• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.107-117
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to revisit the property of tapping, based on the data from Yonbyon Korean. Taps have been described as short segments derived from corresponding stops or trills. It is also widely assumed that tapping occurs due to lenition to minimize articulatory effort. However, Yonbyon Korean data show that taps can occur in strong as well as weak positions The results of the acoustic experiments conducted in this study show that in syllable-onset position, obstruent taps consistently appear from the underlying laterals, while in intervocalic position, sonorant taps similar to American English taps occur. The results of this study provide evidence against the uniform account of tapping as the result of lenition.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.133-145
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• 2006

In order to understand the various groups' perceptual pattern in both VCV trochee and iambus, this study examined the identification correctness and cue robustness for the unit intervals in light of background language, age, and English listening ability. The 4 groups of Native Speakers of English, Korean College Students of High Listening Achievement, Korean College Students of Low Listening Achievement, and Korean Elementary Students took part in the experiments. Tokens of $/d{\ae}per,\;d{\ae}per,\;d{\ae}per,\;d{\ae}per,\;d{\ae}per,\;d{\ae}per$ in trochee and of $/{\eth}{\partial}\;p{\ae}d,\;{\eth}{\partial}\;b{\ae}d,\;{\eth}{\partial}\;t{\ae}d,\;{\eth}{\partial}\;d{\ae}d,\;{\eth}{\partial}\;k{\ae}d,\;{\eth}{\partial}\;g{\ae}d/$ in iambus were extracted and modified into experimental signals composed of two digits(voiced-1, voiceless-0) by following the temporal intervals, in which the signals consisted of preceding vowel, closure, VOT, and post-vowel. In the first experiment of identification correctness in VCV iambus environment, all groups showed almost 100% correctness rate, while in trochee environment all groups were different(native speaker 87%, college high 74%, college low 70%, elementary 65%). In the second experiment of cue robustness, all groups showed the similar perceptual pattern in both environments. There was the order of robustness cues in VCV trochee: pre-vowel ${\gg}$ closure ${\gg}$ VOT ${\gg}$ post-vowel, while the order in VCV iambus: VOT ${\gg}$ post-vowel ${\gg}$ closure ${\gg}$ pre-vowel. In some condition, however, we found moderately different perceptual pattern depending on language, age and listening level.