• Title/Summary/Keyword: Chinese speakers

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Development of Measurement of Stress for Female Marriage Immigrants in Korea (여성결혼이민자의 스트레스 측정도구 개발)

  • Park, Min Hee;Yang, Sook Ja
    • Journal of Korean Public Health Nursing
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    • v.26 no.3
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    • pp.518-531
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    • 2012
  • Purpose: This study was conducted in order to develop and test a measurement for assessment of stress of female marriage immigrants in Korea. Methods: Forty four preliminary items were initially developed based on literature review and focus group interviews. Those items were evaluated by experts for content validity, resulting in six factors and 26 items. The 26 items were translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, and English by professional translators and were reviewed by native speakers of each language who are fluent in Korean. For testing validity and reliability, data were collected from 323 female marriage immigrants residing in five regions in Korea. Results: As a result of item analysis, 25 items were selected. Factor analysis yielded 21 items in four factors, including 1) household economic 2) parenting and discrimination 3) cultural and 4) emotional stressors, explaining 61.3% of the total variance of stress of female marriage immigrants in Korea. The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient was .903 for the overall instrument and .692-.892 for four factors. Conclusion: Measurement of stress for female marriage immigrants in Korea has high validity and reliability. Therefore, this measurement may be utilized for systematic assessment of stress and for identification of areas of support for female marriage immigrants in Korea.

Optimizing Multiple Pronunciation Dictionary Based on a Confusability Measure for Non-native Speech Recognition (타언어권 화자 음성 인식을 위한 혼잡도에 기반한 다중발음사전의 최적화 기법)

  • Kim, Min-A;Oh, Yoo-Rhee;Kim, Hong-Kook;Lee, Yeon-Woo;Cho, Sung-Eui;Lee, Seong-Ro
    • MALSORI
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    • no.65
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    • pp.93-103
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    • 2008
  • In this paper, we propose a method for optimizing a multiple pronunciation dictionary used for modeling pronunciation variations of non-native speech. The proposed method removes some confusable pronunciation variants in the dictionary, resulting in a reduced dictionary size and less decoding time for automatic speech recognition (ASR). To this end, a confusability measure is first defined based on the Levenshtein distance between two different pronunciation variants. Then, the number of phonemes for each pronunciation variant is incorporated into the confusability measure to compensate for ASR errors due to words of a shorter length. We investigate the effect of the proposed method on ASR performance, where Korean is selected as the target language and Korean utterances spoken by Chinese native speakers are considered as non-native speech. It is shown from the experiments that an ASR system using the multiple pronunciation dictionary optimized by the proposed method can provide a relative average word error rate reduction of 6.25%, with 11.67% less ASR decoding time, as compared with that using a multiple pronunciation dictionary without the optimization.

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The influence of task demands on the preparation of spoken word production: Evidence from Korean

  • Choi, Tae-Hwan;Oh, Sujin;Han, Jeong-Im
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.9 no.4
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    • pp.1-7
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    • 2017
  • It was shown in speech production studies that the preparation unit of spoken word production is language particular, such as onset phonemes for English and Dutch, syllables for Mandarin Chinese, and morae for Japanese. However, there have been inconsistent results on whether the onset phoneme is a planning unit of spoken word production in Korean. In this study, two sets of experiments investigated possible influences of task demands on the phonological preparation in native Korean adults, namely, implicit priming and word naming with the form preparation paradigm. Only the word naming task, but not the implicit priming task, showed a significant onset priming effect, even though there were significant syllable priming effects in both tasks. Following the attentional theory ($O^{\prime}S{\acute{e}}aghdha$ & Frazer, 2014), these results suggest that task demands might play a role in the absence/presence of onset priming effects in Korean. Native Korean speakers could maintain their attention to the shared onset phonemes in word naming, which is not very demanding, while they have difficulties in allocating their attention to such units in a more cognitive-demanding implicit priming, even though both tasks involve accessing phonological codes. These findings demonstrate that there are cross-linguistic differences in the first selectable unit in preparation of spoken word production, but within a single language, the preparation unit might not be immutable.

The Study about the suitability of the translations of categories in the Questionnaire for Pattern Identification of Chronic Low Back Pain (만성 요통 한의진단 도구 개발을 위한 변증 항목 번역 적합성에 관한 연구)

  • Park, Chang-Hyun;Kang, Yong-Joong;Ko, Seong-Gyu;Song, Yun-Kyung
    • The Journal of Churna Manual Medicine for Spine and Nerves
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    • v.11 no.2
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    • pp.45-56
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    • 2016
  • Objectives : The aim of this study is to verify if the translation of chronic low back pain questionary is done properly. Methods : We used pattern identification of chronic low back pain in the guideline suggested by Ministry of Food and Drug Safety when making the questionnaire. And we used expressions which four native korean speakers who have bachelor's degree on chinese and teach related subjects in university have agreed on for two times. Results : We examined translated sentences about 40 symptoms according to 9 large categories on the questionnaire and corrected them into agreed expressions. Conclusions : In this study, we carried out evaluations on the suitability of the translations of categories which identify symptoms of low back pain. From now on, it is necessary to verify the degree of accuracy of question items that have been subjected to translation verification in clinical diagnosis. Furthermore considering the characteristics of patients with low back pain, we think diagnostic tools which reflects objective diagnosis results other than diagnostic identification are needed in the clinical field.

