The Perception of Foreign Accent in Isolated Korean Words

This study investigated two outstanding empirical questions related to the perception of foreign accent in Korean. First, how is the perception of foreign accent affected by acoustic properties of the stimuli? Second, do listeners rate speech differently depending on whether they are asked to rate “foreign accent” versus “non-nativeness”? Thirty L1 Korean listeners rated the foreign accent and non-nativeness of isolated word productions of 24 L2 Korean speakers from four different L1 backgrounds. Acoustic differences between L2 and L1 Korean word productions were measured, finding that the f0 and F1 of the stimuli were most predictive of listeners’ foreign accent ratings. Ratings of foreign accent and non-nativeness were highly correlated within individual talkers, but less correlated within individual listeners. The findings corroborate earlier conclusions that segmental errors play an important role in Korean foreign accent perception, and suggest that while the interpretations of terms such as “foreign” and “non-native” may vary in Korean, these differences may wash out when averaged across listeners.