• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.303-321
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• 2006

According to Harris'(1966) distributional hypothesis, understanding the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent on its context. Under this hypothesis about human language ability, this paper proposes a computational model for native speaker's language processing mechanism concerning word sense disambiguation, based on two sets of experiments. Among the three computational models discussed in this paper, namely, the logic model, the probabilistic model, and the probabilistic inference model, the experiment shows that the logic model is first applied fer semantic disambiguation of the key word. Nexr, if the logic model fails to apply, then the probabilistic model becomes most relevant. The three models were also compared with the test results in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient value. It turns out that the logic model best explains the human decision behaviour on the ambiguous words, and the probabilistic inference model tomes next. The experiment consists of two pans; one involves 30 sentences extracted from 1 million graphic-word corpus, and the result shows the agreement rate anong native speakers is at 98% in terms of word sense disambiguation. The other pm of the experiment, which was designed to exclude the logic model effect, is composed of 50 cleft sentences.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.482-489
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• 2014

The purposes of this study are (1) to see if the length of residence in Korea affects to the VOT values of Korean plosives produced by Chinese speakers (2) to investigate if such VOT values are different in non-sense words and real words and (3) to find out how such VOT values are related to the native Korean speakers' understanding of the words. For these purposes, eighteen Chinese speakers' VOT values of Korean plosives were measured using Speech Analyzer and their pronunciations were evaluated by three native Korean speakers. The results show that there is no effect of both (1) length of residence in Korea and (2) production of non-sensed words and sensed words. In addition, it is noticed that VOT values of some plosives affect more to the native Korean speakers' understanding of the words, while some are not.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.23-42
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• 2006

This paper reports a preliminary result of an acoustic study on the stress and intonational system in Lakhota, a native American language. It investigates how the stress and intonation in Lakhota are phonetically manifested; and how the stress interacts with other prosodic factors. The results preliminarily obtained from one native Lakhota speaker suggest that the primary cue of the stress is relatively high F0 which is often accompanied by higher intensity (for the vowel) and longer VOT (for aspirated stops). The results also indicate that stress is not reliably marked by duration. The stress system, however, interacts with the intonational pattern, such that, for example, intonational peak falls on the stressed syllable with a general pattern of L+H* and that it interacts with the boundary tone L%, resulting in mid tone utterance-finally. This paper can be viewed largely as a qualitative study on an understudied native American language, Lakhota and as forming a basis for further development of its stress and intonation system whose acoustic properties of its prosodic system have not been investigated before.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.53-68
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• 2012

This study investigated the speech intelligibility of Korean-accented and native English focus speech for Korean and native English listeners. Three different types of focus in English, broad, narrow and contrastive, were naturally induced in semantically optimal dialogues. Seven high and seven low proficiency Korean speakers and seven native speakers participated in recording the stimuli with another native speaker. Fifteen listeners from each of Korean high & low proficiency and native groups judged audio signals of focus sentences. Results showed that Korean listeners were more accurate at identifying the focal prominence for Korean speakers' narrow focus speech than that of native speakers, and this suggests that the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit-talker (ISIB-T) held true for narrow focus regardless of Korean speakers' and listeners' proficiency. However, Korean listeners did not outperform native listeners for Korean speakers' production of narrow focus, which did not support for the ISIB-listener (L). Broad and contrastive focus speech did not provide evidence for either the ISIB-T or ISIB-L. These findings are explained by the interlanguage shared by Korean speakers and listeners where they have established more L1-like common phonetic features and phonological representations. Once semantically and syntactically interpreted in a higher level processing in Korean narrow focus speech, the narrow focus was phonetically realized in a more intelligible way to Korean listeners due to the interlanguage. This may elicit ISIB. However, Korean speakers did not appear to make complete semantic/syntactic access to either broad or contrastive focus, which might lead to detrimental effects on lower level phonetic outputs in top-down processing. This is, therefore, attributed to the fact that Korean listeners did not take advantage over native listeners for Korean talkers and vice versa.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.155-168
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• 2002

