• 음성과학
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.37-51
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• 2008

The main goal of this study is to examine if there is a difference in the utilization of a vowel length cue between Korean and Japanese L2 learners of English in their perception and production of postvocalic coda contrast in English. Given that Japanese subjects' performances on the identification and production tasks were much better than Korean subjects' performance, we may support the prediction based on the Feature Hypothesis which maintains that L1 phonological features can facilitate the perception of L2 acoustic cue. Since vowel length contrast is a phonological feature in Japanese but not in Korean, the tasks, which assess L2 leaners' ability to discriminate vowel length contrast in English, are much easier for the Japanese group than for the Korean group. Although the Japanese subjects demonstrated a better performance than the Korean subjects, the performance of the Japanese group was worse than that of the English control group. This finding implies that L2 learners, even Japanese learners, should be taught that the durational difference of the preceding vowels is the most important cue to differentiate postvocalic contrastive codas in English.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.93-103
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• 2007

The aims of this study were to examine the acoustic features of Korean and Japanese vowels, and to determine whether new phones that do not have counterparts in Japanese or similar phones that have counterparts improve more from learning. This study consisted of three parts. In Experiment I, a speech production test was performed to observe the acoustic features of Korean and Japanese vowels. In Experiment II, the speech production of Korean vowels produced by Koreans, advanced Japanese learners of Korean, and beginning Japanese learners of Korean was investigated. In Experiment III, a speech perception study of Korean vowels produced by the two Japanese learner groups was conducted to observe the effect of learning on acquiring L2 phones. The conclusion drawn from the study was that the similar phones produced by Japanese show more similarity with those of Koreans than new phones in terms of F1 and F2, but Japanese learners of Korean displayed more improvement in new phones from learning.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.25-36
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• 2021

This study examined the perception and production of eight English fricatives /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ by thirty Chinese English majors and thirty Chinese middle school students through a fricative identification test, an intelligibility test, and a goodness rating test and focused on error patterns and the perception-production relationship. The results showed that substitution errors occurred frequently in the perception and production of English fricatives by both the English majors and the middle school students. Further, the error patterns were attributed to various influencing factors such as the negative transfer from Chinese consonant inventory, hypercorrection or overcompensation mistakes, deficiency of L2 teaching, and acoustic similarities. Significant overall correlations were found between the fricative perception and production by the two subject groups but were not manifested in all the eight fricatives, indicating that Chinese learners' perceptual competence of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their productive excellence of those sounds in all cases. Furthermore, precedences of perception over production were incompletely manifested in the eight fricatives, which suggested that perception might not always be a necessary prerequisite for production. Additionally, subject group and vowel context differences were observed. The English majors performed better than the middle school students, both perceptually and productively, and the subjects' performances in perception and production varied when vowel contexts changed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.23-34
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• 2021

이 연구는 이집트인 한국어 학습자를 대상으로 하여 이들이 한국어 모음을 어떻게 지각하고 범주화하며, 이들이 발음한 한국어 모음을 한국인들이 어떻게 지각하는지 밝히고, 이를 토대로 이집트인 학습자들의 한국어 모음 범주화가 그들의 한국어 모음 지각과 산출에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 밝히는 것을 목적으로 한다. 실험 1에서는 이집트인 학습자가 한국어 모음을 어떻게 지각하는지 알아보기 위해 이집트인 학습자 53명을 대상으로 하여 한국인이 발음한 한국어 자극 단어를 듣고 어느 단어를 들었는지 객관식으로 고르는 과제를 수행하게 하였고, 실험 2에서는 이집트인 학습자들이 발음한 한국어 모음을 한국인들이 어떻게 지각하는지 밝히기 위해 이집트인 학습자 9명이 산출한 자극 단어 117(13개×9명)개를 한국인들에게 들려주고, 어느 단어를 들었는지 객관식으로 고르게 한 다음 모음의 발음이 원어민 수준에 얼마나 근접하는지 5점 척도로 평가하도록 하였다. 실험 결과 이집트어에 존재하지 않는 "새로운" 한국어 모음은 별도의 범주를 쉽게 형성하여 잘 지각된 반면 산출이 잘 되는 새로운 모음도 있었고, 산출에서 어려움을 겪는 모음도 있었다. 반면에 이집트어 음소와 "비슷한" 한국어 음소는 비교적 잘 산출되지만 지각하는 데는 큰 어려움이 있다는 사실도 확인할 수 있었다. 이 연구 결과를 토대로 기존의 음성학습모델(speech learning model)과 지각동화모델(perceptual assimilation model)이 제2언어 학습자들의 제2언어 음성 지각을 잘 설명해 주지만 음성 산출을 설명하는 데 미흡함이 있어 이에 대한 보완이 필요함을 논의했다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

