• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.1-6
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• 2018

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers' productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (Rhee et al., 2005). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers' pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers' learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권3호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.25-36
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• 2021

This study examined the perception and production of eight English fricatives /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ by thirty Chinese English majors and thirty Chinese middle school students through a fricative identification test, an intelligibility test, and a goodness rating test and focused on error patterns and the perception-production relationship. The results showed that substitution errors occurred frequently in the perception and production of English fricatives by both the English majors and the middle school students. Further, the error patterns were attributed to various influencing factors such as the negative transfer from Chinese consonant inventory, hypercorrection or overcompensation mistakes, deficiency of L2 teaching, and acoustic similarities. Significant overall correlations were found between the fricative perception and production by the two subject groups but were not manifested in all the eight fricatives, indicating that Chinese learners' perceptual competence of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their productive excellence of those sounds in all cases. Furthermore, precedences of perception over production were incompletely manifested in the eight fricatives, which suggested that perception might not always be a necessary prerequisite for production. Additionally, subject group and vowel context differences were observed. The English majors performed better than the middle school students, both perceptually and productively, and the subjects' performances in perception and production varied when vowel contexts changed.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.55-64
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• 2007

Laryngeal DDK involve with the rate, pattern, and regularity (periodicity) in opening and closing of vocal fold. This study was aimed at investigating the characteristics of laryngeal DDK between nonfluent and fluent speakers. One with an ataxic dysarthria (with cerebellar lesion) and the other with stuttering, and 13 normal speakers were evaluated. L-DDK were analyzed with MSP (motor speech profile, CSL 4400). Measures of DDK included: DDKavr, DDKcvp, DDKjit, DDKavp. An ataxic dysarthric speaker and a stutterer showed more reduced rate and aperiodic L-DDK (both adductory and abductory movement) than normal speakers. But the average L-DDK period (ms) in adductory movement in a speaker with stuttering showed more decreased than the other. Results from this study are preliminary. Nonetheless, results of L-DDK produced by nonfluent speakers suggested the possibility to have relation with slow rate of phonatory initiation and connected speech. In the future, perceptual studies are needed in conjuction with acoustic and speech production.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제11권3호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.67-77
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• 2014

This study investigated (1) whether Korean learners of English use discourse-level prosody in L2 production as native speakers of English do, and (2) whether discourse-level prosody is also found in the Korean language, as is evident in the prosody of native speakers of English. The study compared the production of the same 15 sentences in two types of reading materials, sentence-level and discourse-level. This study analyzed the onset pitch, sentence mean pitch and pause length to examine the paratone (intonational paragraph) realization in discourse-level speech. The results showed that in L2 discourse-level prosody, the Korean speakers were limited in displaying paratone and did not made significant difference between sentence-level and discourse-level prosody. On the other hand, in L1 discourse-level text, both English and Korean participants demonstrated paratone using pitch. However, there were differences in using prosodic cues between two groups. In using pauses, the ES group paused longer before both the orthographically marked and not marked topic sentences. The KS group paused longer only before the orthographically marked topic sentence in both L1 and L2 text reading. In the comparison of sentence-level and discourse-level prosody, the topic sentences were marked by different prosodic cues. English participants used higher sentence mean pitch, and the Korean participants used higher onset pitch.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.13-26
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• 2015

Speech production studies have suggested that bilinguals who are L2-dominant are the most likely to suppress the influence of the first language (L1) on the second language (L2). The voice onset times (VOTs) and fundamental frequencies (f0s) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and Korean were examined to address the question whether cross language influences occur particularly in L2 predominant bilinguals and to compare their outcomes with those of L2 proficient bilinguals and monolinguals. A total of 28 speakers participated in this experiment and they produced English and Korean stops in the carrier sentence. In English, for voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops, L2 predominant bilingual speakers produced VOTs that were significantly shorter than those of monolingual English speakers. The outcome was analogous in Korean speech. For aspirated and lax stops, they produced shorter Korean VOTs than monolingual speakers. The results of f0s were slightly different from those of VOTs. In English, L2 predominant bilinguals produced f0s that were not significantly different from those of monolingual English speakers. In Korean, however, they produced f0s that were significantly different from those of monolingual Korean speakers. Taken VOT and f0 into consideration together, the overall results suggest that, although they tend to show a corresponding pattern of monolinguals, L2 predominant bilinguals had cross language phonetic influences between L1 and L2, similar to L2 proficient bilinguals. Between the two acoustic cues, f0 seemed to be a more reliable cue than VOT to examine the influences.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.1-13
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• 2019

This study explored the relationship between accurate vowel production and proficiency levels in L2 English produced by Korean EFL adult learners. To this end, nine English vowels /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ɔ, ɑ, ʊ, u/ were selected and adjacent vowels paired up (e.g., /i/-/ɪ/, /u/-/ʊ/, /ɛ/-/æ/, /ʌ/-/ɔ/, /ɔ/-/ɑ/). The spectral features of the pairs were measured instrumentally, namely F1 (indicating tongue height) and F2 (indicating tongue backness). Meanwhile, the durations as well as spectral features of the tense and lax counterparts in /i/-/ɪ/ and /u/-/ʊ/ were measured, as both temporal and spectral features are important in distinguishing them. The findings of this study confirm that higher-rated speakers were better able to distinguish the contrasts in the front vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ than lower-rated learners, but in the central and back vowel pairs /u/-/ʊ/and /ʌ/-/ɔ/ (though not /ɔ/-/ɑ/), Korean EFL learners generally showed difficulty distinguishing adjacent vowels with spectral cues. On the other hand, the durations of the tense and lax vowels showed that the lower-rated speakers were less able to use the temporal feature to differentiate tense vowels from their lax counterparts, unlike previous studies that found that in general Korean learners depend excessively on the temporal cue to distinguish tense and lax vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.51-65
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• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigated the influences of probabilistic accessibility of the word being produced - as determined by its usage frequency and neighborhood density - on native and high-proficiency L2 speakers' realization of six English monophthong vowels. The native group hyperarticulated the vowels over an expanded acoustic space when the vowel occurred in words with low frequency and high density, supporting the claim that vowel forms are modified in accordance with the probabilistic accessibility of words. However, temporal expansion occurred in words with greater accessibility (i.e., with high frequency and low density) as an effect of low phonotactic probability in low-density words, particularly in attended speech. This suggests that temporal modification in the opposite direction may be part of the phonetic characteristics that are enhanced in communicatively driven focus realization. Conversely, none of these spectral and temporal patterns were found in the L2 group, thereby indicating that even the high-proficiency L2 speakers may not have developed experience-based sensitivity to the modulation of sub-categorical phonetic details indexed with word-level probabilistic information. The results are discussed with respect to how phonological representations are shaped in a word-specific manner for the sake of communicatively driven lexical intelligibility, and what factors may contribute to the lack of native-like sensitivity in L2 speech.