• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.67-76
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• 2022

This paper presents two experiments examining different gemination behavior of English affixes. Experiment 1 focused on geminates through affixation with im-, un-, -ness, and -ly. The English group articulated geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for im-, un-, and -ness, but there was no difference for -ly. This suggests that -ly words are more likely to be perceived as whole words, and that -ly is less decomposable. Furthermore, un- geminates exhibited longer absolute and preceding vowel durations than im- geminates, suggesting that im- is more decomposable than un-. However, the Korean group produced geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for all im-, un-, -ness, and -ly, and produced comparable absolute durations of im- and un- geminates. Experiment 2 investigated different gemination behaviors of locative and negative im- prefixes. The English group showed durational contrast between geminates and singletons only for negative im-, indicating that locative im- is not easily separated from stem. However, the Korean group produced longer absolute and relative durations for geminates than for singletons for both locative and negative im-. According to the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, affix decomposability is less likely to influence Korean speakers' English affix gemination, and spellings may have a greater influence.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.83-101
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• 1997

This paper aims at exploring a putative positional neutralization produced at the phonetics/phonology interface. It was designed to determine whether Korean intervocalic laryngeal consonants are phonetically distant from geminates, plain consonants, or laryngeal consonants in consonant clusters. It was found that the contrast between laryngeal singletons and geminates was neutralized intervocalically, and that both of these were patterned with heteroganic consonant sequences rather than with plain singletons.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.459-466
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• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonants in the same intervocalic position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in $su\underline{mm}er$. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of (near) minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the words with singleton graphemes were higher than those for the words with doubleton graphemes both in perception and production because the subjects misperceived and misproduced the doubleton graphemes as geminates due to orthographic influence. In addition, the low error rates of the word with voiced stops were accounted for by Korean language transfer. Further, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words. Finally, pedagogical implications are provided.