Intonational Variations in Korean Learners’ English

This study investigated the effects of English proficiency level of Korean L2 learners on the production of intonational features in L2 English. It was hypothesized that the Korean group who had high proficiency level in the English language would have intonation patterns more similar to those of the native English speakers than a low level group of Korean speakers. Forty-nine subjects in three groups– 21 Korean adults in the high-level group, 19 Korean adults in the low-level group, and 9 native English speakers in a control group – took part in the experiment. The results showed that the high group was more native-like by having a steeper F0 declination tilt (a wider F0 range and fast speech rate). However, even this high-level group exhibited difficulty in controlling phonetic cues at the boundary. These results suggest that the acquisition of second language intonation is affected by English proficiency level, but the degree of intonational acquisition varies by sub-areas such as acoustic cues at the boundary which proved to be hard to acquire.