• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.143-148
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• 2002

This study examined the foreign accent of Korean speakers of English concerning vowel length and utterance position. It then attempts to explain the foreign accent of Koreans when they speak English. The method was to measure the sentence-initial and sentence-final vowels as spoken by Koreans. I chose these two positions, sentence-initial and sentence-final, in order to know if Korean speakers of English, compared with native English speakers, show a difference in sentence stress. I chose English diphthongs, because most Koreans have difficulty pronouncing these sounds. I found that Korean speakers of English as a second language do not know English sentence stress patterns and show a foreign accent, especially when using diphthongs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2022

The English word-final /rl/ cluster poses a particular problem for Korean learners of English because it is the sequence of two sounds, /r/ and /l/, which are not contrastive in Korean. This study compared the similarity distances between English and Korean speakers' /rl/ productions using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The words with /rl/ (pearl, world) and without /rl/ (bird, word) were recorded by four English speakers and four Korean speakers, and compared pairwise. The F2-F1 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of velarized /l/, and F3 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of /r/, were examined. Formant analysis showed that English speakers lowered F2-F1 values toward the end of a word, unlike Korean speakers, suggesting the absence of /l/ in Korean speakers. In contrast, there was no significant difference in F3 values. Mixed-effects regression analyses of the DTW distances revealed that Korean speakers produced /r/ similarly to English speakers but failed to produce the velarized /l/ in /rl/ clusters.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.91-95
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of postvocalic voicing(Contrasting voiceless fricative and affricate with voiced fricative and affricate) on vowel duration. In particular we focused on the durational differences between vowels followed by voiceless and voiced consonants across three groups of speakers: English speakers, English bilinguals and Korean learners of English. the result of experimental I showed that durations of vowels preceding voiced fricative and affricates as well as voiced stops are significantly longer than those preceding voiceless counterparts. Experiment Ⅱ indicated that as the subjects exposed themselves longer to English speaking society, their pronunciation was increasingly similar to those of English native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.11-16
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• 2023

The present study examines how a cognitive attention affects Korean learners of English (L2) in perceiving the English stop voicing distinction (/d/-/t/). This study tested the effect of attentional distractor on primary and non-primary acoustic cues, focusing on the role of Voice Onset Time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0). Using the dual-task paradigm, 28 Korean adult learners of English participated in the stop identification task carried with (distractor) and without (no-distractor) arithmetic calculation. Results showed that when distracted, Korean learners' sensitivity to VOT decreased as priorly reported with native English speakers. Furthermore, as F0 is a primary cue for a L1 Korean stop laryngeal contrast, its role in L2 English voicing distinction was also affected by a distractor, without compensating for the reduced VOT sensitivity. These findings suggest that flexible use of multiple cues in L1 is not necessarily beneficial for L2 phonological processing when coping with a adverse listening condition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.137-147
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable structures of ten Korean numeric sounds produced by ten students. Each sound was normalized by its maximum intensity value and divided into onset, vowel, and coda sections after finding abrupt or visible changes in energy values or cumulative values of lower spectral energy at each pulse point using four Praat scripts. Then, segmental durations and cumulative intensity values of each syllable were obtained to find a statistical summary of the syllable structure. Intensity values at 100 proportional time points were also collected to compare the ten sounds. Results showed as follows: Firstly, 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. Secondly, the onset point for the CV or CVC category sounds and the boundary between the vowel and the nasal or lateral sound were easy to identify, which may be automatically traced later. Thirdly, there seems some tradeoff among the sections maintaining the same total duration per each syllable. Further studies on syllables with various onsets or codas would be desirable to make a general statement on the Korean syllable structure.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1992.06a
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• pp.71-75
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• 1992

