• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1-31
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• 2009

Although Korean university students' primary concern is academic success in their higher degrees in the UK, they highly desire to develop English communicative competence through a number of opportunities to speak with natives speakers. The paper aims at examining to what extent they are able to be socialised into a new environment while they are studying at UK universities. The in-depth, longitudinal interviews with the targeted group of six Korean masters' students at the University of York was undertaken to observe the pace of their progress in developing social skills. Reluctance and hesitance to contact and interact with their supervisors and other academic staff persisted for most of them to the final term caused by cultural reasons such as face and hierarchy rather than language problems. Despite the six participants' variation in their patterns of social interaction, they struggled with pressures towards monoculture-biased interaction with Korean people, which was quite extreme for the five participants. This passivity can be explained by several reasons such as the students' lack of communicative competence and other situational factors on one-year course. It is important to note that students' failure to develop network with native speakers is strongly associated with experience of cultural withdrawal and frustration with developing communicative competence in English.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.73-79
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• 2003

There are more than five systems for transcribing English vowels. Because of this diversity, teachers of English and students are confronted with not a little problems with the English vowel symbols used in the English-Korean dictionaries, English text books, books for Phonetics and Phonology. This study was designed to suggest criterions for the phonemic transcription of English vowels on the basis of phonetic properties of the vowels and a system of English vowel transcription based on the criterions in order to minimize the problems with inter-system differences. A speaker (phonetician) of RP English uttered a series of isolated minimal pairs containing the vowels in question. The suggested vowel symbols are as follows: (1) Simple vowels: /i:/ in beat, /I/ bit, /$\varepsilon$/ bet, /${\ae}$ bat, /a:/ father, /Dlla/ bod, /c:/ bawd, /$\upsilon$ put, /u:/ boot /$\Lambda$/ but, and /e/ about /$\varepsilon:ll3:r$/ bird. (2) Diphthongs: /aI/ in bite, /a$\upsilon$/ bout, /cI/ boy, /3$\upsilon$llo$\upsilon$/ boat, /eI/ bait, /eelleer/ air, /uelluer/ poor, /iellier/ beer. Where two symbols are shown corresponding to the vowel in a single word, the first is appropriate for most speakers of British English and the second for most speakers of American English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.11-20
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• 2016

It is well known that vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants than voiced ones in English, as in many other languages. Research has shown that the ratio of vowel durations in voiced and voiceless contexts in English is in the range of 0.6~0.8. However, little work has been done as to whether the ratio of vowel durations varies depending on English variety. In the production experiment in this paper, seven speakers from three varieties of English, New Zealand, British, and American English, read 30 pairs of (C)VC monosyllabic words which differ in coda voicing (e.g. beat-bead). Vowel height, phonemic vowel length, and consonant manner were varied as well. As expected, vowel-shortening effects were found in all varieties: vowels were shorter before voiceless than before voiced codas. Overall vowel duration was the longest in American English and the shortest in New Zealand (NZ) English. In particular, vowel duration before voiceless codas is the shortest in New Zealand English, indicating the most radical degree of shortening in this variety. As a result, the ratio of vowel durations in varying voicing contexts is the lowest in NZ English, while American and British English do not show a significant difference each other. In addition, consonant closure duration was examined. Whereas NZ speakers show the shortest vowel duration before a voiceless coda, their voiceless consonants have the longest closure duration, which suggest an inverse relationship between vowel duration and closure duration.

• Korean Journal of Cleft Lip And Palate
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.53-62
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• 2010

Nasalance is used to evaluate the velopharyngeal incompetence in clinical diagnosis using Nasometer. The aim of this study is to find the nasalance differences between English native speakers and Korean speakers by measuring the nasalance of Oral and Nasal sentences. 20 Americans and 20 Korean students participate to the experimentation. The results are as follows: (1) The nasalance of females for Oral and Nasal sentences is higher than that of males for both native and Korean speakers. (2) The nasalance of Oral sentences in Korean men and females is higher than that of Oral sentences in American men and females, however, the nasalance of Nasal sentences in American men and females is higher than that of Nasal sentences in Korean men and females. (3) The nasalance of stop consonants /p, t, k/ in Korean men and females is higher than that of consonants in American men and females. (4) The nasalance of nasal consonants /m, n, ɧ/ in American men and females is higher than that of consonants in Korean men and females.

• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.1-11
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• 2008

This study explored the perception of transplanted Korean prosody by NE (Native speakers of English) and NK (Native speakers of Korean) listeners. The Korean utterances of various sentence types produced by NE and NK were employed to transplant the original Korean prosody contours to the Korean utterances read by NE. Then, other NE and NK were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the two rater groups with the three factors (e.g., transplantation types & rater groups, sentence types & rater groups, sentence length & rater groups) turned out to be meaningful. Both rater groups preferred the combined effect of transplanted prosodic components (e.g. DP, DPI) to that of individual transplantation (e.g. I, D, P). Compared to NK, NE were more sensitive to duration change than pitch change whereas NK showed equal preference to the both. In sentence types such as De, Ex, Im, and Ta, NE perceived higher similarity than NK.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.83-102
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to find out some major characteristics of intermediate-advanced Korean learners' English by corpus- linguistically analyzing their essays in comparison with native speakers'. We construct a corpus of CBT TOEFL essays by Korean learners, NNS1 (94076 words in 402 texts), and its sub-corpus, NNS2 (14291 words in 45 texts), and then a corpus of model essays written or meticulously edited by native speakers, NS (14833 words in 35 texts). We compare NNS1 and NNS2 with NS, and with some other corpora, in terms of high-frequency words, and show that Korean learners' writings have more features of informal writing than those of formal writing, which is in accord with the reports in Granger (1998) that EFL writings by European advanced learners are characterized by informality.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.69-87
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• 2006

This study aims to describe the vowel system of present-day American English and to discuss some of its phonetic variations due to regional differences. Fifteen speakers of American English from various regions of the United States produced the monophthongs of English. The vowel duration and the frequencies of the first and the second formant were measured. The results indicate that the distinction between the vowels [c] and [a] has been merged in most parts of the U.S. except in some speakers from eastern and southeastern parts of the U.S., resulting in the general loss of phonemic distinction between the vowels. The phonemic merger of the two vowels can be interpreted as the result of the relatively small functional load of the [c]-[a] contrast, and the smaller back vowel space in comparison to the front vowel space. The study also shows that the F2 frequencies of the high back vowel [u] were extremely high in most of the speakers from the eastern region of the U.S., resulting in the overall reduction of their acoustic space for high vowels. From the viewpoint of the Adaptive Dispersion Theory proposed by Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) and Lindblom (1986), the high back vowel [u] appeared to have been fronted in order to satisfy the economy of articulatory gesture to some extent without blurring any contrast between [i] and [u] in the high vowel region.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.349-354
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• 1996

The phonetic mastery of English has been considered next to impossible to many non-native speakers of English, including even some teachers of English. This paper takes issue with this phonetic problem of second language acquisition and proposes that combination of cognitive and physical approaches can help master English faster and more easily.

• Proceedings of the KSLP Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.170-173
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• 2003

There are more than five systems for transcribing English vowels. Because of this diversity, teachers of English and students are confronted with not a little problems with the English vowel symbols used in the English-Korean dictionaries, English text books, books for Phonetics and Phonology. This study was designed to suggest criterions for the phonemic transcription of English vowels on the basis of phonetic properties of the vowels and a system of English vowel transcription based on the criterions in order to minimize the problems with inter-system differences. A speaker (phonetician) of RP English uttered a series of isolated minimal pairs containing the vowels in question. The suggested vowel symbols are as follows: 1) Simple vowels : /i:/ in beat, /I/ bit, /$\varepsilon$/ bet,/${\ae}$/ bat, /a:/ father, /Dlla/ bod, /$\jmath$:/ bawd, /u/ put, /u:/ boot /$\Lambda$/ but, and /$\partial$/ about /$\Im$:ll$\Im$:r/ bird. 2) Diphthongs : /aI/ in bite, /au/ bout, /$\jmath$I/ boy, /$\Im$ullou/ boat, /er/ bait, /e$\partial$lle$\partial$r/ air, /u$\partial$llu$\partial$r/ poor, /i$\partial$lli$\partial$r/ beer. Where two symbols are shown corresponding to the vowel in a single word, the first is appropriate for most speakers of British English and the second for most speakers of American English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.15-20
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• 2021

In line with recent attention to the multimodal expression of politeness, the present study examined the association between polite speech and acoustic features through the analysis of vowels produced in casual and polite speech contexts in Korean. Fourteen adult native speakers of Seoul Korean produced the utterances in two social conditions to elicit polite (professor) and casual (friend) speech. Vowel duration and the first (F1) and second formants (F2) of seven sentence- and phrase-initial monophthongs were measured. The results showed that polite speech shares acoustic similarities with vowel production in clear speech: speakers showed greater vowel space expansion in polite than casual speech in an effort to enhance perceptual intelligibility. Especially, female speakers hyperarticulated (front) vowels for polite speech, independent of speech rate. The implications for the acoustic encoding of social stance in polite speech are further discussed.