Korean native speakers' perceptive aspects on Korean wh & yes-no questions produced by Chinese Korean learners

Abstract

Korean wh-questions and yes-no questions have morphologically the same structure. In speech, however, two types of questions are distinguished by prosodic difference. In this study, we examined if Korean native speakers can distinguish wh-question and yes-no questions produced by Chinese Korean leaners based on the prosodic information contained in the sentences. For this purpose, we performed perception analysis, and 15 Korean native speakers participated in the perception test. The results show that two types of interrogative sentences produced by Chinese Korean leaners were not distinguished by constant pitch contours. These results reveal that Chinese Korean leaners cannot match prosodic meaning and prosodic form. The most saliant prosodic feature used perceptually by native speakers to discriminate two types of interrogative sentences is pitch difference between the F0 pick of wh-word and boundary tone.