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The effects of explicit and implicit pragmatic instruction in Korean request strategies for Chinese learners (명시적 교수와 암시적 교수가 요청 화행 전략 표현 학습에 미치는 효과 비교 연구 - 중국인 한국어 학습자를 대상으로 -)

  • Lee, YeonKyung
    • Journal of Korean language education
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.115-144
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    • 2014
  • The purpose of this paper is to compare the two different instruction methods for Korean learners of academic purposes in learning request expression. Participants were divided into two groups, explicit and implicit group. Both groups viewed several scenes from the drama that involved native speakers interacting in different situations. The instructional treatment for the explicit group included metapragmatic information while the treatment for the implicit group did not. On the other hand, the treatment for the implicit group followed implicit techniques, which were repetition of the video presentation and a script reading activity. This study was made up of a pre-test, a post-test, and a delayed-test. The pre-test was conducted prior to the instructional treatment. The post-test was administered a day after the last instruction and the delayed-test was conducted five weeks after the treatments. Two types of tests, speaking and writing, were used in this study to examine subjects' knowledge of Korean request. The result of this research reveals that implicit treatment was more effective than explicit treatment in Korean learners' request acquisition. This results might have been due to the operationalization of the implicit condition in this study. Implicit instruction may help language learners make rules by themselves through tasks.

Bilingualism and Processing Strategies: Backward Transfer in Korean-Chinese Bilinguals (이중언어와 문장 처리 전략: 한국어-중국어 이중언어자의 전략후행전이)

  • Lee, Kwee-Ock;Jun, Jong-Sup;Park, Hye-Won;Ahn, Jung-Ok
    • Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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    • v.14 no.4
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    • pp.21-31
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    • 2003
  • This paper reports our experimental study with Korean-Chinese (=KC) bilinguals as compared with Korean monolinguals. We aim to find KC bilingual speakers' sentence processing strategies, and the interaction between the Ll and U2 grammars in bilingual development. To this end, we recruited 166 subjects of all age groups from age 3 to adult in the Korean autonomous community in Yanji, China, and did a classical subject/actor identification test, where subjects are supposed to pick out the subjects/actor of both sensical and nonsensical sentences (cf. Liu, Bates & Li, 1992). We compared our results with our previous work on monolingual Koreans, and found out that KC bilinguals rely on word order as well as anumacy; that KC bilinguals make use of morphology at age 10 as compared with age 5 for monolinguals; and that KC bilingual adults rely on animacy and word order as well as morphology, while monolingual Korean adults rely solely on morphology for sentence interpretation. Given that animacy and word order play an important role in the Chinese grammar, our finding lends support to the backward transfer which Liu, Bates & Li (1992) propose for early bilingualism.

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Korean /l/-flapping in an /i/-/i/ context

  • Son, Minjung
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.7 no.1
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    • pp.151-163
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    • 2015
  • In this study, we aim to describe kinematic characteristics of Korean /l/-flapping in two speech rates (fast vs. comfortable). Production data was collected from seven native speakers of Seoul Korean (four females and three males) using electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA), which provided two dimensional data on the x-y plane. We examined kinematic properties of the vertical/horizontal tongue tip gesture, the vertical/horizontal (rear) tongue body gesture, and the jaw gesture in an /i/-/i/ context. Gestural landmarks of the vertical tongue tip gesture are directly measured. This serves as the actual anchoring time points to which relevant measures of other trajectories referred. The study focuses on velocity profiles, closing/opening spatiotemporal properties, constriction duration, and constriction minima were analyzed. The results are summarized as follows. First, gradiently distributed spatiotemporal values of the vertical tongue tip gesture were on a continuum. This shows more of a reduction in fast speech rate, but no single instance of categorical reduction (deletion). Second, Korean /l/-flapping predominantly exhibited a backward sliding tongue tip movement, in 83% of production, which is apparently distinguished from forward sliding movement in English. Lastly, there was an indication of vocalic reduction in fast rate, truncating spatial displacement of the jaw and the tongue body, although we did not observe positional variations with speech rate. The present study shows that Korean /l/-flapping is characterized by mixed articulatory properties with respect to flapping sounds of other languages such as English and Xiangxiang Chinese. Korean /l/ flapping demonstrates a language-universal property, such as the gradient nature of its flapping sounds that is compatible with other languages. On the other hand, Korean /l/-flapping also shows a language-particular property, particularly distinguished from English, in that a backward gliding movement occurs during the tongue tip closing movement. Although, there was no vocalic reduction in V2 observed in terms of jaw and tongue body height, spatial displacement of these articulators still suggests truncation in fast speech rate.

