Prosodic aspects of structural ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Japanese intermediate Korean learners

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of structural ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Japanese Korean learners and the influence of their first language prosody. Previous studies reported that structural ambiguous sentences in Korean are different especially in prosodic phrasing. So we examined whether Japanese Korean leaners can also distinguish, in production, between two types of structural ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic features. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers and 8 Japanese Korean learners participated in the production test. Analysis materials are 6 sentences where a relative clause modify either NP1 or NP1+NP2. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure (left branching or right branching sentence). Japanese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for two types of ambiguous sentences in most cases, but they have more errors in producing left branching sentences than right branching sentences. In addition to that, interference of Japanese pitch accent in the production of Korean ambiguous sentences was observed.