• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.57-69
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• 2001

Syntactic ambiguity can be understood by context usually, especially in reading and writing. Because phonological structure including stress, intonation and phonological phenomena can be pronounced differently according to different syntactic structures, syntactic ambiguity can be solved by phonological structure in listening and speaking. The objectives of this study was to survey how Korean English teachers apply phonological structures in order to solve syntactic ambiguity. The results of this study is as follows: First, Korean English leachers applied Compound Stress Rules well, when the second word was not branched. But they did not apply Compound Stress Rules well, when the second word was branched. Second, several Korean English teachers did not apply Nuclear Stress Rules well. They usually put the strongest stress on the first word. Third Korean English teachers did not differentiate appropriate applying situation of palatalization. They applied palatalization at both the single and the separated Phonological Phrase. Fourth, Korean English teachers did not apply stress shifting when stress crash happened. Because they did not apply stress shifting, they put the strongest stress on inappropriate syllable.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2006

This study examines the phonetic realizations of English word stress to identify the influence of experiment method on experiment results. Stimuli uttered by native and Korean ESL beginners in authentic conversations are extracted to be shuffled according to their positions in utterances and information structure. Results indicate that the acoustic characteristics of English word stress are realized depending on its position in utterances. The native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity at sentence-final positions unlike the previous experiments and the traditional definition that stressed syllables are uttered in longer duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity; at sentence-medial positions, the native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in longer duration with higher pitch and no regularity in intensity or in shorter duration with lower pitch and intensity depending on their conversational intention. Korean ESL beginners correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration regardless of positions in sentences with no regularity in pitch and intensity. This study, thus, shows that a different experiment method may result in different results on the phonetic realizations of English word stress.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.47-58
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to find out how Korean speakers' speech production in English word boundaries differs from English speakers' and to account for what bring about such differences. Seeing two consecutive words as one single cluster, the English speakers generally pronounce them naturally by linking a word-final consonant of the first word with a word-initial vowel of the second word, while this is not the case with most of the Korean speakers; they read the two consecutive words individually. In consequence, phonological processes such as resyllabification and aspiration can be found in the English speakers' word-boundary production, while glottalization, and unreleased stops are rather common phonological process seen in the Korean speakers' word-boundary production. This may be accounted for by Korean speakers' L1 interference, depending on English proficiency.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.25-36
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• 2008

Language transfer means that the speaker's first language or previously acquired language influences on the production of the target language. This study aims at examining if there is native language influence on the production of English intonation by Korean speakers. The pitch accent patterns and the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent in the sentence produced by Korean speakers are compared to those of American English speakers. The results show that when the word receives emphatic accent in the sentence, American English speakers put H* accent on the stressed syllable of the word, but Korean speakers mostly assign high pitch on the last syllable of the word and have LH tonal pattern despite the fact that primary stress does not come on the last syllable within a word. In addition, comparison of the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent to those of the word with unmarked neutral accent shows that Korean speakers do not realize the intonation of the accented word appropriately because the values decrease even though the word has emphatic accent. This study finds out that there are differences in the production of English intonation of the word with emphatic accent between native speakers of English and Korean speakers, and that there is negative transfer of Korean intonation pattern to the production of English intonation by Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-6
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• 2018

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers' productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (Rhee et al., 2005). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers' pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers' learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.851-870
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution of /ju/ in British English, especially after the coronal sonorants /n, l, /r/. The sequence /ju/ is related with vowels such as /u/, /ʊ/, and /ʊ/, and has occasioned a variety of conflicting analyses or suggestions. One of those is in which context /j/ is deleted if we suppose that the underlying form is /ju/. The context differs according to the dialect we deal with. In British English, it is known that /j/ is deleted always after /r/, and usually after /l/ when it occurs in an unstressed word-medial syllable. To check this well-known fact I searched OED Online (the 2nd Edition, 1989) for those words which contain /n, l, r/ + /ju, jʊ, u, ʊ, (j)u, (j)ʊ/ in their pronunciations, using the search engine provided by OED Online. After removing some unnecessary words, I classified the collected words into several groups according to the preceding sonorant consonants, the positions, and the presence (or absence) of the stress, of the syllable where /ju/ occurs. The results are as follows: 1) the deletion of /j/ depends on the sonorant consonant which /ju/ follows, the position where it occurs, and the presence of the stress which /ju/ bears; 2) though the influence of the sonorant consonants is strong, the position and stress also have non-trivial effect on the deletion of /j/, that is, the word-initial syllable and the stressed syllable prefer the deletion of /j/, and word-medial and unstressed syllable usually retain /j/; 3) the stress and position factors play their own roles even in the context where the effect of /n, l, r/ is dominant.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.77-88
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• 2002

Acoustical correlates of stress can be classified as duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. This study examined the acoustical differences in the first two syllables of stressed English words produced by ten American and Korean speakers. The Korean subjects scored very high on the TOEFL. They read at a normal speed a fable from which the acoustical parameters of eight words were analyzed. In order to make the data comparison meaningful, each parameter was collected at 100 dynamic time points proportional to the total duration of the two syllables. Then the ratio of the parameter sum of the first rime to that of the second rime was calculated to determine the relative prominence of the syllables. Results showed that the durations of the first two syllables were almost comparable between the Americans and Koreans. However, statistically significant differences showed up in the diphthong pronunciations and in the words with the second syllable stressed. Also, remarkably high r-squared values were found between pairs of the three acoustical parameters, which suggests that either one or a combination of two or more parameters may account for the prominence of a syllable within a word.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.378-390
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• 2020

English stress plays such a critical role in understanding spoken English words that its misplacement can lead to a breakdown of communication. Korean learners of English, whose native language is known to lack this feature, are expected to have some difficulty acquiring this English prosodic system. This study explored how Korean is different from English in manifesting prominence at the word level and how the interlanguage of Korean learners of English is dissimilar to both languages in that regard. Four polysyllabic English loanwords in Korean and their English source words were used as stimuli. Ten native English speakers read the English source words while ten Korean learners of English read the English loan words first and then the English source words. The analysis of 120 speech samples revealed that Korean words did not have any salient syllable realized by all stress features: duration, amplitude, and F0. On the contrary, English words had syllables with relative prominence, which was consistently manifested by all the features. Interestingly, in realizing English stress, the interlanguage of the Korean English learners bore more resemblance to that of English than that of their native language.