• Title/Summary/Keyword: English stress

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Language Specific Variations of Domain-initial Strengthening and its Implications on the Phonology-Phonetics Interface: with Particular Reference to English and Hamkyeong Korean

  • Kim, Sung-A
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.11 no.3
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    • pp.7-21
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    • 2004
  • The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

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English Sounds to Japanese Ears

  • Yuichi Endo
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 2000.07a
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    • pp.47-58
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    • 2000
  • For the learners of English as a foreign language, oral repetition of model sentences is an e essential practice to improve their listening and speaking abilities of English. Skill training of both speech perception and production is involved in this practice. This paper reports on an observation of production e$\pi$ors in such practice made by Japanese college students in my class. The teaching material used is intended for acquainting the learners with basic English rhythm and intonation p patterns. The students were required to repeat each sentence in a series of conversations after a model reading. Although the vocabulary and expressions were rather limited, I monitored different kinds of errors in their repetition. Putting aside intonation, their difficulties are classified into five types; 1. Omission of words or morphemes, 2. Addition of unnecessary words or morphemes, 3. Replacement of words, 4. Japanization of English sounds, 5. Wrong rhythm caused by improper stress assignment. Accurate listening, especially to weakly stressed syllables and to assimilated sounds, as has often been pointed out, is the most difficult part in perception for them. Japanese sound system interferes in production of English sounds. More often than not their knowledge of grammar or the context does not work at all to guess the words they are hearing

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Strong (stressed) syllables in English and lexical segmentation by Koreans (영어의 강음절(강세 음절)과 한국어 화자의 단어 분절)

  • Kim, Sun-Mi;Nam, Ki-Chun
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.3 no.1
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    • pp.3-14
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    • 2011
  • It has been posited that in English, native listeners use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS) for the segmentation of continuous speech. Strong syllables tend to be perceived as potential word onsets for English native speakers, which is due to the high proportion of strong syllables word-initially in the English vocabulary. This study investigates whether Koreans employ the same strategy when segmenting speech input in English. Word-spotting experiments were conducted using vowel-initial and consonant-initial bisyllabic targets embedded in nonsense trisyllables in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. The effect of strong syllable was significant in the RT (reaction times) analysis but not in the error analysis. In both experiments, Korean listeners detected words more slowly when the word-initial syllable is strong (stressed) than when it is weak (unstressed). However, the error analysis showed that there was no effect of initial stress in Experiment 1 and in the item (F2) analysis in Experiment 2. Only the subject (F1) analysis in Experiment 2 showed that the participants made more errors when the word starts with a strong syllable. These findings suggest that Koran listeners do not use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for segmenting English speech. They do not treat strong syllables as word beginnings, but rather have difficulties recognizing words when the word starts with a strong syllable. These results are discussed in terms of intonational properties of Korean prosodic phrases which are found to serve as lexical segmentation cues in the Korean language.

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How to Teach English Intonation to Japanese Students

  • Masaki Tsuzuki
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 1996.02a
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    • pp.47-61
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    • 1996
  • The phonetic study of English language in Japan is a matter of great importance, a problem of major concern and a. vital subject The special difficulties which the Japanese college students have in learning English lie in the field of prosodic features of English, such as, syllable, rhythm, stress, intonation, prominence, of.. These difficulties have made Japanese students' pronunciation relatively monotonous or mora(ness). In my presentation, the specific phonetic features of Japanese language first will be discussed and clarified. And then the effective teaching method of intonation to improve Japanese students' pronunciation will be suggested. Finally, the oral dialogue with intonation analysis and transcription in the class room will be demonstrated to highlight the presentation.

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The proficiency-based and integrated teaching of High School English reading and listening based on sense group and utterance restructuring (의미군과 발화의 재구조에 의한 고등학교 영어 읽기와 듣기의 수준별 통합 지도)

  • Lee, Sun-Beom
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 2004.05a
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    • pp.245-249
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    • 2004
  • The aim of this paper is to show the possibilities of the proficiency -based and integrated teaching of High School English reading and listening based on sense group and utterance restructuring. The proficiency -based and integrated listening and reading activities in stages are as follows. Step1, students fill in the blanks with strong or weak sounding words according to their abilities. Step2, speak along (track) based on restructuring and post-lexical phenomena while listening to the sentence. Step3, read and understand directly the passage, which have been marked the differentiated places where a native speaker of English would beat all likely to pause. Students need to listen to spoken English, so they recognize words in written and spoken form. They must be familiar with suprasegmental features, stress and rhythm, and post-lexical phenomena during reading activities.

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A use of songs for Teaching English Pronunciation in Elementary School

  • Hong, Kyung-Suk
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 2000.07a
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    • pp.105-116
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    • 2000
  • How to teach intelligible, communicative pronunciation is a continuous question in the English education. Without good input, we can not expect good output. However, in EFL situation, it is very difficult to input the good English pronunciation, therefore, we have to find out the efficient and effective material for teaching pronunciation. One of the materials is song, because songs contain the linguistic and cultural traits of the language. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the reason why songs are good for teaching pronunciation. Koreans, who are syllable timed language users, have difficulties in English pronunciation of stress, rhythm, consonants cluster, linking or blending in connected speech. The 134 songs from wee sing are analyzed for how these traits show in songs. The result shows that we can acquire the traits easily and naturally through songs. And a lesson plan is offered as an example for teaching songs.

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A Study on the Voice Onset Time of English Voiceless Stops in the Buckeye Corpus (벅아이 코퍼스를 이용한 영어 무성파열음의 VOT 연구)

  • Yoon, Kyu-Chul
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.4 no.2
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    • pp.33-40
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    • 2012
  • The purpose of this paper is to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of the English voiceless stops [p, t, k] found in the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1]. Three young female speakers were chosen for this study and their VOT values were semi-automatically extracted along with other factors. The factors used for the analysis were place of articulation, location in word, syllabic stress, content word or not, word frequency calculated from the corpus, and the speech rate expressed in syllables per second. Results showed that, for the three places of articulation of each speaker, all the factors had a statistically significant effect on the VOT values. This paper has significance in that the materials used for the analysis were from a corpus of spontaneous natural English speech.