• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.3-11
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• 2012

The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic realizations of English unstressed vowels produced by advanced Korean learners (KLs) of English compared with English native speakers (NSs) focusing on the comparative study of English words and English loanwords. The result shows that KLs are usually not native-like in producing the English unstressed vowel /ə/ and loanword orthography affects the way the KLs produce /?/. The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the KLs is different from that of the NSs. In duration and pitch, KLs show significantly less difference between the stressed and unstressed vowels than do the NSs. The KLs usually have a high pitch in the stressed and the last syllable while the NSs usually produce peak F0 in the stressed syllable. When the KLs have a similar vowel quality with that of the NSs, they produce a shorter duration of the unstressed vowels. However, there is no correlation between the realization of the pitch and the vowel quality in KLs speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.167-180
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• 2005

The present study examines the phonetic realizations of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ in English words produced by native and Korean ESL speakers. Traditionally, the stressed elements in utterance are considered to be prominent. In this sense, the unstressed weak vowel /e/ is predicted to be shorter in length, lower in pitch and intensity than the stressed vowels. The experiment shows that native English speakers correlate the unstressed weak vowel /e/ with both shorter duration and lower pitch; Korean ESL speakers correlate it with lower pitch only. We cannot find any significant statistical difference in intensity between /e/ and the stressed vowels in both cases. This study suggests it is important to acquire and produce the correct prosodic correlates of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ for Korean ESL speakers to command more natural English intonation, since /e/ is the most common vowel in English speech and consists of the English foot rhythm along with stressed vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.53-58
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to compare the first two vowel formants of the stressed and unstressed English vowels produced by ten young males (in their twenties and thirties) and ten old males (in their forties or fifties) from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. The results indicate that the stressed and unstressed vowels, /i/ and $/{\ae}/$ in particular, from the two groups are different in their formant frequencies. In addition, the vowel space of the unstressed vowels is somewhat smaller than that of the stressed vowels. Specifically, the range of the second formant of the unstressed vowels and that of the first formant of the unstressed front vowels were compressed. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation training for the Korean learners of English vowels. We propose that teachers of English pay attention to the stress patterns of English vowels as well as their formant frequencies.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2014

This study investigates twenty four Korean females' production of English front vowels focusing on the distinction in /i/ vs /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vs /${\ae}$/ and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels compared with those of native English speakers. The Korean learners were asked to read a textbook passage which includes ten sentences including target vowels. The major results indicate that: (1) Korean learners have trouble producing a distinct version (tense and lax) of front vowels in the paragraph reading; (2) The vowel space of the stressed vowels in a paragraph is smaller than that of embedded sentences; and (3) The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the Korean learners is similar to that of the native English speakers. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation teaching for the Korean learners of English vowels and realization of English stress.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2018

Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.101-108
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• 2014

This study investigates the relation among pitch range differences, speech rate and realization of stress. To identify the realization of the stress, vowel formants and durational differences of stressed and unstressed vowels are measured. The Korean learners were asked to read a textbook passage which includes nine sentences. The major results indicate that: (1) Korean speakers' pitch range is less than 50% of the native speakers; (2) There is a significantly negative relation between high-low pitch range and speech rate; (3) The vowel qualities and durations of the stressed and unstressed vowels are related to the speech rate. But these are not related to the high-low pitch range.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.851-870
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution of /ju/ in British English, especially after the coronal sonorants /n, l, /r/. The sequence /ju/ is related with vowels such as /u/, /ʊ/, and /ʊ/, and has occasioned a variety of conflicting analyses or suggestions. One of those is in which context /j/ is deleted if we suppose that the underlying form is /ju/. The context differs according to the dialect we deal with. In British English, it is known that /j/ is deleted always after /r/, and usually after /l/ when it occurs in an unstressed word-medial syllable. To check this well-known fact I searched OED Online (the 2nd Edition, 1989) for those words which contain /n, l, r/ + /ju, jʊ, u, ʊ, (j)u, (j)ʊ/ in their pronunciations, using the search engine provided by OED Online. After removing some unnecessary words, I classified the collected words into several groups according to the preceding sonorant consonants, the positions, and the presence (or absence) of the stress, of the syllable where /ju/ occurs. The results are as follows: 1) the deletion of /j/ depends on the sonorant consonant which /ju/ follows, the position where it occurs, and the presence of the stress which /ju/ bears; 2) though the influence of the sonorant consonants is strong, the position and stress also have non-trivial effect on the deletion of /j/, that is, the word-initial syllable and the stressed syllable prefer the deletion of /j/, and word-medial and unstressed syllable usually retain /j/; 3) the stress and position factors play their own roles even in the context where the effect of /n, l, r/ is dominant.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.33-40
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• 2020

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.