• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.61-68
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• 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Chinese Korean Learners (L1: Chinese, L2: Korean). In Korean, sentence ambiguity can be caused by homonym or syntactically ambiguous structure. In spoken language however all ambiguity can be resolved by different prosodic features according to the meaning that they transmit. In this study we examined whether Chinese Korean Leaners also distinguish, in production, ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic characteristics. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Chinese Korean learners participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 10 Korean sentences in which 6 sentences are lexically ambiguous and 4 sentences contain structural ambiguity. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure. Chinese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for different ambiguous sentences in most cases. But in the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range was greater for Korean native speakers than Chinese learners.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권4호
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• pp.11-17
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• 2018

This study reports on a production experiment designed to investigate how Korean speaking learners of English produce English forms ending in stops. In a repetition experiment, Korean participants listened to English nonce words ending in a stop and repeated what they heard. English speakers were recruited for the same task as a control group. The experimental result indicated that the transcriptions of the Korean productions by English native speakers showed vowel insertion in only 3% of productions although the pronunciation of English final stops showed that noise intervals after the closure of final stops were significantly longer for Korean speakers than for English speakers. This finding is inconsistent with the loanword data where 49% of words showed vowel insertion. It is also not compatible with the perceptual similarity approach, which predicts that because Korean speakers accurately perceive an English final stop as a final consonant, they will insert a vowel to make the English sound more similar to the Korean sound.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.3-10
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• 2011

This study examined the production of aspirated stop consonants in Korean and English words to address how the influences differed particularly in terms of proficiency in L2 English. Voice onset times (VOTs) were measured from two American monolinguals and seven Korean speakers. The results showed that VOT patterns for both L1 and L2 stops differed according to their proficiency in L2 English. In L2 English, high proficient speakers produced VOTs that were similar to those of native speakers of English whereas low proficient speakers produced VOTs that were significantly longer than those of proficient speakers. In L1 Korean and L2 English, most of the proficient speakers produced VOTs similarly. Unlike previous findings, Korean VOTs were even shorter than English counterparts. The VOT shortening of aspirated stops in Korean was found for most of the proficient speakers. The findings of the present study suggest that cross language phonetic influences as well as the ongoing VOT shortening in Korean aspirated stops may be correlated with L2 proficiency. Since this is a pilot study with a small number of subjects for each proficiency group, further quantitative study is necessary to generalize.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 10월 학술대회지
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• pp.430-431
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• 1996

Among the scholars of second language (L2) acquisition who have used prosodic considerations in syntactic analyses, pausing and intonation contours have been used to define utterances in the speech of second language learners (e.g., Sato, 1990). In recent research on conversational analysis, it has been found that lexically marked causal clause combining in the discourse of native speakers can be distinguished as "intonational subordination" and "intonational coordination(Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, forthcoming.)". This study uses Pienemann's Processability Theory (1995) for an analysis of the speech of native speakers of Japanese (L1) learning English. In order to accurately assess the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development, it is shown that pitch, loudness, and timing must all be considered together with the syntactic analysis of interlanguage speech production. Twelve Japanese subjects participated in eight fifteen minute interviews, ninety-six dyads. The speech analyzed in this report is limited to the twelve subjects interacting with two different non-native speaker interviews for a total of twenty-four dyads. Within each of the interviews, four different tasks are analyzed to determine the stage of acquisition of English for each subject. Initially the speech is segmented according to intonation contour arid pauses. It is then classified accoding to specific syntactic units and further analysed for pitch, loudness and timing. Results indicate that the speech must be first claasified prosodic ally and lexically, prior to beginning syntactic analysis. This analysis stinguishes three interlanguage lexical categories: discourse markers, coordinator $s_ordinators, and transfer from Japanese. After these lexical categories have been determined, the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development can be more accurately assessed.d.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.15-21
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• 2019

Korean and English are both known to show on-focus pitch range expansion and post-focus pitch range compression (PFC). But it is not clear if this prosodic similarity would make it easy for Korean speakers to learn English focus prosody. In the present study, we conducted a production experiment using phone number strings to examine whether Korean learners of English produce a native-like focus prosody. Korean learners of English were classified into three groups (advanced, intermediate and low) according to their English proficiency and were compared to native speakers. Results show that intermediate and low groups of speakers did not increase duration, intensity, and pitch in the focus positions, nor did they compress those cues in the post-focus positions. Advanced speakers noticeably increased the acoustic cues in the focus positions to a similar extent as native speakers. However, their performance in post-focus positions was quite far from that of native speakers in terms of pitch and excursion size. These results thus demonstrate a lack of positive transfer of focus prosody from Korean to English in L2 learning, and learners may have to relearn it from scratch, which is consistent with a previous finding. More importantly, the results provide further support for the view proposed in other works that acoustic properties of PFC were not easily transferred from one language to another.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.69-76
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• 2017

