A Study Using Acoustic Measurement and Perceptual Judgment to identify Prosodic Characteristics of English as Spoken by Koreans

음향 측정과 지각 판단에 의한 한국인 영어의 운율 연구

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.