• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.505-534
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was aimed to compare the lexical access and representation of semantic system in the bilinguals. The participants(late Korean-English bilinguals) performed the word-picture matching task. The task was to decide whether the pictures presented after the words(basic-level categories) represent the Korean(L1) or English(L2) words' meaning or not. The stimuli were consisted of common object belonged to four different categories(animal, part of body, clothes, tool). To control the translation strategies, the SOA(stimulus onset asynchrony) were manipulated as 650ms(Exp. 1) and 200ms(Exp. 2). In both experiment, the RTs were faster in L1 condition. The decision time of the part of body categories were shorter than the animal in L1 condition. In L2 condition, clothes were responded faster than the tools. The differences of the lexical access time implied that the bilingual semantic system seemed to be structured by more sub-level categories than the super-level, living or non-living things, and the ways to access the bilingual lexicon might be differentiated according to the languages.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.61-94
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• 2020

The present study examined vocabulary usage in elementary English classrooms in Japan using elementary school corpus. The authors used three wordlists to benchmark the lexical items for four classes in the corpus: the CEFR-J, the General Service List (GSL), and Academic Word List (AWL). The percentage of vocabulary usage belonging to the Level A1 in the CEFR-J was below 15% (Class A: 12.1%, Class B: 12.6%, Class C: 8.9%, and Class D: 13.6%) with no statistical difference between levels. The mean ratio of Level A2 vocabulary items was below 10%, and all classes showed less than 1% of vocabulary usage for the Levels B1 and B2. Over 70% of all vocabulary items in the corpus belonged to the most frequent 1,000-word band (level 1) of the GSL, while the next most frequent word band (level 2 of the GSL and AWL) accounted for less than 10%. The results suggest that elementary school English teachers should use more vocabulary items in the CEFR-J Level A1. The findings demonstrate that elementary school teachers are less likely to expose their pupils to grammatically well-structured sentences with an abundance of lexical items since the teachers repeatedly use the same lexemes in each class.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.3-20
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a segmentation unit for a Korean noun is a 'syllable' and whether the process of segmenting spoken words occurs at the lexical level. A syllable monitoring task was administered which required participants to detect an auditorily presented target from visually presented words. In Experiment 1, syllable neighborhood density of high frequency words which can be segmented into both CV-CVC and CVC-VC were controlled. The syllable effect and the neighborhood density effect were significant, and the syllable effect emerged differently depending on the syllable neighborhood density. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 2 where low frequency words were used. The significance of word frequency effect on syllable effect was also examined. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that the segmentation unit for a Korean noun is indeed a 'syllable', and this process can occur at the lexical level.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.461-500
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• 2015

This study aims to investigate the effective method to improve the competence of the Vocabulary by the image and listening towards the ELF. In the first part, we observed the problems and point improvement on learning vocabulary based on learner survey. In the second part, we analyzed two remarkable studies: - consistent and adapt method, communicational context - method based on the lexical, morphological semantical, notional and thematic field Then we proposed effective methods that are applicable to the vocabulary's learning in the class : - learning vocabulary by combining the words - learning vocabulary based on the meaning field - learning vocabulary as concrete characters - learning vocabulary by the descriptive character - learning vocabulary with the type "who am I?" - learning vocabulary by listening For teachers, one of the difficulties to the conduct of vocabulary course is that learners take passive position. Specifically, it is the teachers who play an important role because it runs in the direction of the course. However, learners do not show the active attitude for vocabulary lessons despite the course to take to improve their vocabulary skills. Therefore, teachers must prepare course materials that can both improve the competence of the vocabulary of learners and cause their interest or desire on the current vocabulary. This is why teachers should exploit various materials depending on the skill level of the learner vocabulary.

