• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.460-466
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• 2010

It is well-known that Korean EFL learners have difficulties in producing English fricatives which are not in the inventory of Korean and consequently tend to replace English fricatives with stops. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Korean students also have difficulties perceiving English anterior coronal consonants including fricatives. To this end, forty Korean college students participated in an identification test which consisted of 24 nonce words with English anterior coronal consonants in 4 different prosodic locations (CV, VC, VCVV,VVCV). It was shown that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV, providing confusion matrices for each target consonant. It was also found that Korean participants had a great difficulty identifying English[$\theta$] and [$\eth$], which are novel in Korean. Importantly, the confusion patterns found in the perception test tended not to be identical with those found in the previous production studies in that both stops and fricatives were misperceived as fricatives while fricatives were misproduced as stops. Further, perceptual devoicing and intervocalic voicing were attested inVC and intervocalic position, respectively. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications were drawn.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.21-29
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• 2023

This study investigates the transitional aspect of vowel harmony in Korean verbal conjugation. By observing the patterns of harmonic and disharmonic tokens of 42 verbal stems searched for in the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) Korean Dialogue Corpus 2020/2021, I found that disharmonic tokens appeared less than 0.1% of time, most of which consisted of an /a/-stem with a monosyllabic sentence-final suffix. It was noted that disharmonic pattern started to spread to other suffixes and possibly to /o/-stems. A simple perception test showed that the disharmonic forms might have originated from vowel reduction or undershoot. These results suggest that the ongoing change is accounted for from both the articulatory and perceptual perspectives.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.101-113
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• 2020

This study aimed to explore how effective explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) is in teaching the schwa vowel /ə/ to EFL students in a classroom setting. The participants were 25 female high school students, who were divided into the experimental group (n=13) and the control group (n=12). One female American also participated in the study for a speech sample as a reference. The treatment, which involves shadowing model pronunciation by the researcher and a free text-to-speech software and the researcher's feedback in a private session, was given to the control group over a month and a half. The speech samples, for which the participants read the 14 polysyllabic stimulus words followed by the sentences containing the words, were collected before and after the treatment. The paired-samples t test and non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used for analysis. The results showed that the participants of the experimental group in the post-test reduced the duration of the schwa by around 40 percent compared to the pre-test. However, little effect was found in approximating the participants' distribution patterns of /ə/ measured by the F1/F2 formant frequencies to the reference point, which was 539 Hz (F1) by 1797 Hz (F2). The findings of this study suggest that explicit FFI with multiple repetitions and corrective feedback is partly effective in teaching pronunciation.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.325-353
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• 2016

The visual span refers to the number of letters that can be accurately recognized without moving one's eyes. The size of the visual span is affected by sensory factors such as perimetric complexity, crowding, and mislocation of letters. Korean Hangul utilizes rather unique alphabetic-syllabary writing system, quite different from English and Chinese writing systems. Due to this combinatorial nature of the script, the visual span for Hangul characters can also be affected by the letter type (e.g., CV vs CVCC). The present study examined the effect of syllable complexity on the visual span for Hangul by comparing letter recognition accuracy across four letter type conditions (C only, CV, CVC, and CVCC). We also aimed to determine the meaningful letter type(s) that is associated with differences in reading abilities in Korean. Using a trigram presentation method, we found that overall recognition accuracy declined as syllable complexity increased. However, the visual span for CVC type was greater than that for CV type, suggesting that the effect is not necessarily linear, and that there might be other factors affecting the visual span for these types of letters. C and CV type showed fairly strong positive correlations with reading comprehension, suggesting that these might be the meaningful units for measuring visual span in relating to reading abilities.

• 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.