Cross-linguistic effects of Korean experience on Chinese listeners’ perception of English lexical stress

This study explores how cross-language experience with Korean influences Chinese listeners’ perception of English lexical stress, focusing on three prosodic cues: duration, fundamental frequency (F0), and intensity. Three groups participated: native Korean speakers (KL), Chinese speakers in Korea with Korean experience (CK), and Chinese speakers in China with no Korean experience (CC). Participants listened to English nonce words and identified the location of stress. All groups were relatively insensitive to duration, with the KL group showing the least sensitivity. In contrast, F0 and intensity cues strongly influenced perception, often leading to iambic interpretations. Notably, the CK group showed reduced sensitivity to F0 compared to both KL and CC groups. This suggests that experience with Korean, which encodes prominence differently than English, may shift cue weighting strategies in cross-language prosodic perception. Statistical analysis confirmed significant effects of F0 and intensity, along with interactions between listener group and cue type. These findings highlight how third-language experience can shape prosodic processing in a second language, contributing to models of cross-language speech perception.