• ETRI Journal
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.371-382
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• 2019

Machine reading comprehension is the task of understanding a given context and finding the correct response in that context. A simple recurrent unit (SRU) is a model that solves the vanishing gradient problem in a recurrent neural network (RNN) using a neural gate, such as a gated recurrent unit (GRU) and long short-term memory (LSTM); moreover, it removes the previous hidden state from the input gate to improve the speed compared to GRU and LSTM. A self-matching network, used in R-Net, can have a similar effect to coreference resolution because the self-matching network can obtain context information of a similar meaning by calculating the attention weight for its own RNN sequence. In this paper, we construct a dataset for Korean machine reading comprehension and propose an $S^2-Net$ model that adds a self-matching layer to an encoder RNN using multilayer SRU. The experimental results show that the proposed $S^2-Net$ model has performance of single 68.82% EM and 81.25% F1, and ensemble 70.81% EM, 82.48% F1 in the Korean machine reading comprehension test dataset, and has single 71.30% EM and 80.37% F1 and ensemble 73.29% EM and 81.54% F1 performance in the SQuAD dev dataset.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.65-74
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• 2019

The safety and health signs as an important communication tool can help employees recognize the harm and risk information and take proper actions easily and fast. This study investigated the management of safety and health signs in 75 workplaces and also conducted a survey for the level of subjective comprehension of safety and health signs with 150 employees in Korea. In total, 69 safety and health signs containing alternative signs by KS S ISO 7010 were used for the survey for the ease of comprehension. At the results, the frequency of education on the signs was relatively high, but it was difficult to systematically manage those in the small-sized workplaces. In addition, the results of the ease of comprehension survey showed that proportion of alternative signs was high in the upper rank, and also several alternative signs showed significantly high mean compared with safety and health signs. And the means of alternative signs tended to have higher at the categories of prohibition, instruction, and guidance. Although there are some methodological limitations, it is important that the recent management and the level of comprehension for safety and health signs were empirically identified.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.12
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• pp.466-476
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• 2010

The present study is to investigate the changes of idioms comprehension ability according to the familiarity of idiom, gender and academic achievements. 50 idioms were divided familiar and unfamiliar by the survey. The subjects was 18 years old, 63 college students. The participants were assessed with the task. The task is about the idiom comprehension with 25 familiar idioms and 25 unfamiliar. And there investigated about the academic achievements on participants. The result were as follows: Frist, there was significant difference in the idioms comprehension ability according to the familiarity of idiom. Second, there was on significant difference in the idioms comprehension ability according to gender. Third, there was significant difference in the idioms comprehension ability according to academic achievements. The result of present study will be important data for Korean idiom education of foreigner.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.105-115
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• 2003

The four skills of a language are basically required for a communication. They are very important for a learner to develop the balanced language acquisition. Today both listening and speaking skills are emphasized in the global era rather than reading and writing proficiencies. The reason is really why the learners' communicative competence is more needed than the accurate knowledge of a structure in the language. For this reason, the listening comprehension should be taught effectively using the following strategies. First, the sound difference of a language must be taught. Language is a complicated process to convey the comprehensive meaning combined with the internal and external factors of a language. In other words, the meaning for the sound of language should be transmitted by the unit of vocabulary and syntax. Second, a good listening comprehension requires the familiarity and much experience with a lot of English words to understand English sentences unconsciously. Third, as understanding the structure of language is effective for the listening comprehension, the better listening comprehension can be possible through the meaningful exercise. Fourth, the compound process of listening comprehension requires the comprehensive understanding of language, but not the separate understanding of language. Fifth, the appropriate application of the multimedia courseware helps improve the listening comprehension better than that of the existing audio, video, tape recorder and so on. Using multimedia courseware is useful as follows: A learner is able to take as much lesson as he/she wants. It does take little time to repeat about what he/she takes a lesson. It gives the lively picture with the native speakers' voices. It gives him/her(a learner) a feedback effect continuously through the interaction of computer. It controls his/her lesson in accordance with the level of a learner.

