말소리와 음성과학 (Phonetics and Speech Sciences)

  • 제15권1호
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  • Pages.47-54
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  • 2023
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  • 2005-8063(pISSN)
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  • 2586-5854(eISSN)
한국음성학회 (Korean Society of Speech Sciences)
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Evaluation of English speaking proficiency under fixed speech rate: Focusing on utterances produced by Korean child learners of English

  • Narah Choi (Department of English Linguistics, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies) ;
  • Tae-Yeoub Jang (Department of English Linguistics, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)
  • 투고 : 2023.03.05
  • 심사 : 2023.03.20
  • 발행 : 2023.03.31
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초록

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

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과제정보

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2023.

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