• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.59-62
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• 2005

One's mother tongue can have an effect on learning a foreign language, especially on pronunciation. Investigating and comparing English vowels /${\varepsilon}$/ and /${\ae}$/, and their- supposedly- corresponding vowels in Korean /에/ and /애/, this study addresses the following questions: Can Koreans distinguish /에/ and /애/? Can they distinguish /${\varepsilon}$/ and /${\ae}$/ in English? And what is the relationship between the Korean vowels and the English vowels? That is, is the conventional correspondence of /에/-/${\varepsilon}$/ and /애/-/${\ae}$/ appropriate? The results showed that most Korean students distinguish neither Korean /에/ and /애/, nor English /${\varepsilon}$/ and /${\ae}$/. While not distinguishable within a language, Korean /에/ and /애/ still form a separate group from English /${\varepsilon}$/ and /${\ae}$/. Therefore the correspondence between /에/-/${\varepsilon}$/ and /애/-/${\ae}$/ is not appropriate. Strategies for teaching English pronunciation should be designed accordingly.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.47-61
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• 1996

The phonetic study of English language in Japan is a matter of great importance, a problem of major concern and a. vital subject The special difficulties which the Japanese college students have in learning English lie in the field of prosodic features of English, such as, syllable, rhythm, stress, intonation, prominence, of.. These difficulties have made Japanese students' pronunciation relatively monotonous or mora(ness). In my presentation, the specific phonetic features of Japanese language first will be discussed and clarified. And then the effective teaching method of intonation to improve Japanese students' pronunciation will be suggested. Finally, the oral dialogue with intonation analysis and transcription in the class room will be demonstrated to highlight the presentation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.21-27
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• 1999

In this paper, we propose an improved MLP-based English pronunciation dictionary generator to apply to the variable vocabulary word recognizer. The variable vocabulary word recognizer can process any words specified in Korean word lexicon dynamically determined according to the current recognition task. To extend the ability of the system to task for English words, it is necessary to build a pronunciation dictionary generator to be able to process words not included in a predefined lexicon, such as proper nouns. In order to build the English pronunciation dictionary generator, we use context-dependent grapheme-to-phoneme multi-layer perceptron(MLP) architecture for each grapheme. To train each MLP, it is necessary to obtain grapheme-to-phoneme training data from general pronunciation dictionary. To automate the process, we use dynamic programming(DP) algorithm with some distance metrics. For training and testing the grapheme-to-phoneme MLPs, we use general English pronunciation dictionary with about 110 thousand words. With 26 MLPs each having 30 to 50 hidden nodes and the exception grapheme lexicon, we obtained the word accuracy of 72.8% for the 110 thousand words superior to rule-based method showing the word accuracy of 24.0%.

• MALSORI
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• no.2
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• pp.50-55
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• 1981

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.1-6
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• 2017

This paper focuses on the development of a system that improves the convenience of foreign language learning and enhaces the learning ability of the target language through the use of IT devices. In addition to the basic grammar, the importance of pronunciation and intonation have somewhat crucial effect in everyday communication. Pronunciation and intonation of English are different according to the basic characteristics of a native language and these differences often cause problems in communication. The proposed system distinguishes acceptability in English communication process and requests the correction in realtime. The proposed system minimizes system intervention by collecting various voice signals of foreign language learners and setting that can be considered as acceptable threshold points. As a result, the learner can increase the learning efficiency with minimal interruption of the utterance caused by unnecessary system intervention.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.251-255
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of using songs for the acquisition of English Prosody in elementary school. For the purpose, 8 classes were chosen to teach songs for four months, and listening tests and reading test were performed for analyzing the effect. The result is as follows : (1) The result of listening test showed that the average scores of the experimental classes were higher than those of comparative classes, and it was more effective in lower grades than in upper grades. (2) In pronunciation tests, the pronunciations of experimental classes were more similar to native speaker's pronunciation that those of comparative classes in intonation, lexical stress and sentence stress. (3) Singing songs repeatedly is more important than learning many songs. It means that to give the chances to sing as many times as possible is advisable for teaching pronunciation.

• MALSORI
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• no.66
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• pp.41-59
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• 2008

Knowledge in linguistic rhythm of the target language plays a major role in foreign language proficiency. This study attempts to discover valid rhythm features that can be utilized in automatic assessment of non-native English pronunciation. Eight previously proposed and two novel rhythm metrics are investigated with 360 English read speech tokens obtained from 27 Korean learners and 9 native speakers. It is found that some of the speech-rate normalized interval measures and above-word level metrics are effective enough to be further applied for automatic scoring as they are significantly correlated with speakers' proficiency levels. It is also shown that metrics need to be dynamically selected depending upon the structure of target sentences. Results from a preliminary auto-scoring experiment through a Multi Regression analysis suggest that appropriate control of unexpected input utterances is also desirable for better performance.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.37-40
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• 2003

This paper presents the preliminary result of the automatic pronunciation scoring for non-native English speakers, and shows the developmental process for an English speech recognizer for the educational and evaluational purposes. The proposed speech recognizer, featuring two refined acoustic model sets, implements the noise-robust data compensation, phonetic alignment, highly reliable rejection, key-word and phrase detection, easy-to-use language modeling toolkit, etc., The developed speech recognizer achieves 0.725 as the average correlation between the human raters and the machine scores, based on the speech database YOUTH for training and K-SEC for test.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.83-88
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• 2003

This study carried out an experimental English pronunciation assessment to see the differences in the relationship between the different rater categories. The result shows that i) correlation between Korean and Native American raters is high(r=.98) enough to be considered reliable, ii) previous instructions about assessment rubric and the knowledge about English phonetics and phonology exert little influence on the rating scores, iii) correlation between the automatic ILT(Interactive Language Tutor) rating using speech recognition technology and Natives' rating is stronger than that between ILT and Koreans' rating.