The current study examined English-speaking adult learners' production and perception of L2 Korean stops (/t/ or /t'/ or /t^h/) to investigate whether the two modalities are linked in utilizing voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) for the L2 sound distinction and how the learners' L2 proficiency mediates the relationship. Twenty-two English-speaking learners of Korean living in Seoul participated in the word-reading task of producing stop-initial words and the identification task of labelling CV stimuli synthesized to vary VOT and F0. Using logistic mixed-effects regression models, we quantified group- and individual-level weights of the VOT and F0 cues in differentiating the tense-lax, lax-aspirated, and tense-aspirated stops in Korean. The results showed that the learners as a group relied on VOT more than F0 both in production and perception (except the tense-lax pair), reflecting the dominant role of VOT in their L1 stop distinction. Individual-level analyses further revealed that the learners' L2 proficiency was related to their use of F0 in L2 production and their use of VOT in L2 perception. With this effect of L2 proficiency controlled in the partial correlation tests, we found a significant correlation between production and perception in using VOT and F0 for the lax-aspirated stop contrast. However, the same correlation was absent for the other stop pairs. We discuss a contrast-specific role of acoustic cues to address the non-uniform patterns of the production-perception link in the L2 sound learning context.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

This study explored how Korean L2 learners of English utilize multiple acoustic cues (VOT and F0) in perceiving and producing the English alveolar stop with a voicing contrast. Thirty-four 18-year-old high-school students participated in the study. Their English proficiency level was classified as either 'high' (HEP) or 'low' (LEP) according to high-school English level standardization. Thirty different synthesized syllables were presented in audio stimuli by combining a 6-step VOTs and a 5-step F0s. The listeners judged how close the audio stimulus was to /t/ or /d/ in L2 using a visual analogue scale. The L2 /d/ and /t/ productions collected from the 22 learners (12 HEP, 10 LEP) were acoustically analyzed by measuring VOT and F0 at the vowel onset. Results showed that LEP listeners attended to the F0 in the stimuli more sensitively than HEP listeners, suggesting that HEP listeners could inhibit less important acoustic dimensions better than LEP listeners in their L2 perception. The L2 production patterns also exhibited a group-difference between HEP and LEP in that HEP speakers utilized their VOT dimension (primary cue in L2) more effectively than LEP speakers. Taken together, the study showed that the relative cue-weighting strategies in L2 perception and production are closely related to the learner's L2 proficiency level in that more proficient learners had a better control of inhibiting and enhancing the relevant acoustic parameters.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.31-41
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• 2012

Recent studies have shown that the stop system of Korean is undergoing a sound change in terms of the two acoustic parameters, voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (f0). Because of a VOT merger of a consonantal opposition and onset-f0 interaction, the relative importance of the two parameters has been changing in Korean where f0 is a primary cue and VOT is a secondary cue in distinguishing lax from aspirated stops in speech production as well as perception. In English, however, VOT is a primary cue and f0 is a secondary cue in contrasting voiced and voiceless stops. This study examines how Korean English learners use the two acoustic parameters of L1 in producing L2 English stops and whether the sound change of acoustic parameters in L1 affects L2 speech production. The data were collected from six adult Korean English learners. Results show that Korean English learners use not only VOT but also f0 to contrast L2 voiced and voiceless stops. However, unlike VOT variations among speakers, the magnitude effect of onset consonants on f0 in L2 English was steady and robust, indicating that f0 also plays an important role in contrasting the [voice] contrast in L2 English. The results suggest that the important role of f0 in contrasting lax and aspirated stops in L1 Korean is transferred to the contrast of voiced and voiceless stops in L2 English. The results imply that, for Korean English learners, f0 rather than VOT will play an important perceptual cue in contrasting voiced and voiceless stops in L2 English.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.47-54
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• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.51-65
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• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.