The influence of dialect exposure to phonological categories in perceptual and production acquisition

This dissertation investigated the perception and production of dialectally variant prosodic properties in Korean. The current study was focused on the tonal system of North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean to understand how lexical pitch accent, which is a property of the North Kyungsang variety, is realized by native and non-native speakers of that dialect. This research comprised four approaches to interpret the entity of the psychological encoding system.;First, in categorical perception tests, the identification of the lexical pitch accent by the North Kyungsang adult participants was sharper than that of the South Cholla participants. The peak of discrimination at the categorical boundary by North Kyungsang adult participants was much higher than that of South Cholla adult participants.;Second, in a mimicry paradigm, the categorical boundary in mimicry productions for the North Kyungsang participants was correspondent with the one for perceptual identification, but not for the South Cholla participants. The mimicry production of lexical pitch accent produced by North Kyungsang and South Cholla participants was not different within the range of natural production.;Third, in the identification and mimicry performance by North Kyungsang and South Cholla adult and child participants, the identification functions by North Kyungsang child participants were shallower than the adult participants from the same region. In the mimicry task, the child participants from both dialect regions showed much more variations than the North Kyungsang adult participants, but showed more sensitivity to the input stimuli than did South Cholla adult participants.;Fourth, in the production task by adult and child participants, the acoustic characteristics of lexical pitch accent by the North Kyungsang adult and child speakers were significantly different than those of the South Cholla adult and child participants. In the comparison of adult and child speakers from both regions, the children's data conformed to the adults' performance.;These results are discussed with respect to how it is that phonological distinctions instantiate themselves in the developing systems of speakers from related dialects.