• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.691-696
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• 2022

This study explored the lexical sophistication features to distinguish the group membership of English proficiency, using the automatic analysis program of lexical sophistication. A total of 600 essays written by 300 Korean college students were extracted from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus and a discriminant function analysis was performed using SPSS program. Results showed that the lexical features to distinguish three groups of English proficiency are SUBTLEXUS frequency content words, age of acquisition content words, lexical decision mean reaction time function words, and hypernymy verbs. High-level Korean students used frequent content words from SUBTLEXUS corpus to a lesser degree and produced more sophisticated words that can be learned at a later age and take longer reaction time in lexical decision task, and more concrete verbs.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.433-438
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• 2021

This study investigates the relationship between lexical sophistication features and English proficiency for Korean college students. Essays from the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were analyzed, using TAALES program. In order to examine whether or not there are statistically significant differences in lexical sophistication features across three groups, MANOVA was conducted. Results showed that the lexical sophistication features were significantly affected by English proficiency level. Essays written by Korean students with different English proficiency levels can be differentiated in terms of various lexical sophistication features including content words frequency, content words familiarity, lexical decision mean reaction time function words, hypernymy verbs, word naming response time function words, age of acquisition content words.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.265-275
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• 1994

Lexical disambiguation is one of the most basic areas in natural language processing such as speech recognition/synthesis, information retrieval, corpus tagging/ etc. This paper describes a Korean lexical disambiguation mechanism where the disambigution is perfoemed on the basis of the statistical information collected from corpora. In this mechanism, the token tags corresponding to the results of the morphological analysis are used instead of part of speech tags for the purpose of detail disambiguation. The lexical selection function proposed shows considerably high accuracy, since the lexical characteristics of Korean such as concordance of endings or postpositions are well reflected in it. Two disambiguation methods, a unique selection method and a multiple selection method, are provided so that they can be properly according to the application areas.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.137-143
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• 2013

Recent investigation of acoustic correlates of Korean stop manner contrasts has reported a diachronic transition in Korean stops: young Seoul speakers are relatively more dependent on the F0 characteristics of the stops than on the VOT characteristics in aspirated and lenis stop distinction. This finding has been examined against tonal dialects of Korean and the results suggested that the speakers of tonal dialects are not sharing the transition. These results also suggested that F0 function for segmental stop classification interferes with the function for lexical tone classification in their tonal speech. The current study investigated these findings in terms of perception. Perceptual behavior of Seoul and Busan speakers of Korean was examined in a comparative manner through the measurement of perceptual cue weight of F0 and VOT in particular. The results from regression and correlation analyses revealed that Busan speakers are closer to older Seoul speakers than to younger Seoul speakers in that the cue weight for VOT and F0 were comparable in the aspirated-lenis stop distinction. This result was in contrast to the perceptual behavior of younger Seoul speakers who showed clear dominance of F0 over VOT for the same distinction. These findings provided perceptual evidence of the dual function of F0 for segmental and lexical distinctions in tonal dialects of Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.11-18
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• 2011

This paper examines the categorical labeling of lexical pitch accent contrasts in North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean listeners. It focuses specifically on investigating whether the pitch accent perception of adults and children has a dialect-specific effect. To evaluate the development of perceptual identification, slopes, intercepts, and positions at categorical boundaries were computed using a logistic regression function. The results showed that differences in slopes and intercepts were significant between North Kyungsang child and adult listeners, but the same was not the case for the positions at boundaries. As far as South Cholla child and adult listeners were concerned, there was a significant difference in slopes, but not intercepts and positions at boundaries. In the present study, the comparison of intercepts and slopes at the boundaries indicated developmental differences between North Kyungsang adult and child listeners. This improvement in categorical proportion seems to be a result of developmental changes in categorical perception. For South Cholla adult and child listeners, however, perception of the non-native contrast becomes less categorical.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.29
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• pp.453-477
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• 2012

