• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

The purposes of this study are to: (1) Compare the vowel production of English front vowels produced by Korean speakers using regional dialects and; (2) Investigate and compare the effectiveness of pronunciation training for each regional dialect group. To test these objectives, the English front vowels produced by five Youngnam dialect male speakers, five Youngnam dialect female speakers, five Kangwon dialect male speakers, and five Kangwon dialect female speakers were scrutinized. These dialect groups' vowel formants and length of English front vowels were evaluated, and the post-pronunciation training values were compared with those of pre-training values. The results indicate that pronunciation training is more effective for Youngnam dialect speakers, whilst both dialect groups have more success mastering the pronunciation of /${\varepsilon}$/ over /${\ae}$/.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.169-186
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• 2000

This paper aims to confirm the mispronunciation of native Korean students due to the phonetic and phonological system differences between English and Korean, and to find the works-to-do by experiment. Many Korean students tend to differentiate the sounds of word-final stop consonants not by vowel duration or the allophones but by the phoneme of the consonant itself. In English, Stop sounds change through the conditions of the aspirated, unaspirated, or unreleased sounds. But in Korean they are not allophones of phonemes but distinct phonemes. Therefore, many Korean students are apt to add an extra vowel sound /i/ after the final stop consonant in the eve form due to both the unperception of the differences between the phonemes and the allophones of stop consonants, and the influence of the Korean sound-sequence relationship. Since the replacement of the allophones and extra vowel addition does not change the meaning, the importance was almost lost. Nevertheless, this kind of study is essential for the precise learning and the use of the English language.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2006년도 춘계 학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.55-58
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• 2006

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of postvocalic consonant cluster (Contrasting nasal-stops consonant with stops) on vowel duration. In particular we focused on the rate of vowel duration in their words. (Experimental I ) and the tendency of unreleased voiceless stops at the end of the words.(Experimental II). The result of experimental I showed that the rate of vowel duration which is preceding single voiceless stops are significantly longer than those preceding nasal-stops counterparts and the percentage of English native speakers was longer than those of Korean leaners of English Experiment II indicated that the tendency of unreleased stop consonants occurred more frequently on single voiceless stops than nasal-stop clusters and Korean learners of English were more frequently produced the unreleased stops than English natives.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권6호
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• pp.1043-1065
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• 2011

This study investigates i-umlaut which occurred in the period of pre Old English (OE) in two aspects: what motivates i-umlaut in OE and how the phenomenon can be analyzed within the framework of OT. Unlike root-controlled vowel harmony, i-umlaut in OE is triggered by the suffixal i or j in the unstressed syllable whereby a stressed root vowel becomes fronted or raised. In this study, it is proposed that i-umlaut in OE is driven by the weak trigger i or j to improve its poor perception: I-umlaut improves the poor perceptibility of the weak trigger by extending its feature-either [-back] or [-low]-onto the vowel in the stressed syllable. This study provides an OT-theoretic analysis utilizing the licensing account to vowel harmony proposed by Walker (2004, 2005). The licensing constraints, IDENT-IO(F) and the locally conjoined constraints are proposed and their interaction correctly captures the pattern of i-umlaut in OE. Also, it is shown that the licensing account proposed in this paper is superior to the previous analyses as well as the nonlicensing approaches in that it can provide a perceptual motivation couched in i-umlaut in OE.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권2호
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• pp.61-70
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• 2012

The current study observes the durational interaction of tautosyllabic consonants and vowels in the word-initial position of English and Korean child-directed speech (CDS). The effect of phonological laryngeal contrasts in stops on the following vowel duration, and the effect of the intrinsic vowel duration on the release duration of preceding stops in addition to the acoustic realization of the contrastive segments are explored in different prosodic contexts - phrase-initial/medial, focal accented/non-focused - in a marked speech style of CDS. A trade-off relationship between Voice Onset Time (VOT), as consonant release duration, and voicing phonation time, as vowel duration, reported from adult-to-adult speech, and patterns of durational variability are investigated in CDS of two languages with different linguistic rhythms, under systematically controlled prosodic contexts. Speech data were collected from four native English mothers and four native Korean mothers who were talking to their one-word staged infants. In addition to the acoustic measurements, the transformed delta measure is employed as a variability index of individual tokens. Results confirm the durational correlation between prevocalic consonants and following vowels. The interaction is revealed in a compensatory pattern such as longer VOTs followed by shorter vowel durations in both languages. An asymmetry is found in CV interaction in that the effect of consonant on vowel duration is greater than the VOT differences induced by the vowel. Prosodic effects are found such that the acoustic difference is enhanced between the contrastive segments under focal accent, supporting the paradigmatic strengthening effect. Positional variation, however, does not show any systematic effects on the variations of the measured acoustic quantities. Overall vowel duration and syllable duration are longer in English tokens but involve less variability across the prosodic variations. The constancy of syllable duration, therefore, is not found to be more strongly sustained in Korean CDS. The stylistic variation is discussed in relation to the listener under linguistic development in CDS.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.1-13
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• 2019