The current study investigated whether Korean learners' English-learning environments, especially target English accent (General American English (GAE) vs. Southern British English (SBE)) and English-language experience affected their production of English vowels. Thirty six EFL learners, 27 ESL-US learners, and 33 ESL-UK learners produced 8 English vowels with a bVt frame (beat, bit, bet, bat, bought, bot, boat, boot). The learners' productions were acoustically analyzed in terms of F1 and F2 frequencies. The overall results revealed that the learners' target accent had an effect on their production of some English vowels. The EFL and ESL-US learners' (especially, female learners') production of bought, bot, boat, and boot, which show characteristic differences between the GAE and SBE accents, was closer to that of the native American English (AE) speakers than the native British English (BE) speakers. In contrast, the ESL-UK learners' production of bought and bot demonstrated the opposite pattern. Thus, the impact of target accent was not demonstrated across the board. The effect of the learners' different English-language experience was also rather limited. This was because the EFL learners' production was not much different from the ESL-US learners' production, in spite of the ESL-US learners' residence in the US for more than 9 years. Furthermore, the Korean learners, irrespective of their different English-language experience, tended to produce bit and bat with lower F1 than the native AE and BE speakers, thus resulting in bit and bat to be produced similarly to beat and bet, respectively. This demonstrates the learners' persistent L1 effects on their English vowel production despite the learners' residence in the English speaking countries or their high English proficiency.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.71-79
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• 2013

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of the Korean vowels. Specifically the author examined whether Korean monophthongs are acquired rapidly in early stages of learning (Flege, Munro and Skelton, 1992; Munro and Derwing, 2008) or they develop rather gradually in proportion to the learners' experience (Byee, 2001; Ellis, 2006). This study collected the Korean vowel production by 23 Chinese learners for a year, and then analysed F1 and F2 of each Korean vowel. The results showed that 1) Most of the second language (L2) vowels were rapidly improved during the first six or nine months of Korean learning before reaching the constant stage; and 2) The exact acquisition trajectories varied across the seven vowels. Specifically the vowels which were acquired in the early stage of learning were /i, e, ɨ/ for F1 and /ʌ, e, o, u/ for F2. Thus this study supports the hypothesis of Flege et al. (1992) and Munro and Derwing (2008) except the fact that each vowel showed the different learning route.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권3호
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• pp.73-81
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• 2013

Coda in the word-medial position plays an important role in acquisition of our speech. Accuracy of the coda in the word-medial position is important as a diagnostic indicator since it has a close relationship with degrees of disorder. Coda in the word-medial position only appears in condition of connecting two vowels and the sequence causes diverse phonological processes to happen. The coda in the word-medial position differs in production difficulty by the initial sound in the sequence. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the tendency of producing a coda in the word-medial position with consideration of an optional phonological process in spontaneous speech of three and four year old children. Data was collected from 24 children (four groups by age) without speech and language delay. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Sonorant coda in the word-medial position showed a high production frequency in manner of articulation, and alveolar in place of articulation. When the coda in the word-medial position is connected to an initial sound in the same place of articulation, it revealed a high frequency of production. 2) The coda in word-medial position followed by an initial alveolar stop revealed a high error rate. Error patterns showed regressive assimilation predominantly. 3) The order of difficulty that Children had producing codas in the word-medial position was $/k^{\neg}/$, $/p^{\neg}/$, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/. Those results suggest that in targeting coda in the word-medial position for evaluation, we should consider optional phonological process as well as the following initial sound. Further studies would be necessary which codas in the word-medial position will be used for therapeutic purpose.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.319-338
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• 2003

The aim of this paper is to examine the sentence final tonal patterns of English wh-questions through phonetic experiments, based on Intonational Phonology, and to explain the meaning of the final phrase tones of English wh-questions. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) suggested that it is pitch accents rather than boundary tones which play a crucial role in the meaning of a sentence, and that most of the general questions have H-H% tonal patterns in the sentence final. However, they could not explain why wh-questions had final falling tonal patterns (L-L%). While Bartels (1999) suggested that L phrase tone has the meaning of 'ASSERTION' and it could be applied to the explanation of the meaning of wh-questions' final tonal patterns. However, her suggestions are only theoretical explanation without any experimental support. In this paper, based on Bartels (1999), the data was classified into the following three classes: 1) echo wh-questions, 2) reference questions, and 3) common wh-questions. Using this data, a production test by three English native speakers was conducted. The results show that reference questions and common wh-questions have L phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate, and echo wh-questions have H phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate.