• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.3-14
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• 2011

It has been posited that in English, native listeners use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS) for the segmentation of continuous speech. Strong syllables tend to be perceived as potential word onsets for English native speakers, which is due to the high proportion of strong syllables word-initially in the English vocabulary. This study investigates whether Koreans employ the same strategy when segmenting speech input in English. Word-spotting experiments were conducted using vowel-initial and consonant-initial bisyllabic targets embedded in nonsense trisyllables in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. The effect of strong syllable was significant in the RT (reaction times) analysis but not in the error analysis. In both experiments, Korean listeners detected words more slowly when the word-initial syllable is strong (stressed) than when it is weak (unstressed). However, the error analysis showed that there was no effect of initial stress in Experiment 1 and in the item (F2) analysis in Experiment 2. Only the subject (F1) analysis in Experiment 2 showed that the participants made more errors when the word starts with a strong syllable. These findings suggest that Koran listeners do not use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for segmenting English speech. They do not treat strong syllables as word beginnings, but rather have difficulties recognizing words when the word starts with a strong syllable. These results are discussed in terms of intonational properties of Korean prosodic phrases which are found to serve as lexical segmentation cues in the Korean language.

• MALSORI
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• no.37
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• pp.13-21
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• 1999

This study, as a successive study of Ko(1998a) which investigates the effect of vowel length contrast on the voicing of the word-final consonants in English, examines if other phonetic features of word-final stops themselves affect the Perception of their voicing. They are closure duration, voicing status during closure period, release portion. 68 Korean students learning English as a second language in Wonkwang University participate as subjects for this study. The results showed that they are not important clues to Korean students to the voicing identification of the word-final stops in English.

• MALSORI
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• no.61
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• pp.31-48
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• 2007

This study investigated the roles of name agreement and word frequency in the English-Korean word translation task. Using the low-frequency homonyms with low name agreement as stimuli, Experiment 1 revealed that the name agreement of materials is a determinant which could modulate times to translate English words into Korean equivalents. On the contrary, Experiment 2 showed that the name agreement of materials does not play a decisive role in the translation task, using the low-frequency homonyms having high name agreement as stimuli. In Experiment 3, we identified that the frequency effects observed from previous two experiments are indeed brought about during the lexical access. Our findings suggest that the word frequencies of materials have a strong influence on English-Korean word translation times, and homonyms are represented independently each other in the lexeme level.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.19-24
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• 2016

The Korean high back vowels /o/ and /u/ have been reported to be in a state of near-merger especially among young female speakers. Along with cross-generational changes, the vowel position within a word has been reported to render different phonetic realization. The current study examines native English speakers' ability to attend to the phonetic cues that distinguish the two merging vowels and the positional effects (word-initial vs. word-final) on the identification accuracy. 28 two-syllable words containing /o/ or /u/ in either initial or final position were produced by native female Korean speakers. The CV part of each target word were excised and presented to six native English speakers. The results showed that although the identification accuracy was the lowest for /o/ in word- final position (41%), it increased up to 80% in word-initial position. The acoustic analyses of the target vowels showed that /o/ and /u/ were differentiated on the height dimension only in word-initial position, suggesting that English speakers may have perceived the distinctive F1 difference retained in the prominent position.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

This study aims to investigate how prosodic prominence is perceived in relation to word class information (or parts-of-speech) by Korean learners of English compared with native English speakers in public speech. Two groups, Korean learners of English and native English speakers, were asked to judge words perceived as prominent simultaneously while listening to a speech. Parts-of-speech and three acoustic cues (i.e., max F0, mean phone duration, and mean intensity) were analyzed for each word in the speech. The results showed that content words tended to be higher in pitch and longer in duration than function words. Both groups of listeners rated prominence on content words more frequently than on function words. This tendency, however, was significantly greater for Korean learners of English than for native English speakers. Among the parts-of-speech of the content words, Korean learners of English were more likely than native English speakers to judge nouns and verbs as prominent. This study presents evidence that Korean learners of English consider most, if not all, content words as landing locations of prosodic prominence, in alignment with the previous study on the production of prominence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.101-110
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• 2018

This study aimed to show that Selkirk's concept of resyllabification offers a better analysis than Kahn's ambisyllabification to account for phonetic resyllabification. We conducted two production experiments to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the English /s/ in real words and nonce words. Ten English native speakers and six English native speakers participated in experiment 1 and experiment 2, respectively. Three acoustic cues - frication duration, center of gravity and aspiration duration of word-medial /s/ - were measured. We found that these three cues of the word-medial /s/ were realized significantly differently depending on the stresshood and openness of the preceding syllable. We preferred Selkirk's resyllabification to Kahn's ambisyllabification to explain this result because the word-medial and intervocalic /s/ behaved as the coda (as opposed to the onset) when the preceding syllable was stressed and open. The result thus suggested that two conditions must be met for the resyllabification rule to apply in English: a word-medial consonant is resyllabified only when its preceding syllable is stressed and open.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.19-28
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• 2020

Vehicle license plate recognition system is not generalized in Malaysia due to the loose character layout rule and the varying number of characters as well as the mixed capital English characters and italic English words. Because the italic English word is hard to segmentation, a separate method is required to recognize in Malaysian license plate. In this paper, we propose a mixed character level and word level English license plate recognition algorithm using deep learning neural networks. The difference of Gaussian method is used to segment character and word by generating a black and white image with emphasized character strokes and separated touching characters. The proposed deep learning neural networks are implemented on the LPR system at the gate of a building in Kuala-Lumpur for the collection of database and the evaluation of algorithm performance. The evaluation results show that the proposed Malaysian English LPR can be used in commercial market with 98.01% accuracy.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.93-103
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• 2005

Users of searching Internet English dictionary sometimes do not know the correct spelling of the word in mind, but remember only its pronunciation. In order to help these users, we propose a method to retrieve English words effectively with a spoken word transliteration that is a Korean transliteration of English word pronunciation. We develop KONIX codes and transform a spoken word transliteration and English words into them. We then calculate the phonetic similarity between KONIX codes using edit distance and 2-gram methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective for retrieving English words with a spoken word transliteration.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.111-128
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• 2004

In English, a focused word with new information receives a pitch accent. This paper examines how English native speakers and Korean speakers produce and perceive focus in English yes-no questions. The production experiments show that native speakers realize an appropriate intonation of yes-no questions, in which a focused word has a low pitch accent followed by a high phrasal accent and a high boundary tone. However, Korean speakers usually give a high tone to a focused word. In a like manner, the perception experiments show that English native speakers judge a word with a low tone to be focused, while Korean speakers have difficulty in comprehending a focused word realized as a low tone. And it is found that Korean speakers tend to perceive low tones on sentence initial and final focused words better than those on sentence medial focused words, and they often perceive a word with a relatively high fundamental frequency or a sharp rise of fundamental frequency as a focused word. This paper shows that Korean speakers have trouble to produce and perceive an appropriate tonal pattern of a focused yes-no question, and that can cause confusion in a conversation with native speakers.