The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the
acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and
late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns
of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns
of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of
phonologically similar words were investigated for their effect on the
placement of stress in English nonwords. Both bilingual groups—like
the native English controls—showed extension of stress patterns from
phonologically similar real words. The effect of syllabic structure for
early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers, and
late bilinguals showed more reduced effects. Unlike previous work with
Spanish-English bilinguals, Korean-English bilinguals demonstrated a
nonnativelike effect of lexical class, most pronounced in the late
bilinguals. This difference might be due to Koreans' low sensitivity
to word-level statistical distributions because of early exposure to a
phrase-level prosodic system.This research
was supported by a grant (DC05132) from the National Institutes of Health
(National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). Thanks
are extended to J. J. Clark for her help in administering the experiments
and to Kyoung-Ho Kang for help locating participants. I would also like to
thank the four anonymous SSLA reviewers, Jonathan Loftin, and
Lisa Redford for valuable comments on an earlier version of this
article.