• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.207-219
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• 2006

The present study was designed to investigate the comprehension of 'who' and 'what' questions in 2- to 3-year-old normal children. Sixty children were divided into 3 groups depending on their ages, i.e., age groups 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3:5, and 3;6-3;11. Three types of 'who' questions and 2 types of 'what' questions were generated depending on the attached case markers, i.e., who-nominative, who-accusative, who-dative, what-nominative, and what-accusative. The children watched 36 cuts of short video recordings. After watching each cut, they were asked to answer one of the 5 types of wh-questions. For the 'who-nominative' and 'what-accusative' questions, even the late 2-year-old children performed with over 70% of accuracy, and the late 3-year-old children performed with over 95% of accuracy. For the 'who-accusative' and 'who-dative' questions, the late 2-year olds exhibited difficulty in comprehension with performance accuracy of 41% and 33%, respectively. However, the late 3-year olds could comprehend those questions correctly with over 90% of accuracy. On the other hand, in answering 'what-nominative' questions, the children did not show rapid development across the age groups, as the mean performance accuracies of the 3 groups were 39%, 49%, and 59%, respectively. The results indicated that children's understanding of a wh- question is largely affected by the case of the interrogative.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.203-217
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• 2000

In spoken language, the characteristics of prosodic realization are related to the meaning of utterance. The pitch pattern of an interrogative sentence which differs from that of declarative sentences can be considered in this respect.. If we consider the question-answer pair, we can find that the most important variation comes from the intended meaning of asking. In this paper, we experiment with four kinds of interrogative sentences and show that the difference in pitch patterns of interrogative sentences can be explained in relation to the focus phenomena that is, the differences of the boundary tones in interrogative sentences are due to the differences in the prosodic domain of focus. For a relevant explanation with the focus phenomena, we divided focus into the categories: emphatic focus, which plays a role in delivering the speaker's intended meaning for the sentence interpretation, and informational focus, delivers the central intended meaning of the utterance. The results can be summarized in three points. First, High boundary tone delivers the meaning of asking. Second, the realization of different boundary tones that are found in wh-question and alternative question are just phonetic variations caused by focusing. Third, the high rise boundary tone in echo questions is related to the meaning of surprise or incredulity, and this relation is a consensus of existing opinion, that is, the speaker's attitude of surprise can raise the pitch range. From these results we can distinguish between boundary type and phonetic variation, and we can also give appropriate meaning to the different boundary tones in interrogative sentences that have been regarded as merely a part of sentence type.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.311-320
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• 2007

Interrogative sentences are generally used to perform speech acts of directly asking a question or making a request, but they are also used to convey such speech acts indirectly. In the utterances, such indirect uses of interrogative sentences usually carry speaker's emotion with a negative attitude, which is close to an expression of anger. The identification of such negative emotion is known as a difficult problem that requires relevant information in syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, and speech signals. In this paper, we argue that the interrogatives used for indirect speech acts could serve as a dominant marker for identifying the emotional attitudes, such as anger, as compared to other emotion-related markers, such as discourse markers, adverbial words, and syntactic markers. To support such an argument, we analyze the dialogues collected from the Korean soap operas, and examine individual or cooperative influences of the emotion-related markers on emotional realization. The user study shows that the interrogatives could be utilized as a promising device for emotion identification.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.27-38
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• 1997

The differences in French Intonation between French and Korean learners can be applied to French intonation education. One native French speaker and three native Korean speakers who learned French language at High school were selected for this study. The subjects spoke test phrases based on the different syntactic structures. High-Speed speech Analysis system(RILP) was used for this experiment. The different intonation curves were showed at the end of phrase and at the beginning of phrase between French and Korean learners. At the end of phrases, French intonation appeared to have increasing and decending pitch contours in the case of wh-question, exclamation and finality. However, Korean learner's intonation showed only increasing pitch contours. At the beginning of phrase, French intonation shows decending pitch contours in the case of minor continuation and command. In contrast, Korean learner's intonation appeared to have increasing pitch contours. The new intonation training system using PC can have great effect on education of French as a second language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-13
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• 2021

