A time course of prosodic modulation in phonological inferencing: The case of Korean post-obstruent tensing

Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and phonological inferencing. The rule examined was post-obstruent tensing (POT) in Korean, which changes a lax consonant into a tense after an obstruent only within a prosodic domain of Accentual Phrase (AP). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that, upon hearing a derived tense form, listeners indeed recovered its underlying (lax) form. The phonological inferencing effect, however, was observed only in the absence of its tense competitor which was acoustically matched with the auditory input. In Experiment 3, a prosodic cue to an AP boundary (which blocks POT) was created before the target using an F0 cue alone (i.e., without any temporal cues), and the phonological inferencing effect disappeared. This supports the view that phonological inferencing is modulated by listeners’ online computation of prosodic structure (rather than through a low-level temporal normalization). Further analyses of the time course of eye movement suggested that the prosodic modulation effect occurred relatively later in the lexical processing. This implies that speech processing involves segmental processing in conjunction with prosodic structural analysis, and calls for further research on how prosodic information is processed along with segmental information in language-specific vs. universally applicable ways.