• Title/Summary/Keyword: language perception

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Representations and Responsibilities

  • Smith, Neil
    • Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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    • v.3 no.4
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    • pp.527-545
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    • 2003
  • I look at the respective responsibilities of different components of the language faculty in the description of two radically different kinds of linguistic phenomenon. The first is the production/perception mismatch in the child's acquisition of the phonology of its first language. There is strong evidence that the child's lexical representations are the same as the adult's, but I argue that the child's own pronunciations, have no linguistic status and are best treated as the product of a neural network. The second is the nature of compositionality, where I argue that compositionality in Natural Language is derivative from that in the Language of Thought. With this assumption and using evidence from quantification in ‘backward control’ structures, I argue that chain theory is intrinsically inimical to a simple view of the legibility relation between LF and LoT.

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N400 Event-related Potential and Gamma Band Activities during Visual Perception of Korean/English Words (한글 및 영어 단어의 시각적 인지 시 N400 사건관련 뇌전위 및 감마대역 활성화)

  • Yoon, Jin;Choi, Jung-Woo;Kim, Ja-Hyun;Kim, Kyung-Hwan
    • Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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    • v.29 no.6
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    • pp.477-483
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    • 2008
  • The observations of difference and similarity in brain activities involved in processing different languages have fundamental importance in cognitive neuroscience. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference and similarity in temporal brain activation patterns due to the language difference during visual perception of Korean and English words under priming. Especially, we tried to find the difference in evoked spectral power in gamma-band, which is known to reflect feature binding. The stimulation was visually presented as word pairs belonging to same or different categories so that N400 event-related potential(ERP) was evoked. Average ERP analysis and spectral analysis of gamma-band activity(GBA) were performed on 12 normal Korean subjects. Several ERP components such as P1, N1, N400, and P600 could be identified consistently, and the differences in N1, N400, and P600 were observed. From the spectral analysis, we found that the evoked GBA(eGBA) was significantly larger for English at ${\sim}100$ ms poststimulus. The latency of the eGBA was also considerably delayed for English. Overall, the results on the ERP components and eGBA analyses seem to be commensurate with subjects' familiarity of each language, and the difficulty of perceiving words of each language. The methods of this study can also be applied for clinical purposes considering that the language-related processing can be greatly altered for the patients with neurological or psychiatric diseases.

A Study on Korean Students' Production and Perception of English Word-final Stop Voicing

  • Kang, Seok-Han
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.105-119
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    • 2007
  • The purpose of this study is to examine Korean students' production and perception of word-final stop voicing in light of their overseas experience. Subjects were English native speakers, Korean university students with residence experience in America, Korean university students without residence experience in America, and Korean elementary school students. They participated in both production and perception tests. Results showed that the students' production and perception with residence experience in America appeared quite similar to those of the English native speakers. In the production tests, we noticed somewhat different results in temporal and frequency features. The one-year residence in America had some influence on their frequency features, but not the temporal features in the word final stop production. That difference could be seen in the perception tests, too. We could not find any difference in the identification test of the final release environment between the Korean university students who had studied abroad and those who didn't. Rather the difference could be found in the cue influence test in both the final release and non-release environments.

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Korean speakers' perception and production of English word-final voiceless stop release (한국어 화자의 영어 어말 폐쇄음 파열의 인지와 발음 연구)

  • Lee Borim;Lee Sook-hyang;Park Cheon-Bae;Kang Seok-keun
    • MALSORI
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    • no.38
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    • pp.41-70
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    • 1999
  • Researches on perception have, in recent years, been increasingly popular as a means of accounting for cross-linguistic sound patterns (Ohala, 1992; Hemming, 1995; Jun, 1995; Steriade, 1997 among others). In loanword phonology, Silverman(1990, 1992) argues that words from a source language are scanned through the perceptual level and that the features perceived by a speaker are stored in the input to be processed according to his/her native language's phonological constraints. The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of Silverman's proposal by examining the correlation between perception and production of Korean learners of English. We specifically focussed on perception and production of stop release by contrasting English loanwords with English words loarned through education to see if there were any significant differences. The results showed that there was no substantive correlation between the Korean speakers' perception of the loanwords pronounced by English speakers and their own production of those words. In the case of English words, however, the Korean speakers' production was closely related with their perception, although some inter-speaker variations were observed. With Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenksy, 1993) as a theoretical framework of analysis, it was shown that the theory is a useful means of implementing a phonetics-phonology interface and relating perceptual processes with speech production. Specifically, under the assumption that loanwords with [t]~[t/sup h/] alternation (e.g.,'cut') are originally borrowed into Korean as two different input forms, all the alternations could be straightforwardly accounted for in terms of a unified ranking of constraints.

