• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.53-62
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to examine the English l sound in an English short story produced by 16 Korean students in order to determine various allophones of the sound using acoustic visual displays and perceptual judgments. The subjects read the story in a quiet office at normal speed. Each word included the lateral sound in onset or coda positions and before a vowel of the following word. Results showed as follows: Firstly, there was a durational difference between the two major groups. Also the majority of the subjects produced the clear l regardless of the contexts. Some students produced the sound as the Korean flap or the English glide [r]. A few missing cases were also seen. The dark l was mostly produced by the subjects of English majors in coda position with a few cases before a vowel in a phrase. Visual displays using the computer analysis were very helpful in distinguishing lateral variants but sometimes perceptual process would be necessary to judge them in fast and weak production of the target word. Further studies would be desirable to test the discrepancies between the acoustical and perceptual decisions.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1191-1210
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• 2010

This article claims that English liquid consonants are characterized by the presence of complex place nodes, regardless of dialectal varieties. The primary difference between rhotic and laterals can be pursued in a phonological sense. The level of subbranching nodes is in charge of the disparities among two types of liquids: the branching immediately below the Coronal node with laterals, while branching at the secondary sublevel with rhotics. In this context, the processes of rhotic deletion and lateral vocalization can be understood as those motivated to get rid of complex place nodes. That is, those processes take place as part of phonological attrition. Next, the onset/coda asymmetry regarding liquids stems from the dispreference of vocoid at the onset position, which is readily accounted for by the series of constraints on the well-formedness on the onset, namely Harmonic Onset. The rationale of gradualness and harmonic improvement proposed by Harmonic Serialism is useful to separate the attested outputs from unattested ones across the whole gamut of English varieties. All in all, the primary benefits of our analysis can be found in the consistence in the explanation for the operations running through the sounds regarded as belonging to liquid consonants, comprising the whole range of rhotic and lateral consonants.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.53-63
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• 2008

This paper examined the acoustic differences in English speech production between English native speakers and Korean learners. Korean speakers seem to produce errors by over-applying the Korean phonological rules(nasalization and lateralization) to English speech under the conditions comparable to those of Korean which contain nasal+lateral or lateral+nasal sequences. Being based on this prediction, the experimental data is grouped into three sets, [n]+[l] sequence, [l]+[n]sequence, and [m]+[l] sequence. The result shows that, Korean speakers usually nasalize or lateralize the target words or phrases in every three categories while English natives don't. In set A([n]+[l] sequence), both nasalization and lateralization were found in [n]+[l] sequence, the same circumstances where both nasalization and lateralization can be placed as in Korean. In the case of set B([l]+[n] sequence), only lateralization is observed. It is because the nasalization never occurs in the sequence of l-n in Korean. There is no lateralization in set C([m]+[l] sequence), because only nasalization occurs in the sequence of m-l in Korean. This results reconfirmed that the nasalization and lateralization rules in Korean deeply influence on the English production data. Korean speakers need to be taught not to over-apply Korean phonological rule to English production for accurate pronunciation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.93-106
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• 2001

The pronunciation of English l and r was a consistent problem in learning English in Korea as well as Japan. This problem occurs from the fact that in Korea and Japan there is only one liquid sound. Substituting the Korean liquid for English l and r was a common error. The pronunciation of the dark l causes a further problem in pronouncing the English l sound. To see the relationship between the English l, r, and the Korean liquid sound, an electropalatographic (EPG) experiment was done. The findings were (1) there were no tongue contacts either on the alveolar ridge or on the palate during the articulation of the dark l. (2) The Korean liquid sound was different in the tongue contact points either from English l or r. The English clear l consistently touched the alveolar ridge in the forty tokens, but the Korean liquid sound in the intervocalic and word-final position touched mainly the alveopalatal area. The English r touched exclusively the velum area. The Korean intervocalic /l/ was similar to English flap in EPG and spectrographic data. There was evidence that the word-final Korean /l/ is a lateral.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2022

