The Realization and Perception of English Contrastive Focus -A Comparative Study between Native Speakers of English and Korean Learners of English-

영어 대조 초점의 발화와 인지에 관한 연구 - 원어민 화자와 한국인 화자의 실현 양상 비교 -

This study is designed for two purposes. The first one is to compare the realization and perception of English contrastive focus between Korean learners of English and native speakers of English. The second purpose is to study the phonological and phonetical features of contrastive focus by examining the results of production and perception experiments. English native speakers' results show that the English contrastive accents are generally accompanied by higher peak heights. The findings agree with the results of Bartels & Kingston (1994). Unlike native speakers of English, Korean speakers seem to be poor at relating the phonetical features of contrastive focus to their actual speech. Korean speakers' results are especially unsuccessful when the contrast is not distinctly grasped through syntactic structure, or when the function words are contrasted. Furthermore, Korean speakers' utterances tend to have pitch accents on every content word, whether the word is contrasted or not.