• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.10 no.5
• /
• pp.460-466
• /
• 2010

It is well-known that Korean EFL learners have difficulties in producing English fricatives which are not in the inventory of Korean and consequently tend to replace English fricatives with stops. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Korean students also have difficulties perceiving English anterior coronal consonants including fricatives. To this end, forty Korean college students participated in an identification test which consisted of 24 nonce words with English anterior coronal consonants in 4 different prosodic locations (CV, VC, VCVV,VVCV). It was shown that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV, providing confusion matrices for each target consonant. It was also found that Korean participants had a great difficulty identifying English[$\theta$] and [$\eth$], which are novel in Korean. Importantly, the confusion patterns found in the perception test tended not to be identical with those found in the previous production studies in that both stops and fricatives were misperceived as fricatives while fricatives were misproduced as stops. Further, perceptual devoicing and intervocalic voicing were attested inVC and intervocalic position, respectively. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications were drawn.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.53
• /
• pp.1-16
• /
• 2005

This experimental study aims to test the hypothesis that the occurrence of English sentence-final stop release is, at least, partly predictable by examining its phonetic context. 10 native(5 male and 5 female) speakers of American English recorded, in a sound-proof booth, sentences excerpted from novels and the natural documents on the World Wide Web. Based on the waveforms and spectrograms of the recorded sentences, judgements of the release of a sentence-final stop were made. If the aperiodic energy of a given final stop lasted more than .015 second, it was considered to be "released." The result reveals that English sentence-final stops tend to be released when they are 1) velar consonants, 2) preceeded by tense vowels, and 3) coda consonants of content words. The phonetic environment in which final stops are often released can be characterized by the articulatory comfortableness and the need for release burst noise, without which the final stops may not be correctly perceived. By examining the release of English final stops, it is concluded that the phonological events, which had been considered to occur rather "randomly," in fact, reflect the universal tendency of human speech: to minimize the speakers' and hearers' effort.

• Korean Business Review
• /
• v.5
• /
• pp.241-274
• /
• 1992

General American English(=A.E.) has conservative elements as well as progressive elements. A.E. and B.E. are languages which have more similarities than differances. In this paper. I studied the process of English progress before the A.E. had come into being, and the historical background and the cahristics of A.E. coming into being. Considering the differences between A.E. and B.E. from spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, I can give the outline as follows. A spelling 1. B.E. : au, ou $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : a, o 2. B.E. : e $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : i 3. B.E. : $${\ae}$$ oe $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : e 4. B.E. : our $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : or 5. B.E. : re $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : er B. pronunciation 1. B.E. : [e] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [i], [e], $$[\partial]$$ 2. B.E. : [a] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : 3. B.E. : [i(:)] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [ai], $$[\partial]$$, $$[{\varepsilon}]$$ 4. B.E. : $$[{\ae}]$$ $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [e], [c] 5. B.E. : [ai] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : $$[{\ae}]$$, [e] 6. B.E. : [c] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [e], [a], [o] 7. In case of "Vowel+[t]+Vowel", [t] is pronounced into [d] or [r] 8. In case of "-nt", [t] becomes a mute. 9. [t]+[j, l, m, n, r, u, or, w] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [?] (=glottal stop) 10. B.E. : [w] $${\rightarrow}$$A.E. : [hw] 11. B.E. : [Voiceless consonants], [Voiced consonants] $${\leftarrow}$$A.E. : [Voiced consonants], [Voiceless consonants] C. Vocabulary The historical background and geographical conditions of those days caused lots of new compounds and neologies. D. Grammar Though we use "of" to indicate the possessive case of inanimate object, -s genitive is used in A.E. In the perfect tense, "have" is often omitted and also auxiliary verb "will" is used in any case

• MALSORI
• /
• no.37
• /
• pp.13-21
• /
• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.91-99
• /
• 2014

Although it is well documented that patients with cochlear implant experience hearing difficulties when processing their first language, very little is known whether or not and to what extent cochlear implant patients recognize segments in a second language. This preliminary study examines how Korean learners of English identify English segments in a normal hearing and cochlear implant simulation conditions. Participants heard English vowels and consonants in the following three conditions: normal hearing condition, 12-channel noise vocoding with 0mm spectral shift, and 12-channel noise vocoding with 3mm spectral shift. Results confirmed that nonnative listeners could also retrieve spectral information from vocoded speech signal, as they recognized vowel features fairly accurately despite the vocoding. In contrast, the intelligibility of manner and place features of consonants was significantly decreased by vocoding. In addition, we found that spectral shift affected listeners' vowel recognition, probably because information regarding F1 is diminished by spectral shifting. Results suggest that patients with cochlear implant and normal hearing second language learners would experience different patterns of listening errors when processing their second language(s).

