• Speech Sciences
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.243-257
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• 2001

In English textbooks, there are three kinds of English intonation representations: Trager & Smith's, Weak-strong, Audio-lingual way. Each representation has its merits and demerits. Therefore, just one of them is insufficient to represent English intonation properly. Trager & Smith's representation is relevant to show holistic intonation itself. In contrast to this merit, it is not appropriate to represent downstep, declination, etc. With Weak-strong, it is good to show weak and strong point in the sentence. It is not, however, consistent with intonation. Instead of these representations, some textbooks accept Audio-lingual method. Audio-lingual method gives students more chances to hear native speakers' intonations. But it doesn't give ways to understand English intonation itself. In English textbooks, they don't have any hierarchies dependent upon students' proficiency. In spite of various intonations, they just accept a few limited intonation models. Thus, it is necessary to review all kinds of intonation representations and to develop more advanced and relevant English intonation representation.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.95-108
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• 2009

One of the learning difficulties for Korean learners of English is the intonation of English focused yes/no questions. Focused words in English yes/no questions are realized as low pitch accents which contrast with high pitch accents in Korean counterparts. In order to improve Korean students' intonation, direct and metalinguistic explanations on the intonation of English focused yes/no questions were given to Korean learners of English. In pre-tests and post-tests, students' perceptions on the target items were measured. The study results showed that phonetic explanation using intonation contour enhanced students' perception on English intonation. With respect to the position of focused words, sentence initial and medial focused questions were more difficult than sentence final focused questions. The perception was most improved in sentence initial focused questions. The study showed the immediate effects of the explicit instruction on perceptions of English intonation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 대한음성학회 2000년도 7월 학술대회지
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• pp.88-95
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• 2000

This paper attempts to investigate characteristic features of Japanese EFL learners' English intonation and how their Japanese accents are affecting their English intonation, focusing on a comparison between the accent patterns of Japanese compounds and the stress patterns of English compounds. It is based on research dedicated to helping to improve the teaching and learning of English intonation (prosody) for Japanese EFL learners. It examines the Fundamental Frequency (henceforth Fx) contours of two EFL college students, one specializing in English and the other in Japanese. Both of them may be considered upper intermediate EFL students with their TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores ranging between 500 and 550.

• Speech Sciences
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• 제8권2호
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• pp.119-132
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to investigate the intonation of Korean speakers in English sentence adverbials. The intonation of English sentence adverbials is realized by its syntactic and semantic meaning. Many Korean speakers realize falling or stylized high-rising intonation instead of fall-rising in attitudinal adverbials. In addition, Korean students don't realize deaccenting in likelihood adverbials. These results suggest that the intonation patterns in current English textbooks are not sufficient for English intonation education at school.

• Speech Sciences
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.31-46
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• 2007

This study attempts to investigate that the training of pitch manipulation would help Korean speakers reduce the intonation errors based on the review of many previous studies on Korean speakers' phonetic realization of intonation. The previous studies have indicated that Korean speakers have problems with pitch manipulation in their production of English word stress, sentence stress, and eventually intonation. To train Korean speakers phonetically realize English pitch patterns, a blended learning module was operated for two weeks: face-to-face instruction for six hours and e-learning instruction for three hours in total. This module was designed to help Korean speakers realize pitch as a distinctive phoneme. An acoustic assessment on five Korean female English speakers shows that the training of pitch manipulation helps Korean English speakers reduce the intonation errors indicated in the previous studies reviewed.

• Speech Sciences
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.25-36
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• 2008

Language transfer means that the speaker's first language or previously acquired language influences on the production of the target language. This study aims at examining if there is native language influence on the production of English intonation by Korean speakers. The pitch accent patterns and the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent in the sentence produced by Korean speakers are compared to those of American English speakers. The results show that when the word receives emphatic accent in the sentence, American English speakers put H* accent on the stressed syllable of the word, but Korean speakers mostly assign high pitch on the last syllable of the word and have LH tonal pattern despite the fact that primary stress does not come on the last syllable within a word. In addition, comparison of the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent to those of the word with unmarked neutral accent shows that Korean speakers do not realize the intonation of the accented word appropriately because the values decrease even though the word has emphatic accent. This study finds out that there are differences in the production of English intonation of the word with emphatic accent between native speakers of English and Korean speakers, and that there is negative transfer of Korean intonation pattern to the production of English intonation by Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.35-43
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the viability of employing the intonation exaggeration technique proposed in [4] in teaching English prosody to university students. Fifty-six female university students, twenty-two in a control group and the other thirty-four in an experimental group, participated in a teaching experiment as part of their regular coursework for a five-and-a-half week period. For the study material of the experimental group, a set of utterances was synthesized whose intonation contours had been exaggerated whereas the control group was given the same set without any intonation modification. Recordings from both before and after the teaching experiment were made and one sentence set was chosen for analysis. The parameters analyzed were the pitch range, words containing the highest and lowest pitch points, and the 3-dimensional comparison of the three prosodic features [2]. An AXB and subjective rating test were also performed along with a qualitative screening of the individual intonation contours. The results showed that the experimental group performed slightly better in that their intonation contour was more similar to that of the model native speaker's utterance. This appears to suggest that the intonation exaggeration technique can be employed in teaching English prosody to students.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 대한음성학회 1997년도 7월 학술대회지
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• pp.11-25
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• 1997