This study explored the relationship between accurate vowel production and proficiency levels in L2 English produced by Korean EFL adult learners. To this end, nine English vowels /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ɔ, ɑ, ʊ, u/ were selected and adjacent vowels paired up (e.g., /i/-/ɪ/, /u/-/ʊ/, /ɛ/-/æ/, /ʌ/-/ɔ/, /ɔ/-/ɑ/). The spectral features of the pairs were measured instrumentally, namely F1 (indicating tongue height) and F2 (indicating tongue backness). Meanwhile, the durations as well as spectral features of the tense and lax counterparts in /i/-/ɪ/ and /u/-/ʊ/ were measured, as both temporal and spectral features are important in distinguishing them. The findings of this study confirm that higher-rated speakers were better able to distinguish the contrasts in the front vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ than lower-rated learners, but in the central and back vowel pairs /u/-/ʊ/and /ʌ/-/ɔ/ (though not /ɔ/-/ɑ/), Korean EFL learners generally showed difficulty distinguishing adjacent vowels with spectral cues. On the other hand, the durations of the tense and lax vowels showed that the lower-rated speakers were less able to use the temporal feature to differentiate tense vowels from their lax counterparts, unlike previous studies that found that in general Korean learners depend excessively on the temporal cue to distinguish tense and lax vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• 한국콘텐츠학회논문지
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• 제15권8호
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• pp.579-587
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• 2015

본 연구의 목적은 한국인 학습자들이 어떻게 영어모음을 인지하는지를 알아보고, 언어학습모델(SLM)의 예측처럼 한국어에 없는 새로운 영어모음이 한국어와 비슷한 영어모음보다 습득에 용이한지 살펴보는 것이다. 20명의 한국인 실험참여자들은 6개의 영어모음 /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, ɛ, æ/을 사료로 한 영어-한국어 대응 테스트와 영어 모음 판별 테스트에 참여하였다. 영어-한국어 대응 테스트의 결과 대부분의 학생들이 음향적으로 구분되어있는 영어모음 /i/-/ɪ/, /u/-/ʊ/를 각각 하나의 한국어모음인 /이/와 /우/로 대응하여 인지하는 것을 보여주었다. 또한 영어모음 /ɛ/를 한국어모음 /에/와 /애/로 대응하여 인지하였고, 영어모음 /æ/도 마찬가지로 한국어모음 /에/와 /애/로 혼용하여 대응하는 패턴을 보여줌으로써 한국인 영어학습자들이 영어 모음쌍 /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/, /ɛ-æ/을 인지하기 어려울 것으로 예측되었다. 영어모음 판별테스트에서는 새로운 음소로 분류된 영어모음 /ɪ, ʊ, æ/의 판별 정확도(ɪ: 81.3%, ʊ: 62.5%, æ: 60.0%)가 비슷한 음소로 분류된 영어모음 /i, u, ɛ/의 판별 정확도(i: 28,8%, u: 28.8%, ɛ: 32.4%)보다 유의하게 높아서 SLM의 예측대로 새로운 음소가 습득하기 쉽다는 것을 확인할 수 있었다. 또한 비슷한 음소로 분류된 영어모음들의 판별 정확도가 새로운 음소에서의 판별 정확도보다도 현저히 낮은 수치를 보여준 것을 과일반화로 설명하였는데, L2 학습자가 새로운 모음 범주를 습득하는 과정에서 비슷한 L2 소리를 새로운 L2 소리로 과도하게 대치한 현상이다. 본 연구결과를 바탕으로 교육적인 함의점도 제시되었다.