• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.149-154
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• 1996

Since the 1980s, a number of professionals in the ESL/EFL field have investigated the role of pronunciation in the ESL/EFL curriculum. Applying the insights gained from the second language acquisition research, these efforts have focused on the integration of pronunciation teaching and learning into the communicative curriculum, with a shift towards overall intelligibility as the primary goal of pronunciation teaching and learning. The present study reports on the efficacy of audio-visual aids and hyper-pronunciation training method in teaching the productions of English consonants to Japanese college students. The talk will focus on the implications of the present study, and the presenter makes suggestions to teaching pronunciation to Japanese learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.9-17
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• 2021

Voice onset time (VOT) is known to be a primary acoustic cue that differentiates voiced from voiceless stops in the world's languages. While much attention has been given to the sound change of Korean stops, little attention has been given to that of English stops. This study examines VOT of stop consonants as produced by English speakers in comparison to Korean speakers to see whether there is any VOT change for English stops and how the effects of stop, place, gender, and individual on VOT differ cross-linguistically. A total of 24 native speakers (11 Americans and 13 Koreans) participated in this experiment. The results showed that, for Korean, the VOT merger of lax and aspirated stops was replicated, and, for English, voiced stops became initially devoiced and voiceless stops became heavily aspirated. English voiceless stops became longer in VOT than Korean counterparts. The results suggest that, similar to Korean stops, English stops may also undergo a sound change. Since it is the first study to be revealed, more convincing evidence is necessary.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.151-160
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• 2024

Through the utilization of a contrastive analysis of English consonantal phonemes and their Russian counterparts, the present study investigates the challenges faced by Russian EFL learners in pronouncing English consonantal phonemes, with a particular focus on phoneme substitution errors as a principal source of erroneous pronunciation. We comprehensively explore the characteristics of both the English and Russian consonant systems, highlighting the differences between them. Based on this examination, the study aims to present the detailed articulatory characteristics and phonetic variations of Russian speakers' common mispronunciations or improper substitutes of English consonants, rather than focusing on shared ones between the two languages. Furthermore, it seeks to provide strategies for error correction and effective pedagogical strategies to address specific phonemic challenges and enhance accuracy. Grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the objectives and advantages of comparative analysis within the context of phonemic awareness, the study emphasizes the significant importance of pronunciation instruction. It points out that this area still appears somewhat overlooked in specific EFL teaching situations within the context of English language education.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2020

This paper investigates the phonological processes of consonants in pronounced words in the Seoul Corpus, and compares the frequency distribution of these processes to provide a clearer understanding of conversational Korean to linguists and teachers. To this end, both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Seoul Corpus. Next, the phonological processes of consonants in the orthographic and pronounced forms were tabulated separately after syllabifying the onsets and codas, and major consonantal processes were examined. First, the results showed that the majority of the orthographic consonants' sounds were pronounced the same way as their pronounced forms. Second, more than three quarters of the onsets were pronounced as the same forms, while approximately half of the codas were pronounced as variants. Third, the majority of different onset and coda symbols were primarily caused by deletions and insertions. Finally, the five phonological process types accounted for only 12.4% of the total possible procedures. Based on these results, this paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can improve the practical understanding of spoken Korean. Future studies ought to compare the current phonological process data with those of other languages to establish universal patterns in phonological processes.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.135-148
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• 2005

This paper investigated the effect of audio and visual cues on Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the lateral/retroflex contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. Korean listeners showed much better identification rates of the /l/-/r/ contrast than Japanese listeners when presented in audio or audio-visual conditions.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.1-11
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• 2006

This paper investigated AV benefit of Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the liquid contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. The results suggest that increasing auditory proficiency in identifying a non-native contrast is linked with an increasing proficiency in using visual cues to the contrast.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.131-142
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• 2002

Place assimilation in Korean has been argued to reflect the consonantal strength hierarchy in which velar is stronger than labial which is in turn stronger than coronal. The strength relationship has been manifested in two ways in literature. One is through phonological representation as shown in Iverson and Lee (1994). The other is through perceptual salience ranking as suggested by Jun (1995). The goal of this study is to examine the perceptual salience of placed consonants through an identification experiment. The experiment conducted in this study reveals four facts. First, place identification of a prevocalic consonant is higher than that of a postvocalic one. Second, place identification of a stop in coda is more confusable than that of a nasal counterpart in Korean contrary to other previous studies. Third, velar is most confusable in place identification in contrast to Jun (1995) and Hume et al. (1999). Finally, place perception of consonants can vary depending on adjacent vocalic context. These results suggest that perceptual salience is one of the possibly several factors affecting a phonological process.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.37-44
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• 2023

This study investigates perceptual confusions of English fricatives among 121 Korean elementary school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with shorter periods of learning English. The objective is to examine how they perceive English fricative consonants and to provide educational guidelines. Two sets of English fricative identification tasks-voiceless fricatives and voiced fricatives-were administered to participants in a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) setting. Their phonemic awareness of the fricatives was visualized in perceptual confusion maps via multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings are explored in terms of the impacts of Korean EFL learners' L1 linguistic aspects and a comparison with L1 learners. Learners' phonemic awareness patterns are then compared with their relative importance in speech intelligibility based on a functional load hierarchy. The results indicated that Korean elementary EFL learners recognized English fricatives in a manner largely akin to L1 learners, suggesting their ongoing acquisition progress. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the young EFL learners possess sufficient phonemic awareness for most high functional load segments but encounter some difficulties with one high and one low functional pair. The findings of this study offer suggestions for diagnosing language learners' phonemic awareness abilities, thereby aiding in the development of practical guidelines for language instructional design and helping educators make informed decisions regarding teaching priority in L2 classes.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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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.