• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.12
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• pp.14-24
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to understand deeply the current circumstances of parents who took part in child-English Education through semantic analysis about 11 mothers' and their children's experiences in the individual depth interviews and group interviews. The obtained results of this study were as follows: First, mothers started their children's English education on the basis of the belief that English ability is an essential asset in the era of globalization, their experiences and the scheduled situation. Also they positively recognized the effect of English education when they could feel their children's learning improvements. Second, participants had experienced their children's education stress and economic burden. Third, participants had personal, social level desires for their children's proper English education. Through this study, it revealed the critical introspection about mothers' experiences and desires in child-English Education. And it alluded to necessity about continuous attention and debate in child-English Education.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2012

Recent studies on acoustic correlates of stress in English compounds and English phrases have revealed the difference of changes in acoustic manifestation between English compounds and English phrases with different intonation patterns. However, little effort has been made to compare Korean compounds and Korean phrases in different intonational environments. Therefore, this study focuses on the analysis of acoustic characteristics of Korean compounds and Korean phrases produced in different intonational sentence patterns (Subject, Question, Clause-Final, and Statement-Final). Measurements of vowel duration, intensity (dB) and pitch (in semitones) were compared. The results of the experiment in which 30 native speakers of Korean pronounced Korean compounds and Korean phrases (obtained from $8{\times}30$ sentences) in controlled prosodic and intonational environments reveal clear patterns that distinguish Korean compounds from Korean phrases and support the evidence of acoustic salience for phrases. Duration differences turned out to be a significant cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases in all but the Clause Final position. According to the size effect, duration ratio is the most reliable cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases followed by the pitch differences between the first syllable and the second syllable and the intensity ratio. Implications for Korean and English intonation training were also discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.251-255
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of using songs for the acquisition of English Prosody in elementary school. For the purpose, 8 classes were chosen to teach songs for four months, and listening tests and reading test were performed for analyzing the effect. The result is as follows : (1) The result of listening test showed that the average scores of the experimental classes were higher than those of comparative classes, and it was more effective in lower grades than in upper grades. (2) In pronunciation tests, the pronunciations of experimental classes were more similar to native speaker's pronunciation that those of comparative classes in intonation, lexical stress and sentence stress. (3) Singing songs repeatedly is more important than learning many songs. It means that to give the chances to sing as many times as possible is advisable for teaching pronunciation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.23-42
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• 2006

This paper reports a preliminary result of an acoustic study on the stress and intonational system in Lakhota, a native American language. It investigates how the stress and intonation in Lakhota are phonetically manifested; and how the stress interacts with other prosodic factors. The results preliminarily obtained from one native Lakhota speaker suggest that the primary cue of the stress is relatively high F0 which is often accompanied by higher intensity (for the vowel) and longer VOT (for aspirated stops). The results also indicate that stress is not reliably marked by duration. The stress system, however, interacts with the intonational pattern, such that, for example, intonational peak falls on the stressed syllable with a general pattern of L+H* and that it interacts with the boundary tone L%, resulting in mid tone utterance-finally. This paper can be viewed largely as a qualitative study on an understudied native American language, Lakhota and as forming a basis for further development of its stress and intonation system whose acoustic properties of its prosodic system have not been investigated before.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.1137-1144
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• 2012

Many universities stress gradually the importance of english-medium class in order to improve the international competitiveness and the internationalization of the university. In this paper, we compare english-medium class with korean class using course evaluation score. Also we analyze the factors that affect the effectiveness of the course evaluation score of english-medium class. First, logistic regression analysis is used to examine the main effects of subjects and individual characteristics. Also, decision tree analysis is used to examine the interaction effects for subjects and individual characteristics. The results of this paper are as follows. Grade, department category, class size, GPA and screening method affect the effectiveness of english-medium class. The highest effectiveness group of english-medium class is that grade is freshmen and department category is humanity. Also the group of the second highest effectiveness group is that grade is freshmen and department category is nature and art and GPA is high.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.43-51
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• 2013

English native listeners have a tendency to treat strong syllables in a speech stream as the potential initial syllables of new words, since the majority of lexical words in English have a word-initial stress. The current study investigates whether Korean (L1) - English (L2) late bilinguals perceive strong syllables in English continuous speech as word onsets, as English native listeners do. In Experiment 1, word-spotting was slower when the word-initial syllable was strong, indicating that Korean listeners do not perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Experiment 2 was conducted in order to avoid any possibilities that the results of Experiment 1 may be due to the strong-initial targets themselves used in Experiment 1 being slower to recognize than the weak-initial targets. We employed the gating paradigm in Experiment 2, and measured the Isolation Point (IP, the point at which participants correctly identify a word without subsequently changing their minds) and the Recognition Point (RP, the point at which participants correctly identify the target with 85% or greater confidence) for the targets excised from the non-words in the two conditions of Experiment 1. Both the mean IPs and the mean RPs were significantly earlier for the strong-initial targets, which means that the results of Experiment 1 reflect the difficulty of segmentation when the initial syllable of words was strong. These results are consistent with Kim & Nam (2011), indicating that strong syllables are not perceived as word onsets for Korean listeners and interfere with lexical segmentation in English running speech.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.61-71
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• 2001

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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.115-128
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• 2007

The purposes of this paper were to develop an automatic script to collect such acoustic parameters as duration, intensity, pitch and the first two formant values of English words produced by two native Canadian speakers either alone or in a two-word phrase at a normal speed and to compare those values by the position in the phrases. A Praat script was proposed to obtain the comparable parameters at evenly divided time point of the target word. Results showed that the total duration of the word in the phrase was shorter than that of the word produced alone. That was attributed to the pronunciation style of the native speakers generally placing the primary word stress in the first word position. Also, the reduction ratio of the male speaker depended on the word position in the phrase while the female speaker didn't. Moreover, there were different contours of intensity and pitch by the position of the target word in the phrase while almost the same formant patterns were observed. Further studies would be desirable to examine those parameters of the words in the authentic speech materials.