• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.251-271
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• 2011

The present study analyzed Korean learners' production of English /z/-/$d{\Box}$/ and /z/-/${\Box}$/ contrasts in terms of native speaker judgments and acoustic measurements. Korean learner's production was judged to be either correct or incorrect by native English speakers. Correct and incorrect productions were then compared with productions of native speakers' in terms of acoustic analyses. The results indicated that Korean speakers' correct production was more similar to that of native speakers by sharing more acoustic cues. Incorrect production by Korean speakers indicated patterns either different or opposite from that of native speakers, confirming native speaker judgments. The results also revealed acoustic cues on which native speakers rely in judging L2 speech, thereby implying that the more consistent along with more number of acoustic cues used by native speakers may facilitate the acquisition of segment contrasts by L2 learners.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.77-81
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• 2006

This paper presents a technique of imposing the prosodic features of a native speaker's utterance onto the same sentence uttered by a non-native speaker. Three acoustic aspects of the prosodic features were considered: the fundamental frequency (F0) contour, segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The fundamental frequency contour and the segmental durations of the native speaker's utterance were imposed on the non-native speaker's utterance by using the PSOLA (pitch-synchronous overlap and add) algorithm [1] implemented in Praat[2]. The intensity contour transfer was also done in Praat. The technique of transferring one or more of these prosodic features was elaborated and its implications in the area of language education were discussed.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.81
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• pp.245-265
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to prepare the basis for a more objective evaluation of oral fluency by analyzing Korean native speaker's utterance. Traditionally, fluency evaluation tended to rely on the evaluators' experience and subjective idea. Therefore, there has been a need of setting the evaluation standard in numeric form that is easily measurable. In this study, I will analyze Korean native speaker's utterance in focus of pause. Total number of 875 pauses were extracted from the 21st Century Sejong Korean spoken corpus, and the elements before and after the pauses were annotated. From the analysis results, the pauses were divided between fluent pauses and influent pauses. If the length of fluent pauses do not exceed reasonable length of pause for native Korean speakers, there was no point reduction. On the other hand, if the influent pauses are made more frequently than the native Korean speakers, then it is subject to point reduction.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.67-70
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• 2005

The purpose of this paper is the comparison of the Korean medial fortis duration between Korean native speaker and Japanese native speaker who study Korean language. For this purpose, I selected words with medial fortis from the SITEC DB. The Korean medial fortis of Japanese tends to have longer closure/friction duration than Korean native speakers in 3 syllables words. There are no distinct differences in 2 syllables words. This might be owing to the different timing unit of Korean and Japanese.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.223-236
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• 2003

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate characteristics of English pitch accents uttered by Korean speakers. Six English sentences were uttered five times by fifteen male undergraduate and graduate students from three groups, Seoul, Yongnam and Honam dialect speakers. We compared the subjects' data with the data of a native speaker of English as model pronunciation of English pitch accents. Acoustic features(Fo, duration, amplitude) were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Works. Results showed that (1) acoustic features of English pitch accents are Fo and duration for the native speaker and Korean speakers altogether, (2) Seoul dialect speakers uttered English pitch accents more similarly to the English native speaker than the other dialect speakers and (3) Korean speakers generally have difficulties in pronouncing L* accents. It appears that Korean speakers have more problems in pronouncing L* accents than H* accents.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.37-42
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• 1996

This study aims to see some prosodic features of English spoken by Japanese learners of English. It focuses on speech rates, pauses, and intonation when the learners read an English passage. Three Japanese learners of English, who are all male university students, were asked to read the speech material, an English passage of 110 word length, at their normal reading speed. Then a native speaker of English, a male American English teacher. was asked to read the same passage. The Japanese speakers were also asked to read a Japanese passage of 286 letters (Japanese Kana) to compare the reading of English with that of japanese. Their speech was analyzed on a computerized system (KAY Computerized Speech Lab). Wave forms, spectrograms, and F0 contours were shown on the screen to measure the duration of pauses, phrases and sentences and to observe intonation contours. One finding of the experiment was that the movement of the low speakers' speech rates showed a similar tendency in their reading of the English passage. Reading of the Japanese passage by the three learners also had a similar tendency in the movement of speech rates. Another finding was that the frequency of pauses in the learners speech was greater than that in the speech of the native speaker, but that the ration of the total pause length to the whole utterance length was about tile same in both the learners' and the native speaker's speech. A similar tendency was observed about the learners' reading of the Japanese passage except that they used shorter pauses in the mid-sentence position. As to intonation contours, we found that the learners used a narrower pitch range than the native speaker in their reading of the English passage while they used a wider pitch range as they read the Japanese passage. It was found that the learners tended to use falling intonation before pauses whereas the native speaker used different intonation patterns. These findings are applicable to the teaching of English pronunciation at the passage level in the sense that they can show the learners. Japanese here, what their problems are and how they could be solved.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2019

