Stress Placement Processing in Reading Korean and English Words

The present study explored the stress placement processing of sixty-four ninth-graders learning to speak and read in Korean as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2) concurrently. Students’ productive stress processing abilities were assessed in reading Korean real words, English unfamiliar real words, and English pseudo-words. Results unveiled that the Korean-speaking English language learners (ELLs) performed differently in terms of language, number of syllables and syllable structure. More specifically, their stress processing performances between the two languages clearly differed when the number of syllables increases and their stress assignment differences across the two languages were much larger on dissimilar stress patterns than similar ones. In addition, Korean stress patterns were transferred onto English, given contrasting stress patterns on the similar underlying structures across the two languages. Overall, they showed a tendency to place Korean stress patterns on the English words whose first syllable is heavy (e.g., CVC) but they were more likely to assign English stress patterns to the English words whose first syllable is light (e.g., CV). These findings suggest that unfamiliar L2-specific prosodic information such as stress may present additional challenges to L2 learners, especially when their L1 is not stress-based.