• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.17-35
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of an explicit word instruction for EFL beginning readers and their perception on the learning experience. Data were attained from 16 fourth graders who took English class as a development activity. Data include the results of pre- and post-test of high frequency sight word recognition, oral reading ability, students' survey responses, and teacher observation. The descriptive statistics were obtained for the result of the pre- and post-test. The findings from the student survey and teacher observation were also provided and interpreted to better understand the result of project and students' perception on the learning experience. The followings are the results of this study. The word recognition ability of the students was dramatically improved after the project. The students were satisfied with the overall learning experience perceiving it as helpful and fun learning. They expressed that the explicit word instruction helped their word recognition and reading ability. The results also supported that the confidence of students on their reading ability were heightened. Several suggestions are made for teachers and researchers on the word instruction for young EFL learners who are beginning readers.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.303-308
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• 2008

The purpose of the present study is to investigate that word frequency has significant influence on noun definitions in Korean. The experimental group was 80 students from Elementary school, Middle school, High school and University. They rated familiarity and wrote definitions for nouns. Noun definitions were analyzed with semantic categories such as "use/purpose," "description," "association/relation," "partial explanation," "explanation," "error," "partial explanation-attribute," "partial explanation-specific class," "partial explanation-nonspecific class," "explanation-specific class," "explanation-nonspecific class." As a result, they showed familiarity for high-frequency nouns. "EXPL" categories that use class terms or critical attributes were used more frequently in definitions of high-frequency nouns compared with low-frequency nouns. They increased with age and errors decreased with age. Word frequency had a significant influence on noun definitions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.35-48
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• 2006

The present study examined whether words with higher frequency have more exposure to the lenition process such as intervocalic stop voicing or /h/ reduction in the production of the Korean speakers. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 tested if word-internal intervocalic voicing and /h/ reduction occur more often in the words with higher frequency than less frequent words respectively. Results showed that the rate of voicing was not significantly different between the high frequency group and the low frequency group; rather both high and low frequency words were shown to be fully voiced in this prosodic position. However, intervocalic /h/s were deleted more in high frequency words than in low frequency words. Low frequency words showed that other phonetic variants such as [h] and [w] were found more often than in high frequency group. Thus the results of the present study are indefinitive as to the relationship between the word frequency and lenition with the data at hand.

• MALSORI
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• no.61
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• pp.31-48
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• 2007

This study investigated the roles of name agreement and word frequency in the English-Korean word translation task. Using the low-frequency homonyms with low name agreement as stimuli, Experiment 1 revealed that the name agreement of materials is a determinant which could modulate times to translate English words into Korean equivalents. On the contrary, Experiment 2 showed that the name agreement of materials does not play a decisive role in the translation task, using the low-frequency homonyms having high name agreement as stimuli. In Experiment 3, we identified that the frequency effects observed from previous two experiments are indeed brought about during the lexical access. Our findings suggest that the word frequencies of materials have a strong influence on English-Korean word translation times, and homonyms are represented independently each other in the lexeme level.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.567-571
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• 2009

This study was conducted in order to investigate the role of working memory in word recognition. As a preliminary step in tackling this topic, word frequency and working memory load were manipulated in a naming task. The results showed that word frequency is significantly involved with the working memory load. The effects of working memory load were greater in low-frequency word processing than in high-frequency word processing. These results indicat that working memory is involved more in the processing of low-frequency words. The implications for the teaching of children at the early reading acquisition stage are discussed in this paper.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.111-128
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• 2004

In English, a focused word with new information receives a pitch accent. This paper examines how English native speakers and Korean speakers produce and perceive focus in English yes-no questions. The production experiments show that native speakers realize an appropriate intonation of yes-no questions, in which a focused word has a low pitch accent followed by a high phrasal accent and a high boundary tone. However, Korean speakers usually give a high tone to a focused word. In a like manner, the perception experiments show that English native speakers judge a word with a low tone to be focused, while Korean speakers have difficulty in comprehending a focused word realized as a low tone. And it is found that Korean speakers tend to perceive low tones on sentence initial and final focused words better than those on sentence medial focused words, and they often perceive a word with a relatively high fundamental frequency or a sharp rise of fundamental frequency as a focused word. This paper shows that Korean speakers have trouble to produce and perceive an appropriate tonal pattern of a focused yes-no question, and that can cause confusion in a conversation with native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.45-56
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• 2019