This paper suggests a genealogy of romance in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and The Surrendered. A flexible textual performance and literary strategy spanning issues of beauty and love, romance in Lee registers the writer's distinctive diasporic negotiation with sites of departure and arrival, in particular with traumatic histories of the m/other country. Native Speaker resolves the crisis of public immigrant love within the compromise in the domestic melodrama. As Lee turns to the scenes of historical trauma in the twentieth century transpacific, romance becomes a key strategy through which his aestheticized framing and deframing of comfort woman is performed and the Korean War finds odd comfort in the aesthetic energy of perverse care in Italy. Through the dehistoricizing movement outside of the historical into the realm of myth and nostalgia, Lee's diasporic romance breaks away from mandates of representation and works within the excess of mistranslation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.11-19
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• 2014

The focus of this study was to investigate whether there is a position effect on identification accuracy of L2 consonants by Korean listeners and to examine how Korean listeners perceive the phonetic properties of initial and final consonants produced by a Korean learner of English and an English native speaker. Most studies examining L2 learners' perception of L2 sounds have focused on the segmental level but very few studies have examined the role of prosodic position in L2 learners' perception. In the present study, an identification test was conducted for English consonants /p, t, k, f, ɵ, s, ʃ/ in CVC prosodic structures. The results revealed that Korean listeners identified syllable-initial consonants more accurately than syllable-final consonants. The perceptual accuracy in syllable initial consonants may be attributable to the enhanced phonetic properties in the initial consonants. A significant correlation was found between error rates and F2 onset/offset for stops and fricatives, and between perceptual accuracy and RMS burst energy for stops. However, the identification error patterns were found to be different across consonant types and between the different language speakers. In the final position, Korean listeners had difficulty in identifying /p/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were produced by a Korean speaker and showed more errors in /p/, /t/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were spoken by an English native speaker. Comparing to the perception of English consonants spoken by a Korean speaker, greater error rates and diverse error patterns were found in the perception of consonants produced by an English native speaker. The present study provides the evidence that prosodic position plays a crucial role in the perception of L2 segments.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.49-62
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• 1999

This study is concerned with the educational program Visual Analysis Tool (VAT) for sound development for foreign intonation using personal computer. The VAT can run on IBM-PC 386 compatible or higher. It shows the spectrogram, waveform, intensity and the pitch contour. The system can work freely on either waveform zoom in-out or the documentation of measured value. In this paper, intensity and pitch contour information were used. Twelve French sentences were recorded from a French conversational tape. And three Korean participated in this study. They spoke out twelve sentences repeatly and trid to make the same pitch contour - by visually matching their pitcgh contour to the native speaker's. A sentences were recorded again when the participants themselves became familiar with intonation, intensity and pauses. The difference of pitch contour(rising or falling), pitch value, energy, total duration of sentences and the boundary of rhythmic group between native speaker's and theirs before and after training were compared. The results were as following: 1) In a declarative sentence: a native speaker's general pitch contour falls at the end of sentences. But the participant's pitch contours were flat before training. 2) In an interrogative: the native speaker made his pitch contours it rise at the end of sentences with the exception of wh-questions (qu'est-ce que) and a pitch value varied a greath. In the interrogative 'S + V' form sentences, we found the pitch contour rose higher in comparison to other sentences and it varied a great deal. 3) In an exclamatory sentence: the pitch contour looked like a shape of a mountain. But the participants could not make it fall before or after training.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.51-58
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to measure the impact of Korean speakers' English stop pronunciation on their general pronunciation proficiency. For these purposes, 20 Korean speakers read English sentences and their pronunciations were rated by native English speakers. The Korean speakers' VOT values of English stops in sentences were then measured and the relation between the VOT values and native speakers' pronunciation rating was compared. Here, the relation between (1) the proficiency score of each speaker and VOT values; and (2) the proficiency score of each sentence and VOT values were analyzed. The results show that there is a relation between the proficiency score of each sentence and VOT values of /t, b, d, g/; and there is a relation between VOT values of /t, b, d, g/ and proficiency scores of each speaker while these is a weak relation between VOT values of /p, k/ and proficiency scores of each speaker.