• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.173-184
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• 2002

The question of Korean rhythmic type is still a controversial issue (syllable-timed; stress-timed; word-timed). As a step toward solving the question, an experiment was carried out to examine compression effects in Korean. There has been a general belief that the increase of the number of following or preceding syllables causes compression of a vowel (or syllable) in many languages, and a marked anticipatory compression effect can be especially indicative of stress timing. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to obtain some evidence to determine whether or not Korean is stress-timed. The durations of the target vowel/a/ of the monosyllabic word /pap/ were measured at both word and sentence level. In general, marked anticipatory and backward compression effects on the target vowel were observed across one-, two- and three-syllable words in citation form, whereas the effects were neither marked nor consistent at sentence level. These results led us to claim that Korean is not stress-timed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.43-56
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• 2005

This study was analyzed the syllable structure of Korean and Chinese using subjective sound similarity judgement tasks with both Korean-chinese and Chinese students in Shenyang, China. 86 college students were administered with the tasks which lasted about 20 min. in a small group setting. Both Korean-chinese and Chinese students showed the sensitivity for the CV sub-syllabic unit and the CV+C was the building block for phonetic representation for both languages. This syllabic similarity of Korean and Chinese may be a help for Korean-chinese to become horizontal bilinguals. Further studies are needed to specify the mechanism that will explain the syllabic perception of CV+C in both Korean and Chinese which was different from that of C+VC structure dominance in English.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.1092-1096
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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 consonant in the same 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 summer. 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 word with singleton graphemes were relatively high both in perception and production (78.6% and 76.1%, respectively), while those for the word with doubleton graphemes were low both in perception and production (55.3% and 61.7%, respectively). Also, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.23-40
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• 2007

This paper discusses why Korean speakers have problems in pronouncing some medial sonorant clusters in English. We argue that the main reasons lie in the sonority sequence requirement difference between the two languages. English does not have any specific sonority sequence preference between the medial sonorant sequences while Korean has a strict requirement between the two sonorants over a syllable boundary. This sonority sequence requirement difference between the two languages acts as an interference for Korean speakers in learning English pronunciation. This barrier for Korean speakers in acquiring correct pronunciation is implemented in a constraint ranking difference in the Optimality Theory, which is not familiar for Korean speakers. Understanding the details of sonorant production mechanisms along with the different constraint ranking will facilitate the learning process of Korean speakers learning English.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.71-82
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• 1998

Five sets of nonsense acoustical stimuli {$[sp{\varepsilon},st{\varepsilon},sk{\varepsilon}],\;[p{\varepsilon},t{\varepsilon},k{\varepsilon}],\;[sb{\varepsilon},sd{\varepsilon},sg{\varepsilon}],\;[b{\varepsilon},d{\varepsilon},g{\varepsilon}],\;['{\varepsilon}b{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}d{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}g{\varepsilon}]$} were presented for identification of English stops to native speakers of English, Chinese, and Korean. The English speakers perceived stops after /s/ as /p, t, k/; in other contexts as /b, d, g/. In the languages where other distinctions exist, however, the evaluation was different. The results suggest that in English the cue for stops after /s/ was syllable structure constraint: After initial /s/ always /p, t, k/ follow; the cue for the initial stops was aspiration. On the basis of the results, it was concluded that in English we should classify the unaspirated voiceless stops in initial /s/-stop clusters into the phoneme where [$p^{h},t^{h},k^{h}$] are in, and that perception is not only language specific but also context specific.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.19-33
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• 2006

This study explores whether Russian, known to have a process of syllable-final devoicing, reveals differences in vowel duration as a function of the underlying voicing of the coda stop. This paper also examines whether non-native speakers of Russian and English learn typical L2 values in vowel duration. The results indicate that vowels in Russian have a slightly longer mean duration before a voiced stop than before a voiceless stop (a mean difference of 9.52 ms), but in most cases the differences did not exhibit statistical significance. In English the mean difference was 60.05 ms, and the differences were in most cases statistically significant. All native Russian speakers of English produced larger absolute differences in vowel duration for English than for Russian, and all native English speakers of Russian produced smaller absolute differences for Russian than for English. More experienced learners seemed to achieve more native-like values of vowel duration than less experienced learners did, suggesting that learning occurs gradually as the learners gain more experience with the L2.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.95-109
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• 2004

Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1999.10e
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• pp.335-342
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• 1999

The experiments reported here investigated whether seeing a speaker's face (visible speech) affects the perception and memory of Korean speech sounds. In order to exclude the possibility of top-down, knowledge-based influences on perception and memory, the experiments tested people with no knowledge of Korean. The first experiment examined whether visible speech (Auditory and Visual - AV) assists English native speakers (with no knowledge of Korean) in the detection of a syllable within a Korean speech phrase. It was found that a syllable was more likely to be detected within a phrase when the participants could see the speaker's face. The second experiment investigated whether English native speakers' judgments about the duration of a Korean phrase would be affected by visible speech. It was found that in the AV condition participant's estimates of phrase duration were highly correlated with the actual durations whereas those in the AO condition were not. The results are discussed with respect to the benefits of communication with multimodal information and future applications.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1989.07a
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• pp.491-494
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• 1989

We have developed a simple and efficient hangul recognizing automata as a part of a graphic project. this automata accepts both English and Korean code from a Korean syllable from a stream of Korean alphabets. The automata then mates a 2 byte Hangul combination code from the recognized syllable and passes that code to the graphic system.

• MALSORI
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• no.40
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• pp.29-49
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• 2000

This study has two aim: one is to clarify the restructuring of English in utterance and the other is to make use of text-setting to be applied to getting accustomed to the English rhythm and pronunciation. Clitics prove to play a crucial role on the English restructuring, and are found to be attached to their previous and to their next head or host, thus forming, respectively, an on-cliticized rhythm, trochee and a pro-cliticized rhythm, iambus. En-cliticization proves to be preferred to pro-cliticization in most types of English rhythms. Accordingly, the restructuring turn out to occur all over the levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy. That is, syllables, words and clitic groups are restructured in poetry as well as in song words, which means the necessity of restructuring throughout the levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy from the syllable to the utterance. The present study suggests a good use of a rhythmic textsetting for learners of English to get accustomed to the stress-timed rhythm as well as to such changes in pronunciation as reductions, deletions, resolutions, contractions, and rhythms in English.