• International Journal of Contents
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.48-52
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to examine 30 logical connectors in the essay writing of Korean university students for comparison with the use in similar types of native English writing. The main questions addressed were as follows: Do Korean EFL students tend to over- or underuse logical connectors? What types of connectors differentiate Korean learners from native use? To answer these questions, EFL learner data were compared with data from native speakers using computerized corpora and linguistic software tools to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The analysis revealed that Korean EFL learners tend to overuse logical connectors in the initial position of the sentence, and that they tend to overuse additive connectors such as 'moreover', 'besides', and 'furthermore', whereas they underuse contrastive connectors such as 'yet' and 'instead'. On the basis of the results of this study, some pedagogical implications are made concerning the need for teaching of the semantic, stylistic, and syntactic behavior of logical connectors.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.119-122
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• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accent, pronunciation, and intonation in English spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation. we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation and calculate the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input and reference. For the intonation evaluation. we propose nine pattern of slope to estimate pitch contour, then we grade test sentences by accumulated error obtained by the distance measure and estimated slope. Our result shows that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with perceptual measure. As the result of the intonation evaluation. system represent the similar order of grade for the four sentences having different intonation patterns compared with perceptual evaluation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.201-210
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• 2002

This paper explores whether there is correlation between consonants' place and duration of adjacent vowels in English and Korean. The results showed that in English the vowels preceding alveolar stops were in general longer than the vowels before bilabial or velar stops. Consonants appeared to have their inherent length due to their place and to exhibit some compensatory effects on the duration of preceding vowels. This effect can be explained in a physiological term that the tongue tip is the organ which might be more agile in articulatory movement than the tongue body for the velars or the lower lip (and the jaw) for the bilabials is and the shorter production time of the alveolars caused the lengthening of the adjacent vowels. However, this physiological account did not hold in the case of Korean, which exhibited less consistent patterns across speakers for the consonants' place and the vowel duration. The segmental duration seemed to be timed quite consistently within a language but the pattern was not universal across languages.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.163-185
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• 2001

Listening comprehension is an integrative and creative process of interaction through which listeners receive speakers' production of linguistic or non-linguistic knowledge. Improving listening comprehension requires continual attentiveness and interest. .Listening skill can be extended systematically only when students are frequently exposed to a wide range of listening materials with an affective, cultural, social, and psycholinguistic approach. Therefore, teachers should help students learn how to comprehend intactly the overall meaning of intended messages. Practical classroom teaching necessitates a systematic procedure in which students should take part in meaningful tasks and activities. This study purposes to investigate the effects of task-based listening comprehension instruction on improvement of EFL learners' listening comprehension and their attitude and interest. 74 freshmen who enrolled in College English conversation classes in Kongju National University participated in this study. The participants were administered listening comprehension tests and questionnaires. The results show that the listening comprehension instruction through tasks and activities has a positive impact on EFL learners' improvement of listening comprehension and their attitude and interest toward the target language as well.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.245-253
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• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accents and pronunciations in English words spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation, we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation, and perform the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input patterns and reference patterns. Based on these spectral distances, we decide whether to recommend the pronunciation correction or not. Our results show that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with the perceptual measure.

• 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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• 2007.05a
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• pp.281-284
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• 2007

This experimental study aims to find out the correlation between semantic predictability and pitch-accent realization. For the experiment, we classified the predictability into three degrees: unpredictable, implicitly predictable, and explicitly predictable. And then each degree divided into to two subcatergories: one is adverbs/adverbial phrases of time or place and the other one is not time or place adverbs/adverbial phrases. The materials used in the experiment were 9 sentences for the each subcategory. One male and one female English native speakers participated in this experiment. Their reading speeches were recorded on Digital Audio Tape. Their speech data were analyzed by using Pitchworks program. The results of this experiment show pitch accented ratio is somewhat in inverse proportion to the degree of predictability.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to know the acoustic characteristics of voice under stressful and relaxed conditions. Ten undergraduate male students participated in this study and produced 아, 에, 이 vowels in English reading, difficult Korean reading under stressful conditions, and easy Korean reading under relaxed conditions. After that, F0, jitter, shimmer, NHR, F1, F2, and F3 values were measured and analyzed. The results of this study demonstrate that speech parameters related to stress are jitter, shimmer, and NHR in that these values are lower under relaxed situations (easy Korean reading) than that of stressful situations (English and difficult Korean reading). This study will be a foundation to verify that the analysis of acoustic characteristics can serve as a quantitative tool for measuring stress levels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to examine the voice onset times(VOTs) of the voiceless and voiced stops from the ten young male speakers of the Buckeye corpus[9]. The factors that are known to affect VOTs were also extracted, including the place of articulation, height of following vowels, location within word, presence of a preceding [s], status of the target word with respect to the content versus function word, presence of a syllabic stress, word frequency and speech rate. Findings from this work mostly agreed with those from earlier studies on English, but with some exceptions and new discoveries. We hope that this work can contribute to figuring out the nature and properties of the spontaneous speech of English.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.67-84
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• 2007

Verb phrase could have two different meanings according to which is followed after verb; adverb or preposition. The meaning of 'verb+adverb' is deduced from a figurative meaning which is idiomatic expression, and 'verb+preposition' is interpreted as the literal meaning. The purpose of this study is to observe how English native speakers and Korean leaners of English distinguish two sentences of the same word strings with acoustic cues like pause and duration. According to the result, as pause was used for meaning distinction, it was likely that the pause length preceding prepositions was longer than that of following adverbs. To distinguish two sentences of the same word strings, all participants seemed to use pause, verb lengthening and adverb/preposition lengthening. Among them, there is a hierarchical significance; in sequence, pause, verb lengthening, adverb/preposition lengthening.