control Technique and Applications in Tibetan TTS(2005)
- → On the Utility of Self-supervised Models for Prosody-related Tasks(2022)