• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.115-121
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• 2011

This paper examines how L2 speech production varies according to learner's L2 proficiency level. L2 speech production variations are analyzed by quantitative measures at word and phone levels using Korean learners' English corpus. Word-level variations are analyzed using correctness to explain how speech realizations are different from the canonical forms, while accuracy is used for analysis at phone level to reflect phone insertions and deletions together with substitutions. The results show that speech production of learners with different L2 proficiency levels are considerably different in terms of performance and individual realizations at word and phone levels. These results confirm that speech production of non-native speakers varies according to their L2 proficiency levels, even though they share the same L1 background. Furthermore, they will contribute to improve non-native speech recognition performance of ASR-based English language educational system for Korean learners of English.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.187-209
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• 2001

This study attempts to supplement what is known about the influence of prior knowledge on second language listening comprehension. To do so, the study examines the effect of prior knowledge and language proficiency on the ability of L2 listeners to understand texts. The purpose of an experiment was to determine the effect of topic familiarity on the L2 listening comprehension ability of subjects who varied in L2 listening proficiency level. The subjects (N=117) were selected from a population of college students enrolled in the Departments of English and Business in Korea. English listening proficiency levels were designated on the basis of TOEFL listening scores. Subjects listened twice each to texts (more familiar and less familiar). After listening to each text, a ten-item objective test was administered to test the subjects' comprehension of the information presented in the text. Objective tests were analyzed. using repeated measures analysis. A post hoc test was conducted to identify the means that were significantly different. This study yielded the following results: (1) subjects with high prior knowledge comprehended texts significantly better than did subjects with low prior knowledge; (2) the level of L2 listening proficiency had a significant effect on the L2 listening comprehension of texts, but there was no interaction between prior knowledge and the level of L2 listening proficiency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

This study explored how Korean L2 learners of English utilize multiple acoustic cues (VOT and F0) in perceiving and producing the English alveolar stop with a voicing contrast. Thirty-four 18-year-old high-school students participated in the study. Their English proficiency level was classified as either 'high' (HEP) or 'low' (LEP) according to high-school English level standardization. Thirty different synthesized syllables were presented in audio stimuli by combining a 6-step VOTs and a 5-step F0s. The listeners judged how close the audio stimulus was to /t/ or /d/ in L2 using a visual analogue scale. The L2 /d/ and /t/ productions collected from the 22 learners (12 HEP, 10 LEP) were acoustically analyzed by measuring VOT and F0 at the vowel onset. Results showed that LEP listeners attended to the F0 in the stimuli more sensitively than HEP listeners, suggesting that HEP listeners could inhibit less important acoustic dimensions better than LEP listeners in their L2 perception. The L2 production patterns also exhibited a group-difference between HEP and LEP in that HEP speakers utilized their VOT dimension (primary cue in L2) more effectively than LEP speakers. Taken together, the study showed that the relative cue-weighting strategies in L2 perception and production are closely related to the learner's L2 proficiency level in that more proficient learners had a better control of inhibiting and enhancing the relevant acoustic parameters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.99-105
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• 2015

The current study investigates whether Korean-speaking adults show differential sensitivities to the sources of auditory stimuli (L1 Korean and L2 English) in utilizing VOT and f0 in the perceptual mode of L2 stops, and how the L2 proficiency interacts with the learners' low-level phonetic sensitivities in L2 perceptual mode. 48 Korean learners of English participated in the perception experiments where they rated the goodness of English /t/ and /d/ using an analogue scale. Two sets of stimuli (English and Korean sources) were prepared by manipulating VOT (6-steps) and f0 (5-steps) values of productions by an English male (L2 source condition) and a Korean male (L1 source condition). Findings showed that, in judging /t/-likeness, the listeners responded differently to the two auditory stimulus conditions by relying on VOT significantly more in English source condition than in Korean source condition. The listeners' English proficiency did not interact with these differential sensitivities to the auditory stimulus source either along the VOT dimension or the f0 dimension. The results of the current study suggest that low-level contextual information of the auditory source can affect the learners in faithfully being in the L2 perceptual mode.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

