A Comparative Study on the Speech Rate of Advanced Korean(L2) Learners and Korean Native Speakers in Conversational Speech

자유 대화에서의 한국어 원어민 화자와 한국어 고급 학습자들의 발화 속도 비교

The purpose of this study is to compare the speech rate of advanced Korean(L2) learners and Korean native speakers in spontaneous utterances. Specifically, the current study investigated the difference of the two groups' speech pattern according to utterance length. Eight advanced Korean(L2) learners and eight Korean native speakers participated in this study. The data were collected by recording their conversation and physical measurements (speaking rate, articulatory rates, pause and several types of speech disfluency) were taken on extracted 120 utterances from 12 out of the 16 participants. The findings show that advanced Korean learners' speech pattern is similar to that of Koreans in the short-length utterance. However, in the long-length utterance, two groups show different speech patterns; while the articulatory rate of Korean native speakers increased in the long-length utterance, that of Korean learners decreased. This suggests that the frequency of speech disfluency factors might affect this result.