• 디지털콘텐츠학회 논문지
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• 제13권3호
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• pp.279-290
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• 2012

본 연구는 Praat 소프트웨어 프로그램을 이용하여 영어이중모음 /eɪ/ 와 /aɪ/, 그리고 영어전설저모음 /æ/의 발음 길이에 관해 한국인 피 실험자와 원어민 피 실험자를 대상으로 그 차이를 비교분석해보고자 한 연구이다. 이 연구를 위해서 영어문장이 발화되고 녹음되었으며, 피 실험자는 한국인과 원어민 각각 6명씩 참가하였으며, 모두 여성이었고 나이는 23세에서 35세에 위치하고 있다. 음향특질중 하나인 길이측정을 위해서 Praat소프트웨어 프로그램을 활용하였으며, 그 결과를 통계 처리하였다. 실험결과 /eɪ/ 와 /aɪ/에서는 한국인들이 더 길게 발음하였지만 그 차이가 통계상 유의미한 수준은 아니었다. 그러나 /æ/의 발음에서는 한국인들의 발음 길이가 원어민에 비해 훨씬 짧았으며, 그 차이도 통계상 유의미한 수준으로 나타났다.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.3-13
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• 2003

The devoicing vowel is a phonological process whose contrast in sonority is lost or reduces in a particular phonetic environment. Phonetically, the vocal fold vibration originates from the abduction/adduction of the glottis in relation to supraglottal articulatory movements. The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean vowel devoicing by means of experimental instruments. The interrelated laryngeal adjustments and aerodynamic effects for this voicing can clarify the redundant articulatory gestures relevant to the distinctive feature of sonority. Five test words were selected, being composed of the high vowel /i/, between the fricative and strong aspirated or lenis affricated consonants. The subjects uttered the test words successively at a normal or at a faster speed. The EMG, the sensing tube Gaeltec S7b and the High-Speech Analysis system and MSL II were used in these studies. Acoustically, three different types of speech waveforms and spectrograms were classified, based on the voicing variation. The intraoral air pressure curves showed differences, depending on the voicing variations. The activity patterns of the PCA and the CT for devoicing vowels appeared differently from those showing the partially devoicing vowels and the voicing vowels.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.11-17
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• 2022

English vowels play an important role in verbal communication. However, Korean students tend to experience difficulty pronouncing a certain set of vowels despite extensive education in English. The aim of this study is to apply speech recognition software to evaluate Korean students' pronunciation of English vowels in minimal pair words and then to examine acoustic characteristics of the pairs in order to check their pronunciation problems. Thirty female Korean college students participated in the recording. Speech recognition rates were obtained to examine which English vowels were correctly pronounced. To compare and verify the recognition results, such acoustic analyses as the first and second formant trajectories and durations were also collected using Praat. The results showed an overall recognition rate of 54.7%. Some students incorrectly switched the tense and lax counterparts and produced the same vowel sounds for qualitatively different English vowels. From the acoustic analyses of the vowel formant trajectories, some of these vowel pairs were almost overlapped or exhibited slight acoustic differences at the majority of the measurement points. On the other hand, statistical analyses on the first formant trajectories of the three vowel pairs revealed significant differences throughout the measurement points, a finding that requires further investigation. Durational comparisons revealed a consistent pattern among the vowel pairs. The author concludes that speech recognition and analysis software can be useful to diagnose pronunciation problems of English-language learners.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

The purposes of this study are to: (1) Compare the vowel production of English front vowels produced by Korean speakers using regional dialects and; (2) Investigate and compare the effectiveness of pronunciation training for each regional dialect group. To test these objectives, the English front vowels produced by five Youngnam dialect male speakers, five Youngnam dialect female speakers, five Kangwon dialect male speakers, and five Kangwon dialect female speakers were scrutinized. These dialect groups' vowel formants and length of English front vowels were evaluated, and the post-pronunciation training values were compared with those of pre-training values. The results indicate that pronunciation training is more effective for Youngnam dialect speakers, whilst both dialect groups have more success mastering the pronunciation of /${\varepsilon}$/ over /${\ae}$/.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2007년도 한국음성과학회 공동학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.183-186
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• 2007

This study analyzes Korean high school students' pronunciation errors in word-initial onglides in English. For this study, 24 Korean high school students read 34 English words including glide-vowel sequences in word-initial positions and vowel-initial words in a frame sentence. The results showed 2 different error types: glide deletion and vowel distortion. After the analysis of the first recording, the subjects were taught how to pronounce glide-vowel sequences properly in a 60-minute class. Comparison of the analyses of the first and second recordings showed that the subjects improved on the pronunciation of glide-vowel sequences. After the training, the pronunciation errors of diphthongs unique to English, [$j_I$], decreased substantially. However, most subjects still had difficulties in pronouncing [$w{\mho}$], [wu], and [wo]. There was no significant correlation between English course grade and error reduction.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.23-34
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• 2011

Many Korean children have difficulty learning English vowels. The gestures inside the oral and pharyngeal cavities are hard to control when they cannot see the gestures and the target vowel system is quite different from that of Korean. This study attempts to collect children's acoustic data of twelve English vowels published by Hillenbrand et al. (1995) online and to examine the acoustic features of English vowels for phoneticians and English teachers. The author used Praat to obtain the data systematically at six equidistant timepoints over the vowel segment avoiding any obvious errors. Results show inherent acoustic properties for vowels from the children's distribution of vowel duration, f0 and intensity values. Second, children's gestures for each vowel coincide with the regression analysis of all formant values at different timepoints regardless of the vocal fold and tract difference. Third, locus points appear higher than those of American males and females. Their gestures along the timepoints display almost similar patterns. From the results the author concludes that vowel formant trajectories provide useful and important information on dynamic articulatory gestures, which may be applicable to Korean children's education and correction of English vowels. Further studies on the developmental study of vowel formants and pitch values are desirable.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권4호
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

English vowels play an important role in the daily communication between Korean students and international visitors. However, many Korean students still have difficulty producing them distinctively. Vowels vary according to shapes of oral and pharyngeal cavities, which are mainly determined by the degree of jaw opening and tongue position. Yang (2008a) proposed a simplified chart of English and Korean vowels for an educational purpose. He also suggested to use wooden chopsticks to secure distinguishable jaw openings. The purpose of this study is to tap whether wooden chopsticks can be applicable to a method for correcting English vowel pronunciation. Twelve male and female students participated in the recordings of eight /hVd/ words followed by additional recordings with wooden chopsticks between upper and lower teeth. The first and second formant trajectories of both natural and controlled vowel productions were obtained and compared at six equidistant measurement points using Praat. Results showed that the formant values of natural vowel productions were comparable to those of controlled productions. Vowels with similar formant trajectories of male students were separated with the aid of chopsticks. The width of each chopstick could be controlled similarly in the experiment. The author concludes that wooden chopsticks can be useful to correct vowel pronunciation. Further studies are desirable for native speakers to make perceptual evaluations of controlled vowel productions by nonnative speakers.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.133-138
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to provide deeper understanding of how it is possible for people to understand PC communication language they have never seen or heard before without any problem. In order to answer this question, we focused on the vowel variation through which new variants are created (for PC communication), and hypothesized that there is a phonetic constraint which requires the vowel of the variant to be phonetically similar (to the maximum) to the vowel of the original word. Through the corpus analysis of the dictionary of PC communication language, we show that our hypothesis is justified by the fact that most of the variants we collected from the dictionary, that is, 90% of them, conformed to the phonetic constraint we postulated.