• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.145-155
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• 2013

This study investigated the articulatory characteristics of Korean singleton and geminate sonorants in the word-medial position, effects of the duration of the sonorant consonant and the preceding vowel on perception, and the difference between native Korean speakers and foreign learners of Korean in perceiving the singleton and geminate consonant contrast. The Korean sonorant consonants(/m, n, l/) are examined from the VCCV, VCV sequences through speech production and perception experiments. The results suggest that the duration of the sonorant consonant is the most important factor for native Korean speakers to recognize whether sonorants are overlapped, and the duration of preceding vowel and other factors affect the recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast if the duration is not obvious. A perception experiment showed Chinese Korean language learners did not clearly distinguish singleton consonants from geminate consonants. The results of this study provide basic data for recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast in word-medial of Korean language, and can be utilized for teaching Korean pronunciation as a foreign language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.230-233
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• 2007

In the literature on the tense consonants in Korean, it has been proposed that this consonant is underlyingly represented by a single consonant (the singleton hypothesis) and that it is represented by a sequence of two lenis consonants (the geminate hypothesis). One piece of the empirical evidence supporting the geminate hypothesis is that the closure duration of tense consonants in intervocalic position is more than twice as long in comparison with their lenis counterparts. In this paper, we report on the closure duration of three types of plosives in various phonotactically permitted contexts in Korean. The results of the measurement show that the duration of the tense consonants in post-sonorant contexts is reduced by a third in comparison with that of the intervocalic ones. These temporal differences suggest that the measurement of closure durations in intervocalic position alone is not sufficient to sustain the geminate hypothesis.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.19-25
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• 2017

The current study focused on the production of geminate nasal consonants across different word boundary types in Korean as a function of speech style to investigate whether temporal properties are preserved across varying speaking rates. Assimilated geminates in Korean, known as true geminates, are produced with distinctively longer consonant duration compared to singletons. Despite a large body of literature for geminates across different languages, geminates in Korean have been relatively less investigated with respect to the durational patterns in relative terms and temporal variabilities. In this study, singletons, word-internal geminates and word-boundary (fake) geminates produced by ten native Seoul Korean speakers were compared in terms of absolute consonant closure duration, preceding vowel duration, the relative ratios (consonant-to-preceding vowel duration) as well as the temporal variabilities in speech production. The results showed that word-internal geminates were produced with longer consonant duration and greater temporal variabilities than singletons and word-boundary geminates in absolute duration, indicating relatively greater flexibility in timing. However, only word-internal geminates were produced with distinctively longer consonant duration with significantly lower variability in relative duration regardless of speech styles. The results provide some insight into the representation of temporal information in the production of Korean geminate consonants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.77-83
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• 2015

The aim of this paper is to investigate Japanese speakers' perception of Korean tense consonants. In a range of perceptual experiments Japanese participants were directed to label Korean stimuli using Japanese katakana characters. The analysis of the results showed a strong influence of Japanese phonology in the responses. Japanese perception of sokuon was increased, (1) when the tense consonants were in word medial position, (2) when tense consonants were other than /s/, (3) when the tense consonant followed voiceless consonants, (4) when the consonants were part of a cluster sharing their point of articulation, (5) when preceding vowel were other than /u/, (6) when following vowel were /u/. This result, showing preference for phonology, is in harmony with previous research on the Japanese sokuon perception using Japanese (Takeyasu 2009, Matsui 2011), and Italian (Tanaka & Kubozono 2008) stimuli.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.1092-1096
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• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonant in the same position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in summer. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of near minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the word with singleton graphemes were relatively high both in perception and production (78.6% and 76.1%, respectively), while those for the word with doubleton graphemes were low both in perception and production (55.3% and 61.7%, respectively). Also, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.459-466
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• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonants in the same intervocalic position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in $su\underline{mm}er$. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of (near) minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the words with singleton graphemes were higher than those for the words with doubleton graphemes both in perception and production because the subjects misperceived and misproduced the doubleton graphemes as geminates due to orthographic influence. In addition, the low error rates of the word with voiced stops were accounted for by Korean language transfer. Further, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words. Finally, pedagogical implications are provided.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.482-487
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• 1996

Korean fortis consonant is not included in the consonantal inventory, but a result of phonetic implementation at the phonetic level, P. With the framework of Cognitive Phonology, a construction of Post Obstruent Tensification is proposed in such a way that rule-ordering is eliminated. This enables us to overcome methodological problems raised in former analyses of fortis under geminate hypothesis, and give a uniform account for three categories of fortis consonants. By assuming extrasyllabicity of verb-stem-final, consonant neutralization of fortis in the coda position is explained by the invisibility at the P-level. and, therefore. modification of Coda Neutralization rule is called for.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.409-414
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• 1996

The aim of this paper is to research on the actual condition of Koreans' Spanish consonants pronunciation with an emphasis on describing the phonetic different of Korean speakers and Spanish speakers. 40 Spanish words were chosen for the speech sampling, and 10 Spanish majoring Korean students from Seoul or Kyunggi Province and 3 Spanish speakers form Castile, Spain participated in the interview. The most noticeable phonetic differences of Korean speakers' pronunciation comparing with Spanish speakers are abstracted as follows: 1) The voiced stops are pronounced voiceless or weak voiced. 2) The voiced stops are slightly aspirated. 3) The length of voiceless consonants is quite longer than the length of proceeding vowel. 4) Fricatives and affricates are somewhat fronter, and weaker in the degree of friction. 5) There is a strong tendency to geminate dental lateral /l/ such as 'pelo' and to vocalize palatal lateral /$\rightthreetimes$/ such as 'calle' 6) Unlike in Spanish speech flap $\mid$r$\mid$ and trill [r] are pronounced similarly in Korean speech.