• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.7-16
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• 2000

It is a great honour for me to speak to you today on the Korean's problems in learning English pronunciation. First of all I would like to thank Prof. H. B. Lee, President of the Phonetic Society of Korea for calling upon me to make a keynote speech at this International Conference on Phonetic Sciences. The year before last when the 1 st Joint Summit on English Phonetics was held at Aichi Gakuin University in Japan, the warm hospitality given to me and my colleagues by the English Phonetic Society of Japan was so great that I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the English Phonetic Society of Japan and especially to Prof. Masaki Tsuzuki, President of the Society. Korean learners of English have a lot of problems in learning English pronunciation. Some vowel problems seem to be shared by Japanese learners but other problems, especially in consonants, are peculiar to Koreans owing to the nature of phonological rules peculiar to the Korean language. Of course, there are other important problems like speech rhythm and intonation besides vowels and consonants. But they will not be included here because of limited time.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.8
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• pp.313-329
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• 2006

In some American English dialects, the vowels /a:/ or /c:/ have been replaced with /a:/, as in caught /ka:t/ dog /da:g/ that were pronounced in /kc:t/, and /dc:g/ previously. General American does not have /a:/ in its vowel system. But in East American and Western Pensylvania, cot and caught are homophones, /ka:t/, and similarly with other pairs such as collar vs. caller, stock vs. stalk, don vs. down, knotty vs. naughty. The use of /a/ or /c/ is quite unstable, and is a well-known diagnostic for distinguishing the northern speech area of the United States from the midland and southern area. For an increasing number of Americans, however, entirely lack the opposition between /a/ and /c/, merging to /a/, referring to 'both' of the vowels of lot. This paper investigates the use of /b:/ in American dialects and its relationship with /a:/, /c:/ in AE, and with short /a/ in RP. Examining the isoglosses of the use of /a:/ in various databases of the phonological atlas of North America, this paper discusses the use, position, and trend of merger to /a:/ from the vowels of /a:/ and /c:/ in Current American English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.31-37
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• 2018

Pitch trajectories reflect a continuous variation of vocal fold movements over time. This study examined the pitch trajectories of English vowels produced by 139 American English speakers, statistically analyzing their trajectories using the Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). First, Praat was used to read the sound data of Hillenbrand et al. (1995). A pitch analysis script was then prepared, and six pitch values at the corresponding time points within each vowel segment were collected and checked. The results showed that the group of men produced the lowest pitch trajectories, followed by the groups of women, boys, then girls. The density line showed a bimodal distribution. The pitch values at the six corresponding time points formed a single dip, which changed gradually across the vowel segment from 204 to 193 to 196 Hz. The normality tests performed on the pitch data rejected the null hypothesis. Nonparametric tests were therefore conducted to discover the significant differences in the values among the four groups. The GAMMs, which analyzed all the pitch data, produced significant results among the pitch values at the six corresponding time points but not between the two groups of boys and girls. The GAMMs also revealed that the two groups were significantly different only at the first and second time points. Accordingly, the methodology of this study and its findings may be applicable to future studies comparing curvilinear data sets elicited by experimental conditions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

This study investigates the perception and production of English front vowels focusing on the distinction in /i/ vs /I/ and /$\varepsilon$/ vs /$\ae$/ by sixty-one Korean speakers. The first portion of this study focused on the perceptional discrimination by the subjects of two sets of English vowel contrasts, /i/ vs /I/ and /$\varepsilon$/ vs /$\ae$/. In the second portion of the study, the production of these vowels by the same subjects who had participated in the perceptional discrimination test was examined acoustically and subsequently compared with that of the control group comprised of native English speakers. The major results indicate that: (1) In perception tests, Korean subjects can discriminate between /i/ and /I/ relatively well, while many of them were not able to discriminate between /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\ae$/; (2) the Korean subjects, however, have difficulty producing a distinct version of these front vowels; and, (3) The relationship between the perception and production is not significant. These results were analyzed with the concept of "under-differentiation" and "reinterpretation of distinction," as well as how phonetic differences influenced the production and discrimination of front vowels by Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.49-55
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• 2009

This study investigates whether rhythm metrics can be used to capture the rhythmic differences between spontaneous and read English speech. Transcription of spontaneous speech tokens extracted from a corpus is read by three English native speakers to generate the corresponding read speech tokens. Two data sets are compared in terms of seven rhythm measures that are suggested by previous studies. Results show that there is a significant difference in the values of vowel-based metrics (VarcoV and nPVI-V) between spontaneous and read speech. This manifests a greater variability in vocalic intervals in spontaneous speech than in read speech. The current study is especially meaningful as it demonstrates a way in which speech styles can be differentiated and parameterized in numerical terms.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.207-221
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• 2003

Phonetic voicing does not support the phonological distinction of voiced/voiceless in English stops. The present study is aimed at defining the nature of voicing of English voiced stops. A review of the literature reveals that the voicing is position-conditioned and its length is notably inconsistent relative to the closure duration. No consistent relationships are found between vocal fold adduction and glottal pulsing in initial position. Stress reduced the voicing, etc. The hypothesis for experiments was: (1) active voicing: stress generates longer (stronger) voicing during the closure duration of a voiced stop; (2) passive voicing: stress induces shorter (weaker) voicing during the closure. Instead the voiced stop becomes more voiced when the preceding vowel (syllable) is stressed. The literature review and the results of two experiments comparing English and Slovakian suggested that the voicing of English voiced stops is passive (i.e., a coarticulation of glottal pulsing for adjacent vowels-syllables) and should be distinguished from active voicing in some other languages.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.167-169
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• 2007

This study analyzes Korean students' pronunciation errors in stop-nasal sequences in English. For the study, 23 English words of stop-nasal sequences were pronounced by 4 natives and 21 Korean students. The results showed two kinds of pronunciation errors: the insertion of a vowel and the nasal assimilation between stops and nasals. A teaching material was designed based on the errors. After a 60-minute class with the material they were asked to pronounce the same words in another session. There was a substantial improvement in the error correction.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.287-304
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• 2002

Truncated forms (truncata) in English hypocoristic words have been argued to be faithful to their bases. This means that “ ... the base of truncation is an output form"”(Benua 1995:6,12). For example, in some non-rhotic dialects where syllable-final [r]s are deleted, the [r]s of truncated names such as Gar [gær] (truncated form of Garry [gæri]) are not deleted although they are syllable-final. This is an example of base-truncatum identity. That is, the syllable-final [r] is retained to make the truncatum more faithful to its base. However, there are many English hypocoristic names which are not faithful to their base forms. For example, Letty [equation omitted] (hypocoristic form of Latitia [equation omitted]) is not faithful to its base; the first vowel and the second consonant of the truncatum are not identical to the corresponding segments of the base. It will be argued, therefore, that some truncated forms are more faithful to the inputs than the bases. It will also be argued that McCarthy and Prince's (1995) Full Model is needed to deal successfully with all the phenomena related to truncation.