• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.7-14
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• 2001

This study was done to find out the difference in vowel length between the English language produced by American soldiers and KATUSA soldiers. Though English pronunciation by Koreans shows different features in many ways, I focused on English vowel length of KATUSA soldiers. I wanted to know if KATUSA soldiers, when compared with American soldiers, showed a foreign accent when they produced English diphthongs. The reason I wanted to deal with English diphthongs is that most Koreans have difficulty in pronouncing them since they do not understand the concept of diphthongs. Therefore I selected five English diphthongs, /aI/, cI/, /au/, /eI/, /ou,/as/ the experimental object, and I tried to find out the foreign accent of them. In this study I also tried to find out the vowel lengths in relation to their utterance positions. I investigated the difference of the English diphthong length between American and KATUSA soldiers using information gathered from experimental results.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.7-27
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• 2006

This study explored the discrimination of synthesized English vowel pairs by twenty-seven American and Korean, male and female listeners. The average formant values of nine monophthongs produced by ten American English male speakers were employed to synthesize the vowels. Then, subjects were instructed explicitly to respond to AX discrimination tasks in which the standard vowel was followed by another one with the increment or decrement of the original formant values. The highest and lowest formant values of the same vowel quality were collected and compared to examine patterns of vowel discrimination. Results showed that the American and Korean groups discriminated the vowel pairs almost identically and their center formant frequency values of the high and low boundary fell almost exactly on those of the standards. In addition, the acceptable range of the same vowel quality was similar among the language and gender groups. The acceptable thresholds of each vowel formed oval to maintain perceptual contrast from adjacent vowels. The results suggested that nonnative speakers with high English proficiency could match native speakers' performance in discriminating vowel pairs with a shorter inter-stimulus interval. Pedagogical implications of those findings are discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.71-90
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to analyze the improvement of students' interest and general proficiency of English through cultural understanding. To achieve this purpose, two classes of the 2nd grade in the informational high school were divided into the experimental class and the control class. The Grammar-Translation Method was used for the control class and a cultural learning - compare and contrast Korean culture and American culture - was taken for the experimental. After various cultural differences were studied, surveys of students' attitude and reading and listening test were taken. The results from this study were as follows: Firstly, students' interest in English was improved through learning the American culture that was related to the content of each lesson. Secondly, English reading and communicative skills were improved by learning about cultural aspects. Therefore, it can be said that teaching culture stimulates students' interest and motivation for learning English and helps students retain such affective attitudes. And English communicative skills were improved as well.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2013

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is known to be a fronto-centrally negative component of the auditory event-related potentials (ERP). $N\ddot{a}\ddot{a}t\ddot{a}nen$ et al. (1997) and Winkler et al. (1999) discuss that MMN acts as a cue to a phoneme perception in the ERP paradigm. In this study a perception experiment based on an ERP paradigm to check how Korean and American English speakers perceive the American English high front vowels was conducted. The study found that the MMN obtained from both Korean and American English speakers was shown around the same time after they heard F1s of English high front vowels. However, when the same groups heard English words containing them, the American English listeners' MMN was shown to be a little faster than the Korean listeners' MMN. These findings suggest that non-speech sounds, such as F1s of vowels, may be processed similarly across speakers of different languages; however, phonemes are processed differently; a native language phoneme is processed faster than a non-native language phoneme.

• MALSORI
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• no.38
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• pp.71-97
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• 1999

In this paper I have surveyed vowel phonemes in a variety of English accents and have proposed the vowel systems of English. The English accents covered in this paper include General American English, Northeastern American English, Western American English, Southern British English, Northern British English, Scottish English, Southern Irish English, Northern Irish English, Australian English, and New Zealand English. The vowel systems proposed here reflect the acoustic information of vowels and phonological aspects of English. This paper offers an Optimality Theory-based analysis of the English vowel systems by appealing to independently motivated constraints. This paper, following Flemming(1995), makes an assumption that the vowel system in question is selected in output as an optimal candidate by a given constraint ranking, the assumption which is different from the view that the vowel system is fixed in input. The analysis proposed here gives an answer to why a specific vowel system is selected and why dialectal variations come about. It is shown in this paper that the vowel system selected in a specific dialect comes from an optimal satisfaction of a given constraint ranking and that dialectal differences result from dynamic permutations of the same constraints. The constraint-based analysis proffered here accounts well for the similarities and differences among dialects in regard to the vowel system.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.157-173
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• 2003

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate and compare the. vowel lengths of English diphthongs and low vowels among native-English-speaking Americans with Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Eight words and sixteen sentences were uttered five times by twenty five subjects from three groups; 1) Chungnam dialect speakers, 2) Gyungnam dialect speakers and 3) five native-English-speaking Americans. Acoustic features (duration) were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Quire. Results showed that the vowel lengths of English diphthongs and low vowels between native English speakers and Korean collegians of Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces were different. Comparing the average length of English diphthongs of Korean collegians with those of American natives, we can see that native English speakers tend to pronounce the English diphthongs shorter than Korean collegians do. However, native English speakers tend to pronounce the English low vowels longer than Korean collegians do. In this study we also tried to find out the differences of English diphthongs and low vowel lengths in relation to their utterance positions among American natives and Chungnam and Gyungnam dialect speakers. By the results of this experiment, we observed a lengthening effect in the three groups. However, in the pronunciation of American natives, a lengthening effect of English vowels was more clearly observed, especially in the pronunciation of English diphthongs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.75-83
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• 2012

The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.73-89
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• 2007

This study explored the perception of transplanted English prosody by thirty American and Korean, male and female listeners. The English utterances of various sentence types produced by Korean and American male speakers were employed to transplant the American prosody contours to Korean English utterances. Then, the thirty subjects were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the three factors (e.g., rater groups & transplantation types; transplantation types & sentence types; rater groups & transplantation types & sentence types) turned out to be meaningful. Both Americans and Koreans perceived the effectiveness of the combined effect of transplanted duration and pitch or duration and pitch and intensity. However, when perceiving individual prosodic components, Americans and Koreans showed different perceptual ratings. As for the overall prosody change, Americans perceived the change of intensity in a significant way but Koreans did not because intensity is not a crucial semantic factor in Korean. Americans rated the transplantation of duration alone as ineffective while Koreans rated otherwise. This was explained by the difference between English and Korean. The difference of perspective was also significant with different sentence types, especially with the three sentence types that had speech rates slower than other sentence types. A slower speech rate intensified the mismatch between the transplanted duration and the original pitch causing a negative impression on American listeners whereas this did not affect Korean listeners. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2002

One of the benefits of the internet-assisted instruction is that it can improve L2 Learners' motivation to express themselves in English. The purpose of this paper is to investigate an effective approach to British-American fiction learning in Korean universities, which can emphasize communicative strategies drawing on video-conferencing system, a chat system(CUSeeMe), and an e-mail system. Students are passive participants who cannot assert their creativity in the traditional teaching method of British-American fiction, which mainly relies upon reading and translation far from literature lessons. In CCDL(Cross-cultural distance learning) class, students can play active roles in asserting their own ideas and assuming considerable responsibility for making a presentation in English. A professor can play a role as a coordinator in supporting the students' activities and in winding up the class. The main significance of this article lies in providing a paradigm for CCDL class beyond the limitation of the traditional teaching method of British-American fiction in Korea and futhermore in exploring the eclectic integration of the traditional one and CCDL.