• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.125-146
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• 2015

This study investigated the contribution of Korean phonological awareness to English phonological awareness and the relations of phonological awareness with reading and writing in Korean Hangul and English among Korean 5th graders. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, Korean phonological awareness was transferred to English phonological awareness. Specifically, syllable and phoneme awareness in Korean transferred to syllable awareness in English, and Korean phoneme awareness transferred to English phoneme awareness. In addition, English phoneme awareness independently explained significant variance of reading and writing in Korean and English after controlling for age and vocabulary. Syllable awareness in Korean and English explained Hangul reading and writing, respectively. The results suggest cross-language transfer of phonological awareness that is a metalinguistic skill. Phoneme awareness is important in reading and writing in English whereas both of syllable and phoneme awareness are important in literacy of Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.121-130
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• 2014

This study investigates the acoustic property of aspiration realized in English voiceless stops of /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters. VOT is measured from stops in these clusters produced by two groups; one from native speakers of English and the other from Korean native speakers. Aspiration of stops in different types of clusters is compared to various phonological factors such as location of stress, syllable type, and position in word. Pursuing the idea that phonetic realization is correlated with phonological representation, attempts are made to account for the gradient nature of aspiration of stops on the basis of syllable structure at the phonetic level, which may vary in the wake of resyllabification. Voiceless stops in /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters are further compared to results obtained in the previous study on /sC/ cluster. Variations in aspiration are also characterized in terms of segmental precedence relation of stops in the clusters, namely, post-[s], pre-[r], or both.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.431-469
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• 2002

The main purpose of this paper is to present data about schm constructions in English and to examine them within the framework of Optimality Theory. American people sometimes reduplicate a word in deprecation using a prefix schm- or shm-, as in fancy-shmancy, and old-shmold. In these data, reduplicants surface as a copy of the whole word except the onset of the first syllable, which is replaced with schm. My data include some examples where the onset of the second syllable, not the first syllable, within the word reduplication is deleted and replaced with fixed segmentism schm, which seems to be infix rather than prefix. Above all, this study presents concrete evidence for the existence and function of ‘syllable’ and ‘foot’ known as prosodic categories by examining schm reduplication. Such extensions of schm-reduplcation also make predictions about types of outputs corresponding to their inputs.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.211-219
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• 2000

In this paper, we examine fO peak lagging phenomenon in English. FO peak lagging refers to the fact that fO peak corresponding to an accent is realized beyond the domain of the host syllable. We present experimental data of fO peak lagging, which shows that fO peak is heavily delayed when the duration of the accented syllable is relatively short. In addition, we show that fO peak is also heavily delayed and realized in the following syllable in a focused word, even where the target vowel is not intrinsically short.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.169-172
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to provide preliminary data on the acoustical differences of one syllable words spoken by speakers with different language backgrounds. 20 native speakers of Korean and English were asked to read 7 one-syllable words written in their native language. The phonetic and phonemic characteristics of 7 words were similar between two languages. The ratio of duration of the body (onset+nucleus) and the rhyme(nucleus+coda) relative to the duration of each syllable were calculated using CSL (Computerized Speech Laboratory). The results corresponds to the body-coda structure of the Korean syllable which is supported by the recent experimental psychological studies. More acoustic studies on the Korean syllable structure are required to establish clinical foundation for the phonological awareness and the reading intervention programs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.15-22
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• 2009

Prominence of speech, which is often called 'accent,' affects the fluency of speaking American English greatly. In this paper, we present an accurate prominence detection method that can be utilized in computer-aided language learning (CALL) systems. We employed pitch movement, overall syllable energy, 300-2200 Hz band energy, syllable duration, and spectral and temporal correlation as features to model the prominence of speech. After the features for vowel syllables of speech were extracted, prominent syllables were classified by SVM (Support Vector Machine). To further improve accuracy, the differences in characteristics of neighboring syllables were added as additional features. We also applied a speech recognizer to extract more precise syllable boundaries. The performance of our prominence detector was measured based on the Intonational Variation in English (IViE) speech corpus. We obtained 84.9% accuracy which is about 10% higher than previous research.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.303-314
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• 2002

The main purpose of this paper is to show how Jespersen analyzed the date of English compound related with reduplication. Especially dealing with the compound words he classified the examples related with reduplication as a separate part and attempted to account for the patters based on the structure of the first syllable constituting the initial part of the second element in a compound word. 1 tried to explain the peculiar shape of the reduplicational pattern in English based on the Optimality Theory, especially the method of 'melodic overwriting' of McCarthy(1997). According to the analysis the initial part of the second element of a compound has to be stipulated before reduplication occurs. When the reduplicant has to be decided at the first syllable of the second element, the form which is stipulated to take the position comes to appear at the post instead of repeating the morphemic shape of the first syllable at the first element of the word.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.22-28
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• 1994

Previous studies reveal that in English there is no EMG evidence fur the feature tense-lax distinction. The technique of electro-myography(EMG) was used to see if the existing claim holds true, particularly in unstressed syllable. It was found that in unstressed syllable, the peak EMG amplitude from the orbicularis oris superior muscle was significantly greater in /p/ than in /b/, while in stressed syllable this difference was negligible. It was hypothesized that in stressed syllable, /p/ and /b/ may be differentiated by the EMG activities from a muscle other than the orbicularis oris superior muscle, e.g. the respiratory muscles relating to 'aspiration' or depressor anguli oris muscle. In Korean, there was a clear labial gestures for the feature tense-lax distinction. The phoneme-sensitive manifestation of stress and some possible reasons for the inter-speaker variability in the data and the variability within a given speaker were discussed.