• 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.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.12
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• pp.865-872
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• 2013

Two-level morphology analysis method is one of rule-based morphological analysis method. This approach handles morphological transformation using rules and analyzes words with morpheme connection information in a lexicon. It is independent of language and Korean Two-level system was also developed. But, it was limited in practical use, because of using very small set of lexicon built manually. And it has also a over-generation problem. In this paper, we propose an automatic construction method of Korean Two-level lexicon for PC-KIMMO from morpheme tagged corpus. We also propose a method to solve over-generation problem using lexical information and sub-tags. The experiment showed that the proposed method reduced over-generation by 68% compared with the previous method, and the performance increased from 39% to 65% in f-measure.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.77-106
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• 2004

This study aims to investigate how the four college students interact with one another to discuss and construct meaning in a small reading group. Additionally, this study attempts to examine how the participants played their roles in the group. Data sources consisted of transcripts of the students' interactions, questionnaires and informal interviews, and the researchers' observation notes. The data revealed that the participants contributed fairly steadily to the interactions by checking with own grammatical knowledge, providing lexical information, understanding the micro level context, and presenting the macro level context. Several pedagogical implications are presented for the practical classroom. Findings of the study suggest effective ways to implement group activities in reading classes and a teacher's role for optimum group learning.

• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.673-684
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to compare the complexity of language level between verbally-precocious and typically-developing children from 2 to 3 years-old. Participants were 15 children classified as verbally-precocious were scored at the mean 56.85(expressive language) and 88.82(receptive language), and another 15 children classified as typically developing did at the mean 33.51(expressive language) and 58.01(receptive language) on MCDI-K. Each child's spontaneous utterances in interaction with her caregiver were collected at three different times with 6 months interval. All of the utterances were transcribed and analyzed for the use of MLU and lexical diversity by using KCLA. Summarizing the overall results, verbally-precocious children had significantly higher language abilities than typically-developing children at each time, and there were significant differences between two groups in syntactic and semantic language development, showing that verbally-precocious children indicated distinctive MLU and lexical diversity. These results suggest a high degree of stability in precocious verbal status, with variations in language complexity during conversations contributing to later differences in their language ability.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.109-127
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• 2007

As an attempt to investigate the use of common verbs by a small group of Korean college students at the advanced level, the present study describes the students' speech production data collected from picture description tasks. The primary focus of the data description was how the students used high-frequency verbs in describing everyday activities. Out of total 442 units, 149 verbs were erroneously used. All erroneous utterances were classified into four categories according to their characteristics. The most prominent error type was overgeneralization due to incomplete knowledge of lexical items. Results showed that verbs used in everyday life were not easy even for the advanced level students. Although in some cases, L1 influence was discerned, the students' problems are more fundamental. In particular, the data revealed lack of knowledge of collocational possibilities and restrictions, and confusion about semantic boundaries between verbs which have similar semantic areas. The findings suggest that teaching at the advanced level should take contrastive approaches intralingually as well as interlingually to the high-frequency verbs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.101-113
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• 2010

The present study investigated how the kinematics of the /a/-to-/i/ tongue movement in Korean would be influenced by prosodic boundary. The /a/-to-/i/ sequence was used as 'transboundary' test materials which occurred across a prosodic boundary as in /ilnjəʃ$^h$a/ # / minsakwae/ ('일년차#민사과에' 'the first year worker' # 'dept. of civil affairs'). It also tested whether the V-to-V tongue movement would be further influenced by its syllable structure with /m/ which was placed either in the coda condition (/am#i/) or in the onset condition (/a#mi). Results of an EMA (Electromagnetic Articulagraphy) study showed that kinematical parameters such as the movement distance (displacement), the movement duration, and the movement velocity (speed) all varied as a function of the boundary strength, showing an articulatory strengthening pattern of a "larger, longer and faster" movement. Interestingly, however, the larger, longer and faster pattern associated with boundary marking in Korean has often been observed with stress (prominence) marking in English. It was proposed that language-specific prosodic systems induce different ways in which phonetics and prosody interact: Korean, as a language without lexical stress and pitch accent, has more degree of freedom to express prosodic strengthening, while languages such as English have constraints, so that some strengthening patterns are reserved for lexical stress. The V-to-V tongue movement was also found to be influenced by the intervening consonant /m/'s syllable affiliation, showing a more preboundary lengthening of the tongue movement when /m/ was part of the preboundary syllable (/am#i/). The results, together, show that the fine-grained phonetic details do not simply arise as low-level physical phenomena, but reflect higher-level linguistic structures, such as syllable and prosodic structures. It was also discussed how the boundary-induced kinematic patterns could be accounted for in terms of the task dynamic model and the theory of the prosodic gesture ($\pi$-gesture).