The Production and Perception of Focus in English Yes- No Questions

영어 가부 의문문 초점 발화와 지각

In English, a focused word with new information receives a pitch accent. This paper examines how English native speakers and Korean speakers produce and perceive focus in English yes-no questions. The production experiments show that native speakers realize an appropriate intonation of yes-no questions, in which a focused word has a low pitch accent followed by a high phrasal accent and a high boundary tone. However, Korean speakers usually give a high tone to a focused word. In a like manner, the perception experiments show that English native speakers judge a word with a low tone to be focused, while Korean speakers have difficulty in comprehending a focused word realized as a low tone. And it is found that Korean speakers tend to perceive low tones on sentence initial and final focused words better than those on sentence medial focused words, and they often perceive a word with a relatively high fundamental frequency or a sharp rise of fundamental frequency as a focused word. This paper shows that Korean speakers have trouble to produce and perceive an appropriate tonal pattern of a focused yes-no question, and that can cause confusion in a conversation with native speakers.