Perception of Lexical Pitch Accent by Kyungsang and Cholla Korean Listeners

This paper investigates the identification and discrimination of lexical pitch accent by native and non-native dialectal listeners. Specifically, this research is focused on examining the relation between linguistic experience and phonetic levels of discrimination in speech perception. Participants identified and discriminated the continuum resynthesized from three pitch accent minimal pairs of North Kyungsang Korean. Results show that North Kyungsang listeners exhibited a sharper identification boundary and higher discrimination peak than South Cholla listeners. North Kyungsang listeners show the increase of between-category discrimination relative to within-category discrimination, whereas South Cholla listeners do not process them categorically, though showing some auditory sensitivity to all of the pitch accent contour variations. Moreover, in the case of pitch accent, within-category discrimination was better for listeners of dialects with pitch accents, than for listeners of dialects without pitch accents.