• 아동학회지
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• 제28권6호
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• pp.17-36
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• 2007

This study examined educational and career backgrounds of 180 early childhood English teachers and curricula of training courses for early childhood English teachers in continuing education centers across 6 areas in Korea. Data analyses showed that (1) curricula for early childhood English teachers consists of basic practical conversation, English teaching skills, understanding early childhood education and general English knowledge. (2) Most teachers are women between 30 to 40 years of age, university graduates with majors in English literature, English education and/or early childhood education with confidence in speaking in and listening to English. (3) They were satisfied with their retraining courses. (4) English pronunciation skill was not always related to English conversation skill, but clarity of pronunciation influenced teaching confidence.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권3호
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• pp.185-200
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• 2005

The objective of this study is to examine acoustic cues in spoken French for the assessment of pronunciation which is necessary to realization of the multimedia system. The corpus is composed of simple expressions which consist of the French phonological system include all phonemes. This experiment was made on 4 male and female French native speakers and on 20 Korean speakers, university students who had learned the French language more than two years. We analyzed the recorded data by using spectrograph and measured comparative features by the numerical values. First of all, we found the mean and the deviation of all phonemes, and then chose features which had high error frequency and great differences between French and Korean pronunciations. The selected data were simplified and compared among them. After we judged whether the problems of pronunciation in each Korean speaker were either the utterance mistake or the interference of mother tongue, in terms of articulatory and auditory aspects, we tried to find acoustic features as simplified as possible. From this experiment, we could extract acoustic cues for the construction of the French pronunciation training system.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2004년도 춘계 학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.239-242
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• 2004

An automatic pronunciation correction system provides users with correction guidelines for each pronunciation error. For this purpose, we propose a speech recognition system which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Koreans speak a foreign language. In this paper, we also propose machine scoring methods for automatic assessment of pronunciation quality by the speech recognizer. Scores obtained from an expert human listener are used as the reference to evaluate the different machine scores and to provide targets when training some of algorithms. We use a log-likelihood score and a normalized log-likelihood score as machine scoring methods. Experimental results show that the normalized log-likelihood score had higher correlation with human scores than that obtained using the log-likelihood score.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.31-38
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• 2008

The aim of this study was to find how English vowels affect the pronunciation of English sibilants /$d_3,\;{_3}$, z/ by Korean learners of English. Fifteen nonsense syllables composed by five vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ were pronounced six times by twelve Korean learners of English. Test scores were measured from the scoreboard made by a speech training software program, which was designed for English pronunciation practice and improvement. Results show that 1) the subjects had the lowest scores in /a_a/ position, and 2) subjects had lower scores in the /i_i/ position than in /e_e/, /o_o/ and /u_u/ positions when they pronounced $/d_3/,\;/{_3}/$, and /z/ in their respective inter-vocalic position. This study found that for the group studied Korean learners of English have more difficulty in pronouncing sibilants in /a_a/ and /i_i/ positions than in the other positions.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2007년도 한국음성과학회 공동학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.183-186
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• 2007

This study analyzes Korean high school students' pronunciation errors in word-initial onglides in English. For this study, 24 Korean high school students read 34 English words including glide-vowel sequences in word-initial positions and vowel-initial words in a frame sentence. The results showed 2 different error types: glide deletion and vowel distortion. After the analysis of the first recording, the subjects were taught how to pronounce glide-vowel sequences properly in a 60-minute class. Comparison of the analyses of the first and second recordings showed that the subjects improved on the pronunciation of glide-vowel sequences. After the training, the pronunciation errors of diphthongs unique to English, [$j_I$], decreased substantially. However, most subjects still had difficulties in pronouncing [$w{\mho}$], [wu], and [wo]. There was no significant correlation between English course grade and error reduction.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.217-226
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• 2004