This paper proposes algorithm in order to classify Korean consonant phonemes same as polosives, fricatives affricates into la sounds, glottalized sounds, aspirated sounds. This three kinds of sounds are one of distinctive characters of the Korean language which don't eist in language same as English. This is thesis on classfication of 14 Korean consonants(k, t, p, s, c, k', t', p', s', c', kh, ph, ch) as a previous stage for Korean phone recognition. As feature sets for classification, LPC cepstral analysis. The eperiments are two stages. First, using short-time speech signal analysis and Mahalanobis distance, consonant segments are detected from original speech signal, then the consonants are classified by fuzzy inference. As the results of computer simulations, the classification rate of the speech data was come to 93.75%.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2017

This study examined how early bilingual children produce sounds in their two languages articulated with the same manner of articulation but at different places of articulation. English affricates are palato-alveolar and Korean affricates are alveolar. This study analyzed the frequencies of center of gravity (COG), spectral peak (SP), and the second formant (F2) of word-initial affricates in English and Korean produced by twenty-four early Korean-English bilingual children (aged 4 to 7), and compared them with those of monolingual counterparts in the two languages. If early Korean-English bilingual children produce palato-alveolar affricates in English and alveolar affricates in Korean, they may produce Korean affricates with higher COGs, SPs, and F2s than English affricates. The early Korean-English bilingual children at the age of 4 produced English and Korean affricates with similar COGs, SPs, and F2s, and the COGs, SPs, and F2s of their Korean affricates were similar to those of the Korean monolingual counterparts. However, the early bilingual children at the age of 5 to 7 had lower COGs and SPs for English affricates with higher F2s compared to Korean affricates, and the COGs, SPs, and F2s of their English affricates were similar to those of the English monolingual counterparts.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.53-62
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to examine the English l sound in an English short story produced by 16 Korean students in order to determine various allophones of the sound using acoustic visual displays and perceptual judgments. The subjects read the story in a quiet office at normal speed. Each word included the lateral sound in onset or coda positions and before a vowel of the following word. Results showed as follows: Firstly, there was a durational difference between the two major groups. Also the majority of the subjects produced the clear l regardless of the contexts. Some students produced the sound as the Korean flap or the English glide [r]. A few missing cases were also seen. The dark l was mostly produced by the subjects of English majors in coda position with a few cases before a vowel in a phrase. Visual displays using the computer analysis were very helpful in distinguishing lateral variants but sometimes perceptual process would be necessary to judge them in fast and weak production of the target word. Further studies would be desirable to test the discrepancies between the acoustical and perceptual decisions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.75-87
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• 2005

In this study I investigate how native Korean listeners perceive English vowels /i/, /I/, and /$\epsilon$/. I extend Flege et al's (1997) study with synthesized /i/-/I/ and /I/-/$\epsilon$/ continua, and apply the results to Flege's (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM). The statistical results show that native speakers of English rely more on spectral steps than on vowel duration when they identify the /i/-/I/ continuum, whereas native speakers of Korean rely more on vowel duration than on spectral steps when they identify the same continuum. In the case of the /I/-/$\epsilon$/ continuum, both groups rely on spectral steps when they identify the /$\epsilon$/, which supports the SLM; Koreans identified the /$\epsilon$/ categorically since Korean has the equivalent vowel. However, there was not statistical difference between Korean subjects with more English experience (KE) and those with less English experience in the identification of both continua. This contradicts the SLM, which posits that experienced L2 learners are better than inexperienced L2 learners in perception of L2 sounds. The exact nature of this should be further investigated in the SLM.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.36-43
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• 2000

Koreans' interest in and concern with learning English are at the peak as more actions and transactions in our daily life are carried out in English. Even though we are experiencing a big transition from a conventional grammar-translation method to communicative language teaching, little efforts have been made to set the new goals and objectives, norms and standards, and to develop new instructional methods for teaching pronunciation for international communication. This lecture will introduce a new approach of teaching English pronunciation for international communication, suggesting how to implement it to Korean ELT classrooms. It will also address the necessity of research on Korean learners of English, focusing on their perception and production of English sounds for international intelligibility and identity,