This study investigates how the truth-related words in Korean, which were originally noun or adverb with 'truth' related meaning, can be used as discourse markers with the functions such as 'emphatic marker', 'attention getter', or 'hesitation marker', and it argues that such functions of the discourse markers are the result of grammaticalization process. That is to say that the truth-related words have acquired new functions as discourse markers from their corresponding lexical items as a noun or an adverb through grammaticalization process. In this study, we demonstrate that the truth-related words tend to appear sentence-initially or sentence-medially when they are used as discourse markers. We also show that they are most likely to be used as emphatic marker because of the lexical meaning of the truth-related words. Finally, we state that truth-related words differ from one another in where they appear and what function they are used with.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.649-678
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• 2011

The purpose of this work is to explain categorial correlations between indirect evidentiality and epistemic modality on the basis of semantic, pragmatic usages of Russian so-called non-specialized lexical markers of evidentiality, such as kazhetsja, naverno, vidimo, poxozhe, dolzhno byt' etc. To do this, firstly I concentrated on the parameter of internal functional variation of a given parenthetic word. Secondly, I approached this topic from a typological perspective. Thirdly, I accepted Sweeter(1990)'s methodological assumption that etymological prototype of a given word plays a great role in grammatical, semantic, pragmatic changes. As a result, I could postulate general tendencies of grammaticalizations (or semantic, pragmatic, funtional changes) in the direction from epistemic modality to indirect evidentialty, which consists of inferentives, presumptives, and quotatives. For example, such a parenthetic word as kazhetsja can functions not only as a marker of epistemic modality of uncertainty, but also as inferentives. Besides, it is very interesting that this word lately has started to function as quotatives, too. This kind of functional variations are very characteristic in these spheres.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.251-275
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a novel kernel called a semantic parse tree kernel that extends the parse tree kernel previously studied to extract protein-protein interactions(PPIs) and shown prominent results. Among the drawbacks of the existing parse tree kernel is that it could degenerate the overall performance of PPI extraction because the kernel function may produce lower kernel values of two sentences than the actual analogy between them due to the simple comparison mechanisms handling only the superficial aspects of the constituting words. The new kernel can compute the lexical semantic similarity as well as the syntactic analogy between two parse trees of target sentences. In order to calculate the lexical semantic similarity, it incorporates context-based word sense disambiguation producing synsets in WordNet as its outputs, which, in turn, can be transformed into more general ones. In experiments, we introduced two new parameters: tree kernel decay factors, and degrees of abstracting lexical concepts which can accelerate the optimization of PPI extraction performance in addition to the conventional SVM's regularization factor. Through these multi-strategic experiments, we confirmed the pivotal role of the newly applied parameters. Additionally, the experimental results showed that semantic parse tree kernel is superior to the conventional kernels especially in the PPI classification tasks.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.301-314
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• 2009

This study explores the function of the affixes -en and -ing that could influence the theta-roles of verbs to which the affixes are attached. The two affixes often appear in the synthetic compounds in English. The results are as follows. First, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed, which is proposed as Theta-linking Principle: that is, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed. Second, in the synthetic compounds including the affixes -en and -ing, the left element must not be the subject of the verb, which is the Synthetic Compound Constraint. And the affix -er link thematic roles of the sentential subject, such as Agent, Instrument. Thus, this study aims to find out the function of the affixes on the point of lexical functional approach.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This paper investigated Korean prosody as it relates to graded internal structure in an identification function. Within Korean prosody, variants regarded as dialectal variations can appear as different prosodic scales, which contain the range of within-category variations. The current experiment was intended to show how the prosodic scale corresponding to the range of within-category differences relates to f0 contours for speakers of two Korean dialects, North Kyungsang and South Cholla. In an identification task, participants responded by selecting an item from two answer choices. The probability of choosing the correct response from the two choices was computed by a logistic regression analysis using intercepts and slopes. That is, the correct response between two choices was used to show a linear line with an s-shape presentation. In this paper, to investigate the graded internal structure of labeling, 25%, 50%, and 75% of predicted probability were assessed. Listeners from North Kyungsang showed progressive variations, whereas listeners from South Cholla revealed random patterns in the internal structure of the identification function. In this paper, the results were plotted using scatterplot graphs, applying the range of within-category variation and predicted probability obtained from the logistic regression analyses. The scatterplot graphs showed the different degree of the responses for f0 scales (i.e., variations within categories). The results demonstrate that the gradient structures of native pitch accent users become more progressive in response to f0 scales.