• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.203-217
• /
• 2008

The number of Asian women immigrants in Korea is getting bigger and it's important to note that their communication problem in Korean causes not only the difficulty of adapting to Korean society but their children's speech-language disorder. To date there is little research on their acoustics characters and articulatory errors. Therefore, this study focuses on acoustic characters and articulatory error patterns of the women immigrants from Japan and Philippine based on the theory of "contrastive analysis". The subjects were 16 Japanese women immigrants(age: 42.5$\pm$4.4) and 14 Philippine women immigrants(age: 31.64$\pm$6.7) and control group consisted of 10 Korean women(age: 28.3$\pm$1.2). Speech and hearing of all subjects and control group were within normal limits. Speech samples were analyzed in a computer using CSL and data analysis was done on FFT widow for F1, F2, F3 of vowels and on wideband spectrogram for VOT of plosives and africatives. The results of this study were like this; For Japanese women immigrants, they had different articulatory patterns of /e/, /a/, /u/, /o/, /$\varepsilon$/, /m/ from those of Koreans and showed articulatory errors on the fortis and aspirated sounds. The reason is Japanese has only two distinctive characters for plosives and affricates; voicing and voiceless. The Philippine women immigrants also showed the same error patterns as the Japanese women immigrants. Especially the errors on aspirated sounds were prominent because their mother tongue has no distinctive characters about aspirated sounds. For vowels, they showed errors of /a/, /o/, /c/.