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Korean-english Bilingual Children’s Stress Cue Sensitivity and its Relationship with Reading in English

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Abstract

Lexical stress plays a critical role in multisyllabic word reading in English. However, assignment of English lexical stress, which is neither fixed nor marked in writing, can pose significant challenges for English learners and has not been well-understood. The present study aims to fill the research gap by studying sensitivity to lexical stress cues and its contribution to their word reading performance among young English-language learners whose first language is Korean. The fundamental differences in prosodic systems between Korean and English provide theoretical significance of studying how bilingual children having no lexical stress in their first language process English lexical stress. This study focuses on two major cues to English lexical stress: morphological and orthographic cues. Findings revealed that the participants are sensitive to the two stress cues, with better performance with orthographic cues to stress assignment. However, no statistically significant correlations were found among variables on stress cue sensitivity with those on reading.

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  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Jeong Hyun Park, Li-Jen Kuo, Quentin Dixon & Haemin Kim

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  1. Jeong Hyun Park
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Correspondence to Haemin Kim.

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Appendix

Appendix

Appendix A Stimuli used for probabilistic orthographic cues
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Appendix B Stimuli used for morphological suffix cues
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Park, J.H., Kuo, LJ., Dixon, Q. et al. Korean-english Bilingual Children’s Stress Cue Sensitivity and its Relationship with Reading in English. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 397–415 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09854-y

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