• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.61-70
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• 2012

The current study observes the durational interaction of tautosyllabic consonants and vowels in the word-initial position of English and Korean child-directed speech (CDS). The effect of phonological laryngeal contrasts in stops on the following vowel duration, and the effect of the intrinsic vowel duration on the release duration of preceding stops in addition to the acoustic realization of the contrastive segments are explored in different prosodic contexts - phrase-initial/medial, focal accented/non-focused - in a marked speech style of CDS. A trade-off relationship between Voice Onset Time (VOT), as consonant release duration, and voicing phonation time, as vowel duration, reported from adult-to-adult speech, and patterns of durational variability are investigated in CDS of two languages with different linguistic rhythms, under systematically controlled prosodic contexts. Speech data were collected from four native English mothers and four native Korean mothers who were talking to their one-word staged infants. In addition to the acoustic measurements, the transformed delta measure is employed as a variability index of individual tokens. Results confirm the durational correlation between prevocalic consonants and following vowels. The interaction is revealed in a compensatory pattern such as longer VOTs followed by shorter vowel durations in both languages. An asymmetry is found in CV interaction in that the effect of consonant on vowel duration is greater than the VOT differences induced by the vowel. Prosodic effects are found such that the acoustic difference is enhanced between the contrastive segments under focal accent, supporting the paradigmatic strengthening effect. Positional variation, however, does not show any systematic effects on the variations of the measured acoustic quantities. Overall vowel duration and syllable duration are longer in English tokens but involve less variability across the prosodic variations. The constancy of syllable duration, therefore, is not found to be more strongly sustained in Korean CDS. The stylistic variation is discussed in relation to the listener under linguistic development in CDS.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.87-102
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• 2003

In this paper, we present an English pronunciation correction system for Korean speakers and show some of experimental results on it. The aim of the system is to detect mispronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give appropriate correction comments to users. There are several English pronunciation correction systems adopting speech recognition technology, however, most of them use conventional speech recognition engines. From this reason, they could not give phoneme based correction comments to users. In our system, we build two kinds of phoneme models: standard native speaker models and Korean's error models. We also design recognition network based on phonemes to detect Koreans' common mispronunciations. We get 90% detection rate in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we cannot get high detection rate in diphthong split and accents.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.141-149
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• 2009

An emphasis on teaching suprasegmental features of English, specifically English rhythm, is essential in order to improve the 'intelligibility' of the pronunciation of Korean EFL learners among interlocutors who use English as a Lingua Franca(ELF). By redefining the ELF suggested by Jenkins (2000, 2002), this paper argues that Lingua Franca Core (LFC) must include suprasegmental features such as 'stress-based rhythm' and word stress. However, because 'isochrony' is difficult to measure in a foot, the rhythm unit must be expanded to an intonational phrase which has prominence in it and the rhythm of the unit can be measured by calculating the duration of each segment in context The rhythmic pattern of Korean learners of English and that of native speakers or other non-native English speakers can then be calculated and compared by using correlation coefficients of the segmental duration. In terms of sociolinguistic factors, improving the 'comprehensibility' and 'accentedness' of Korean EFL learners' pronunciation is also important in international communication, which calls for more emphasis on suprasegmental features.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.105-119
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to examine Korean students' production and perception of word-final stop voicing in light of their overseas experience. Subjects were English native speakers, Korean university students with residence experience in America, Korean university students without residence experience in America, and Korean elementary school students. They participated in both production and perception tests. Results showed that the students' production and perception with residence experience in America appeared quite similar to those of the English native speakers. In the production tests, we noticed somewhat different results in temporal and frequency features. The one-year residence in America had some influence on their frequency features, but not the temporal features in the word final stop production. That difference could be seen in the perception tests, too. We could not find any difference in the identification test of the final release environment between the Korean university students who had studied abroad and those who didn't. Rather the difference could be found in the cue influence test in both the final release and non-release environments.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.349-354
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• 1996

The phonetic mastery of English has been considered next to impossible to many non-native speakers of English, including even some teachers of English. This paper takes issue with this phonetic problem of second language acquisition and proposes that combination of cognitive and physical approaches can help master English faster and more easily.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.131-136
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• 2016

An appropriate evaluation on learner's pronunciation has been an important part of foreign language education. The learners should be evaluated and receive proper feedback for pronunciation improvement. Due to the cost and consistency problem of human evaluation, automatic pronunciation evaluation system has been studied. The most of the current automatic evaluation systems utilizes underlying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. We suggest in this work to evaluate learner's pronunciation accuracy and fluency in word-level using the ASR and non-native teacher's speech model. Through the performance evaluation on our system, we confirm the overall evaluation result of pronunciation accuracy and fluency actually represents the learner's English skill level quite accurately.

• 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.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.47-66
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• 2006

This study examined the effect of English-language experience on Korean- and Japanese-English late learners' production of English unstressed vowels in terms of four acoustic phonetic features: F0, duration, intensity and vowel reduction. The learners manifested some improvement with experience. The native-like attainment of a phonetic feature, however, was related to the phonological status of that feature in the speakers' native language. The results suggest that the extent to which the non-native speakers' production of English unstressed vowels improved with English-language experience varied as a function of their native language background.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.519-524
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• 2021

Recently, the fourth industrial revolution has become an area of interest to many countries, mainly in major advanced countries. Artificial intelligence technology, the core technology of the fourth industrial revolution, is developing in a form of convergence in various fields and has a lot of influence on the edutech field to change education innovatively. This paper builds an experimental environment using the DTW speech recognition algorithm and deep learning on various native and non-native data. Furthermore, through comparisons with CNN algorithms, we study non-native speakers to correct them with similar pronunciation to native speakers by measuring the similarity of English pronunciation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.43-51
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• 2013

English native listeners have a tendency to treat strong syllables in a speech stream as the potential initial syllables of new words, since the majority of lexical words in English have a word-initial stress. The current study investigates whether Korean (L1) - English (L2) late bilinguals perceive strong syllables in English continuous speech as word onsets, as English native listeners do. In Experiment 1, word-spotting was slower when the word-initial syllable was strong, indicating that Korean listeners do not perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Experiment 2 was conducted in order to avoid any possibilities that the results of Experiment 1 may be due to the strong-initial targets themselves used in Experiment 1 being slower to recognize than the weak-initial targets. We employed the gating paradigm in Experiment 2, and measured the Isolation Point (IP, the point at which participants correctly identify a word without subsequently changing their minds) and the Recognition Point (RP, the point at which participants correctly identify the target with 85% or greater confidence) for the targets excised from the non-words in the two conditions of Experiment 1. Both the mean IPs and the mean RPs were significantly earlier for the strong-initial targets, which means that the results of Experiment 1 reflect the difficulty of segmentation when the initial syllable of words was strong. These results are consistent with Kim & Nam (2011), indicating that strong syllables are not perceived as word onsets for Korean listeners and interfere with lexical segmentation in English running speech.