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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.396-417
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Mar 2026
Received 08 Feb 2026 Revised 03 Mar 2026 Accepted 03 Mar 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202603.396

The Interaction of Focus Prosody and Lexical Stress on Lexical Processing During Online Sentence Comprehension by Native and Non-native English Listeners

Hyunah Baek ; Matthew W. Lowder ; Wonil Choi
(First author) Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Ajou University hyunahbaek@ajou.ac.kr
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology University of Richmond mlowder@richmond.edu
(Corresponding author) Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Tel: +82-62-715-3657 wichoi@gist.ac.kr


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigated how English contrastive focus prosody interacts with lexical stress during online sentence processing among native English speakers and Korean speakers learning English as a second language (L2). In an eye-tracking study, participants heard instructions containing focused trisyllabic nouns with stress on the initial, medial, or final syllable (e.g., cúcumber, banána, chimpanzée). Both groups showed earlier target fixations when focus prosody was contextually felicitous, but only for words with initial or medial stress. The effect was more evident and emerged earlier for the English speakers than for the Korean speakers, suggesting greater difficulty in integrating prosodic cues in L2, as proposed by the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011). The Korean speakers were more sensitive to prosody on medial-stressed words, possibly reflecting an influence of L1 prosody. These findings suggest that L2 learners use prosody during online sentence comprehension, though their processing is relatively slower and modulated by L1 effects.

Keywords:

focus prosody, lexical stress, sentence processing, second language, visual world paradigm

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A8052482). The methodologies used in this study were approved by the IRB of Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (20201008-HR-56-06-02) and the University of Richmond (URIRB230920). We are grateful to the LCBL members for creating stimuli and collecting data.

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