• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.37-42
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• 1996

This study aims to see some prosodic features of English spoken by Japanese learners of English. It focuses on speech rates, pauses, and intonation when the learners read an English passage. Three Japanese learners of English, who are all male university students, were asked to read the speech material, an English passage of 110 word length, at their normal reading speed. Then a native speaker of English, a male American English teacher. was asked to read the same passage. The Japanese speakers were also asked to read a Japanese passage of 286 letters (Japanese Kana) to compare the reading of English with that of japanese. Their speech was analyzed on a computerized system (KAY Computerized Speech Lab). Wave forms, spectrograms, and F0 contours were shown on the screen to measure the duration of pauses, phrases and sentences and to observe intonation contours. One finding of the experiment was that the movement of the low speakers' speech rates showed a similar tendency in their reading of the English passage. Reading of the Japanese passage by the three learners also had a similar tendency in the movement of speech rates. Another finding was that the frequency of pauses in the learners speech was greater than that in the speech of the native speaker, but that the ration of the total pause length to the whole utterance length was about tile same in both the learners' and the native speaker's speech. A similar tendency was observed about the learners' reading of the Japanese passage except that they used shorter pauses in the mid-sentence position. As to intonation contours, we found that the learners used a narrower pitch range than the native speaker in their reading of the English passage while they used a wider pitch range as they read the Japanese passage. It was found that the learners tended to use falling intonation before pauses whereas the native speaker used different intonation patterns. These findings are applicable to the teaching of English pronunciation at the passage level in the sense that they can show the learners. Japanese here, what their problems are and how they could be solved.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.329-345
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• 2018

Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.274-274
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• 1996

This presents the preliminary results from work in progress of a paired study of the acquisition of voiceless stops by Spanish speakers learning English, and American English speakers learning Spanish. For this study the hypothesis was that the American speakers would have no difficulty suppressing the aspiration in Spanish unaspirated stops; the Spanish speakers would have difficulty acquiring the aspiration necessary for English voiceless stops, according to Eckman's Markedness Differential Hypothesis. The null hypothesis was proved. All subjects were given the same set of disyllabic real words of English and Spanish in carrier phrases. The tokens analyzed in this report are limited to word-initial voiceless stops, followed by a low back vowel in stressed syllables. Tokens were randomized and then arranged in a list with the words appearing three separate times. Aspiration was measured from the burst to the onset of voicing(VOT). Both the first language (Ll) tokens and second language (L2) tokens were compared for each speaker and between the two groups of language speakers. Results indicate that the Spanish speakers, as a group, were able to reach the accepted target language VOT of English, but English speakers were not able to reach the accepted range for Spanish, in spite of statistically significant changes of p<.OOl by speakers in both groups of learners. A closer analysis of the speech samples revealed wide variability within the speech of native speakers of English. Not only is variability in English due to the wide range of VOT (120 msecs. for English labials, for example) but individual speakers showed different patterns. These results are revealing for the demands requied in experimental designs and the number of speakers and tokens requied for an adequate description of different languages. In addition, a simple report of means will not distinguish the speakers and the respective language learning situation; measurements must also include the RANGE of acceptability of VOT for phonetic segments. This has immediate consequences for the learning and teaching of foreign languages involving aspirated stops. In addition, the labelling of spoken language in speech technology is shown to be inadequate without a fuller mathematical description.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.163-170
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• 2017

Despite the rise of studies in spoken to sign language translation, low-resource problems of sign language corpus have been rarely addressed. As a first step towards translating from spoken to sign language, we addressed the problems arising from resource scarcity when translating spoken language to manual signals translation using statistical machine translation techniques. More specifically, we proposed three preprocessing methods: 1) paraphrase generation, which increases the size of the corpora, 2) lemmatization, which increases the frequency of each word in the corpora and the translatability of new input words in spoken language, and 3) elimination of function words that are not glossed into manual signals, which match the corresponding constituents of the bilingual sentence pairs. In our experiments, we used different types of English-American sign language parallel corpora. The experimental results showed that the system with each method and the combination of the methods improved the quality of manual signals translation, regardless of the type of the corpora.

• 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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.93-119
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• 2009

Internalized Confucian cultural scripts trigger meta-pragmatic thinking in Korean communication. Commonly shared cultural knowledge acts as a powerful constraint upon the behavioral patterns of each participant and this knowledge can be strategically manipulated to avoid confrontations. The strategic use of address reference terms utilizes cultural values as a face-redress mechanism to achieve situation-specific goals. This paper offers a view of Korean address reference terms that rests on four revisions of politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987). First, the notion of discernment - or 'wakimae' - as a culture-specific mechanism is reanalyzed. Secondly, culture-specific values as another R (ranking of imposition) variable are introduced. Thirdly, a reevaluation of the notion of positive face (respect) is discussed. Finally, the address reference terms in combination with other honorifics by the speaker that can be strategically applied either to threaten or to enhance the face of the hearer is observed. Because Confucianism is embedded in Korean cultural identity, teaching cultural values integrated and their roles in situation-dependent politeness is required in order to understand interactional nature of politeness occurring from particular discourse contexts.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2004

The number of schools that implement English medium instruction (EMI) to improve students' English proficiency has been increasing. Despite the increasing popularity of EMI, little attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of EMI and its impact on students and instructors. This study explores these issues, focused on the case of the College of Engineering at Y University. A survey questionnaire was administered to 19 engineering professors who offered EMI courses in the Fall of 2003. The survey results show that: 1) the professors perceive that students' low English proficiency is a large obstacle to successful implementation of EMI, and that pre-EMI language courses are needed to prepare students for EMI. 2)Though the professors expressed confidence in their English proficiency, they indicated that they felt quite a lot stressed at teaching EMI courses; hence, support of the school administration is needed to help faculty offering EMI courses. 3)To improve students' English proficiency, native-speaking language instructors are needed to provide feedback on students' written and spoken English.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.37-46
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• 2001

Recently speech technologies have shown notable advancements and they now play major roles in computer-aided language learning systems. In the current paper, use of speech recognition technologies is viewed with our system for teaching English pronunciation to Japanese speakers.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.71-74
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• 2003

In this paper, we present some of experimental results developed in computer-based English Pronunciation Correction System for Korean speakers. The aim of the system is to detect incorrectly pronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give correction comment to users. Speech data were collected from 254 native speakers and 411 Koreans, then used for phoneme modeling and test. We built two types of acoustic phoneme models: native speaker model and Korean speaker model. We also built langugage models to reflect Koreans' commonly occurred mispronunications. The detection rate was over 90% in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we got under 75% detection rate in diphthong split and accents.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.7-10
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• 2000

Studies of prosody and sentence processing have demonstrated that prosodic phrasing can exhibit strong effects on processing decisions in English. In this paper, we tested Korean sentence fragments containing syntactically ambiguous Adj-N1-N2 strings in a cross-modal naming task. Four accentual phrasing patterns were tested: (a) the default phrasing pattern, in which each word forms an accentual phrase; (b) a phrasing biased toward N1 modification; (c) a phrasing biased toward complex-NP modification; and (d) a phrasing used with adjective focus. Patterns (b) and (c) are disambiguating phrasings; the other two are commonly found with both interpretations and are thus ambiguous. The results showed that the naming time of items produced in the prosody contradicting the semantic grouping is significantly longer than that produced in either default or supporting prosody, We claim that, as in English, prosodic information in Korean is parsed into a well-formed prosodic representation during the early stages of processing. The partially constructed prosodic representation produces incremental effects on syntactic and semantic processing decisions and is retained in memory to influence reanalysis decisions.