• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.31-68
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• 2006

The present research investigates the acquisition of the English locative alternation by Korean EFL learners, which poses a learnability paradox, taking Pinker's framework of learnability theory as its basis. It addresses two questions (1) how lexical knowledge is represented initially and at different levels of interlanguage development and (2) what kinds of difficulty Korean learners find in the acquisition of English locative verbs and their constructions. Three groups of learners at different proficiency levels with a control group of English native speakers are examined by two instruments: elicited production task and grammaticality judgment task. According to different levels of proficiency, the learners exhibit gradual sensitivity to a change-of-state meaning and obtain complete perception of the meanings of locative verbs (manner-of-motion and change-of-state) and their constructions. Overgeneralization errors are observed in their performance. The errors are due to misinterpretations of particular lexical items in conjunction with the universal linking rules. More fundamental cause of difficulty is accounted for by partial use of learning mechanisms, caused by insufficient L2 input.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.87-93
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• 2009

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 and Korean college exchange students. To do this eight words and sixteen sentences were uttered and recorded by nine subjects, five Korean subjects and four American subjects. Results showed that the vowel lengths of English low vowels between American subjects and Korean subjects were different, which may lead to foreign accent of Korean speakers. Comparing the average length of English low vowels of Korean subjects with those of American subjects, we can see that American subjects tend to pronounce the English low vowels longer than Korean subjects do. In the pronunciation of diphthongs /eI/ and /ou/, Korean subjects pronounced longer than American subjects did. However, in the pronunciation of diphthongs /au/, /aI/, and /ɔI/, American subjects pronounced longer than Korean subjects did.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.261-265
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to improve English communicative competence of elementary school students through an acoustic study For this purpose, this study investigates various postlexical phenomena which can be applied to utterence contents in elementary school English book and analyzes the application of postlexical phenomena through the spectrogram when native speakers and elementary school students speak English. The speech materials were seven sentences which contained various postlexical phenomena. This leads to the conclusion that knowing and pronouncing postlexical phenomena of English is needed for improving English communicative competence successfully.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.49-55
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• 2009

This study investigates whether rhythm metrics can be used to capture the rhythmic differences between spontaneous and read English speech. Transcription of spontaneous speech tokens extracted from a corpus is read by three English native speakers to generate the corresponding read speech tokens. Two data sets are compared in terms of seven rhythm measures that are suggested by previous studies. Results show that there is a significant difference in the values of vowel-based metrics (VarcoV and nPVI-V) between spontaneous and read speech. This manifests a greater variability in vocalic intervals in spontaneous speech than in read speech. The current study is especially meaningful as it demonstrates a way in which speech styles can be differentiated and parameterized in numerical terms.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.249-277
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to show that Web-Based English Instruction (WBEI) focused on writing is effective in learning English in Korea. To investigate the effectiveness of WBEI, a survey was conducted to the experimental group after WBEI and a test was taken to compare the difference of the score of the experimental group and control group. According to the survey, almost all students thought that WBEI was a most effective way to improve communicative competence by exchanging electronic mails with native speakers. The test showed that the experimental group's score was somewhat low in comparison with the control group's in pre-test, but the former groups' was rather higher than the control groups' in post-test. This study also suggests that we should develop more effective Web-based English teaching-learning methods to activate WBEI in our classroom.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-80
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• 2011

The study examines how Koreans' politeness is realized in a speech act, request. The main focus is to explore underlying rationale and influence involved in their performance, not just the comparison of difference in politeness realization between native and nonnative speakers of English, as previous studies did. The study employs the DCT, an attached politeness scale questionnaire, and interviews. Twenty nine university students participated in the study. Interchangeable reading of the three data yields some interesting and valuable insights. The participants heavily rely on a few formulaic expressions to express politeness, such as interrogatives with modal verbs, please and excuse me as a politeness marker. They want to use honorific address terms that is literally translated into English, and have a belief that there are honorific words in English as in Korean. The study refers to the participants' voice on indirectness, nonverbal messages, and expressions with different connotations between English and Korean.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.55-58
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• 2006

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of postvocalic consonant cluster (Contrasting nasal-stops consonant with stops) on vowel duration. In particular we focused on the rate of vowel duration in their words. (Experimental I ) and the tendency of unreleased voiceless stops at the end of the words.(Experimental II). The result of experimental I showed that the rate of vowel duration which is preceding single voiceless stops are significantly longer than those preceding nasal-stops counterparts and the percentage of English native speakers was longer than those of Korean leaners of English Experiment II indicated that the tendency of unreleased stop consonants occurred more frequently on single voiceless stops than nasal-stop clusters and Korean learners of English were more frequently produced the unreleased stops than English natives.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.537-560
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• 2001

Stroik (1992, 1995, 1999) argues for the syntactic approach to English middles. His argumentation is heavily dependent upon the occurrence of a for-phrase in middles. However, many native speakers of English judge middles containing a for-phrase awkward or at best marginal. In addition, some other adverbials show a trait of a very similar nature. These two observational facts seem to justify the Genericity Constraint on Middles (=GCM). Yet a third observational fact that middles in the past tense can be sporadic nullifies GCM. In the present article, based upon several pieces of evidence, I show that the subject of the middle is a topic. In addition, it is argued that the Topical Subject Constraint on Middles can explain away the three observational facts.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.207-214
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• 2001

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.