• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2021

In this study, listening errors by Korean EFL learners are comprehensively analyzed from self-paced passage dictation tasks. Fifty-five Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Listeners were asked to write down dictation passages as accurately as possible, while listening to the audio as much as they needed. The results show that (i) low-proficiency learners tend to misperceive longer phrases than high-proficiency learners, (ii) function words are more often omitted or misheard than content words, and (iii) low-proficiency learners have more difficulties with content words than high-proficiency learners do. Most frequent suffix errors were omissions of past or plural suffixes. Among the function words, the most frequent errors were found with auxiliary contractions, infinitive marker to, and articles, mostly in the environment of linking and elision. It is also shown that C-V linking, C-C linking, and elision are the primary sources for the most frequent errors. C-V linking led to errors in correctly locating the word boundary, while C-C linking and elision resulted in omission. These errors show that Korean EFL listeners have difficulties in detecting fine-grained phonetic details to the extent that native speakers can do.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.71-80
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• 2016

The phonemic awareness tasks (phonemic synthesis, phonemic elision, phonemic segmentation) by auditory presentation and visual presentation were conducted to 40 children who are 5 and 6 years old. The scores and error types in the sub-tasks by two presentations were compared to each other. Also, the correlation between the performances of phonemic awareness sub-tasks in two presentation conditions were examined. As a result, 6-year-old group showed significantly higher phonemic awareness scores than 5-year-old group. Both group showed significantly higher scores in visual presentation than auditory presentation. While the performance under the visual presentation was significantly lower especially in the segmentation than the other two tasks, there was no significant difference among sub-tasks under the auditory presentation. 5-year-old group showed significantly more 'no response' errors than 6-year-old group and 6-year-old group showed significantly more 'phoneme substitution' and 'phoneme omission' errors than 5-year-old group. Significantly more 'phoneme omission' errors were observed in the segmentation than the elision task, and significantly more 'phoneme addition' errors were observed in elision than the synthesis task. Lastly, there are positive correlations in auditory and visual synthesis tasks, auditory and visual elision tasks, and auditory and visual segmentation tasks. Summarizing the results, children tend to depend on orthographic knowledge when acquiring the initial phonemic awareness. Therefore, the result of this research would support the position that the orthographic knowledge affects the improvement of phonemic awareness.

• MALSORI
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• no.19_20
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• pp.58-87
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• 1990

According to Government Phonology, at 1 phonological positions save the domain's head must be licensed in order to appear in the syllable structure. A non-nuclear head is licensed by the following nucleus, and the nuclei with phonetic content are licensed through government by the nuclear head of the domain at the level of the nuclear projection. Therefore, in the theory of Government Phonology it is claimed that words always end with a nucleus. With regard to the licensing of empty nuclei, Kaye(1990a) proposes the 'Empty Category Principle' and its sub-theory of 'Projection Government'. Government Phonology claims that a nucleus which dominates a vowel that regularly undergoes elision in certain contexts is underlyingly empty. This underlying empty nucleus is not manifested phonetically when it is properly governed by an unlicensed(i, e, a nucleus filled with a full vowel). It is when proper government fails to apply, that the empty nucleus is phonetically Interpreted. The purpose of this paper is to present a principled account of the process of $[i]{\Leftrightarrow}{\emptyset}$ alternation in Korean. Following Kaye's proposal, we assume that [i] of Korean is underlyingly empty. This position is pronounced as [i] if it is unlicensed, and is not phonetically realized if is licensed. Empty nuclei ape devided into two categories: domain-internal and domain-final. Firstly, we consider the question why Korean has little word ending with [i]. As for this, ECP states that domain-final empty nuclei are not pronounced if the language licenses domain-final empty nuclei. Whether a final empty nucleus may occur in the structure is parametric variation. This property is seen from the fact that words may appear to end in consonants in this language. Since Korean abounds with words ending in a consonant, it licenses domain-final empty nuclei. Therefore, it is quite natural that Korean has little word ending with [i]. Secondly, word-internal empty nuclei of Korean respect proper government and inter-onset government. That is, an empty nucleus in word-internal position will be pronounced with the vowel [i] if either proper government or inter-onset government fail to apply. Inter-onset government refers to the government established between two onsets across an empty nucleus. Thirdly, we consider words ending with [i], which seems to be exceptional to the final licensing. Host of them are. either mono-syllabic verbs(for instance, [s'i-] 'to write') or derived adjectives ending with [p'i] (for instance, [kip'i-] 'be happy'). As for the former, the 'inaccessibility for proper government' is applied because the empty nucleus appears in the first syllable. In latter case, domain-final empty nuclei are pronounced as [i] because of government-licensing. That is, final empty nucleus is pronounced to license the preceding onset dominating negatively charmed segments which empty nucleus of Korean cannot license.