• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.67-84
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• 2012

The present study investigated the effect of sentence translation as a production task on short-term and long-term retention of foreign vocabulary. 87 EFL university students at a beginning level, enrolled in reading class participated in the study. The study compared the performance of three groups on vocabulary recall: (1) Control group, (2) Translation group, and (3) Copy group. During the treatment sessions, translation group translated L1 sentences into English, while copy group simply copied given English sentences with each target word. Results of the immediate test were collected each week from week 2 to week 5 and analyzed by one-way ANOVA. Results revealed that regarding short-term vocabulary retention, participants in rote-copy condition outperformed those in translation group. Four weeks later a delayed test was administered to measure long-term vocabulary retention. In contrast, the results of two-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that long-term vocabulary retention of translation group was significantly greater than copy group. The findings suggest that although sentence translation is rather challenging to low-level learners, it may facilitate long-term retention of new vocabulary given the more elaborate and deeper processing the task entails.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

Previous research on syntactic processing shows that the interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence is frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another. The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on the production of disambiguating prosody for English ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, 40 speakers gave default readings of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences. Questioning was used to prove intended meanings behind default readings. Intended meanings were treated as interpretation biases when a majority of speakers read a sentence with the same intended meaning. The size of the majority was used to establish bias strength. In Experiment 2, 10 speakers were instructed to use prosody to disambiguate given alternate meanings of the sentences from Experiment 1. The results indicated an effect of bias strength on disambiguating prosody: speakers used temporal juncture cues to reliably disambiguate alternate meanings for sentences with a weak interpretation bias, but not for those with a strong bias. Overall, the results indicated that interpretation biases strongly affect the production of prosody.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.25-36
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• 2008

Language transfer means that the speaker's first language or previously acquired language influences on the production of the target language. This study aims at examining if there is native language influence on the production of English intonation by Korean speakers. The pitch accent patterns and the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent in the sentence produced by Korean speakers are compared to those of American English speakers. The results show that when the word receives emphatic accent in the sentence, American English speakers put H* accent on the stressed syllable of the word, but Korean speakers mostly assign high pitch on the last syllable of the word and have LH tonal pattern despite the fact that primary stress does not come on the last syllable within a word. In addition, comparison of the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent to those of the word with unmarked neutral accent shows that Korean speakers do not realize the intonation of the accented word appropriately because the values decrease even though the word has emphatic accent. This study finds out that there are differences in the production of English intonation of the word with emphatic accent between native speakers of English and Korean speakers, and that there is negative transfer of Korean intonation pattern to the production of English intonation by Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.59-69
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the variation of pitch contour observed in the reading of Korean sentences produced by Chinese Korean-learners. In the reading context, Korean sentence intonation can be described by considering accentual phrases' pitch pattern and intonational phrases' boundary tone. But when APs and IPs connect to each other to form sentences, another aspect of speech production must be considered, that is declination of pitch contour. So, in order to examine how Chinese speakers produce Korean sentence intonation, we have analysed the sentences' pitch contours produced by fourteen Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to decline the pitch contour in shorter sentences, but for longer sentences, the declination was not observed. Moreover, even though Chinese speakers produced sentences with declination, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.19-40
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• 2006

This paper deals with a part-specific analysis of grammatical errors in the production of the English passive in writing. The purpose of the study is dual: to explore common error types in forming the passive; and to provide plausible sources of the errors, with special attention to the role of the native language. To this end, this study obtained a large amount of data from Korean EFL university students using an essay writing task. The results show that in forming the passive sentence, errors were made in various ways and that the most common problem was the formation of the be-auxiliary, in particular, the proper use of tense and S-V agreement. Another important finding was that the global errors found in this study were not necessarily those with the greatest frequency. Also corroborated was the general claim that many factors work together to account for errors. In many cases, interlingual and intralingual factors were shown to interact with each other to explain the passive errors made by Korean students. On the basis of the results, suggestions are made for effective and well-formed use of the passive sentence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.61-68
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• 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Chinese Korean Learners (L1: Chinese, L2: Korean). In Korean, sentence ambiguity can be caused by homonym or syntactically ambiguous structure. In spoken language however all ambiguity can be resolved by different prosodic features according to the meaning that they transmit. In this study we examined whether Chinese Korean Leaners also distinguish, in production, ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic characteristics. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Chinese Korean learners participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 10 Korean sentences in which 6 sentences are lexically ambiguous and 4 sentences contain structural ambiguity. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure. Chinese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for different ambiguous sentences in most cases. But in the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range was greater for Korean native speakers than Chinese learners.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.105-117
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• 2004

