• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.9-18
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• 2018

This paper presents an acoustic and phonological study of the alveolar flaps in American English. Based on the Buckeye Corpus, the flapping tokens produced by twenty men are analyzed at both lexical and post-lexical levels. The data, analyzed with Pratt speech analysis, include duration, F2 and F3 in voicing during the flap, as well as duration, F1, F2, F3, and f0 in the adjacent vowels. The results provide evidence on two issues: (1) The different ways in which voiced and voiceless alveolar stops give rise to neutralized flapping stops by following lexical and post-lexical levels, (2) The extent to which the vowel features (height, frontness, and tenseness) affect flapping sounds. The results show that flaps are affected by pre-consonantal vowel features at the lexical as well as post-lexical levels. Unlike previous studies, this study uses the Praat method to distinguish flapped from unflapped tokens in the Buckeye Corpus and examines connections between the lexical and post-lexical levels.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.239-265
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• 2010

This study investigates the effects of corpus-based vocabulary tasks on the acquisition of English vocabulary in an attempt to explore the influence of corpus use on EFL pedagogy. For this to be realized, a total of 40 Korean high school students participated in the study over a 4-week period. An experimental group used a set of corpus-based tasks for vocabulary learning, whereas a control group carried out a traditional task (i.e., the L1-L2 translation) for vocabulary learning. To assess learning gains, the students were asked to complete the pre- and post-treatment tests measuring the word form, meaning, and use aspects of target lexical items. Results of the study indicate that in the experimental group the corpus-based vocabulary tasks were beneficial for the learning of word forms and use. In particular, corpus-based benefits were greatest in the low-proficiency EFL learners' collocational aspects of vocabulary use. On the other hand, in the control group, the traditional vocabulary tasks benefited the meaning aspects of target vocabulary items the most. In addition, survey results revealed that most students were positive about the corpus-based learning experience although some expressed reservations about the heavy cognitive load and the time-consuming nature of the analysis of corpus data primarily due to learners' lack of language proficiency.

• 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.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.31-41
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• 2021

This paper makes a quantitative analysis of the diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese vocabulary by constructing and counting a large-scale rough annotated corpus. The texts from Si Ku Quan Shu (a collection of Chinese ancient books) are automatically segmented to obtain ancient Chinese vocabulary with time information, which is used to the statistics on word frequency, standardized type/token ratio and proportion of monosyllabic words and dissyllabic words. Through data analysis, this study has the following four findings. Firstly, the high-frequency words in ancient Chinese are stable to a certain extent. Secondly, there is no obvious dissyllabic trend in ancient Chinese vocabulary. Moreover, the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) are probably the two periods with the most abundant vocabulary in ancient Chinese. Finally, the unique words with high frequency in each dynasty are mainly official titles with real power. These findings break away from qualitative methods used in traditional researches on Chinese language history and instead uses quantitative methods to draw macroscopic conclusions from large-scale corpus.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.3 no.6
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• pp.1588-1597
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• 1996

This paper describes an estimation method for lexical probabilities in Korean lexical disambiguation. In the stochastic to lexical disambiguation lexical probabilities and contextual probabilities are generally estimated on the basis of statistical data extracted form corpora. It is desirable to apply lexical probabilities in terms of word phrases for Korean because sentences are spaced in the unit of word phrase. However, Korean word phrases are so multiform that there are more or less chances that lexical probabilities cannot be estimated directly in terms of word phrases though fairly large corpora are used. To overcome this problem, similarity for word phrases is defined from the lexical analysis point of view in this research and an estimation method for Korean lexical probabilities based on the similarity is proposed. In this method, when a lexical probability for a word phrase cannot be estimated directly, it is estimated indirectly through the word phrase similar to the given one. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective for Korean lexical disambiguation.

• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.37
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• pp.309-334
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• 2014

This study is based on the Korean-Chinese parallel corpus, utilizing the Korean connective morpheme '-myenseo' and contrasting with the Chinese expression. Korean learners often struggle with the use of Korean Connective Morpheme especially when there is a lexical gap between their mother language. '-myenseo' is of the most use Korean Connective Morpheme, it usually contrast to the Chinese coordinating conjunction. But according to the corpus, the contrastive Chinese expression to '-myenseo' is more than coordinating conjunction. So through this study, can help the Chinese Korean language learners learn easier while studying '-myenseo', because the variety Chinese expression are found from the parallel corpus that related to '-myenseo'. In this study, firstly discussed the semantic features and syntactic characteristics of '-myenseo'. The significant semantic features of '-myenseo' are 'simultaneous' and 'conflict'. So in this chapter the study use examples of usage to analyse the specific usage of '-myenseo'. And then this study analyse syntactic characteristics of '-myenseo' through the subject constraint, predicate constraints, temporal constraints, mood constraints, negatives constraints. then summarize them into a table. And the most important part of this study is Chapter 4. In this chapter, it contrasted the Korean connective morpheme '-myenseo' to the Chinese expression by analysing the Korean-Chinese parallel corpus. As a result of the analysis, the frequency of the Chinese expression that contrasted to '-myenseo' is summarized into