• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.165-168
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• 2002

This research was conducted to investigate the priming effect in Korean and English word production by Korean speakers. Picture-naming with distractors was used as experimental task. The type of target language, the type of distractor language and SOA(Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) were used as variables. Cross-linguistic priming effect and within-linguistic priming effect were mesured to investigate bilinguals' conceptual system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.11-16
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• 2024

The fundamental frequency (f0), representing an acoustic measure of vocal fold vibration, serves as an indicator of the speaker's emotional state and language-specific pattern in daily conversations. This study aimed to examine the f0 distribution in an English corpus of spontaneous speech, establishing normative data for American speakers. The corpus involved 40 participants engaging in free discussions on daily activities and personal viewpoints. Using Praat, f0 values were collected filtering outliers after removing nonspeech sounds and interviewer voices. Statistical analyses were performed with R. Results indicated a median f0 value of 145 Hz for all the speakers. The f0 values for all speakers exhibited a right-skewed, pointy distribution within a frequency range of 216 Hz from 75 Hz to 339 Hz. The female f0 range was wider than that of males, with a median of 113 Hz for males and 181 Hz for females. This spontaneous speech corpus provides valuable insights for linguists into f0 variation among individuals or groups in a language. Further research is encouraged to develop analytical and statistical measures for establishing reliable f0 standards for the general population.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.31-40
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• 2009

English education taken with native English speakers is very effective, but it is hard to obtain English education with native English speakers in rural schools. In this study, therefore, we supported English education with on-line content and video conferencing with native English speakers. This study worked with one hundred fifty students from six elementary and middle schools equally distributed by city size over three months. This study performed experimental research by T-test comparing of pre- and post-tests of the hybrid model. In our results, the upper group showed greater improvement in understanding while the lower group showed more improvement in writing. In addition, the lower group showed more improvement than the upper group in overall English accomplishment.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.107-120
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• 2006

The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether Korean learners can use the vowel duration cue to distinguish voicing contrasts in word-final consonants in English. Given that the Korean group's performance on the auditory task was much better than their performance on the identification task or on the production task, we conclude that the AX discrimination task makes contact with a different layer of perception. In particular, the AX discrimination task can be done at the auditory or phonetic level, where differences in vowel length are still encoded in the representation. In contrast, the identification and production tasks are probing the mental representation of vowel length and voicing. It was also founded that Korean speakers stored neither vowel length nor voicing in memorized representations and did not internalize the lengthening of the preceding vowel as a rule to differentiate the voicing contrasts of final consonants, even though they were able to detect the acoustic differences in vowel duration provided that they were tested in an appropriate task.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2019

Korean (L1)-English (L2) bilingual adults' and children's production of Korean and English stops was examined to determine the age effects and L2 experience on the development of L1 and L2 stop contrasts. Four groups of Seoul Korean speakers (experienced and inexperienced adult and child groups) and two groups of age-matched native English speakers participated. The overall results of voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) of phrase-initial stops in Korean and word-intial stops in English showed a delay in the acquisition of L1 due to the dominant exposure to L2. Significantly longer VOT and lower F0 for aspirated stops as well as high temporal variability across repetitions of lenis stops were interpreted to indicate a strong effect of English on Korean stop contrasts for bilingual children. That is, the heavy use of VOT for Korean stop contrasts shows bilingual children's attention to the acoustic cue that are primarily employed in the dominant L2. Furthermore, inexperienced children, but not adults, were shown to create new L2 categories that are distinctive from the L1 within 6 months of L2 experience, suggesting greater independence between the two phonological systems. The implications of bilinguals' age at the time of testing to the degree and direction of L1-L2 interaction are further discussed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.17-26
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• 1999

We present the first speech coarticulation database of Korean, English and Konglish/sup 3)/ named "SORIDA"/sup 4)/, which is designed to cover the maximum number of representations of coarticulation in these languages [1]. SORIDA features a compact database which is designed to contain a maximum number of triphones in a minimum number of prompts. SORIDA contains all consonantal triphones and vowel allophones in 682 Korean prompts of word length and in 717 English prompt words, spoken five times by speakers of balanced genders, dialects and ages. Korean prompts are synthesized lexicons which maximize their coarticulation variation disregarding any stress phenomena, while English prompts are natural words that fully reflect their stress effects with respect to the coarticulation variation. The prompts are designed differently because English phonology has stress while Korean does not. An intermediate language, Konglish has also been modeled by two Korean speakers reading 717 English prompt words. Recording was done in a controlled laboratory environment with an AKG Model C-100 microphone and a Fostex D-5 digital-audio-tape (DAT) recorder. The total recording time lasted four hours. SORIDA CD-ROM is available in one disk of 22.05 kHz sampling rate with a 16 bit sample size. SORIDA digital audio-tapes are available in four 124-minute-tapes of 48 kHz sampling rate. SORIDA′s list of phonetically-rich-words is also available in English and Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2006

This study examines the phonetic realizations of English word stress to identify the influence of experiment method on experiment results. Stimuli uttered by native and Korean ESL beginners in authentic conversations are extracted to be shuffled according to their positions in utterances and information structure. Results indicate that the acoustic characteristics of English word stress are realized depending on its position in utterances. The native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity at sentence-final positions unlike the previous experiments and the traditional definition that stressed syllables are uttered in longer duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity; at sentence-medial positions, the native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in longer duration with higher pitch and no regularity in intensity or in shorter duration with lower pitch and intensity depending on their conversational intention. Korean ESL beginners correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration regardless of positions in sentences with no regularity in pitch and intensity. This study, thus, shows that a different experiment method may result in different results on the phonetic realizations of English word stress.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.173-181
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• 2007

This is a semantic pilot study which concentrates on how people in Taiwan process the temporal metaphors, ego-moving metaphor and time-moving metaphor. Motivated by the research of Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002) in which the English native speakers comprehend ego-moving metaphors faster than time-moving metaphors, the present study attempts to reexamine whether the faster reaction to ego-moving metaphors is shared by both the Chinese native speakers and EFL learners. To achieve the goals, 25 Chinese/English bilinguals are invited to be examined via the16 Chinese and 16 English test sentences. The recordings of their accuracy on each item are served as the databases used to compare with the study of Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002). The two finding presented here are: (1) when the subjects tested in their native language, Chinese, they process ego-moving metaphors better. (2) when tested in the foreign language, English, they conceptualize time-moving metaphors much better.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.71-75
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• 2005

We can easily recognize the voices already known to us. But what about unknown voices? Is there any relationship between voices and the images triggered by the voices? Actually, this question has been partly addressed by Moon(2000, 2002). The current study aims at shedding some more lights on the topic by investigating the relationship between unknown foreign voices and the images triggered by them. Speech samples from 16 American males and females (8 each) were recorded and 180 Korean subjects without any knowledge of the American Speakers were asked to match the voices with the corresponding photos. And the number of corrects matches between voices and pictures of the current study was less than that of Korean-speakers and Korean-listeners case. But in terms of the majority matches, regardless of correctness, the present study showed a similar trend: that is, there is more than a chance relationship between voices and the images triggered by the voices.