• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-27
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• 2014

This study investigates how common English hedge expressions such as 'I think' and 'I guess' appear in Korean, with the aim of providing explicit explanation for English-speaking leaners of Korean. Based on a contrastive analysis of spoken English and Korean corpus, this study argues three points: Firstly, 'I guess' appears with a wider variety of modalities in Korean than 'I think'. Secondly, this study has found that Korean textbooks contain inappropriate use of registers regarding the English translations of '-geot -gat-': although these markers are used in spoken Korean, they were translated into written English. Therefore, this study suggests that '-geot -gat-' be translated into 'I think' in spoken English, and into 'it seems' in the case of written English and narratives. Lastly, the contrastive analysis has shown that when 'I think' is used with deontic modalities such as 'I think I have to', Korean use '-a-ya-get-': the use of hedge marker 'I think' with 'I have to', which shows obligation or speaker's volition turns the deontic modalities into expressions of speaker's opinion.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

The development of corpus in recent years has attracted increased research on spoken Korean. Nevertheless, these research outcomes are yet to be meaningfully and adequately reflected in Korean language textbooks. The reported speech marker '-dae' is one of these areas that need more attention. This study investigates whether or not in textbooks '-dae' is clearly explained to English-speaking learners to prevent confusion and misuse. Based on a contrastive analysis of Korean and English, this study argues three points: Firstly, '-dae' should be introduced to Korean learners as an independent sentence ender rather than a contracted form of '-dago hae'. Secondly, it is necessary to teach English-speaking learners that '-dae' is not equivalent to the English report speech form. It functions more or less as a third person marker in Korean. Learners should be informed that '-dae' is used for statements in English, if those statements were hearsay but the source of information does not need to be specified. This is a very distinctive difference between Korean and English and should be emphasized in class when 'dae' is taught. Thirdly, '-dae' should be introduced before indirect speech constructions, because it is mainly used in simple statements and the frequency of '-dae' is very high in spoken Korean.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.93-103
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• 2005

Users of searching Internet English dictionary sometimes do not know the correct spelling of the word in mind, but remember only its pronunciation. In order to help these users, we propose a method to retrieve English words effectively with a spoken word transliteration that is a Korean transliteration of English word pronunciation. We develop KONIX codes and transform a spoken word transliteration and English words into them. We then calculate the phonetic similarity between KONIX codes using edit distance and 2-gram methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective for retrieving English words with a spoken word transliteration.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.95-108
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• 1997

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.99-108
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• 2000

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate characteristics of English vowels as spoken by Korean speakers. Ten English mono-syllabic words were spoken six times by six male college students who were born and raised in Seoul. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Quirer. Results showed that Korean speakers similarly pronounced /i/ and /I/, /u/ and /$\upsilon$/, and /$\varepsilon$/ and /${\ae}$/ respectively. It seems that Korean speakers can not differentiate tense vowels(/i/, /u/) from lax vowels(/i/, /$\upsilon$/) and pronounce low vowels such as /${\ae}$/, /a/, /c/ clearly. It is necessary that Korean speakers practice the correct movements of the jaw, tongue, and lips when they pronounce English vowels.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.185-191
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• 2001

This study was designed to determine what components of spoken language have been relatively neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension in Korea and to suggest a model of listening process. Two types of tests were undertaken using spoken and written forms of English with secondary school teachers of English and college students. Findings: Hearing power has been generally neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension. Hearing power which can be thought as an active process is defined as an ability to transfer the sequence of discrete phonetic segments without word boundary into the sequence of words in phonemic representations by using both nonlinguistic factors and linguistic factors including perception rules based on phonetics and phonology. Vocabularies, hearing-speaking power, syntactic structures and idiomatic expressions are to be taught for spoken English. A model of listening process was suggested and discussed.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.159-174
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• 2003

K-SEC (Korean-Spoken English Corpus) is a kind of speech database that is being under construction by the authors of this paper This article discusses the needs of the K-SEC from various academic disciplines and industrial circles, and it introduces the characteristics of the K-SEC design, its catalogues and contents of the recorded database, exemplifying what are being considered from both Korean and English languages' phonetics and phonologies. The K-SEC can be marked as a beginning of a parallel speech corpus, and it is suggested that a similar corpus should be enlarged for the future advancements of the experimental phonetics and the speech information technology.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.5 no.9
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• pp.2361-2368
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• 1998

This paper analyzes Korean spoken language and describes the machine translation o[ Korean to-English spoken language based on semantic patterns, In Korean-to-English machine translation. ambiguity of Korean sentence analysis using syntactic information can be resolved by semantic patterns, Therefore, for machine translation of spoken language, we estabilish the system based on semantic patterns extracted from Korean scheduling domain, This system obtains the robustness by skip ability of syllables in analysis of Korean sentence and we add options to semantic patterns in order to reduce pattern numbers, The data used [or the experiment are scheduling domain and performance of Korean-to-English translation is 88%.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.3-10
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• 2011

This study investigates the role of suprasegmental features with respect to the intelligibility of Korean-spoken English judged by Korean and English raters as being good or bad. It has been hypothesized that Korean raters would have different evaluations from English native raters and that the effect may vary depending on the types of suprasegmental factors. Four Korean and four English native raters, respectively, took part in the evaluation of 14 Korean subjects' English speaking. The subjects read a given paragraph. The results show that the evaluation for 'intelligibility' is different for the two groups and that the difference comes from their perception of L2 English suprasegmentals.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.69-75
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• 2010

We propose an automatic pronunciation diagnosis system to evaluate the pronunciation of a foreign language without the uttered text. We recorded English utterances spoken by native and Korean speakers, and utterances spoken by Koreans are evaluated by native speakers based on three criteria: fluency, accuracy of phones and intonation. The system evaluates the utterances of test Korean speakers based on the differences of log-likelihood given two models: one is trained by English speech uttered by native speakers, and the other is trained by English speech uttered by Korean speakers. We also applied purification algorithm to increase class differentiability. The purification can detect and eliminate the non-speech frames such as short pauses, occlusive silences that do not help to discriminate between utterances. As the results, our proposed system has higher correlation with the human scores than the baseline system.