• 영어어문교육
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.1-18
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• 2005

This study is a preliminary investigation of the nature of discourse marker acquisition in Korean American speakers of English. Discourse markers are of interest because they are not an aspect of language taught through formal instruction either to native or non-native speakers. Therefore, discourse marker use serves as indirect evidence of face-to-face interaction with native speakers and an indicator of integration. In this light, the present study examines the presence of discourse markers in Korean Americans. The markers chosen for analysis were you know, like, and I mean. The data consist of spontaneous speech elicited from interviews. Sociolinguistic variables such as age, sex, and generation (i.e., $1^{st}$, 1.5, $2^{nd}$) were examined. Results show that there appears to be interaction between the variables and discourse marker use. While all speakers showed variable acquisition of markers, younger, female, and 1.5 generation speakers were found to use discourse markers more than other speakers. Although discourse marker use is optional and thus not a linguistic feature that must be necessarily acquired, it is clear that use is pervasive and acquired differentially by English speakers irrespective of whether they are native or not.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권3호
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• pp.345-363
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare the speech rate of advanced Korean(L2) learners and Korean native speakers in spontaneous utterances. Specifically, the current study investigated the difference of the two groups' speech pattern according to utterance length. Eight advanced Korean(L2) learners and eight Korean native speakers participated in this study. The data were collected by recording their conversation and physical measurements (speaking rate, articulatory rates, pause and several types of speech disfluency) were taken on extracted 120 utterances from 12 out of the 16 participants. The findings show that advanced Korean learners' speech pattern is similar to that of Koreans in the short-length utterance. However, in the long-length utterance, two groups show different speech patterns; while the articulatory rate of Korean native speakers increased in the long-length utterance, that of Korean learners decreased. This suggests that the frequency of speech disfluency factors might affect this result.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권4호
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• pp.137-168
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to prepare the basis for a more objective evaluation of oral fluency by comparing speech patterns of Korean native speakers and L2 Korean learners. For this purpose, the current study focused on the analysis of speech materials of the 21st century Sejong spoken corpus and Korean learner corpus. We compared the oral fluency of Korean native speakers and Korean learners based on speech rate, pause, and discourse markers. The results show that the pattern of Korean learners is different to that of Korean native speakers in all aspects of speech rate, pause, and discourse markers; even though proficiency of Korean leaners show increase, they could not reach the oral fluency level of Korean native speakers. At last, based on these results of the analysis, we added suggestions for setting the evaluation criteria of oral fluency of Korean learners.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.19-28
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• 2022

The current study was designed to explore whether taking English pronunciation classes could improve the realization of English rhythm by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study used various rhythm metrics to examine the extent to which the learners' speech became rhythmically similar to the target language after taking classes that focused on English pronunciation. Sixteen learners who took a 15-week English pronunciation course at a university read an English passage twice (at the beginning and the end of the semester). The rhythm metrics such as Deltas, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indices were calculated for the learners' speech, as well as that of 8 native speakers of English. The results demonstrated that the learners' speech was slower, and they put more frequent within-sentence pauses than the native speakers even after the classes. The analyses also indicated that the speech recorded at the beginning of the semester was rhythmically much more different from the target language than at the end of the semester. After the classes, however, the learners' consonantal intervals became much more target-like, while the vocalic intervals were rhythmically even further from those in the target language. Overall, the findings suggested that the pronunciation classes helped the learners to produce English speech that was rhythmically similar to the native speakers.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.27-36
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• 2014