The intervocalic Korean liquid sound has been recognized as a flap in the studies of the Korean language. But there has been very little experimental data corroborating it. The electropalatographic (EPG) experiment was conducted to test this. The subjects were one Korean speaker and one native English speaker who had a pseudopalate and did the EPG experiment at the UCLA phonetics laboratory. The spectrographic evidence of the flaps in both the English t-flap and the Korean liquid flap was also sought. The English and Korean flaps were between mid/low back vowels so that the vowels themselves would not affect palatal contacts of the tongue. The results confirmed that the Korean liquid is realized as a flap in intervocallical position with many similar properties to English flap in both EPG and spectrographic data. The Korean initial liquid sound in borrowed words such as 'rotary' and 'radio' was also a flap. But the Korean liquid in the word-final and geminate positions was a lateral as in words 'dol ' (stone), 'dollo' (with stone), 'nal' (day) and 'nallara' (carry). The intuitive theory of the Korean liquid flap was proved by the EPG and spectrographic data.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-103
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• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.364-364
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• 2000

It has been widely discussed in phonology that syllable structure of mother tongue influences one's acquisition of foreign language. However, the topic was hardly examined experimentally. So, we investigated effects of Korean syllable structure when Korean speakers pronounce English words, especially focusing on consonant strings that are not allowed in Korean. In the experiment, all the subjects are divided into 3 groups, that is, native, experienced, and inexperienced speakers. Native group consists of 1 male English native speaker. Experienced and inexperienced are each composed of 3 male Korean speakers. These 2 groups are divided by the length of residence in the country using English as a native language. 41 mono-syllable words are prepared considering the position (onset vs. coda), characteristic (stops, affricates, fricatives), and number of consonant. Then, the length of the consonant cluster is measured. To eliminate tempo effect, the measured length is normalized using the length of the word 'say' in the carrier sentence. Measurement of consonant cluster is the relative time period between the initiation of energy (onset I coda) which is acoustically representative of noise (consonant portion) and voicing. bar (vowel portion) in a syllable. Statistical method is used to estimate the differences among 3 groups. For each word, analysis of variance (ANDY A) and Post Hoc tests are carried out.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.335-357
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• 2007

This study aims to investigate the pragmatic features of Korean EFL learners' interlanguage in the communicative act of complaining. Since a complaint, by its nature, is likely to cause offence, thereby threatening the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer, making a complaint in a polite manner is of crucial importance in maintaining harmonious social relationships. However, very little research has been carried out on the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners. In particular, studies which attempt to examine the effect of social status on the choice of complaint speech act strategies are rare. The present study compared the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners and those of native speakers of English with respect to social status. 24 Korean EFL learners and 28 native speakers of English participated and the data were collected via a Discourse Completion Test. The findings revealed that Korean EFL learners differed from native English speakers in the use of complaint strategies. These results indicate that Korean EFL learners lack certain important skills necessary to make complaints appropriately, suggesting the need for the foreign language learners to develop a more extensive pragmatic knowledge of complaint strategies.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.87-102
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• 2003

In this paper, we present an English pronunciation correction system for Korean speakers and show some of experimental results on it. The aim of the system is to detect mispronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give appropriate correction comments to users. There are several English pronunciation correction systems adopting speech recognition technology, however, most of them use conventional speech recognition engines. From this reason, they could not give phoneme based correction comments to users. In our system, we build two kinds of phoneme models: standard native speaker models and Korean's error models. We also design recognition network based on phonemes to detect Koreans' common mispronunciations. We get 90% detection rate in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we cannot get high detection rate in diphthong split and accents.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.77-89
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• 2007

This paper examined the intonation contours of English sentences produced by the Korean students. Thirty students participated in the speaking tasks made up of three parts: an oral interview, picture description and a conversational text reading. Their pronunciations in the parts were recorded on a minidisk. Then, two native instructors evaluated their proficiency level focusing on general intelligibility and suprasegmental aspects of the speech. Based on the results of evaluation they were divided into two groups: high and low proficiency groups. The pitch contours of three sentences produced by both the Korean students and a native speaker were compared to find any similarities and differences in the students' intonation patterns using Praat. Results showed that there was a moderate correlation in the proficiency scores of the students by the two native speakers. Secondly, students who earned high scores in the proficiency level matched better the native model. Thirdly, the high group students knew more on the pitch contour and tried to carefully realize them while fewer students in the low group answered positively on the questionnaire. In conclusion, English learners need to know the proper intonation patterns and to practice them consciously and sufficiently to realize correct intonation contours. Further studies would be desirable on the students' pronunciation focused on discourse structure.