• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

It was shown in speech production studies that the preparation unit of spoken word production is language particular, such as onset phonemes for English and Dutch, syllables for Mandarin Chinese, and morae for Japanese. However, there have been inconsistent results on whether the onset phoneme is a planning unit of spoken word production in Korean. In this study, two sets of experiments investigated possible influences of task demands on the phonological preparation in native Korean adults, namely, implicit priming and word naming with the form preparation paradigm. Only the word naming task, but not the implicit priming task, showed a significant onset priming effect, even though there were significant syllable priming effects in both tasks. Following the attentional theory ($O^{\prime}S{\acute{e}}aghdha$ & Frazer, 2014), these results suggest that task demands might play a role in the absence/presence of onset priming effects in Korean. Native Korean speakers could maintain their attention to the shared onset phonemes in word naming, which is not very demanding, while they have difficulties in allocating their attention to such units in a more cognitive-demanding implicit priming, even though both tasks involve accessing phonological codes. These findings demonstrate that there are cross-linguistic differences in the first selectable unit in preparation of spoken word production, but within a single language, the preparation unit might not be immutable.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.120-128
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• 2000

Even though we basically regard spoken English like listening and speaking rather than written language as an important principle in Elementary Education of English, actually students are being taught English only by imitating what they heard and watched through audio or video tapes in the scene of elementary school. Of course, it is successful to learn English focused on a spoken language not in EFL(English as a foreign language) but in ESL(English as a second language) circumstance. Therefore, we provide products of multimedia contents in order to give opportunities which can make use of English in the classroom through the Web in this paper. In addition to it, we write this paper on method to strengthen motivation for learning language even out of the classroom by putting English to practical use through video conference system or E-mail exchange.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.245-249
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• 2004

The aim of this paper is to show the possibilities of the proficiency -based and integrated teaching of High School English reading and listening based on sense group and utterance restructuring. The proficiency -based and integrated listening and reading activities in stages are as follows. Step1, students fill in the blanks with strong or weak sounding words according to their abilities. Step2, speak along (track) based on restructuring and post-lexical phenomena while listening to the sentence. Step3, read and understand directly the passage, which have been marked the differentiated places where a native speaker of English would beat all likely to pause. Students need to listen to spoken English, so they recognize words in written and spoken form. They must be familiar with suprasegmental features, stress and rhythm, and post-lexical phenomena during reading activities.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.197-216
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• 2012

This study examines spoken interlanguage of Korean learners of English, focusing on the distribution of modal verbs and devices of epistemic modality. (Semi-) spontaneous speech data were collected from four students participating in a self-organized study group for seven months, which produced a corpus of about 55,000 words. The data analysis reveals the following: 1) The frequency of the modal verbs produced by the learners was lower than that of native speakers; 1.99 vs. 2.32 tokens per 100 words. The range of the modal verbs used by the learners was also very limited, with over-reliance on can (43%). 2) The grammatical categories of the devices marking epistemic modality were in the order of adverbs, lexical verbs, and modal verbs, with a high frequency of a few items in each category. 3) Lexical items conveying certainty and modals of obligation were preferred over markers of weaker commitment, resulting in speech characterized by firmer assertions and a more authoritative tone, a potential cause for pragmatic failure. 4) A weak developmental change was observed in the frequency of modal verbs, but not in their functions over the seven month period of data collection. L1 influence, L2 proficiency, mode of communication, and instruction effects are discussed as possible variables involved in the distribution patterns observed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.12-20
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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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.11-19
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• 2014

The focus of this study was to investigate whether there is a position effect on identification accuracy of L2 consonants by Korean listeners and to examine how Korean listeners perceive the phonetic properties of initial and final consonants produced by a Korean learner of English and an English native speaker. Most studies examining L2 learners' perception of L2 sounds have focused on the segmental level but very few studies have examined the role of prosodic position in L2 learners' perception. In the present study, an identification test was conducted for English consonants /p, t, k, f, ɵ, s, ʃ/ in CVC prosodic structures. The results revealed that Korean listeners identified syllable-initial consonants more accurately than syllable-final consonants. The perceptual accuracy in syllable initial consonants may be attributable to the enhanced phonetic properties in the initial consonants. A significant correlation was found between error rates and F2 onset/offset for stops and fricatives, and between perceptual accuracy and RMS burst energy for stops. However, the identification error patterns were found to be different across consonant types and between the different language speakers. In the final position, Korean listeners had difficulty in identifying /p/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were produced by a Korean speaker and showed more errors in /p/, /t/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were spoken by an English native speaker. Comparing to the perception of English consonants spoken by a Korean speaker, greater error rates and diverse error patterns were found in the perception of consonants produced by an English native speaker. The present study provides the evidence that prosodic position plays a crucial role in the perception of L2 segments.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.143-148
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• 2002

This study examined the foreign accent of Korean speakers of English concerning vowel length and utterance position. It then attempts to explain the foreign accent of Koreans when they speak English. The method was to measure the sentence-initial and sentence-final vowels as spoken by Koreans. I chose these two positions, sentence-initial and sentence-final, in order to know if Korean speakers of English, compared with native English speakers, show a difference in sentence stress. I chose English diphthongs, because most Koreans have difficulty pronouncing these sounds. I found that Korean speakers of English as a second language do not know English sentence stress patterns and show a foreign accent, especially when using diphthongs.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.57-63
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• 2021

Spoken language understanding, which aims to understand utterance as naturally as human would, are mostly focused on English language. In this paper, we construct a Korean language dataset for spoken language understanding, which is based on a conversational corpus between reservation system and its user. The domain of conversation is limited to restaurant reservation. There are 7 types of slot tags and 5 types of intent tags in 6857 sentences. When a model proposed in English-based research is trained with our dataset, intent classification accuracy decreased a little, while slot filling F1 score decreased significantly.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.159-174
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• 2004

The development of the durational component of prosody modelling was overviewed and discussed in text-to-speech conversion of spoken English and Korean, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The possibility of integrating linguistic feature effects into the duration modelling of TTS systems was also investigated. This paper claims that current approaches to language timing synthesis still require an understanding of how segmental duration is affected by context. Three modelling approaches were discussed: sequential rule systems, Classification and Regression Tree (CART) models and Sums-of-Products (SoP) models. The CART and SoP models show good performance results in predicting segment duration in English, while it is not the case in the SoP modelling of spoken Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.7-16
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• 2005

The purpose, this experimental study was to identify pronunciation difficulties between male and female Korean speakers in their articulation of English vowels. Ten English mono-syllabic words were spoken six times by six male and six female college students. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by Pitch Works. Results show that Korean female speakers uttered English vowels more similar to those uttered by English native speakers than did Korean male speakers. While Korean male speakers could not readily distinguish between /i/ and /I/, /u/ and /v/, and /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/, respectively, Korean female speakers had difficulty only with /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/. The tentative results suggests that on the whole Korean speakers have difficulty in discriminating tense vowels from lax vowels, and they also have articulatory problems pronouncing low and back vowels such as /ae/. /a/ and /c/.