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of Korean vowels. Specifically, I examined the Chinese learners' Korean monophthongs /i, e, ɨ, ${\Lambda}$, a, u, o/ that were created at the time of 1 month and 12 months, tried to verify empirically how they learn by dealing with their mother tongue, and Korean vowels through dealing with pattern of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (henceforth PAM) of Best (Best, 1993; 1994; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the Speech Learning Model (henceforth SLM) of Flege (Flege, 1987; Bohn & Flege, 1992, Flege, 1995). As a result, most of the present results are shown to be similarly explained by the PAM and SLM, and the only discrepancy between these two models is found in the 'similar' category of sounds between the learners' native language and the target language. Specifically, the acquisition pattern of /u/ and /o/ in Korean is well accounted for the PAM, but not in the SLM. The SLM did not explain why the Chinese learners had difficulty in acquiring the Korean vowel /u/, because according to the SLM, the vowel /u/ in Chinese (the native language) is matched either to the vowel /u/ or /o/ in Korean (the target language). Namely, there is only a one-to-one matching relationship between the native language and the target language. In contrast, the Chinese learners' difficulty for the Korean vowel /u/ is well accounted for in the PAM in that the Chinese vowel /u/ is matched to the vowel pair /o, u/ in Korean, not the single vowel, /o/ or /u/.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.69-76
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• 2017

The current study investigated whether Korean learners' English-learning environments, especially target English accent (General American English (GAE) vs. Southern British English (SBE)) and English-language experience affected their production of English vowels. Thirty six EFL learners, 27 ESL-US learners, and 33 ESL-UK learners produced 8 English vowels with a bVt frame (beat, bit, bet, bat, bought, bot, boat, boot). The learners' productions were acoustically analyzed in terms of F1 and F2 frequencies. The overall results revealed that the learners' target accent had an effect on their production of some English vowels. The EFL and ESL-US learners' (especially, female learners') production of bought, bot, boat, and boot, which show characteristic differences between the GAE and SBE accents, was closer to that of the native American English (AE) speakers than the native British English (BE) speakers. In contrast, the ESL-UK learners' production of bought and bot demonstrated the opposite pattern. Thus, the impact of target accent was not demonstrated across the board. The effect of the learners' different English-language experience was also rather limited. This was because the EFL learners' production was not much different from the ESL-US learners' production, in spite of the ESL-US learners' residence in the US for more than 9 years. Furthermore, the Korean learners, irrespective of their different English-language experience, tended to produce bit and bat with lower F1 than the native AE and BE speakers, thus resulting in bit and bat to be produced similarly to beat and bet, respectively. This demonstrates the learners' persistent L1 effects on their English vowel production despite the learners' residence in the English speaking countries or their high English proficiency.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.145-155
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• 2013

This study investigated the articulatory characteristics of Korean singleton and geminate sonorants in the word-medial position, effects of the duration of the sonorant consonant and the preceding vowel on perception, and the difference between native Korean speakers and foreign learners of Korean in perceiving the singleton and geminate consonant contrast. The Korean sonorant consonants(/m, n, l/) are examined from the VCCV, VCV sequences through speech production and perception experiments. The results suggest that the duration of the sonorant consonant is the most important factor for native Korean speakers to recognize whether sonorants are overlapped, and the duration of preceding vowel and other factors affect the recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast if the duration is not obvious. A perception experiment showed Chinese Korean language learners did not clearly distinguish singleton consonants from geminate consonants. The results of this study provide basic data for recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast in word-medial of Korean language, and can be utilized for teaching Korean pronunciation as a foreign language.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.29-41
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제46권1호
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• pp.48-58
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• 2024

This paper presents the development of language tutoring systems for nonnative speakers by leveraging advanced end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) and proficiency evaluation. Given the frequent errors in non-native speech, high-performance spontaneous speech recognition must be applied. Our systems accurately evaluate pronunciation and speaking fluency and provide feedback on errors by relying on precise transcriptions. End-to-end ASR is implemented and enhanced by using diverse non-native speaker speech data for model training. For performance enhancement, we combine semisupervised and transfer learning techniques using labeled and unlabeled speech data. Automatic proficiency evaluation is performed by a model trained to maximize the statistical correlation between the fluency score manually determined by a human expert and a calculated fluency score. We developed an English tutoring system for Korean elementary students called EBS AI Peng-Talk and a Korean tutoring system for foreigners called KSI Korean AI Tutor. Both systems were deployed by South Korean government agencies.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제17권4호
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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.