• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.33-38
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• 2024

The present study investigated the perceptual cues utilized by Korean L2 learners of English in recognizing lexical stress in English nonwords, with a focus on the roles of fundamental frequency (F0) and duration. Twenty-three Korean learners of English participated in a sequence recall task involving nonword stimuli under five different conditions: (1) the naturally-produced stimuli, (2) the duration-only condition, (3) the F0-only condition, (4) the duration-F0 matching condition, and (5) the duration-F0 conflicting condition. The results demonstrate that F0 is the primary cue for stress perception among Korean L2 learners, whereas duration acts as a secondary cue, particularly when F0 is unreliable or absent. These findings highlight the influence of L1 prosodic structures on L2 perception and suggest that Korean L2 learners adapt their perceptual weighting of stress based on cue availability. This study contributes to the understanding of the role of cue weighting in L2 prosodic acquisition.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.109-133
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• 2014

Psychological distance refers to the perceived gap between a stimulus and a person's direct experience and its activation influences the decisions and actions that the person makes towards the stimulus. We investigated whether the level of familiarity affects the construction of psychological distance. Specifically, we hypothesized that a familiar stimulus, relative to an unfamiliar stimulus, is perceived to be psychologically closer to the observer and so its perception might be modulated by the perceived spatial distance. The familiarity of stimuli was manipulated in terms of preexposure frequency and preexposure perceptual fluency. In experiments, participants were first exposed with three nonsense words in a lexical decision task. The nonsense words were presented in nonword trials with different levels of frequency (frequent vs. rare, Experiment 1) or with different levels of visibility (less blurred vs. more blurred, Experiment 2). Participants then performed a distance Stroop task with the most familiar and the least familiar nonwords. Each of them appeared in either proximal or distant spatial locations in scenes with clear depth cues. The results showed a significant interaction between the word familiarity and the spatial distance: the familiar word was judged faster in proximal locations but slower in distant locations relative to the unfamiliar word. The current findings suggest that metacognitive evaluation of familiarity could be one of the critical factors that underlie the construction of psychological distance.