This study examined the characteristics of linguistic prosody in terms of cerebral lateralization in three groups of 9 healthy speakers and 14 speakers with a history of stroke (7 with left hemisphere damage (LHD), 7 with right hemisphere damage (RHD)). Specifically, prosodic characteristics related to speech rate, duration, pitch, and intensity were examined in three types of interrogative sentences (wh-questions, yes-no questions, alternative questions) with auditory perceptual evaluation. As a result, the statistically significant key variables showed flaws in production of the linguistic prosody in the speakers with LHD. The statistically significant variables were more insufficiently produced for wh-questions than for yes-no and alternative questions. This trend was particularly noticeable in variables related to pitch and speech rate. This result suggests that when Korean speakers process linguistic prosody, such as that of lexico-semantic and syntactic information in interrogative sentences, the left hemisphere seems to be superior to the right hemisphere.

• The Journal of Korean Academic Society of Nursing Education
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• v.3
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• pp.78-98
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• 1997

Health education, as the most fundamental concept for national health promotion, alms for developing the self-care ability of the general public. High school days are regarded as the period when most important physical, mental and social developments occur, and most health-related behaviors are formed. School health education is one of the major learning resources influencing health potential in the home and community as well as for the individual student. High school health education in Korea has a fundamental systemic flaw in that health-related subjects are divided and taught under various subjects areas at school. In order to achieve the goal of school health education, it is essential to make a systematic assessment of the learner's concerns connected with his health and life, and the factors affecting them. So far, most of the research projects that had been carried out for improving high school health education were limited in their concerns to a particular aspect of health. Even though some had been done in view of comprehensive school health education, they failed to Include a health assessment of the learner. Therefore, in this study the high school students' concerns related to health and life were investigated in the first place on the basis of the PRECEDE model, developed by Green and others for the purpose of a comprehensive diagnostic research on high school health education. This study was done in two steps : one was the basic study for developing research instrument and the other was the main one. The former was conducted at five high schools in Seoul and Cheongju for 2 months-beginning in March, 1996. The students were asked to respond to questions related to their health and lives in unstructured open-ended question forms. On the basis of analysis of the basic study, the diagnostic instruments for the quality of life, health problems, health behavior and educational factors were constructed to be used for the collection of data for main study. An expert panel and the pilot study were used to improve content validity and reliability of the instruments. The reliability of the instruments was measured at between .7697 and .9611 by the Cronbach $\alpha$. The data for this study were collected from the sample consisted of the junior and senior classes of twenty general and vocational high schools in Seoul and Cheongju for two months period beginning in July, 1996. In analyzing the data, both t-test and $X^2$-test were done by using SAS-$PC^+$ Program to compare data between the sexes of the high school students and the types of high school. A canonical correlation analysis was carried out to determine the relationships among the diagnostic variables, and a multivariate multiple regression analysis was conducted by using LISREL 8.03 to ascertain the influences of variables on the high school students' health and quality of life. The results were as follows : 1) The findings of the hypothesis tests (1) The canonical correlation between the educational diagnosis variables and behavioral, epidemiological, social diagnosis variables was .7221, which was significant at the level of p<.001. (2) The canonical correlation between the educational diagnosis variables and the behavior variables was .6851, which also was significant (p<.001). (3) The canonical correlation between the behavioral diagnosis variables and the epidemiological variables was 4295, which was significant (p<.001). (4) The canonical correlation between the epidemiological diagnosis variables and the social variables was .6005, which was also significant (p<.001). Therefore, the relationship between each diagnosis variable suggested by the PRECEDE model had been experimentally proven to be valid, supporting the conceptual framework of the study as appropriate for assessing the multi-dimensional factors affecting high school students' health and quality of life. Health behavior self-efficacy, the level of parents' interest and knowledge of health, and the level of the perception of school health education, all of which are the educational diagnostic variables, are the most influential variables in students' health and quality of life. In particular, health behavior self-efficacy, a causative factor, was one of the main influential variables in their health and quality of life. Other diagnostic variables suggested in the steps of the PRECEDE model were found to have reciprocal relations rather than a unidirectional causative relationship. The significance of this research is that it has diagnosed the needs of high school health education by the learner-centered assessment of variety of factors related to the health and the life of the students. This research findings suggest an integrated system of school health education to be contrived to enhance the effectiveness of the education by strengthening the influential factors such as self-efficacy to improve the health and quality of the lives of high school students.