This study investigates the effects of left- (LHD) or right-hemisphere damage (RHD) on the production of matched idiomatic or literal expressions by examining healthy listeners' abilities to identify, evaluate and perceptually characterize the utterances. Native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and healthy controls (HCs) produced six ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in an elicitation and a repetition task. Healthy listeners identified the sentence types and indicated how well each utterance represented the intended meaning. Perceptual ratings of voice quality were performed by expert listeners. The results indicate a negative effect of RHD on listeners' identification and goodness ratings of utterance type. Repetition yielded better speech exemplars than elicitation. Sentence type was associated with selected voice qualities. These findings support previous reports of prosodic information serving to signal idiomatic versus literal meanings as well as a right-hemisphere involvement in formulaic language and the dual process model of language.

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Ditropic sentences are utterances that convey either a literal or an idiomatic meaning (e.g., It broke the ice). This study investigated listener’s ability to discriminate between literal or idiomatic meanings and examined the acoustic features contributing to this distinction. Ten ditropically ambiguous Korean sentences were audio-recorded by four native speakers of Korean. Each utterance was produced twice with either a literal or idiomatic meaning. Fifteen native Korean subjects listened to a randomized presentation of these utterances singly and in pairs without other context and identified each as literal or idiomatic. Listeners successfully discriminated the intended idiomatic or literal meanings (singletons = 70.65%, pairs = 75.67%). These results were consistent with those of Van Lancker and Canter [(1981)] for English ditropic sentences. Each utterance was acoustically analyzed in terms of means and variations in fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity. Analyses of variance revealed significantly longer durations and greater variation in syllable duration for literal than idiomatic sentences, whereas idiomatic sentences were characterized by significantly greater variation in intensity than literal sentences. Some prosodic cues for Korean differed from those found previously for English [Van Lancker et al. (1981)] and French [Abdelli-Baruh et al. (2007)]. These results further understanding of use of prosody in sentential linguistic contrasts.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of the listener’s education and occupation on intelligibility, comprehensibility (ease of understanding), and accentedness in speakers of Russian-accented American English (RA), Southern-accented American English (SA), and General American English (GAE). Native English listeners ( N=126) rated various aspects of each sample presented via a questionnaire. All aspects of speech other than rate were rated highest in the GAE sample followed by the SA and RA samples. Intonation and fluency aspects of accented speech appeared to be influenced by the differences in educational or occupational backgrounds. The study also discussed additional influential factors for the perception of accented speech such as clarity, accentedness, and acceptability of speech for SLPs. This study contributes to increase the awareness of factors associated with the negative perception of regional and foreign accents.