An automatic pronunciation correction system provides users with correction guidelines for each pronunciation error. For this purpose, we develop a speech recognition system which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Koreans speak a foreign language. In this paper, we propose a machine scoring method for automatic assessment of pronunciation quality by the speech recognizer. Scores obtained from an expert human listener are used as the reference to evaluate the different machine scores and to provide targets when training some of algorithms. We use a log-likelihood score and a normalized log-likelihood score as machine scoring methods. Experimental results show that the normalized log-likelihood score had higher correlation with human scores than that obtained using the log-likelihood score.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.43-50
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• 2017

These days voice models of speech recognition software are sophisticated enough to process the natural speech of people without any previous training. However, not much research has reported on the use of speech recognition tools in the field of pronunciation education. This paper examined Google speech recognition of a short English paragraph produced by Korean college students in clear and casual speech styles in order to diagnose and resolve students' pronunciation problems. Thirty three Korean college students participated in the recording of the English paragraph. The Google soundwriter was employed to collect data on the word recognition rates of the paragraph. Results showed that the total word recognition rate was 73% with a standard deviation of 11.5%. The word recognition rate of clear speech was around 77.3% while that of casual speech amounted to 68.7%. The reasons for the low recognition rate of casual speech were attributed to both individual pronunciation errors and the software itself as shown in its fricative recognition. Various distributions of unrecognized words were observed depending on each participant and proficiency groups. From the results, the author concludes that the speech recognition software is useful to diagnose each individual or group's pronunciation problems. Further studies on progressive improvements of learners' erroneous pronunciations would be desirable.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.53-58
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to compare the first two vowel formants of the stressed and unstressed English vowels produced by ten young males (in their twenties and thirties) and ten old males (in their forties or fifties) from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. The results indicate that the stressed and unstressed vowels, /i/ and $/{\ae}/$ in particular, from the two groups are different in their formant frequencies. In addition, the vowel space of the unstressed vowels is somewhat smaller than that of the stressed vowels. Specifically, the range of the second formant of the unstressed vowels and that of the first formant of the unstressed front vowels were compressed. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation training for the Korean learners of English vowels. We propose that teachers of English pay attention to the stress patterns of English vowels as well as their formant frequencies.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.43-50
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• 2006

The aim of this study was to identify pronunciation difficulties of Korean learners of English in their articulation of English sibilants /dg, g, z/. Forty-five syllables were produced five times by twelve college students. Test scores were measured from the score board made by FluSpeak, a speech training software program, which was designed for English pronunciation practice and improvement. Results show that 1) the subjects had lower scores in producing /g/ than /dg/ and /z/ from all positions, and 2) subjects had lower scores in inter-vocalic position than in pre-vocalic position and in post-vocalic position when they produced /dg/, /g/, and /z/. The results suggest that on the whole Korean learners have much difficulty in producing /g/, and they also have more auditory and articulatory problems in intervocalic than in the other positions when they produce these sibilants.

• 한국멀티미디어학회논문지
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• 제21권7호
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• pp.745-754
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• 2018

Language is an essential tool for verbal and emotional communication among human beings, enabling them to engage in social interactions. Although a majority of hearing-impaired people can speak; however, they are unable to receive feedback on their pronunciation most of them can speak. However, they do not receive feedback on their pronunciation. This results in impaired communication owing to incorrect pronunciation, which causes difficulties in their social interactions. If hearing-impaired people could receive continuous feedback on their pronunciation and phonation through lip-reading training, they could communicate more effectively with people without hearing disabilities, anytime and anywhere, without the use of sign language. In this study, the mouth area is detected from videos of learners speaking monosyllabic words. The grayscale information of the detected mouth area is used to estimate a velocity vector using Optical Flow. This information is then quantified as feature values to classify vowels. Subsequently, a system is proposed that classifies monosyllables by algebraic computation of geometric feature values of lips using the characteristics of articulatory phonation. Additionally, the system provides feedback by evaluating the comparison between the information which is obtained from the sample categories and experimental results.