Recently, many scholars have emphasized the importance of English listening ability for smoother communication. Most audio materials, however, were recorded in a quiet sound-proof booth. Therefore, students who have spent so much time listening to the ideal audio materials are expected to have difficulty communicating with native speakers in the real life. In this study, we examined how well thirty three Korean university students and five native speakers will repeat the recorded English sentences under noise and speed conditions. The subjects' production was scored by listening to each recorded sentence and counting the number of words correctly produced and determined the percent ratios of correctly produced words to the total words in each sentence. Results showed that the student group correctly repeated around 65% of all the words in each sentence while the native speakers demonstrated almost perfect match. It seemed that the students had difficulty perceiving and repeating function words in various conditions. Also, high-proficiency student group outperformed the low-proficiency student group particularly in their repetition of function words. In addition, the student subjects' accuracy of repetition remarkably dropped when the normal sentences were both sped up and mixed with noise. Finally, it was observed that the Korean students' percent correct ratio fell down as the stimulus sentence became longer.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.71-78
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Japanese(L1) on the production of Korean accentual phrases(L2). Korean and Japanese have a similar prosodic structure. But different from Korean, Japanese is a pitch accent language. So each word has its own pitch accent. And pitch accents are maintained in the sentence intonation. This difference will have a negative influence on the production of Korean sentence intonation. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Japanese learners of Korean participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 11 Korean sentences, six of which contain formally identical Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese words. The results show that the initial pitch pattern of Korean accentual phrases was affected by Japanese pitch accent types and this interference was greater for formally identical Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese words. But besides initial tones of accentual phrase, some positive interference was observed in the internal tonal pattern of accentual phrase. In the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range and initial pitch rising of accentual phrases was greater for Japanese learners of Korean than native speakers of Korean.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.3 s.113
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• pp.223-230
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• 2007

The purpose of developing an automated scoring system for English composition is to score the tests for writing English sentences and to give feedback on them without human's efforts. This paper presents an automated system to score English composition, whose input is a single sentence, not an essay. Dealing with a single sentence as an input has some advantages on comparing the input with the given answers by human teachers and giving detailed feedback to the test takers. The system has been developed and tested with the real test data collected through English tests given to the third grade students in junior high school. Two steps of the process are required to score a single sentence. The first process is analyzing the input sentence in order to detect possible errors, such as spelling errors, syntactic errors and so on. The second process is comparing the input sentence with the given answer to identify the differences as errors. The results produced by the system were then compared with those provided by human raters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.85-95
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• 2020

Sentence repetition is a way of evaluating speech sound production to improve the limitation of word tests and spontaneous speech analysis. Speech sounds produced by children can be evaluated using several indicators. This study examined the progression of the percentage of correct consonants-revised (PCC-R) and phonological whole-word measure in different age and gender groups after setting consonants in various vowel contexts and implementing sentence repetition tasks that were designed to give all phonemes the chance to appear at least three times. For this study, 11 sentence repetition tasks were applied to 535 children aged 3 to 7 across the country, after which the resulting PCC-R and whole-word measure were analyzed. The study results showed that all the indicators improved in older age groups and there were significant differences depending on age, however, no significant differences dependent on gender were found. The sentence repetition conditions data used in this study were collected from across the country, and the age difference between each age group was six months. This study is noteworthy because it collected a sufficient amount of data from each group, highlighted the limitation of the word naming and the spontaneous speech analysis, and suggests new criteria of evaluation through the analysis of each whole-word measure in sentence repetition, which was not applied in previous studies.