We examined how North Korean refugees (NKRs) residing in South Korea and South Korean natives (SKs) perceive expressive speech act with message-oriented utterances and relationship-oriented utterances. Unlike most previous literature, we focused on the pragmatic heterogeneity and illustrated possible pragmatic failures that NKRs may encounter in South Korea. The 47-SKs and 43-NKRs responded to the survey with videoclips that shows combinations of the speech acts (thanking, compliment/response, and apology) and the utterance type (message-oriented and relationship-oriented). Each video entails three survey questions asking for participant's perception of conversations and their evaluation on the speaker's personality. The analysis revealed that SKs' perception of relationship-oriented utterances is more positive than NKRs. Also, NKRs' evaluations did not change significantly over time, showing that explicit instruction on the difference may be required. These findings suggest that for successful communication between two groups with different sociocultural backgrounds, instruction in language use can be helpful.

This study aims at unveiling phonetic cue weighting of English word recognition by Korean learners of English using a web-based online perception experiment. The longer duration of a high front tense vowel than that of a lax counterpart is used as a cue by native English speakers and presumably as a cue by Korean learners of English. The longer duration of a vowel before voiced stops than that of an equivalent before voiceless stops serves as a cue by native Speakers of English and also probably by Korean learners of English. A web-based online experiment has been designed to examine how Korean learners of English cope with a mixture of fine grained phonetic cues. Results of the web-based online experiment reveal that duration is primarily and robustly used to distinguish a tense vowel before voiced stops and a lax vowel before voiceless stops. At the same time, spectral cues are also put to use, though to a lesser extent, to help make a distinction from a tense vowel before voiceless stops and a lax vowel before voiced stops. The study implies that learners of English try to utilize a complex mixture of acoustic cues to distinguish words.