Intonation Patterns of Korean Second Language Learners of English

Abstract

Intonation is an important property when analyzing speech and
is one of those properties of speech by which it is easy to
distinguish bilinguals from monolinguals. Taking into account
the different stress patterns of various languages, we chose to
study Korean and English, since Korean is a syllable-timed
language and English is a stress-timed language. Significant
research has been done on similar research questions by Ulrike
Gut, who studied intonation acquisition of German-English
bilingual children, and Danica MacDonald, who studied Koreans’
acquisition of English question intonation. Our goal was to
answer broader questions about bilingualism, and how it affects
the acquisition of intonation. Via Skype, we recorded our
participants reading a pre-written English paragraph and plotted
the pitch and intensity of three different phrases (a declaration, a
question, and an exclamation) using the speech analysis software
Praat. Our results generally showed that the intonation patterns
of a speaker’s first language affect those of their second language,
but overall our study was inconclusive since the COVID-19
pandemic did not lend itself well to gathering all the data we
might have needed to come to more confident conclusions.