The English word-final /rl/ cluster poses a particular problem for Korean learners of English because it is the sequence of two sounds, /r/ and /l/, which are not contrastive in Korean. This study compared the similarity distances between English and Korean speakers' /rl/ productions using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The words with /rl/ (pearl, world) and without /rl/ (bird, word) were recorded by four English speakers and four Korean speakers, and compared pairwise. The F2-F1 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of velarized /l/, and F3 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of /r/, were examined. Formant analysis showed that English speakers lowered F2-F1 values toward the end of a word, unlike Korean speakers, suggesting the absence of /l/ in Korean speakers. In contrast, there was no significant difference in F3 values. Mixed-effects regression analyses of the DTW distances revealed that Korean speakers produced /r/ similarly to English speakers but failed to produce the velarized /l/ in /rl/ clusters.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.127-138
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• 2000

The aim of this paper is to find the speech problems of English Laterals by Korean learners and to contribute to the effective pronunciation education with visualizing the pronunciation. In this paper we analyzed 18 words including lateral sounds which were divided into such as: initial, initial consonant cluster, intervocalic, final consonant cluster, and final. To analyse the words we used High speed speech analysis system. We examined acoustic characteristics of English lateral spectrogram by using voice sustained time(ms), FL1, FL2, FL3. Before we started, we had expected that the result would show us that the mother tongue interfere in the final sounds because we have similar sounds in Korea. The results of our experiments showed that initially, voice sustained time showed many more differences between Korean and native pronunciation. Also, it was seen that Korean pronunciation used the syllable structure of the own mother tongue. For instance, in the case of initial consonant cluster CCVC, Koreans often used CC as a syllable and VC as another. This was due to the mother tongue interference. For this reason in the intervocalic and in the final, we saw the differences between Korean and native. Therefore we have to accept the visualized analysis system in the instruction of pronunciation.

• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.155-168
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• 2002

The intervocalic Korean liquid sound has been recognized as a flap in the studies of the Korean language. But there has been very little experimental data corroborating it. The electropalatographic (EPG) experiment was conducted to test this. The subjects were one Korean speaker and one native English speaker who had a pseudopalate and did the EPG experiment at the UCLA phonetics laboratory. The spectrographic evidence of the flaps in both the English t-flap and the Korean liquid flap was also sought. The English and Korean flaps were between mid/low back vowels so that the vowels themselves would not affect palatal contacts of the tongue. The results confirmed that the Korean liquid is realized as a flap in intervocallical position with many similar properties to English flap in both EPG and spectrographic data. The Korean initial liquid sound in borrowed words such as 'rotary' and 'radio' was also a flap. But the Korean liquid in the word-final and geminate positions was a lateral as in words 'dol ' (stone), 'dollo' (with stone), 'nal' (day) and 'nallara' (carry). The intuitive theory of the Korean liquid flap was proved by the EPG and spectrographic data.

• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.75-101
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• 2005

This study investigated the articulatory and acoustic correlates of Korean /1/. In particular, direct comparison between Korean /1/ and English /1/ was made to evaluate the current assumption about Korean /1/ such that Korean /1/ is phonetically similar to English clear /1/. The present study revealed that Korea /1/ is different from English /1/ in several properties. First, F2 for Korean /1/ is around 600-700 Hz higher than F2 for English /1/. The overall higher F2 for Korean /1/ is attributed to the fact that Korean /1/ involves tongue body raising while it lacks a dorsal gesture. Second, F3 value for Korean /1/ becomes significantly lower when the preceeding vowel is a back vowel. This kind of variable F3 pattern was not observed in English /1/. The current study relates the F3 lowering to the retroflexion of Korean /1/ in the back vowel context.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.201-222
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate /l/-deletion in lC clusters which are composed of a lateral followed by consonants at syllable-final position in English. For this, I have analyzed /l/-deletion in words depending on conditions and theoretical analyses such as Sonority Sequencing Generalization, Cluster Simplification, Complex sounds and merger, and Feature Geometry, but they didn't offer a very satisfactory explanation to the phenomenon. Therefore, I adopted a historical approach in order to determine the cause and origin of /l/-deletion in lC clusters, and then as a phonological analysis tool, I relied on the constraints and their ranking in Optimal Theory framework for explaining /l/-deletion in the clusters more consistently. As a result, I can explain the phenomenon more explicitly than from the above mentioned analyses.