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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper

Title:	The Use of Prosodic Cues in Learning New Words in an Unfamiliar Language
Author:	Sahyang Kim
Institution:	Hongik University
Author:	Mirjam Broersma
Institution:	F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
Author:	Taehong Cho
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://tcho.hanyang.ac.kr/Frame_right.htm
Institution:	Hanyang University
Linguistic Field:	Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics
Subject Language:	Dutch Korean
Abstract:	The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages—Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)—participated. The words to be learned varied with prosodic cues: no prosody, fundamental frequency (F0) rise in initial and final position, final lengthening, and final lengthening plus F0 rise. Both listener groups performed well above chance level with the final lengthening cue, confirming its crosslinguistic use. As for final F0 rise, however, Dutch listeners did not use it until the second exposure session, whereas Korean listeners used it at initial exposure. Neither group used initial F0 rise. On the basis of these results, F0 and durational cues appear to be universal in the sense that they are used across languages for their universally applicable auditory-perceptual saliency, but how they are used is language specific and constrains the use of available prosodic cues in processing a nonnative language. A discussion on how these findings bear on theories of second language (L2) speech perception and learning is provided.

	This article appears in Studies in Second Language Acquisition Vol. 34, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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