• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.691-696
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• 2022

This study explored the lexical sophistication features to distinguish the group membership of English proficiency, using the automatic analysis program of lexical sophistication. A total of 600 essays written by 300 Korean college students were extracted from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus and a discriminant function analysis was performed using SPSS program. Results showed that the lexical features to distinguish three groups of English proficiency are SUBTLEXUS frequency content words, age of acquisition content words, lexical decision mean reaction time function words, and hypernymy verbs. High-level Korean students used frequent content words from SUBTLEXUS corpus to a lesser degree and produced more sophisticated words that can be learned at a later age and take longer reaction time in lexical decision task, and more concrete verbs.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.439-444
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• 2021

This study investigates the relationship between syntactic complexity and English proficiency for Korean college students, using the recently developed TAASSC(the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity) program. Essays on the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were employed and phrasal complexity indices and clausal complexity indices, respectively were used to predict English proficiency level for Korean students. Results of stepwise regression analysis showed that indices of phrasal complexity explained 8% of variance in English proficiency, while indices of clausal complexity accounted for approximately 11%. That is, indices of clausal complexity were slightly better predictors of English proficiency than indices of phrasal complexity, which contradicts Biber et at.(2011)'s claim that phrasal complexity is the hallmark of writing development.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.433-438
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• 2021

This study investigates the relationship between lexical sophistication features and English proficiency for Korean college students. Essays from the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were analyzed, using TAALES program. In order to examine whether or not there are statistically significant differences in lexical sophistication features across three groups, MANOVA was conducted. Results showed that the lexical sophistication features were significantly affected by English proficiency level. Essays written by Korean students with different English proficiency levels can be differentiated in terms of various lexical sophistication features including content words frequency, content words familiarity, lexical decision mean reaction time function words, hypernymy verbs, word naming response time function words, age of acquisition content words.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.565-577
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• 2024

This discussion looked at how emotional adjectives are connected in the format [[emotional adjective + '-ko(and)'] + emotional adjective]. As a result, it was confirmed that there are quite a few cases in which two or more emotional adjectives are used to express emotions in Korean. This can help Korean learners understand and express the individual lexical meanings of emotional adjectives more clearly by identifying emotional adjectives that are used together with the corresponding configuration. It was believed that it could help Korean language learners express complex emotions or create rich emotional expressions when expressing their emotions in Korean. It is hoped that the examples and frequency of [[emotional adjective+'-ko(and)'+emotional adjective] shown in this discussion will be of some help in teaching and learning Korean emotional vocabulary.

• Language Facts and Perspectives
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• v.47
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• pp.177-203
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to suggest the possibility of using online corpora for teaching synonyms in Korean. The research included how to develop the effective concordance learning materials for teaching synonyms in Korean using data driven learning(DDL). Because synonyms are similar in meaning and usage, even native speaker can not clearly explain the difference in synonyms. Furthermore, it is not easy to provide proper example sentences for each word, and it is a reality that the differentiation of the synonyms are not sufficiently provided in the Korean textbooks. In recent years, it has been claimed that DDL helps students produce vocabulary as well as comprehend vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is hard to find how the concordance materials should be made for them. In this study, we extract concordance examples from the various kinds of online corpora; written and spoken corpora, korean textbooks, newspapers. We presented how to make corpus-designed activities using concordance materials for teaching Korean synonyms. In order to examine the effects of DDL, five experimental lessons were given to a group of 15 advanced korean learners in the university and follow-up surveys(attitude-questionnaire) were conducted. This study is meaningful in that it proposed a new teaching method in Korean synonym education.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.76
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• pp.187-211
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate the speech act realization of speculative expressions and to present their teaching-learning contents. It is hard for Korean learners to use speculative expressions appropriately because there are various similar expressions and their meaning is distinctive in detail. This study describes speech act realizations of '-는 것 같다, -을까, -나 보다, -을걸'. All these forms have the meaning of speculations, so they are mainly used to present uncertain information or thoughts of speaker. But they show distinctive aspects. '-는 것 같다' is mainly used to present contents contrary to their counterparts' opinions or irritating for their counterparts. It is used as polite forms because it conveys meanings of uncertainty. Especially in these contexts, it performs the refusal speech acts. '-을까' has the characteristic feature in the complex forms such as '뭐랄까', '뭐라고 할까' and it performs request speech acts more frequently than '-는 것 같다'. Also it is used to express the speakers' opinions contrary to their counterparts'. '-나 보다' expresses speaker's speculations based on hearer's conditions or his speech, so it is used to respond to hearer actively and express interests unlike other speculative expressions. '-을걸' isn't used to perform request, to express interests to hearer. However, it is mainly used when speaker has the contrary assumptions or expectations to hearer's. Based on the analyze, this study presents and grades teaching-learning contents of speculative expressions.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.49
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• pp.95-126
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• 2017

The purpose of this paper is to compare learners' academic texts with academic texts of native speakers and to examine the usage patterns of learners' objectification strategies in detail. In order to achieve objectivity as a discourse mechanism applied to describe the results of academic inquiry in a scientific way with universality and validity, we analyzed concepts and signs such as related intentionality, accuracy, and mitigation of the linguistic markers of objectification strategies. As a result of the comparison, it was analyzed that there are intersectional overlaps with the signs that reveal objectivity, signs indicating related mechanisms, and there is a different set that is differentiated. Objective markers can be broadly classified as emphasizing stativity of research results, separating research subjects from research results, and generalizing research contents. Sustainable expressions and noun phrases emphasize statehood, and non-inhabited expressions, passive expressions, and self-quotations are maintained in the distance between the claimant and the writer, and the pluralization through first-person pronouns and suffixes contributes to generalization. In the case of the learner, the non-inhuman expression of the quotation type appears to be very less compared to the maw speaker, which could be due to the lack of recognition of the citation method of the Korean academic text. Next, in the generalization of the research contents, the expression of 'we' was very less compared to the maw speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.33-40
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• 2020

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.27-40
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• 2020

In this paper, we investigate the correlation between the amount of English sentences that Korean English learners (L2ers) are exposed to and their sentence processing patterns by examining what Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) language models (LMs) can learn about implicit syntactic relationship: that is, the filler-gap dependency. The filler-gap dependency refers to a relationship between a (wh-)filler, which is a wh-phrase like 'what' or 'who' overtly in clause-peripheral position, and its gap in clause-internal position, which is an invisible, empty syntactic position to be filled by the (wh-)filler for proper interpretation. Here to implement L2ers' English learning, we build LSTM LMs that in turn learn a subset of the known restrictions on the filler-gap dependency from English sentences in the L2 corpus that L2ers can potentially encounter in their English learning. Examining LSTM LMs' behaviors on controlled sentences designed with the filler-gap dependency, we show the characteristics of L2ers' sentence processing using the information-theoretic metric of surprisal that quantifies violations of the filler-gap dependency or wh-licensing interaction effects. Furthermore, comparing L2ers' LMs with native speakers' LM in light of processing the filler-gap dependency, we not only note that in their sentence processing both L2ers' LM and native speakers' LM can track abstract syntactic structures involved in the filler-gap dependency, but also show using linear mixed-effects regression models that there exist significant differences between them in processing such a dependency.