Acquisition of Second Language Prosody and the Role of Prosody in Discourse: A Study of English Speakers’ Korean and Korean Speakers’ English

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of second language (L2) prosody (e.g.,intonation, stress, rhythm) in native English speakers’ Korean and native Korean speakers’English based on the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework. Specifically, by comparingprosodic characteristics of the first language (L1) and L2, this study examines how L2 speakersnegotiate meanings in discourse (e.g., signal turn-taking and convey various pragmaticmeanings) through intonation and co-occurring grammatical resources, and why the speech of L2speakers sounds foreign. There is a lack of understanding of the role of L2 prosody at thediscourse level. Considerable research focuses on L2 prosody in made-up sentences, failing toexplain meaning negotiation conveyed through prosody. Moreover, few studies have usedappropriate prosodic frameworks when describing prosodic errors of L2 speech.In this dissertation, Korean L2 data were collected from 12 oral proficiency interviews(OPI) between Korean L2 interviewees and a native Korean interviewer; four interviews withnative Korean speakers served as controls. English L2 data were collected from 12 oralproficiency tests designed for international teaching assistants at the University of California,Los Angeles; three presentations by native English speakers served as controls. The data werelabeled using the Korean TOnes and Break Indices (K-ToBI, Jun 1993, 2000, 2005) andMainstream American English (MAE) ToBI (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman & Pierrehumbert,1986; Beckman et al. 2005) transcription systems. Analysis revealed that L2 speakers at differentproficiency levels (i.e., intermediate and advanced) were able to use prosody to signal turncontinuations but more advanced speakers were better at using prosody to convey variouspragmatic meanings appropriate to the conversational context. However, the foreign accents orerror types in prosody were frequent in L2 production at both proficiency levels, suggesting lateracquisition of these features.This study introduces how the AM framework can be used to analyze L2 prosody indiscourse. The study further suggests crosslinguistic similarities in the acquisition order betweenprosody associated with pragmatic meanings and prosody associated with nonpragmaticmeanings.