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.113-128
• /
• 2005

The underlying premise of this study was that L1 production is easily transferred into L2 production. In neutral intonation, there is a consonant-tone correlation in Korean: High tone patterns are correlated with voiceless aspirated and tense consonants and Low-High tone patterns are correlated with lax or other voiced consonants. The purpose of this study was to see whether the correlation in Korean (L1) is transferred into English (L2) production and whether the degree of transfer differs depending on the degree of proficiency. Eight Korean speakers and two American speakers participated in the experiment. F0 contours of words and sentences were collected and analyzed. The results of the present study showed that there is a strong correlation between voicing and tone in L2 utterances. When utterance-initial consonant types were voiceless, the word or the sentence began with the H pattern; otherwise it had the LH pattern. The degree of interference differed depending on the degree of proficiency: less proficient speakers showed a stronger correlation in terms of the magnitude (Hz) and size (ms) of the effects on F0. The results indicate that the consonant-tone correlation in L1 is strongly transferred into L2 production and the correlation transfer can be one of the actual aspects that cause L2 speakers to produce deviant L2 accents and intonation.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.143-153
• /
• 2002

This study was designed to determine (1) the effects of the following stop consonant on the vowel length in isolated bi-syllabic words, (2) the mechanism which renders vowels longer in duration before lax stops than tense stops, (3) where the aspiratory interval is included, in the vowel portion or the preceding consonantal portion and (4) the influence of the preceding consonants upon the duration of the following vowel. Measurements were made of five timing variables on acoustic signals as three native Korean speakers uttered isolated bi-syllabic /VCV/ words in which the vowel was identical, /$\alpha$/, and the C slot was filled with bilabial stops. Findings: (1) the vowel length before the lax stops was significantly longer than before the tense stops, while the difference in the vowel duration between the tense stops was insignificant or negligible, (2) the vowel length varied as a function of the articulatory force of the following consonants, regardless of the phonological unit of syllable, (3) The aspiratory interval is interpreted as a portion of the preceding consonant and (4) The effects of the preceding consonants on the final vowel length were not rule-governed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 2007

The purpose of this research is to explore the effects of systematic teaching English pronunciation and listening in English. Focusing on phonemes and words in pairs and sentences, the sound systems of the English and Korean languages are dealt with in conjunction with the test data. This paper first discusses the systemic, or primary interference and the habitual, or secondary interference that hinder comprehension of certain English sounds. Second, the analysis of input and output test data on the contrasting vowels and consonants shows statistic significance in terms of the probability (p value) of t-test. Third, the comparative data by means of percentile of right answers on contrasting vowel and consonant sounds expound the different sound systems of the English and Korean languages. With this data, problems in pronunciation of and listening to English, and the factors that may cause these problems are analyzed so that they can be used as a guideline for a systematic approach in teaching English learners, thus leading to more satisfactory performance.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
• /
• 2009.05a
• /
• pp.1092-1096
• /
• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonant in the same position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in summer. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of near minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the word with singleton graphemes were relatively high both in perception and production (78.6% and 76.1%, respectively), while those for the word with doubleton graphemes were low both in perception and production (55.3% and 61.7%, respectively). Also, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3
• /
• pp.93-108
• /
• 1998

This paper attempts to acoustically examine the place of articulation of Korean affricates. In order to pursue an acoustic analysis of where Korean affricates are articulated, we resort to LPC spectra of the Korean plain affricate /c/ in intervocalic position, based on theoretical assumptions (e.g., Stevens 1993a), and compare the data to that of the Korean alveolar consonants /t, s/ in the same context. Our phonetic results show that in intervocalic position, the Korean plain affricate is alveolar just like the Korean alveolar consonants /t, s/, supporting the articulatory studies of $Skali{\check{c}}kov{\acute{a}}$ (1960) and Kim (1997).