This presentation will focus on building basic English Prosodic Skills which are very useful and helpful for Japanese learners of English. The focus first will be on recognizing the seven basic nuclear tones, analysing intonation structures, distinguishing intonation patterns and then on the way of improving speaking ability using sufficient verbal contents of intonation (mini-dialogue). My presentation deals mainly with some difficulties which Japanese learners of English have in the field of RP intonation, It is chiefly concerned with identifying, describing and analysing tone-group sequences. It sometimes happens that Japanese learners of English can pronounce isolated bounds correctly and read phonetic symbols sufficiently, bet have difficult problems in carrying out accurate prosodic features. The use of wrong intonation is sometimes the cause of misunderstanding of speaker's attitude, connotation and shades of meaning, etc.. However accurately students can pronounce the nuclear tone or tone-group of English, they have to learn how to connect tone-groups properly for suitable sequences in respect to meaning or implication. We are faced with the complicated theory of RF intonation on the one hand and difficult realization of it on the other. Japanese learners of English have special difficulties in employing "rising tune" and "falling + rising tune". If students are taught pitch movements by indicating dots graphically between two horizontal lines, they can easily understand the whole shape of pitch movements. In this presentation, I illuminate several tone-group sequences which are very useful for Japanese learning English intonation. Among them, four similar Pitch Patterns, such as, (1) (equation omitted)- type, (2) (equation omitted) - type, (3) (equation omitted) - type and (4) (Rising Head) (equation omitted)- type are clarified and other important tone-group sequences aye also highlighted from the point of view of teaching English as a foreign language. The intonation theory, tone marks and technical terms are, in all essentials, those of Intonation of Colloquial English by O'Connor, J. D. and Arnold, G. F., Longman, 2nd ed., 1982. The changes of tone are shown graphically between two horizontal lines representing the ordinary high and low zones of the utterance. A.C.Gimson (1981:314) : The intonation of English has been studied in greater detail and for longer than that of any other language. No definitive analysis, classifying the features of RP intonation, has yet appeared (though that presented by O'Connor and Arnold (1973) provides the most comprehensive and useful account from the foreign learner's point of view).

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 10월 학술대회지
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• pp.574-575
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• 1996

The theme of the current study is to study intonation of Taiwanese(Tw.) by comparing the intonation patterns in native language (Ll), target language (L2), and interlanguage (IL). Studies on interlanguage have dealt primarily with segments. Though there were studies which addressed to the issues of interlanguage intonation, more often than not, they didn't offer evidence for the statement, and the hypotheses were mainly based on impression. Therefore, a formal description of interlanguage intonation is necessary for further development in this field. The basic assumption of this study is that native speakers of one language perceive and produce a second language in ways closely related to the patterns of their first language. Several studies on interlanguage prosody have suggested that prosodic structure and rules are more subject to transfer than certain other phonological phenomena, given their abstract structural nature and generality(Vogel 1991). Broselow(1988) also shows that interlanguage may provide evidence for particular analyses of the native language grammar, which may not be available from the study of the native language alone. Several research questions will be addressed in the current study: A. How does duration vary among native and nominative utterances\ulcorner The results shows that there is a significant difference in duration between the beginning English learners, and the native speakers of American English for all the eleven English sentences. The mean duration shows that the beginning English learners take almost twice as much time (1.70sec.), as Americans (O.97sec.) to produce English sentences. The results also show that American speakers take significant longer time to speak all ten Taiwanese utterances. The mean duration shows that Americans take almost twice as much time (2.24sec.) as adult Taiwanese (1.14sec.) to produce Taiwanese sentences. B. Does proficiency level influence the performance of interlanguage intonation\ulcorner Can native intonation patterns be achieved by a non-native speaker\ulcorner Wenk(1986) considers proficiency level might be a variable which related to the extent of Ll influence. His study showed that beginners do transfer rhythmic features of the Ll and advanced learners can and do succeed in overcoming mother-tongue influence. The current study shows that proficiency level does play a role in the acquisition of English intonation by Taiwanese speakers. The duration and pitch range of the advanced learners are much closer to those of the native American English speakers than the beginners, but even advanced learners still cannot achieve native-like intonation patterns. C. Do Taiwanese have a narrower pitch range in comparison with American English speakers\ulcorner Ross et. al.(1986) suggests that the presence of tone in a language significantly inhibits the unrestricted manipulation of three acoustical measures of prosody which are involved in producing local pitch changes in the fundamental frequency contour during affective signaling. Will the presence of tone in a language inhibit the ability of speakers to modulate intonation\ulcorner The results do show that Taiwanese have a narrower pitch range in comparison with American English speakers. Both advanced (84Hz) and beginning learners (58Hz) of English show a significant narrower FO range than that of Americans' (112Hz), and the difference is greater between the beginning learners' group and native American English speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.89-110
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• 2002

Intonation is very difficult to describe and it is furthermore difficult to compare intonation between different languages because of their differences of intonation systems. This paper aims to compare some intonation phenomena between Korean, French and English. In this paper I will refer to ToBI (the Tone and Break Indices) which is a prosodic transcription model proposed originally by Pierrehumbert (1980) as a description tool. In the first part, I will summarize different ToBI systems, namely, K-ToBI (Korean ToBI), F-ToBI (French ToBI) and ToBI itself (English ToBI) in order to compare the differences of three languages within prosody. In the second part, I will analyze some tokens registered by Korean, French and American in different languages to show the difficulties of learning other languages and to find the prosodic cues to pronounce correctly other languages. The point of comparison in this study is the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Korean and in French and the intermediate phrase (ip) in English, which I will call ' subject phrase ' in this study for convenience.