• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.411-426
• /
• 2003

I report on the case of a polyglot ‘savant’ (C), who is mildly autistic, severely apraxic, and of limited intellectual ability; yet who can read, write, speak and understand about twenty languages. I outline his abilities, both verbal and non-verbal, noting the asymmetry between his linguistic ability and his general intellectual inability and, within the former, between his unlimited morphological and lexical prowess as opposed to his limited syntax. I then spell out the implications of these findings for modularity. C's unique profile suggested a further project in which we taught him British Sign Language. I report on this work, paying particular attention to the learning and use of classifiers, and discuss its relevance to the issue of modality: whether the human language faculty is preferentially tied to the oral domain, or is ‘modality-neutral’ as between the spoken and the visual modes.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.11 no.2
• /
• pp.67-86
• /
• 2007

The semantic literature on definiteness and specificity shows that the former is relatively an established notion, whereas the latter is still a vague notion that needs to be more clarified and confirmed. Given this, Ionin (2006) argues for the reality of specificity based on the informal use of this. She proposes this in spoken English as a specificity marker which has a semantic feature indicating "peaker intent to refer" and "noteworthiness." She also provides as evidence the results of some crosslinguistics studies including an L2 acquisition study with both L1-Russian and L1-Korean L2-English learners. However, this paper will argue that the informal use of this does not seem to mark specificity according to Ionin's definition of specificity. It will also be argued that the L2 acquisition study cannot be used as evidence for the reality of specificity. Based on these arguments, this paper will try to redefine specificity, based on the notions of existence and uniqueness.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.9-20
• /
• 2014

In this paper, we propose an automatic fluency evaluation algorithm for English speaking tests. In the proposed algorithm, acoustic features are extracted from an input spoken utterance and then fluency score is computed by using support vector regression (SVR). We estimate the parameters of feature modeling and SVR using the speech signals and the corresponding scores by human raters. From the correlation analysis results, it is shown that speech rate, articulation rate, and mean length of runs are best for fluency evaluation. Experimental results show that the correlation between the human score and the SVR score is 0.87 for 3 speaking tests, which suggests the possibility of the proposed algorithm as a secondary fluency evaluation tool.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.21-29
• /
• 2007

The necessity for improving the English listening ability of Korean learners has been emphasized since the ultimate goal of English education converted to CLT(Communicative Language Teaching) in Korea. Verbotonal Approach as an auditory-based strategy has been proved to be effective substantially in maximizing the listening skill of spoken foreign language. The purpose of this study is to find out an efficient way of improving listening ability for Korean middle school students by employing OFH(Optimal Frequency of Hearing) using Tonality Word Sentence Test, before & after using Listen II Verbotonal training unit based on VTS(Verbotonal System). The results of the listening tests showed that the listening ability of the subjects increased by 16.7% on the words and by 5.5% on the sentences after using Listen II, compared with before using Listen II and that the improvement rate of listening ability on the level of words is much higher than that on the level of sentences. From the results, we can come to a conclusion that training the listening skill with words in mid-tonality and low-tonality based on OFH might give a great positive effect in improving listening ability for Korean learners of English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.55-62
• /
• 2019

This paper investigates the phonological processes of consonants in pronounced words in the Buckeye Corpus and compares the frequency distribution of these processes to provide a clearer understanding of conversational English for linguists and teachers. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus. Next, the phonological processes of consonants in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated separately by onsets and codas, and a frequency distribution by consonant process types was examined. The results showed that the majority of the onset clusters were pronounced as the same sounds in the Buckeye Corpus. The participants in the corpus were presumed to speak semiformally. In addition, the onsets have fewer deletions than the codas, which might be related to the information weight of the syllable components. Moreover, there is a significant association and strong positive correlation between the phonological processes of the onsets and codas in men and women. This paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can contribute to a practical understanding of spoken English. Further studies comparing the current phonological process data with those of other languages would be desirable to establish universal patterns in phonological processes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.33-40
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.3
• /
• pp.115-124
• /
• 2010

The current study investigated the role of acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening in lexical segmentation of a non-native language. In a series of cross-modal identity-priming experiments, native Korean listeners heard English auditory stimuli and made lexical decision to visual targets (i.e., written words). The auditory stimuli contained critical two word sequences which created temporal lexical ambiguity (e.g., 'mill#company', with the competitor 'milk'). There was either an IP boundary or a word boundary between the two words in the critical sequences. The initial CV of the second word (e.g., [$k_{\Lambda}$] in 'company') was spliced from another token of the sequence in IP- or Wd-initial positions. The prime words were postboundary words (e.g., company) in Experiment 1, and preboundary words (e.g., mill) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, Korean listeners showed priming effects only in IP contexts, indicating that they can make use of IP boundary cues of English in lexical segmentation of English. The acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening were also exploited by Korean listeners, but significant effects were found only for the segmentation of postboundary words. The results therefore indicate that L2 listeners can make use of prosodically driven phonetic detail in lexical segmentation of L2, as long as the direction of those cues are similar in their L1 and L2. The exact use of the cues by Korean listeners was, however, different from that found with native English listeners in Cho, McQueen, and Cox (2007). The differential use of the prosodically driven phonetic cues by the native and non-native listeners are thus discussed.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
• /
• 2009.10a
• /
• pp.50-55
• /
• 2009

현재, 자동번역의 도메인은 응용 프로그램의 요구에 따라, 점차 문어체에서 대화체(spoken language)로 옮겨가고 있는 추세이다. 본 논문은 대화체가 지니는 특성을 자동번역 시스템을 구성하는 각 모듈별 및 지식 관점에서 분석하였다. 특성 분석을 기반으로 하여, 본 논문에서는 여행 영역을 대상으로 하는 대화체 자동번역시스템의 특화를 수행하였다. 대화체 자동번역을 위한 새로운 지식으로 구조화 번역메모리(Translation Memory)가 도입되었으며, 시스템을 구성하는 각 모듈별로 대화체 특화가 이루어졌다. 또한 기존의 문어체용 기구축 패턴 등이 정비되었으며, 고빈도 대화체 표현에 대한 신규 패턴이 도입되었다. 제안하는 방법의 검증을 위해 수동평가를 수행하였으며, 그 결과, 영한 대화체 자동번역에 있어서 번역률 향상이 있었다.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.37 no.2
• /
• pp.129-136
• /
• 2010

In this paper, we present an Example-based Dialogue System for English conversation tutoring. It aims to provide intelligent one-to-one English conversation tutoring instead of old fashioned language education with static multimedia materials. This system can understand poor expressions of students and it enables green hands to engage in a dialogue in spite of their poor linguistic ability, which gives students interesting motivation to learn a foreign language. And this system also has educational functionalities to improve the linguistic ability. To achieve these goals, we have developed a statistical natural language understanding module for understanding poor expressions and an example-based dialogue manager with high domain scalability and several effective tutoring methods.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.65-74
• /
• 1999

People in the world can send and get useful information from anywhere via internet. Using the internet for educational purposes has been studied for several years. In this paper, we have been designed and implemented video database systems for English education. In the system we have studied ways to build and retrieve useful information from video database systems. By using our system we can easily find required video segment and can play it in real-time way by using streaming techniques.