Hierarchical Regimentation of Korean Language Uses (반말의 비인문성 -철학자가 본 한국의 언어연구-)

  • 정대현
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.5
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    • pp.75-92
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    • 2003
  • One of the distinctive features of Korean language is that it has a fine hierarchical regimentation of language uses, perhaps finer than English, Chinese or Japanese. If English language uses have a hierarchical structure they are to be thick. You may respond to any of your male colleagues often by saying either "Yes, Sir" or "Yes, John". But Korean speakers attend to the One grades of differences of social positions of a speaker and a hearer and they show the respect of the difference by adding or dropping relevant suffixes of verbs which Korean language has developed. For example, one yew difference would affect how you choose a suffix of verbs you use to speak to your hearer and two year difference often leads to the adoption of still another fitting suffix of the same verb. One year criterion works not only in 3my barracks, school dormitories but also in government offices. business sectors. Korean speaking people have been taught to use this finely regimented hierarchical language. I try, in this paper, to develop the idea that hierarchical regimentation of Korean language uses is not humane. 1 of for the main argument for the thesis as what follows: How could one justify the hierarchical regimentation of a language like Korean\ulcorner Only if there is an essential structure in which the fine grades of differences of social positions of all the people are distinct; The essentialism here involved is not plausible. And I may add that language is to be used fur the purposes of communication, rationalization and expression. If true, language use is a genuine art of liberation or humanization. Any overt hierarchical language tends to damage those purposes and more to enforce those oppressive elements already existing in the community. Then, a hierarchical language is to defeat its own purpose.

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Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

  • Koroloff, Carolyn
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • no.5
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    • pp.49-62
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    • 1999
  • Education systems throughout the world encourage their students to learn languages other than their native one. In Australia, our Education Boards provide students with the opportunity to learn European and Asian languages. French, German, Chinese and Japanese are the most popular languages studied in elementary and high schools. This choice is a reflection of Australias European heritage and its geographical position near Asia. In most non-English speaking countries, English is the foreign language most readily available to students. In Korea, the English language is actively promoted by the Education Department and, in less official ways, by companies and the public. It is impossible to be anywhere in Korea without seeing the English language alongside or intermingled with Korean. When I ask students why they are learning English, I receive answers that include the word globalization and the importance of English throughout the world. When I press further and ask why they personally are learning English, the students mention passing exams, usually high school tests or TOEIC, and the necessity of passing the latter to obtain a good job. Seldom do I ever hear anything about communication: about the desire to talk with other people in English, to read novels or poetry in English, to understand movies or pop-songs in English, to chat on the Internet in English, to search for information on the Internet in English, or to email pen-pals in English. Yet isnt communication the only valid reason for learning a language? We learn our native language to communicate with those around us. Shouldnt we set the same goal for learning a foreign language? In my opinion communication, whether it is reading and writing or speaking and listening, must be central to language learning. Learning a language to pass examinations is meaningless unless those examinations are a reliable indicator of the ability of the student to communicate. In previous eras, most communication in a foreign language was through reading novels or formal letters. This required a thorough knowledge of grammar and a large vocabulary. Todays communication is much less formal. Telephone conversations, tele-conferences, faxes and emails allow people to communicate regularly and informally. Reading materials are also less formal as popular novels and newspapers are available world-wide. Movies and popular songs have added to the range of informal communication available. Finally travel has ensured that people from different cultures will meet easily and regularly. This informal communication requires less emphasis on grammar and vocabulary and more emphasis on comprehension and confidence to speak. Placing communication central to language learning has important implications for the Education system and for teachers.

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Speech Recognition Using Linear Discriminant Analysis and Common Vector Extraction (선형 판별분석과 공통벡터 추출방법을 이용한 음성인식)

  • 남명우;노승용
    • The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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    • v.20 no.4
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    • pp.35-41
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    • 2001
  • This paper describes Linear Discriminant Analysis and common vector extraction for speech recognition. Voice signal contains psychological and physiological properties of the speaker as well as dialect differences, acoustical environment effects, and phase differences. For these reasons, the same word spelled out by different speakers can be very different heard. This property of speech signal make it very difficult to extract common properties in the same speech class (word or phoneme). Linear algebra method like BT (Karhunen-Loeve Transformation) is generally used for common properties extraction In the speech signals, but common vector extraction which is suggested by M. Bilginer et at. is used in this paper. The method of M. Bilginer et al. extracts the optimized common vector from the speech signals used for training. And it has 100% recognition accuracy in the trained data which is used for common vector extraction. In spite of these characteristics, the method has some drawback-we cannot use numbers of speech signal for training and the discriminant information among common vectors is not defined. This paper suggests advanced method which can reduce error rate by maximizing the discriminant information among common vectors. And novel method to normalize the size of common vector also added. The result shows improved performance of algorithm and better recognition accuracy of 2% than conventional method.

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