• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.251-271
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• 2011

The present study analyzed Korean learners' production of English /z/-/$d{\Box}$/ and /z/-/${\Box}$/ contrasts in terms of native speaker judgments and acoustic measurements. Korean learner's production was judged to be either correct or incorrect by native English speakers. Correct and incorrect productions were then compared with productions of native speakers' in terms of acoustic analyses. The results indicated that Korean speakers' correct production was more similar to that of native speakers by sharing more acoustic cues. Incorrect production by Korean speakers indicated patterns either different or opposite from that of native speakers, confirming native speaker judgments. The results also revealed acoustic cues on which native speakers rely in judging L2 speech, thereby implying that the more consistent along with more number of acoustic cues used by native speakers may facilitate the acquisition of segment contrasts by L2 learners.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.93-103
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• 2003

This study examines the high-low pitch range differences between Korean and native English speakers' utterances of 36 English sentences, and explores the role of the pitch fluctuation range in the pronunciation assessment. Findings are: i) Korean speakers implement half as much pitch fluctuation as the native speakers with the achievement rate of, on an average, 47%. Especially, pitch fluctuation range is below the average in the sentence types of exclamation, yes-no & wh-questions, ii) the reason why Korean speakers' pitch fluctuation range is only half the range of the native speakers is that Korean speakers do not raise the pitch at certain sentence positions so much as the native speakers, and iii) the range of pitch fluctuation plays an important role in distinguishing the utterances of the native speakers from those of Korean speakers, but does not in rating the English utterances among Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2018

Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.59-73
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• 2012

This study attempts to investigate the contribution of prosody to the foreign accent in Chinese speakers' English production by examining the synthesized speech of crossing native and non-native talkers' prosody and segments. For the stimuli of the foreign accent ratings, we transplanted gender-matched native speakers' prosody onto non-native talkers' segments and vice versa, utilizing the TD-PSOLA algorithm. Eight English native listeners participated in judging foreign accent and comprehensibility of the transplanted stimuli. Results showed that the synthesized stimuli were perceived as stronger foreign accent regardless of speakers' proficiency when English speakers' prosody was crossed with Chinese speakers' segments. This suggests that segments contribute more than prosody to native listeners' evaluation of foreign accent. When transplanted with English speakers' segments, Chinese speakers' prosody showed a difference in duration rather than pitch between high and low proficiency such that stronger foreign accent was detected when low proficient Chinese speakers' duration was crossed with English speakers' segments. This indicated that prosody, more specifically duration, plays a role though the prosodic role is not overall as significant as segments. According to the post acoustic analysis, the temporal features contributing to making the duration parameter prominent as opposed to pitch were found out to be speaking rate, pause duration and pause frequency. Finally, foreign accent and comprehensibility showed no significant correlation such that native listeners had no difficulty listening to highly foreign accented speech.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.332-332
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception and production of English vowels by native speakers of Korean. In perception test, twelve English vowels /${\ae},{\;}a,{\;}{\Game},{\;}e,{\;}{\varepsilon},{\;}i,{\;}I,{\;}a,{\;}o,{\;}u,{\wedge},{\;}{\mho}$/, as in had, hard, hoard, hayed, head, heed, hid, hod, hoed, whod, Hudd, and hood produced by native speakers of English were used as perception test materials and subjects were asked to identify the vowels. Two different groups of subjects participated in the perception test. One consisted of 90 students who were taking an English phonetics course, and the other consisted of 64 who were not. The results showed that the former did better than the latter m identifYing English vowels, and that vowels in 'head' and 'had' were relatively hard to identify, while vowels in 'hayed', 'hard', and unexpectedly, 'heed' and hid' were easy to perceive. In production test, two native English speakers and 4 native Korean speakers served as subjects. The 4 native Korean speakers were divided into two groups as in the perception test, experienced and inexperienced, depending on whether they were taking an English phonetics course or not. Native English speakers generally showed significant differences both in vowel duration and in FI & F2 values between members of the vowel pairs which are of special interest of this study: /i/ vs. /I/, /${\ae}$/ vs. /$\varepsilon$/, and /u/ vs. and /$\mho$/. There was no significant difference between the two Korean groups. Native Korean speakers showed much difference in neither duration nor FI & F2 values except significant durational difference in /i/ vs. /I/ pair.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2011