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This study revises Lee Hyo-seok's The Buckwheat Season, utilizing Novel Corpus, intermediate learners' level (소설텍스트의 난이도 조정 방안 연구 -이효석의 「메밀꽃 필 무렵」을 중심으로-)

  • Hwang, Hye ran
    • Journal of Korean language education
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    • v.29 no.4
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    • pp.255-294
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    • 2018
  • The Buckwheat Season, evaluated as the best of Lee Hyo-seok's literature, is one of the short stories that represent Korean literature. However, vivid literary expressions such as lyrical and beautiful depictions, figurative expressions and dialects, which show the Korean beauty, rather make learners have difficulty and become a factor that fails in reading comprehension. Thus, it is necessary to revise and present the text modified for the learners' language level. The methods of revising a literary text include the revision of linguistic elements such as cryptic vocabulary or sentence structure and the revision of the composition of the text, e.g. suggestion of characters or plot, or insertion of illustration. The methods of revising the language of the text can be divided into methods of simplification and detailing. However, in the process of revising the text, many depend on the adapter's subjective perception, not revising it with objective criteria. This paper revised the text, utilizing by the Academy of Korean Studies, , and the by the National Institute of Korean Language to secure objectivity in revising the text.

The Effect of Audio and Visual Cues on Korean and Japanese EFL Learners' Perception of English Liquids

  • Chung, Hyun-Song
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.11 no.2
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    • pp.135-148
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    • 2005
  • This paper investigated the effect of audio and visual cues on Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the lateral/retroflex contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. Korean listeners showed much better identification rates of the /l/-/r/ contrast than Japanese listeners when presented in audio or audio-visual conditions.

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The Poetics of Language: Reality, Thought, Language and the World

  • Park, Yee-Mun
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.349-362
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    • 2002
  • The paper argues for the necessicity of revising many fundamental concepts that we use in everyday situations and in communication such as reality, thought, language, the world and finally the truth. The paper develops the argument that what the word ′truth′ actually signifies cannot be addressed just by explicating what philosophy, science or even religion denote but that it can only be answered fully by the study of language and therefore in a larger context linguistics. Language is the very tool that enriches the communication between one another due to its diverse significations that one may use when expressing one′s views, thereby making life more enjoyable. The paper develops why the above corresponding argument should be justified by developing three outstanding views as follows. The world or reality is indistinguishable from the common worldview that we associate with without the means of language. That the worldview is in essence inseparable from the mental and intellectual representation of it and the only means of expression lies with language. And finally, that the language is a complex signification in itself in every aspect. Language in short is the very essence of what we define as being ′poetic.′ With these arguments in mind, we may once again ponder the signification of Nietzsche′s words when he states that "to see science through the lens of art, and art through the lens of life."

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Copy Raising Construction in English: A Usage-based Perspective

  • Kim, Jong-Bok
    • Language and Information
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.1-15
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    • 2012
  • In accounting for the so-called copy raising (CR) in English, the movement perspective has assumed that the embedded subject of the CR verb's sentential complement is raised to the matrix subject, leaving behind its pronominal copy. This kind of movement-based analysis raises both empirical and analytical issues, when considering variations in the pronominal copy constraint. This paper investigates the actual uses of the construction, using online-available corpora. Based on this corpus search, we classify two different types of copy raising predicates (genuine and perception), and discuss their grammatical properties in detail. We suggest that the simple copying rule couched upon movement operations is not enough to capture great variations in the uses of the construction, and show that interpretive constraints, e.g., perceptual characterization condition, play an important role in licensing the construction.

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A Study of the use of allophonic cues in the perception of English word boundaries by Korean learners of English (한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 단어 경계 인지 시 변이음 단서 사용 연구)

  • Chang, Soo-Young;Park, Han-Sang
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.3 no.3
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    • pp.63-68
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    • 2011
  • This study investigates how Korean students employ acoustic-phonetic cues in perceiving word boundaries of near-homophonous English phrases. For this study, 60 Korean college students participated in the experiment of discriminating word boundaries for 42 pairs of stimuli comprising the allophonic cues of aspiration and glottal stop. Results were analysed in terms of the correctness of responses and the correlation between correctness and confidence. Results showed that stimuli pairs of the glottal stop cue give a higher correctness but those of aspiration a relatively lower correctness. Comparison of the results of this study with those of the previous studies of English and Japanese speakers showed that Korean and Japanese speakers of English give a substantially lower correctness than native speakers of English, while Korean learners of English as a foreign language provide a lower correctness than Japanese speakers of English as a second language.

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Some effects of audio-visual speech in perceiving Korean

  • Kim, Jee-Sun;Davis, Chris
    • Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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    • 1999.10e
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    • pp.335-342
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    • 1999
  • The experiments reported here investigated whether seeing a speaker's face (visible speech) affects the perception and memory of Korean speech sounds. In order to exclude the possibility of top-down, knowledge-based influences on perception and memory, the experiments tested people with no knowledge of Korean. The first experiment examined whether visible speech (Auditory and Visual - AV) assists English native speakers (with no knowledge of Korean) in the detection of a syllable within a Korean speech phrase. It was found that a syllable was more likely to be detected within a phrase when the participants could see the speaker's face. The second experiment investigated whether English native speakers' judgments about the duration of a Korean phrase would be affected by visible speech. It was found that in the AV condition participant's estimates of phrase duration were highly correlated with the actual durations whereas those in the AO condition were not. The results are discussed with respect to the benefits of communication with multimodal information and future applications.

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