• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.47-66
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• 2006

This study examined the effect of English-language experience on Korean- and Japanese-English late learners' production of English unstressed vowels in terms of four acoustic phonetic features: F0, duration, intensity and vowel reduction. The learners manifested some improvement with experience. The native-like attainment of a phonetic feature, however, was related to the phonological status of that feature in the speakers' native language. The results suggest that the extent to which the non-native speakers' production of English unstressed vowels improved with English-language experience varied as a function of their native language background.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.17-20
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• 2005

The purpose of this project is to develop a device that can automatically measure pronunciation of English speech produced by Korean learners of English. Pronunciation proficiency will be measured largely in two areas; suprasegmental and segmental areas. In suprasegmental area, intonation and word stress will be traced and compared with those of native speakers by way of statistical methods using tilt parameters. Durations of phones are also examined to measure speakers' naturalness of their pronunciations. In doing so, statistical duration modelling from a large speech database using CART will be considered. For segmental measurement of pronunciation, acoustic probability of a phone, which is a byproduct when doing the forced alignment, will be a basis of scoring pronunciation accuracy of a phone. The final score will be a feedback to the learners to improve their pronunciation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.81-87
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• 2019

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the realization of speech rhythm in English as spoken by Korean learners of English. The study particularly aims to examine the rhythm metrics of English read speech by learners who speak Busan or the South Kyungsang dialect of Korean. Twenty-four learners whose L1 is Busan Korean and eight native speakers of English read a passage wherein five sentences were segmented and labeled as vocalic and intervocalic intervals. Various rhythm metrics such as %V, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indexes (PVIs) were calculated. The results show that Korean learners read English sentences with significantly more vocalic and consonantal intervals at a slower speech rate than native English speakers. The analyses of rhythm metrics revealed that when the speech rate was not normalized, Korean learners' English showed more variability in the length of consonantal and vocalic intervals. However, speech-rate-normalized rhythm metrics for vocalic intervals indicated that Korean learners transferred their L1 rhythmic structures (a syllable-timed language) into their L2 speech (a stress-timed language). Overall, the results suggest that Korean learners' English reflects the rhythmic characteristics of their L1. The effect of the learners' L1 dialect on the realization of L2 speech rhythm is also speculated.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.181-197
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to measure how English immersion classes affect students. This study seeks to answer two questions. First, will the young learners gain an international sense? Second, will the students learn English naturally without having to be sent abroad to an English speaking country? Several kinds of immersion programs have been designed and implemented in Korea. However, many students have felt great stress and mental pressure in the immersion programs. Students find the programs stressful because English must be used at all times. In this paper, two groups of elementary school students are compared: one being the control group and the other being the experimental group, an immersion class. The results show that the mental health problems, sensitivities, and rates of depression in the immersion group are greater than those of the students in the control group. Therefore, the immersion students' overall mental health is substandard. The negative effects of lethargy and depression are made worse when they are placed in English only environments. The results indicate more attention should be focused on respecting and understanding the students' overall mental health when teaching them English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.455-464
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• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.147-166
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to explain stress shift and its following segmental variations when some suffixes are added to the bases. In the past those were analyzed in stress or vowel laxing phenomenon separately, but rather those should be analyzed in one framework compositively. Therefore in this paper I will introduce a new theory, which is known as Harmonic theory, and confirm that it can solve the problems related with stress and vowel laxing simultaneously. The first thing, as a prosodic approach I am going to analyze vowel laxing according to Liberman & Prince (1977), Burzio (1993), and then next to go to the Harmonic theory approach. Within the theory I will analyze the phonological phenomena harmoniously through the important three levels, M-level, W-level, P-level. Therefore this paper is to show that from the comparison between the prosodic analysis and the Harmonic analysis, what is more natural and harmonious analysis is based on the Harmonic approach.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.3-11
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• 2015

This study compared English and Korean speakers with regard to the nasalization of the English stops /b, d, g, p, t, k/before a nasal within and across a word boundary. Nine English and thirty Korean speakers participated in the experiment. We used 37 speech items with different grammatical structures. Overall the English informants rarely nasalized the stops while the Korean informants generally greatly nasalized them though widely varying from no nasalization to almost complete nasalization. In general, voiced stops were more likely to be nasalized than voiceless stops. Also, the alveolar stops /d, t/tended to be nasalized the most, the bilabial stops /b, p/ the second most, and the velar stops /g, k/ the least. Besides, the closer the grammatical relationship between neighboring words, the more likely the stop nasalization occurred. In contrast, the Korean syllabification - the addition of the vowel /i/ to the final stops - worked against the stop nasalization. On the other hand, different stress (accent) or rhythm effects of the two languages are assumed to contribute to the significantly different nasalization between English and Korean speakers. The spectrum of stop nasalization obtained from this study can be used as an index to measure how close a certain Korean speaker's stop nasalization is to English speakers'.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.161-163
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• 2004

This study concerns the constraints of English Poetic Fixed Meter. In English poems, the metrical pattern doesn't always match the linguistic stress on the lines. These mismatches are found differently among the poets. For the lexical stress mismatched with the weak metrical position, ${\ast}W{\Rightarrow}$ Strength is established by the concept of the strong syllable. The peaked monosyllabic word mismatched with weak metrical position is divided according to which side of the boundary of a phonological domain it is adjacent to. In most poets, ${\ast}$Peak] is ranked higher than ${\ast}$[Peak. In Shakespeare, Adjacency Constraint is ranked higher than ${\ast}$Peak].

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to know the acoustic characteristics of voice under stressful and relaxed conditions. Ten undergraduate male students participated in this study and produced 아, 에, 이 vowels in English reading, difficult Korean reading under stressful conditions, and easy Korean reading under relaxed conditions. After that, F0, jitter, shimmer, NHR, F1, F2, and F3 values were measured and analyzed. The results of this study demonstrate that speech parameters related to stress are jitter, shimmer, and NHR in that these values are lower under relaxed situations (easy Korean reading) than that of stressful situations (English and difficult Korean reading). This study will be a foundation to verify that the analysis of acoustic characteristics can serve as a quantitative tool for measuring stress levels.