• Korean Journal of Forensic Psychology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.241-265
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to compare the current victims' rights guide, which was revised during 2019, with former victims' rights guide to determine whether the current guide improved the comprehension of victims' rights among lay people. In addition, we examined the effect of the level of education and perceived stress on the comprehension of the victims' rights. A total of 289 participants were asked to answer a series of questions to examine their comprehension level of the victim's rights and to measure their level of education and perceived stress level. The results showed that the objective comprehension level the current guide condition was higher than the former one, but no difference was found with the subjective comprehension level. The interaction effect between conditions of the guide and educational level was not found on the objective comprehension of the victims' rights. The effect of the conditions of the guide on the subjective comprehension of victims' rights indicated a tendency to decrease by perceived stress. Finally, policy implications and limitations of this study were also discussed.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.15-28
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• 2009

This study focused on the comprehension of texts written either in Korean script (Hangul) or Chinese script (Hanja). For this purpose, we measured the reading time and the correct response in text comprehension tasks with 104 Korean-Chinese children who were either 10 or 19 years old. There was a main effect of script : The reading time of Hanja texts was shorter than that of Hangul or Hangul Hanja mixed texts. But the older subjects who spent the same reading time in both Hangul and Hanja texts showed the longer reading time in Hangul Hanja mixed texts revealing the interaction between age and script. The correct response rate on the comprehension task was the highest in Hangul text. The results were discussed in relation to the independent dual language processing systems in Korean-Chinese.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.187-209
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• 2001

This study attempts to supplement what is known about the influence of prior knowledge on second language listening comprehension. To do so, the study examines the effect of prior knowledge and language proficiency on the ability of L2 listeners to understand texts. The purpose of an experiment was to determine the effect of topic familiarity on the L2 listening comprehension ability of subjects who varied in L2 listening proficiency level. The subjects (N=117) were selected from a population of college students enrolled in the Departments of English and Business in Korea. English listening proficiency levels were designated on the basis of TOEFL listening scores. Subjects listened twice each to texts (more familiar and less familiar). After listening to each text, a ten-item objective test was administered to test the subjects' comprehension of the information presented in the text. Objective tests were analyzed. using repeated measures analysis. A post hoc test was conducted to identify the means that were significantly different. This study yielded the following results: (1) subjects with high prior knowledge comprehended texts significantly better than did subjects with low prior knowledge; (2) the level of L2 listening proficiency had a significant effect on the L2 listening comprehension of texts, but there was no interaction between prior knowledge and the level of L2 listening proficiency.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.362-371
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate difficulties in using prosodic information to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences in children with high functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen high functioning autistic children and fifteen children who matched their chronological age (CA) participated in this study. We compared the performance of the two groups by conducting syntactically and affectively ambiguous sentence comprehension (SASC and AASC) tasks. The results of this study show that in both tasks, the difference between the two groups was statistically significant at each condition and the performance of high functioning autistic children was significantly lower. In a correlation analysis of major variables, children who matched CA showed a correlation between prosody-only (PO) and AASC, while children with HFA showed a correlation between PO and MO (morpheme-only). Children with HFA used grammatical morpheme information to understand general sentences. We found that the ability to use prosodic information in children with HFA is significantly lower than that of normally developed children. Considering the relevance of prosody to linguistic, non-linguistic and emotional aspects of communication, improving prosodic perception is thought to be a way to mediate deficits in the comprehension of ambiguous sentences in children with HFA.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.249-262
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• 2014

This study investigated differences in children's story comprehension as they related to the types of reading media. The participants comprised 62 four-years-olds from two child-care centers located in a middle-income region of Seoul and Gyeonggi Province. In order to control the experience effect, newly developed stories published into two formats of reading media (paperback books and electronic books) were provided to the participants. The results indicated that there were no significant differences in children's story comprehension depending on the types of reading media. Paperback book readers and electronic book readers did not show any significant difference in story comprehension, which consists of recall, recognition and reasoning tasks. As literature pertaining to children's usage of electronic books is limited, the present study offers guidelines for the development of children's reading media and may serve as a useful resource for future studies.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.127-134
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to present evidence for a particular processing approach based on the language-specific characteristics of Korean. To compare individuals' sentence-comprehension abilities, this study measured the accuracy and reaction times (RT) of 12 aphasic patients (AP) and 12 normal controls (NC) during a sentence-picture matching task. Four versions of a sentence were constructed with the two types of voice (active/passive) and two types of word order (agent-first/patient-first). To examine the effects of increased processing demand, picture stimuli were manipulated in such a way that they appeared immediately after the sentence was presented. As expected, the AP group showed higher error rates and longer RT for all conditions than the NC group. Furthermore, Korean speakers with aphasia performed above a chance level in sentence comprehension, even with passive sentences. Aphasics understood sentences more quickly and accurately when they were given in the active voice and with agent-first order. The patterns of the NC group were similar. These results confirm that Korean adults with aphasia do not completely lose their knowledge of sentence comprehension. When the processing demand was increased by delaying the picture stimulus onset, the effect of increased processing demands on RT was more pronounced in the AP than in the NC group. These findings fit well with the idea that the computational system for interpreting sentences is intact in aphasics, but its ability is compromised when processing demands increase.