Perceptive evaluation of Korean native speakers on the polysemic sentence final ending produced by Chinese Korean learners

The aim of this study is to investigate the perceptive aspects of the polysemic sentence final ending “-(eu)lgeol” produced by Chinese Korean learners. “-(Eu)lgeol” has two different meanings, that is, a guess and a regret, and these different meanings are expressed by the different prosodic features of the last syllable of “-(eu)lgeol”. To examine how Korean native speakers perceive “-(eu)lgeol” sentences produced by Chinese Korean learners and the most saliant prosodic variable for the semantic discrimination of “-(eu)lgeol” at the perceptive level, we performed a perceptual experiment. The analysed material constituted four Korean sentences containing “-(eu)lgeol” in which two sentences expressed guesses and the other two expressed regret. Twenty-five Korean native speakers participated in the perceptual experiment. Participants were asked to mark whether “-(eu)lgeol” sentences they listened to were (1) definitely regrets, (2) probably regrets, (3) ambiguous, (4) probably guesses, or (5) definitely guesses based on the prosodic features of the last syllable of “-(eu)lgeol”. The analysed prosodic variables were sentence boundary tones, slopes of boundary tones, pitch difference between sentence-final and penultimate syllables, and pitch levels of boundary tones. The results show that all the analysed prosodic variables are significantly correlated with the semantic discrimination of “-(eu)lgeol” and among these prosodic variables, the most salient role in the semantic discrimination of “-(eu)lgeol” is pitch difference between sentence-final syllable and penultimate syllable.