Testing the Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis with Korean listeners’ perception of English lexical stress

This study investigates whether listeners’ use of prosodic cues to lexical contrasts can transfer from the processing of one phonological phenomenon in the native (i.e., first) language (L1) to the processing of another phonological phenomenon in a second language (L2). It does so by investigating how Gyeongsang Korean (GK) and Seoul Korean (SK) listeners process English lexical stress contrasts. While GK has lexical pitch accents, SK does not. Korean L2 learners of English completed a sequence-recall task in which they were asked to recall four-item sequences of English words that differed suprasegmentally (stress contrast) or segmentally (phonemic contrast). The results show that there is a significant interaction between L1 and contrast type for GK listeners, but not for SK listeners. The simple effects of L1 confirm that SK listeners showed lower accuracy than GK listeners in the stress contrast condition. GK listeners’ advantage over SK listeners in the stress contrast condition suggests that L2 learners can transfer the use of prosodic cues from one phonological phenomenon in the L1 (lexical pitch accents) to another phonological phenomenon in the L2 (lexical stress), providing robust evidence for the phonetic approach (e.g., Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis) to the perception of lexical stress contrasts.