‘해요체’의 발음 교육을 위한 청자의 친절도 반응 비교

A perception study on acoustic aspects of politeness of the ending verb ‘haeyo’

The aim of this study was to extend the Yoon & Kim(2011)’s perception study to three new groups of subjects: Koreans who speak Standard Korean(KS), speakers who use a Daegu(KD) dialect, and Chinese learners of Korean residing in Daegu(CD). This paper examines whether listeners perceive a different level of politeness (on a 9-point scale) when the duration of the Korean sentence-final auxiliary particle -yo is varied. The stimuli were manipulated by lengthening and shortening ‘-yo’ by ±30%. A noteworthy feature of Yoon & Kim(2011)’s study was that the participants perceived decreased politeness as the duration of -yo was shortened and increased politeness as it was lengthened. It, however, was found in this study that both Korean and Chinese listeners living in the Daegu area did not perceive a different level of politeness from the manipulated sentences. In addition, this study demonstrated that the perception of the duration of ‘-yo’ by L2 learners were consistent with their dialectal region; in other words, the sensitivity to the durational change was relatively low for the Chinese speakers residing in Daegu compared to the Chinese speakers residing in Seoul. Finally, regardless of nationality, the responses to the degree of politeness varied depending on the gender of the listener and the type of sentence; (1) Female speakers perceived a higher degree of politeness than male speakers in the same tokens of duration. (2) Imperative sentences were perceived with authority when the duration of final syllables were shortened. These findings suggest that it is important to teach L2 speakers that the duration of the auxiliary particle -yo (all other things be equal) plays a role in Seoul listeners’ perception of politeness, but not in speakers who use a Daegu dialect.