• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.554-559
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• 1996

An utterance is normally divided into two or more intonation groups. Bach intonation group has its intonation pattern. Pitch movement of Spanish utterance is basically determined by a combination of two factors: position of the stressed syllables and the intonation pattern. The pitch of a syllable can be affected by that of preceding syllables. This is rather a physiological effect than a phonological one.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.52-64
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• 1993

This paper aims to explore the rhythmic phenomena of standard Korean by an experimental phonetic method. A total of 16 informants taking part in this experiment were divided into four groups : old males(OM) and old females(OF) in their fifties and young males(YM) and young females(YF) in their twenties. The informants were asked to read speech data consisting of two rhythmic units, each of which began with a stressed syllable with a long wowel. Starting with the frame / 'ma:1 'ma:nta /, the first rhythmic unit was expanded up to five syllables in all while keeping the second rhythmic unit constant with a view to investigate the pattern of increase in the interstress time interval. The results of this study are as follows: 1. There is a considerable difference between yen and old generations with respect to the duration of interstress interval . The young generation tends to speak faster than the old generation. This observation is supported by difference in the interstress intervals as exhibited by OM(389.66), OF(473), YM(275.55), YF(285.83) in the test frame '말 많다' ['ma:1 'ma:nta]. 2. Young and old generations showed a different tendency in the increase rate of duration between mono-syllables and polysyllables. In other words, the rhythm of young generation shows the tendency of syllable-timed language whereas that of old generation clearly leans towards the stressed-timed language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.51-60
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• 2010

This study is to examine how Korean speakers realize English stress on the homographic words. Experiments were performed by Korean speakers three times, before stress instruction, immediately after instruction, and six weeks after instruction. First, duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the vowel in a stressed syllable of three homographic words produced by Korean speakers were compared with those of native speakers of English. The result shows that when the words were used as nouns, before instruction Korean speakers had shorter duration and lower fundamental frequency in the stressed vowel than the native speakers, which indicates that Korean speakers did not assign the primary stress on the first syllable of the nouns. After instruction, the values of duration and fundamental frequency were increased and the differences between two groups were decreased. Next, the values of these stress features measured three times were analyzed in order to find out how they changed through instruction. The analysis shows that after instruction the values of three features were increased compared to the ones before instruction, and that the biggest change was in duration of the vowel and the next was fundamental frequency. Six weeks after instruction, the values of duration and intensity were decreased than those immediately after instruction. This means that instruction is helpful for Korean speakers to assign the stress for the English homographic words, and that instruction and practice are needed repeatedly.

• MALSORI
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• no.4
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• pp.31-48
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• 1982

This paper describes the rhythmic structure of the Korean standard speech of Seoul in terms of what the writer calls 'Speech Segmentv as the basic unit of the rhythm. The speech segment consists of a 'Nucleus'( a stressed syllable ) with or without one or more weak syllable(s) . The nucleus is always long and the weak syllables are short except the last syllable of the speech rhythm, which may be realized nearly as Long as the nuclear syllable.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2003

This paper proposes an empty constituent, a silent beat, to express long duration of stressed syllable in the word final position and rhythmic correspondence in English. This empty constituent has an important consequence. It helps reveal one of the characteristics English feet have: they must be non-final in nouns as well as in verbs. In addition, the silent beats overcome the shortcomings of empty constituents proposed previously, namely null vowels (Burzio 1994) and invisible suffixes (Hammond 1999).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.77-88
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• 2011

Foreign accent in second language production depends heavily on the transfer of features from the first language. This study examines acoustic variations in segments and suprasegments by native and nonnative speakers of English, searching for patterns of the transfer and plausible indexes of foreign accent in English. The acoustic variations are analyzed with recorded read speech by 20 native English speakers and 50 Korean learners of English, in terms of vowel formants, vowel duration, and syllabic variation induced by stress. The results show that the acoustic measurements of vowel formants and vowel and syllable durations display difference between native speakers and nonnative speakers. The difference is robust in the production of lax vowels, diphthongs, and stressed syllables, namely the English-specific features. L1 transfer on L2 specification is found both at the segmental levels and at the suprasegmental levels. The transfer levels measured as groups and individuals further show a continuum of divergence from the native-like target. Overall, the eldest group, students who are in the graduate schools, shows more native-like patterns, suggesting weaker foreign accent in English, whereas the high school students tend to involve larger deviation from the native speakers' patterns. Individual results show interdependence between segmental transfer and prosodic transfer, and correlation with self-reported proficiency levels. Additionally, experience factors in English such as length of English study and length of residence in English speaking countries are further discussed as factors to explain the acoustic variation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.207-221
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• 2003

Phonetic voicing does not support the phonological distinction of voiced/voiceless in English stops. The present study is aimed at defining the nature of voicing of English voiced stops. A review of the literature reveals that the voicing is position-conditioned and its length is notably inconsistent relative to the closure duration. No consistent relationships are found between vocal fold adduction and glottal pulsing in initial position. Stress reduced the voicing, etc. The hypothesis for experiments was: (1) active voicing: stress generates longer (stronger) voicing during the closure duration of a voiced stop; (2) passive voicing: stress induces shorter (weaker) voicing during the closure. Instead the voiced stop becomes more voiced when the preceding vowel (syllable) is stressed. The literature review and the results of two experiments comparing English and Slovakian suggested that the voicing of English voiced stops is passive (i.e., a coarticulation of glottal pulsing for adjacent vowels-syllables) and should be distinguished from active voicing in some other languages.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.213-216
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to observe how Korean learners with low (KL) and high (KH) English proficiency manifest English rhythm with respect to the relative temporal stability or temporal constraint of syllable. In this study, speech cycling task, repeating a short phrase with the series of beeps of same interval, was used to examine temporal distribution of stressed beats.