• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.133-149
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• 2003

As the world becomes a global village, national conferences become more frequent, and the language of choice to mediate the exchange of information is English. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to find several methods to prepare L2 students for English communication at conferences. Various studies about discourse markers can be found in this study. Discourse markers are indicators of fluency in spoken language, and indicators of improvement from features of spoken English to more typical forms of formal writing. In this study the presentation styles of native speakers and Asian non-native speakers are compared, and the difference between efficient and non-efficient speakers at conferences are discussed. As a study of conference English teaching and learning method, this research targets suggestion and application of discourse markers for L2 speakers. As a result, the fact that discourse markers are very important in effective writing and conference English is found and accordingly we can see that developing the ability to use discourse markers in writing and speaking are essential for L2 speakers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.2
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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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.157-173
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• 2003

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate and compare the. vowel lengths of English diphthongs and low vowels among native-English-speaking Americans with Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Eight words and sixteen sentences were uttered five times by twenty five subjects from three groups; 1) Chungnam dialect speakers, 2) Gyungnam dialect speakers and 3) five native-English-speaking Americans. Acoustic features (duration) were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Quire. Results showed that the vowel lengths of English diphthongs and low vowels between native English speakers and Korean collegians of Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces were different. Comparing the average length of English diphthongs of Korean collegians with those of American natives, we can see that native English speakers tend to pronounce the English diphthongs shorter than Korean collegians do. However, native English speakers tend to pronounce the English low vowels longer than Korean collegians do. In this study we also tried to find out the differences of English diphthongs and low vowel lengths in relation to their utterance positions among American natives and Chungnam and Gyungnam dialect speakers. By the results of this experiment, we observed a lengthening effect in the three groups. However, in the pronunciation of American natives, a lengthening effect of English vowels was more clearly observed, especially in the pronunciation of English diphthongs.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.93-103
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• 2003

This study examines the high-low pitch range differences between Korean and native English speakers' utterances of 36 English sentences, and explores the role of the pitch fluctuation range in the pronunciation assessment. Findings are: i) Korean speakers implement half as much pitch fluctuation as the native speakers with the achievement rate of, on an average, 47%. Especially, pitch fluctuation range is below the average in the sentence types of exclamation, yes-no & wh-questions, ii) the reason why Korean speakers' pitch fluctuation range is only half the range of the native speakers is that Korean speakers do not raise the pitch at certain sentence positions so much as the native speakers, and iii) the range of pitch fluctuation plays an important role in distinguishing the utterances of the native speakers from those of Korean speakers, but does not in rating the English utterances among Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.45-53
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• 2011

Flemming and Johnson (2007) claim that there is a fundamental distinction between the mid central vowel [ə] and the high central vowel [?] in that [ə] occurs in an unstressed word-final position while [?] appears elsewhere. Compared to English counterparts, Korean [ə] and [?] are full vowels and they have phonemic contrast. The purpose of this paper is to explore the acoustic quality of two English reduced vowels produced by Korean learners and native speakers of English in terms of their two formant frequencies. Sixteen Korean learners of English and six native speakers of English produced four types of English words and two types of Korean words with different phonological and morphological patterns. The results show that Korean learners of English produced the two reduced vowels of English and their Korean counterparts differently in Korean and English words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of foreign-accentedness of English pronunciation across subject groups, evaluated accents, and compared components. This study independently evaluates the prosody and segmentals of the foreign-accented English sentences by pairwise difference rating. Using the prosody swapping technique, segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by native speakers of American English (one male and one female) were combined with the corresponding segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by male and female native speakers of Chinese, Japanese or Korean (one male and one female from each native language). These stimuli were evaluated by 4 different subject groups: native speakers of American English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. The results showed that the Japanese subject group scored higher in prosody difference than in segmental difference while the other groups scored the other way around. This study is significant in that the attitude toward the difference in segmentals and prosody of the foreign accents of English varies with the native language of the subject group. In other words, for native speakers of some languages, the difference in prosody could have a greater influence on the foreign-accentedness than the difference in segmentals, while for native speakers of other languages the other way around.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2013

This study investigated the rhythmic accommodation of Korean English learners' interlanguage talk. Twelve Korean speakers, 6 native English speakers and 6 non-native English speakers in London participated in multiple conversations on different topics which produced 36 conversational data in interlanguage talk (ILT) settings. 190 utterances from the 36 conversational data were analyzed to investigate the rhythmic patterns of Korean English learners when they communicated with English speakers with different language backgrounds. Save for the final-syllable, the normalized duration of consecutive syllables was compared in order to derive a variability index (VI). It was found that there was no significant variability in the measurement of the syllable-to-syllable duration for the utterances of Korean English learners, regardless of their interlocutor's language background. Conversely, it was found that there was evidence that Korean English learners showed rhythmic accommodation in ILT when they conversed with non-native English speakers. The speaking rate became significantly slower when Korean English learners talked to non-native English speakers, than when they talked to other Korean English learners. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between speaking rate and the VI in the utterances of Korean English learners in ILT.

• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.49-73
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• 2005

This study explores the most important temporal cues in the perception of the voiced/voiceless distinction of English plosives in terms of newly defined measures of perception: original signal to response agreement, unit signal to response agreement, and robustness. Seven native speakers of English and three leveled groups of Korean English learners participated in the present study. The results showed that both native speakers of English and Korean groups failed to successfully perceive the voiced/voiceless distinction of English plosives, particularly alveolar plosives, in word-medial trochaic positions. The results also showed that in word-initial and word-medial iambic positions both native speakers of English and Korean groups employ the information in the release burst and aspiration in the perception of the voiced/voiceless distinction, of English plosives, and that in word-final positions native speakers of English employ the information in the preceding vowel, while Korean groups employ the information in the closure interval.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.43-54
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to examine temporal structures of English words beginning with an /s/ plus stop sequence through production experiments with native speakers of Korean learning English and native speakers of English. According to the results of our production experiment, both a beginner and an advanced group of Korean English learners produced /s/ shorter than a following stop, while the opposite pattern was observed in English native speakers' production. An advanced group of Korean English learners were good at producing a stop after /s/ as unaspirated, but their production of a stop following /s/ was different from English native speakers' production in that the closure duration of the stop was much longer.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.