The current study examined English-speaking adult learners' production and perception of L2 Korean stops (/t/ or /t'/ or /t^h/) to investigate whether the two modalities are linked in utilizing voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) for the L2 sound distinction and how the learners' L2 proficiency mediates the relationship. Twenty-two English-speaking learners of Korean living in Seoul participated in the word-reading task of producing stop-initial words and the identification task of labelling CV stimuli synthesized to vary VOT and F0. Using logistic mixed-effects regression models, we quantified group- and individual-level weights of the VOT and F0 cues in differentiating the tense-lax, lax-aspirated, and tense-aspirated stops in Korean. The results showed that the learners as a group relied on VOT more than F0 both in production and perception (except the tense-lax pair), reflecting the dominant role of VOT in their L1 stop distinction. Individual-level analyses further revealed that the learners' L2 proficiency was related to their use of F0 in L2 production and their use of VOT in L2 perception. With this effect of L2 proficiency controlled in the partial correlation tests, we found a significant correlation between production and perception in using VOT and F0 for the lax-aspirated stop contrast. However, the same correlation was absent for the other stop pairs. We discuss a contrast-specific role of acoustic cues to address the non-uniform patterns of the production-perception link in the L2 sound learning context.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.91-108
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• 2007

This study investigates learners' perception on their engagement in rating activities in the EFL essay-writing context. The current study aims to address the answers to the following research questions: 1) What attitude do students show about their participation in the rating tasks? and 2) which of three aspects (e.g. the degree of rating experience, the exposure to English composition instruction and learning, and proficiency level) significantly influences learners' rating activities? 104 EFL learners participated in the rater training session. After participants finished rater training session, they rated three sample essays and peer essays using the given scoring guide. Based on the analysis of survey responses that students made, students showed positive attitude toward their engagement in rating tasks. For research question 2, only L2 writing proficiency seriously affected students' perception on the rating tasks. Advanced level of subjects did not feel stressed by a grade of peers as low level of subjects did. They were also critical about the benefits of self- and peer-assessment, suggesting that a peer's feedback on their own essay was not so useful and that a self-rating does not fully help learners identify their writing proficiency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.35-45
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• 2021

With the wide spread of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scales, many studies attempt to apply them in routine teaching and rater training, while more evidence regarding criterial features at different CEFR levels are still urgently needed. The current study aims to explore complexity features that distinguish and predict CEFR proficiency levels in oral performance. Using a quantitative/corpus-based approach, this research analyzed lexical and syntactic complexity features over 80 transcriptions (includes A1, A2, B1 CEFR levels, and native speakers), based on an interview test, Standard Speaking Test (SST). ANOVA and correlation analysis were conducted to exclude insignificant complexity indices before the discriminant analysis. In the result, distinctive differences in complexity between CEFR speaking levels were observed, and with a combination of six major complexity features as predictors, 78.8% of the oral transcriptions were classified into the appropriate CEFR proficiency levels. It further confirms the possibility of predicting CEFR level of L2 learners based on their objective linguistic features. This study can be helpful as an empirical reference in language pedagogy, especially for L2 learners' self-assessment and teachers' prediction of students' proficiency levels. Also, it offers implications for the validation of the rating criteria, and improvement of rating system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.3-10
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• 2010

The present study aims to investigate neural activations according to the level of code switching in English proficient bilinguals and to find the relationship between the performance of language switching and proficiency level using ERPs (event-related potentials). First, when comparing high-proficient (HP) with low-proficient (LP) bilingual performance in a native language environment, the activation level of N2 was observed to be higher in the HP group than in the LP group, but only under two conditions: 1) the language switching (between-language) condition known as indexing attention of code switching and 2) the inhibition of current language for L1. Another effect of N400 can be shown in both groups only in the language non-switching (within-language) condition. This effect suggests that both groups completed the semantic acceptability task well in their native language environment without the burden of language switching, irrespective of high or low performance. The latencies of N400 are only about 100ms earlier in the HP group than in the LP group. This difference can be interpreted as facilitation of the given task. These results suggest that HP showed the differential activation in inhibitory system for L1 in switching condition of L1-to-L2 to be contrary to inactivation of inhibitory system for the LP group. Despite the absence of an N400 effect at the given task in both groups, differential latencies between the peaks were attributed to the differences of efficiency in semantic processing.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.69-89
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• 2006

This study investigated whether and how semantic nature of intransitive verbs can be related to the L2 overpassivization errors. A total of 126 Korean high school students participated in a grammaticality judgment test on English sentences in which seven semantically different types of intransitive verbs were passivized. The results showed that there was an effect of semantic type on the students' judgment on overpassivization errors. Overall, it was shown that the students experienced the lowest degree of difficulty with the Controlled Process-Motional type verbs while experiencing the high degree of difficulty with the Change of State, Existence of State, Continuation of Pre-existing State, and Uncontrolled Process types. Two interlanguage patterns were also identified: the students at higher proficiency level and those at lower-proficiency level showed distinctive patterns on the task. It was argued that the simple dichotomy of unaccusative-unergative distinction does not suffice for the explanation of the complex phenomenon of L2 overpassivization.