• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.63-72
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• 2007

In this study, the researchers evaluate the hypothesis that the reaction time (RT) in the brain is largely dependent on age and gender. The researchers tested English and Korean words using two types: reading as visual stimuli, and listening as auditory stimuli. The E-Prime program installed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (f-MRI) was used. There are 136 Korean subjects in three groups: 30 children (5th and 6th grade elementary school students), 76 young adults (college students), and 30 adults (35-53 years old). In the listening test, the variation for the two languages was different among the three age groups, regardless of gender, whereas the data did not show meaningful differences in the reading test. The findings will provide some meaningful information regarding perception and acquisition of a foreign language.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.135-147
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• 1997

This thesis describes pronunciation differences of vowel lengths between Koreans and Americans speaking English words and sentences. This study also analizes the reasons for these differences with the help of acoustic instruments. Sixteen sentences and eight words were selected as the experimental material. The informants for this study were 9 males; 3 Americans and 6 Koreans, who were asked to pronounce the test words and sentences five times. In this study, the acoustical analysis to measure duration was done through computer digital techniques. According to the results of the experiment, duration of 8 English vowels pronounced between Koreans and Americans shows very different features. When Koreans pronounce English vowels, the duration of the stressed vowel in the sentence-final position is much shorter than in other positions, such as in the sentence-initial and in word position. On the contrary, when Americans pronounce English vowels, the duration of the stressed vowel in the sentence-final position is much longer than in other positions. If the correlation between length and stress were to be studied in a more detailed manner, it would give fundamental help to the study of relation between stress and length.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.25-36
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• 1998

The prosodic properties of Korean and English stress were examined with focus on syllable duration and pitch by loan words. 14 loan words were selected by the criteria of the numbers of syllables and stress positions. 3 Korean males using Seoul dialect and 3 American males using general American English served as subjects. Each tokens were uttered 3 times and second one was chosen to be analysed by CSL. We measured the duration and F0 of each syllable. In English, duration is the most salient acoustic correlates of stress, and pitch is the second. In Korean, by contrast, it seems that neither duration nor pitch is the acoustic features of stress, from our data

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.215-234
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• 2002

This study is designed for two purposes. The first one is to compare the realization and perception of English contrastive focus between Korean learners of English and native speakers of English. The second purpose is to study the phonological and phonetical features of contrastive focus by examining the results of production and perception experiments. English native speakers' results show that the English contrastive accents are generally accompanied by higher peak heights. The findings agree with the results of Bartels & Kingston (1994). Unlike native speakers of English, Korean speakers seem to be poor at relating the phonetical features of contrastive focus to their actual speech. Korean speakers' results are especially unsuccessful when the contrast is not distinctly grasped through syntactic structure, or when the function words are contrasted. Furthermore, Korean speakers' utterances tend to have pitch accents on every content word, whether the word is contrasted or not.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.9
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• pp.381-388
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• 2014

In this paper, we deal with implementation issues of an unknown word classifier for middle-school level English writing test. We define the type of unknown words occurred in English text and discuss the detection process for unknown words. Also, we define the type of swear words occurred in students's English writings, and suggest how to handle this type of words. We implement an unknown word classifier with a swear detection module for developing an automatic English writing scoring system. By experiments with actual test data, we evaluate the accuracy of the unknown word classifier as well as the swear detection module.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.55-68
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• 2004

