• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.33-52
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• 2001

A bilingual sound dictionary in Korean and English has been created for a broad range of sound reference to cross-linguistic, dialectal, native language (L1)-transferred biological and allophonic variations. The paper demonstrates that the pronunciation dictionary of the lexicon is inadequate for sound reference due to the preponderance of unmarked sounds. The audio registry consists of the three-way comparison of 1) English speech from native English speakers, 2) Korean speech from Korean speakers, and 3) English speech from Korean speakers. Several sub-dictionaries have been created as the foundation research for independent development. They are 1) a pronunciation dictionary of the Korean lexicon in a keyboard-compatible phonetic transcription, 2) a sound dictionary of L1-interfered language, and 3) an audible dictionary of Korean sounds. The dictionary was designed to facilitate the exchange of the speech signal and its corresponding text data on various media particularly on CD-ROM. The methodology and findings of the construction are discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.81-91
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• 1997

This paper deals with the problems of English listening comprehension: the rate of understanding difference in positions and sentence structures, parts of speech easily missed to understand, English sounds only in English(not in Korean), confusion of sounds, unaccented prefixes and suffixes, polysemy, homonym, juncture, understanding as one word by two different words, and sound blending in a normal speed of connected speech. Bearing those in mind I taught Suwon University freshmen video English with the mixed idea of Peterson's bottom-up and top-down methods putting in a meaningful context with thought group rather than word to word understanding. As a consequence, their errors come: prepositions, conjunctions, unstressed prefixes and suffixes, -ing from the present progressives and so forth. Assignments to have students transcribe the TV commercials and the names of reporters or Korean related news from English broadcastings are of use and help.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2005

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not the use of the Korean alphabet increased the accuracy of English sentences Korean university students produced in dictation. The students were divided into three categories, beginning, intermediate, and advanced, based on the listening comprehension scores of a practice TOEIC test. The total population of 120 students were divided into two groups, control and experiment. In the first testing, the experiment group transcribed the English utterances on a practice TOEIC tape into phonological writing in Korean and then later changed the Korean writing into English words and sentences. In the second testing, the control group became the experiment group and used the Korean alphabet in transcribing the English sounds. Statistically significant differences were found in the improvement of accuracy in dictation when the Korean alphabet was used, especially for the beginning and intermediate students. By using the Korean alphabet as the phonological representation of the sounds, the students in the experiment group produced more accurate English words than the control group who went directly from the English utterances to writing in English. Statistically significant results were not produced for the advanced students. The significance of the present study relates to the need to add to the paucity of available data on the use of the Korean alphabet in teaching listening comprehension.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.37-46
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• 2010

This study investigates acoustic characteristics of English and Korean voiceless sibilant fricatives as they appear before the three vowels, /i/, /$\alpha$/ and /u/. Three measurements - duration, center of gravity and major spectral peak - are employed to compare acoustic properties and vowel effect for each fricative sound. This study also investigates the question of whether Korean sibilant fricatives are acoustically similar to the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ or to the palato-alveolar /$\int$/. The results show that in the duration of frication noise, English /$\int$/ is the longest and Korean lax /s/ the shortest of the four sounds. It is also observed that English alveolar /s/ has the highest value, whereas Korean /s/ shows the lowest value in the frequency of center of gravity. In terms of major spectral peak, while English /s/ reveals the highest frequency, English /$\int$/ shows the lowest value. In addition, evidence indicates that there is a strong vowel effect in the fricative sounds of both languages, although the vowel effect patterns of the two languages are inconsistent. For instance, in the major spectral peak, both Korean lax /s/ and tense /$s^*$/ show significantly higher frequencies before the vowel /$\alpha$/ than before the other vowels, whereas both English /s/ and /$\int$/ exhibit significantly higher frequencies before the vowel /i/ than before the other vowels. These results indicate that Korean sibilant fricatives are acoustically distinct from both English /s/ and /$\int$/.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.366-370
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• 2000

Thie aim of this paper is to assess the Japanese students' listening ability to distinguish English sounds by using the modified version of the English Auditory discrimination Test which was devised by the author in 19998.

• 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.7 no.3
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• pp.127-138
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• 2000

The aim of this paper is to find the speech problems of English Laterals by Korean learners and to contribute to the effective pronunciation education with visualizing the pronunciation. In this paper we analyzed 18 words including lateral sounds which were divided into such as: initial, initial consonant cluster, intervocalic, final consonant cluster, and final. To analyse the words we used High speed speech analysis system. We examined acoustic characteristics of English lateral spectrogram by using voice sustained time(ms), FL1, FL2, FL3. Before we started, we had expected that the result would show us that the mother tongue interfere in the final sounds because we have similar sounds in Korea. The results of our experiments showed that initially, voice sustained time showed many more differences between Korean and native pronunciation. Also, it was seen that Korean pronunciation used the syllable structure of the own mother tongue. For instance, in the case of initial consonant cluster CCVC, Koreans often used CC as a syllable and VC as another. This was due to the mother tongue interference. For this reason in the intervocalic and in the final, we saw the differences between Korean and native. Therefore we have to accept the visualized analysis system in the instruction of pronunciation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.91-112
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• 1998

This paper aimed at examining the influence of L1 (native language) phonology when speakers of L1 perceive L2 (foreign language) sounds. Korean and Japanese learners of English took a perception test of Australian English words 'work', 'walk' and 'wok'. Based on Korean and Japanese phonology, it was predicted that Korean subjects would face more difficulties than Japanese subjects. The results of the experiment substantiated the influence of L1 phonology in L2 learners' L2 sound perception.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.63-75
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• 2002

This paper examines the principles of the International Phonetic Association and its Alphabet to see if the International Phonetic Alphabet (the IPA, for short) is adequate for transcribing sounds of a language like Korean. Special attention is given to 'broad transcription' and it has been found that the IPA is inadequate in representing the phonemes: there is no way to correctly transcribe phonemically the sounds of Korean with the current alphabet. A suggestion is given to help solve this problem and extend the IPA to accommodate all the different languages of the world.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.170-172
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable structures of ten Korean numeric sounds produced by ten subjects of the same age. Each sound was normalized and divided into onset, vowel, and coda sections. Then, acoustical measurements of each syllable were done to compare the ten sounds. Results showed that there was not much deviation from the grand average duration and intensity for the majority of the sounds except the two diphthongal sounds on which their boundary points varied among the speakers. Some syllable boundaries were quite obvious while others were ambiguous. There seemed some tradeoff among the syllable components depending on their acoustic features.