This study investigated the interaction between phonological phrase boundary and word frequency variable in Korean speech processing. A word monitoring task was performed to examine the interference caused by the frequency effect of target word depending on whether a phonological phrase is formed within the target word. Frequency of target word (high vs low) and phonological phrase boundary (within target word vs between target words) were applied as between and within subject condition respectively. Our results showed the significant main effect of the phonological phrase boundary and the significant interaction. In the post-hoc analysis, the high-frequency target words were detected significantly faster than the low-frequency target words only in the within phonological phrase boundary condition. Frequency effect in the between phonological phrase boundary condition did not appear. The results indicated that the phonological phrase boundary and word frequency variable played an important role in Korean speech processing. In particular, we discussed the possibility of processing the word frequency at the very early sensory information processing stage based on the interaction of two experimental factors.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.325-350
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• 2007

This study investigated global and local characteristics of eye movement while 16 college students read 48 easy Korean sentences. It was found that readers lusted for about 225ms at the word cluster(eojeol), made a forward saccade of about 3.6 characters to the next word, skipped short and high-frequent words about 25% during the first-pass reading, and regressed backward at 19%. There were also individual differences in readers' pattern of fixation and saccade. In addition, the effects of word cluster length and word frequency and the effects related to landing position were examined. The eyes landed on the center of a word cluster more frequently than on the boundaries. When the eyes landed at the boundaries, the eyes fixated the word cluster again more frequently. The word clusters with high-frequency words were read faster than those with low-frequency words.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.7-19
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• 2007

The present study investigates the so-called frequency inheritance effect in word production. According to some earlier studies (e.g. Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), retrieval of a low-frequency homophone benefits from its high-frequency homophone twin, and more specifically word-retrieval RT is determined by the frequency of the phonological form of the word (sum of homophone frequencies) rather than the frequency of the specific word. This result, however, has been challenged by later studies (e.g. Caramazza et al., 2001) and one possible resolution is that languages differ in the extent to which the inheritance effect occurs. Two experiments are reported to test whether the frequency inheritance effect depends on the target language, namely, if a language such as Korean with relatively many homophones tend not to show frequency inheritance, which is compared with the language with fewer homophones such as Dutch and German (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Jescheniak et al., 2003). Experiment 1 was picture naming, and Experiment 2 used an English-to-Korean translation task. In both experiments, the homophones were actually slower than the low-frequency controls, suggesting that there was no evidence for the inheritance effect. These results imply that the issue of whether specific word or homophone frequency determines production can be properly assessed by taking into account the language-specific nature of the lexicon such as the percentage of the homophone words in that language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigated the influences of probabilistic accessibility of the word being produced - as determined by its usage frequency and neighborhood density - on native and high-proficiency L2 speakers' realization of six English monophthong vowels. The native group hyperarticulated the vowels over an expanded acoustic space when the vowel occurred in words with low frequency and high density, supporting the claim that vowel forms are modified in accordance with the probabilistic accessibility of words. However, temporal expansion occurred in words with greater accessibility (i.e., with high frequency and low density) as an effect of low phonotactic probability in low-density words, particularly in attended speech. This suggests that temporal modification in the opposite direction may be part of the phonetic characteristics that are enhanced in communicatively driven focus realization. Conversely, none of these spectral and temporal patterns were found in the L2 group, thereby indicating that even the high-proficiency L2 speakers may not have developed experience-based sensitivity to the modulation of sub-categorical phonetic details indexed with word-level probabilistic information. The results are discussed with respect to how phonological representations are shaped in a word-specific manner for the sake of communicatively driven lexical intelligibility, and what factors may contribute to the lack of native-like sensitivity in L2 speech.