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the relationship between English pronunciation and listening comprehension of English diphthongs and low vowels of Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Of 22 test sentences for listening comprehension, 15 sentences were recorded by native speakers and seven sentences were edited from Springboard by Oxford University Press. For the listening comprehension test, 90 subjects from two groups, Chungnam dialect speakers and Gyungnam dialect speakers, were selected. They listened to 22 sentences produced by audio cassette tape and completed a cloze exercise. By the results of this experiment, we observed that Korean collegians of Gyungnam province showed a better listening comprehension of words including front low vowels when they preceded voiced sounds than those of Chungnam province. When the back low vowel came in an open syllable, we also recognized the same result; Gyungnam province collegians showed better listening comprehension of words including back low vowels than those of Chungnam province. As the results of Hee-Suk Park & Jung-Soak Kim(2003) showed that Gyungnam province collegians pronounced the English low vowels longer than Chungnam province collegians, we discovered that there was a positive relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension, especially in Gyungnam province collegians. However regarding words including English diphthongs we discovered almost no relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.121-135
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Korean speakers realize English stress and rhythm at the sentence level, and investigate what different acoustic characteristics of English sentence stress and rhythm Korean speakers have, compared with those of American English speakers. Stressed words in the sentence were analyzed in terms of duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the stressed vowel in the word with neutral stress and with emphatic stress, respectively. According to the results, when the words had emphatic stress, both Koreans' and Americans' F0 and intensity of the stressed vowel were higher than those with neutral stress. Korean speakers of English realized the sentence stress with shorter vowel duration and higher F0 than American English speakers when the words had emphatic stress. The analysis of the timing of the sentence with increased unstressed syllables showed that both Americans and Koreans produced the sentence with longer duration as the number of unstressed syllables increased. However, the duration of unstressed syllables between stressed syllables by Koreans was longer than that by Americans. Americans seemed to produce unstressed syllables between stressed syllables faster than Koreans for regular intervals of stressed syllables. This analysis implies that if there are more unstressed syllables between stressed syllables, Koreans might produce unstressed syllables and the whole sentence with longer duration.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.67-76
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• 2022

This paper presents two experiments examining different gemination behavior of English affixes. Experiment 1 focused on geminates through affixation with im-, un-, -ness, and -ly. The English group articulated geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for im-, un-, and -ness, but there was no difference for -ly. This suggests that -ly words are more likely to be perceived as whole words, and that -ly is less decomposable. Furthermore, un- geminates exhibited longer absolute and preceding vowel durations than im- geminates, suggesting that im- is more decomposable than un-. However, the Korean group produced geminates with longer absolute and relative durations than singletons for all im-, un-, -ness, and -ly, and produced comparable absolute durations of im- and un- geminates. Experiment 2 investigated different gemination behaviors of locative and negative im- prefixes. The English group showed durational contrast between geminates and singletons only for negative im-, indicating that locative im- is not easily separated from stem. However, the Korean group produced longer absolute and relative durations for geminates than for singletons for both locative and negative im-. According to the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, affix decomposability is less likely to influence Korean speakers' English affix gemination, and spellings may have a greater influence.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.54-57
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• 2014

This paper investigated the influence of foreign words, otherwise known as loan words, on global communication abilities of university students from two non English-speaking countries: Korea and Japan. To survey the understanding and usage of foreign words which are from English language and used frequently in daily conversation, questionnaires were administered to Korean and Japanese university students majoring in engineering who shared similar linguistic backgrounds. The results were analyzed from global communication viewpoint. Based on the results, methods for improving global communication skills in engineering education were proposed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.193-206
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• 2001

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate characteristics of English vowels uttered by Korean regional dialect speakers. Ten English mono-syllabic words, and eight Korean mono-syllabic words, were uttered six times by nine female graduate students from three areas: Seoul, Yongnam and Honam. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Quirer. Results showed that Seoul dialect speakers uttered English vowels more similar to those uttered by English native speakers than did the other dialect speakers. In particular, Yongnam dialect speakers have articulatory problems pronouncing the back vowels(/u/, /$\upsilon$/, /c/), while Honam dialect speakers have problems pronouncing the front vowels(/i/. /I/, /$\varepsilon$/, /$\ae$/). Even though each group has different problems pronouncing English vowels, Korean speakers generally have difficulty in discriminating tense vowels(/i/ and /u/) from the lax vowels(/I/ and /$\upsilon$/). It appears that the width of Korean speakers' articulatory movements is comparatively narrower than those of native English speakers.