• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• 제56권4호
• /
• pp.753-772
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this work is to examine the viability of employing the prosody cloning technique in teaching English prosody. Ten native speakers of Korean high school students with similar level of English proficiency participated in the poem self-study experiment. Five of them were grouped into the experimental group and the remaining five into the control group. One popular English poem from a high school textbook was selected and its recording by a professional native speaker of English was used in the experiment. The members of the two groups made a recording of the poem both before and after the experiment. For the study material, the experimental group used their own recorded utterances with their prosody cloned from the professional English speaker, while the control group used the utterances of the professional speaker alone. The acoustic analysis of the recordings by the prosodic foot both before and after the experiment showed that the experimental group performed slightly better than the control group in the realization of the intensity contour of the poem. There were no significant differences in the realization of the intonation contour and segmental durations between the two groups. The recording after the experiment was also subjectively evaluated by a native speaker of English and the scores for the experimental group were slightly higher than the control group. These findings suggest that the use of English poems with the help of the prosody cloning technique is a potentially viable approach to teaching English intonation to high school students. A long-term study with more students is necessary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• 제10권2호
• /
• pp.39-44
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• 제4권1호
• /
• pp.81-89
• /
• 1998

This paper investigates the phatic function of intonation in Russian by recording and analysing 11 female native speakers of standard Moscow Russian. This paper shows that differences in intonation pattern of a sentence are associated with differences in degree of listener's involvement in the speech. Intonation pattern of an utterance having phatic function appears to be determined by 1) the speaker's readiness to talk to evoke the listener's attention ; 2) the speaker's intention to continue the communication. Some emphasis is placed on the relationship between intonation pattern of an utterance and speaker-listener interaction.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 대한음성학회 2002년도 11월 학술대회지
• /
• pp.47-50
• /
• 2002

This paper is to introduce 'Dr. Speaking', which was recently developed by Eonon Inc.. 'Dr. Speaking' is an English pronunciation tutoring system. This has three distinguishing features. First, it teaches how to organize a speaker's vocal organs to pronounce accurately. Second, after it compares a speaker's pronunciation with that of a native speaker's, it grades that speaker's pronunciation level according to phonetic standards. Third, it provides proper information necessary for correcting a speaker's incorrect pronunciation. It is not always easy for a tutoring system to execute the above three almost simutaneously. However, 'Dr. Speaking' proved itself that it is possible by adding speech technology (e.g. speech recognition) to phonetic knowledge.

• 한국정보교육학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국정보교육학회 2010년도 하계학술대회
• /
• pp.185-192
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to suggest design principles for videoconferencing using an English Native Speaker. For this, Design-Based Research which is emerging newly was applied. During the research period of 3 months, several English classes were recorded. After finishing each class, Korean teacher and Native teacher wrote reflective diary and a researcher implemented interviews to students who had this class. Based on these data, this class was divided into 3 steps which is consisted of before class, under class, and after class. And then a research analysed patterns of this class, errors, and interactivity etc. The result of this paper, because a Korean teacher and students in the classroom meet a Native speaker in the distance through the videoconferencing system, teachers who design this class should consider many aspects due to the complexity of this.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• 제9권1호
• /
• pp.193-206
• /
• 2002

The aim of this study is to find out how the labiovelar onglide /w/ in English kwV sequences that have minimal pairs with kV sequences is pronounced differently among Korean EFL learners based on acoustic evidence. This study tries to identify /w/ sound in English kwV sequences through spectrograms and to examine the duration ratios of each segment in kwV words to compare the patterns of an English native speaker with those of Korean speakers of English. In spectrographic analyses, the complete deletion of /w/ and partial pronunciation of /w/ dubbed [$k^{w}$] were identified as well as the targetappropriate production of /w/. The general production patterns with respect to the duration ratios in English [kw] sequence words showed that the subjects who produced /w/ had similar ratio patterns that the native speaker had in that the vowel duration ratio in kwV sequences was shorter than that in kV sequences. By contrast, the subjects who deleted [w] had a long ratio of the onset [$k^{h}$] while the speaker with a partial pronunciation of /w/ had a long ratio of the following vowel.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
• /
• 한국정보과학회언어공학연구회 1999년도 제11회 한글 및 한국어 정보처리 학술대회
• /
• pp.335-342
• /
• 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.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
• /
• 제18권5호
• /
• pp.985-994
• /
• 2009

This research is exploratory in considering the unique socio-cultural context of South Korea, where the present government is responding to the demand for English language training. The study asked the question: What do mothers experience when sending their young children to a private English institute, so called English kindergarten, instead of a regular preschool? A qualitative approach was used to analyze the in-depth interviews with 19 mothers who sent their young child to an English kindergarten. Mothers stated that their young child needs to be a competent English speaker. The mothers expected that an English kindergarten would prepare their child better for the elementary school English curriculum than a regular preschool. The study revealed that English kindergartens symbolized the precedence and the privileges of the elite because of their high tuition fees, native-speaker teachers, and small class sizes. The mothers showed a sense of pride and vicarious satisfaction from sending their child to an English kindergarten. However, the mothers recognized that English kindergartens put more emphasis on cognitive learning instead of the social development of children. It was almost impossible for mothers to communicate with the native-speaker teachers about their child. The mothers seemed to overlook their child's struggle to adapt to an English Kindergarten. The findings of the study raise issues concerning the boom of teaching young children English in Korea.

• MALSORI
• /
• 제38호
• /
• pp.113-124
• /
• 1999

It is well known that Japanese prosodic structure assumes mora below the syllable tier. Syllables with V or CV structure are counted as having one morn whereas those with coda consonants /-pp, -tt, -kk, -ss, -N/ or long vowels are counted as having two morns in Japanese. This study measured the acoustic duration of these special moras ('tokusyuhaku') produced by Tokyo dialect speakers to see if they are isochronic with V or CV. It also examined the production of Korean(Seoul/Kyungsang dialect) and Chinese native speakers loaming Japanese as a second language to examine how the learners' first language influence their second language. Finally, it examined how speakers of the Akita dialect, which is blown as a syllabeme dialect in Japanese, produced them. The results showed that intra-speaker variation as well as inter-speaker variation was observed in the production by Akita dialect speakers. Production of native speakers of Chinese and Kyungsang dialect of Korean -- which have vowel length contrast in their phonological systems -- showed a similar result to Tokyo dialect speakers, which implies the influence of the learners' first language on the acquisition of the second language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 대한음성학회 2003년도 5월 학술대회지
• /
• pp.71-74
• /
• 2003

In this paper, we present some of experimental results developed in computer-based English Pronunciation Correction System for Korean speakers. The aim of the system is to detect incorrectly pronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give correction comment to users. Speech data were collected from 254 native speakers and 411 Koreans, then used for phoneme modeling and test. We built two types of acoustic phoneme models: native speaker model and Korean speaker model. We also built langugage models to reflect Koreans' commonly occurred mispronunications. The detection rate was over 90% in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we got under 75% detection rate in diphthong split and accents.