The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate the correlation between English word-final stop and the duration of vowels before word-final stop and (2) to suggest a way to detect pronunciation errors and teach the pronunciation of English word-final stops. For these purposes, 18 Korean speakers' production was recorded and analysed using Speech Analyzer and their production was compared with that of native English speakers. In addition, two native English speakers evaluated the subjects' pronunciation. The major findings are the voicing dependent effect of the English vowels produced by native Korean speakers is lower than that of native English speakers; Korean speakers release English word-final stops less than native English speakers; and the pronunciation of English word-final stops and the duration of adjacent vowels are closely related in that the pronunciation score of final stops and the ratio of vowels between the vowels before voiced stops and voiceless stops are correlated. In addition, this study concludes with pedagogical suggestions that may be useful for English pronunciation teaching.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.55-66
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• 2006

A purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of English stress produced by the two groups of South Kyungsang (henceforth, SK) Korean speakers: high-proficiency and low-proficiency with reference to English native speakers. Another purpose is to compare results from the high- and low-proficiency SK Korean subjects with those of the native speakers, and to provide an analytical account of how approximate the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' production is to the native speakers' and how different the low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' is from the native speakers'. Results indicated that the native speakers' main strategy used in producing stressed syllables was duration while the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' was predominantly pitch-oriented. The low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' pitch patterns showed regularity, emphasizing the penultimate syllable with pitch. In comparing duration among the three groups, both groups of the SK Korean subjects became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.117-130
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• 2004

This paper investigates the English intonation of Korean speakers of English as a second language and compares it to that of English native speakers. The speech data of ten Korean speakers and three native speaker controls were tape recorded in an oral reading task in which the subjects were asked to read aloud the given text which was used in the study of Wennerstrom (1994). Following Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) who distinguishes the discrete units of meaning in intonation, pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones were measured. It was found that Korean speakers' use of phrase accents and boundary tones were relatively good compared to their use of pitch accents. That is, Korean speakers conform to native speakers' use of phrase or boundary tones for the purpose of marking the relationship between intermediate or intonational phrases. In contrast, the main difference of Korean speakers' use of intonation from that of native speakers was the use of pitch accents. That is, Korean speakers tend to have difficulty in assigning an appropriate pitch accent to signal relationships between new or contrastive information and that which is assumed to be understood or contributes little to the meaning of the utterance.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.175-183
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• 2005

In this study, realization of strong and weak syllables in English by Korean leaners with low English proficiency was examined through experiment. The aspects of three acoustic characteristics-duration, pitch, amplitude-were measured and compared with native speakers of English. It was assumed that production of duration, pitch and amplitude of strong and weak syllable by Korean learners would be different from that of English native speakers. According to the production experiments, English native speakers produced strong syllable longer, higher and louder than weak syllable. However, Korean leaners produced strong syllable higher and louder than weak syllable, but not longer enough. Specifically, weak syllable by Korean leaners was longer and strong syllable shorter than native speakers. Furthermore, the difference in duration of syllables between Korean leaners and English native speakers is more significant than pitch and amplitude. As a result, the duration was more important cue for the realization of stress than pitch and amplitude. However, Korean leaners did not produce duration of stressed syllables as English native speakers did, even though they produce the pitch and amplitude of stressed syllable in a similar way to native speakers. The reasons for those were considered, too.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2005

This study is a preliminary investigation of the nature of discourse marker acquisition in Korean American speakers of English. Discourse markers are of interest because they are not an aspect of language taught through formal instruction either to native or non-native speakers. Therefore, discourse marker use serves as indirect evidence of face-to-face interaction with native speakers and an indicator of integration. In this light, the present study examines the presence of discourse markers in Korean Americans. The markers chosen for analysis were you know, like, and I mean. The data consist of spontaneous speech elicited from interviews. Sociolinguistic variables such as age, sex, and generation (i.e., $1^{st}$, 1.5, $2^{nd}$) were examined. Results show that there appears to be interaction between the variables and discourse marker use. While all speakers showed variable acquisition of markers, younger, female, and 1.5 generation speakers were found to use discourse markers more than other speakers. Although discourse marker use is optional and thus not a linguistic feature that must be necessarily acquired, it is clear that use is pervasive and acquired differentially by English speakers irrespective of whether they are native or not.