• 음성과학
• /
• 제14권4호
• /
• pp.41-52
• /
• 2007

Recent experimental studies have shown that language-users' knowledge of the statistical characteristic of their native language plays a key role in their task performance. One specific instance of this that the current study focuses on is the effect of phonotactic probabilities on speakers' wordlikeness judgment of nonwords. In this paper, I explore the question of whether the judgment of Korean speaking subjects as to the wordlikeness of Korean nonsense words is influenced by the degree of association between two-phoneme sequences in Korean. The current results suggest that the objective measure of correlations (expressed by $r_{\phi}$ values) between an onset consonant and a vowel inside Korean syllables play an important role in Korean speakers' nonword processing. The current results additionally indicate an effect of the correlations of two-phoneme sequences including vowels and coda consonants on nonword processing. Implications of these findings for Korean speakers' learning the correlations between adjacent segments inside the syllable are discussed.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제14권3호
• /
• pp.77-89
• /
• 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.

• 아동학회지
• /
• 제22권4호
• /
• pp.299-313
• /
• 2001

This study examines the current state of English education in private kindergartens in Korea. Among 1700 kindergarten teachers surveyed for this research, 680 replied that their institutions provided English lessons for children. Analyses of the data collected from these 680 teachers showed : 1) They started to teach English not because of educational considerations but because of pressure from children's parents or kindergarten principals; 2) Most of the English teachers were part-time instructors specially recruited for English lessons. Generally, English lessons were given two or three times a week, with one session lasting for about 20 minutes. A variety of teaching methods and materials were used for the lessons given to children aged three to five. Focus of the lessons was given to listening and speaking words and sentences; 3) Most of the teachers considered the scarcity of qualified English instructors as the most serious problem for providing English education in kindergartens, and they did not want to teach English themselves. They evaluated positively the performance and role of Korean part-time English instructors. The evaluations were generally poor as to native speakers serving as kindergarten English teachers.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제4권1호
• /
• pp.13-20
• /
• 2012

A lax stop in Korean, one of the three laryngeal contrastive stops, has undergone a sound change in terms of its acoustic properties. Prior production studies described this recent lax stop as being differentiated from tense and aspirated stops primarily by fundamental frequencies (f0). And, the acoustic property of voice onset time (VOT) further separates tense stops from lax and aspirated stops. The current research explores how these two major acoustic parameters of f0 and VOT cue the three stop categories in Korean adult listeners' perception. Thirty-one native speakers of Korean participated in two experimental tasks: categorization judgment and within-category goodness ratings. Two sets of audio stimuli were prepared by synthesizing English and Korean male speakers' CV productions. The findings showed that while f0 cues listeners to lax stops as production patterns would predict, VOT were closely related to listeners' categorization and goodness ratings of lax stops. This suggests that accurate characterizations of the recent lax stop category need to be based on Korean speakers' perceptual behavior as well as production patterns.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권3호
• /
• pp.101-108
• /
• 2014

This study investigates the relation among pitch range differences, speech rate and realization of stress. To identify the realization of the stress, vowel formants and durational differences of stressed and unstressed vowels are measured. The Korean learners were asked to read a textbook passage which includes nine sentences. The major results indicate that: (1) Korean speakers' pitch range is less than 50% of the native speakers; (2) There is a significantly negative relation between high-low pitch range and speech rate; (3) The vowel qualities and durations of the stressed and unstressed vowels are related to the speech rate. But these are not related to the high-low pitch range.

• 융합정보논문지
• /
• 제11권3호
• /
• pp.159-166
• /
• 2021

영어 교육에서 의사소통적 접근 방식을 채택함에 따라 한국 학생과 교사의 의사소통 능력을 향상시키기 위해 1995 년 교육부는 영어 원어민 화자를 모집하여 영어 교사로 활용하는 한국 영어 프로그램(EPIK)을 도입하였다. 이 프로그램을 통하여 영어를 모국어로 사용하는 7개 나라에서 모집된 영어 원어민 교사들은 한국의 공립학교에서 한국인 영어교사와 함께 영어를 가르치고 있다. 하지만 이 프로그램의 효율성에 대해 많은 의문이 제기되어 왔다. 따라서 이 논문을 통해 EPIK 프로그램에 대한 조사를 통해 EPIK의 효과와 목표로 하는 프로그램의 현재 상태, 문제점 및 방향을 탐색하고자 한다. 끝으로 본 논문은 EPIK프로그램의 활용성을 높이기 위해 오리엔테이션 및 교육훈련 프로그램에서 VR 사용가능성을 포함한 몇 가지 가능한 대책과 제안을 제시하고자 한다.

• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제10권3호
• /
• pp.159-175
• /
• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.165-171
• /
• 2018

As the artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in machine translation (MT) which has loomed large as a new translation paradigm, concerns have also arisen if MT can produce a quality product as human translation (HT) can. In fact, several MT experimental studies report cases in which the MT product called post-editing (PE) as equally as HT or often superior ([1],[2],[6]). As motivated from those studies on translation quality between HT and PE, this study set up an experimental situation in which Korean literature was translated into English, comparatively, by 3 translators and 3 post-editors. Afterwards, a group of 3 other Koreans checked for accuracy of HT and PE; a group of 3 English native speakers scored for fluency of HT and PE. The findings are (1) HT took the translation time, at least, twice longer than PE. (2) Both HT and PE produced similar error types, and Mistranslation and Omission were the major errors for accuracy and Grammar for fluency. (3) HT turned to be inferior to PE for both accuracy and fluency.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제13권4호
• /
• pp.127-140
• /
• 2006

This study examined acoustic characteristics of 900 CV syllables produced by five English native speakers. Those target syllables were produced between the syllable /ba/ twenty times. The syllables were segmented and normalized by the maximum intensity value of each syllable and were divided into consonant or vowel sections by a few visible acoustic criteria. Intensity values were collected at 100 relative time points per syllable. Also, cumulative intensity values and consonant and vowel durations along with the ratio of a consonant to each syllable were measured using Praat scripts. Results showed as follows: Firstly, the consonantal section amounted to a quarter of the syllable in terms of both the cumulative intensity and duration. Secondly, the consonantal ratio by the cumulative intensity was similar to that by the duration. Finally, the sum of the cumulative intensity values in each syllable partially coincided with the consonant order by the current sonority scale. Further studies would be desirable on more reliable acoustical measurements and sophisticated perceptual experiments on the English syllables.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제46호
• /
• pp.87-102
• /
• 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.