• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.39-46
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• 2009

This study compares the perception of English high tense and lax vowels (/i, I, u, $\mho$/) by English speakers and Korean speakers of English. The four vowels were produced in /hVd/ context by a native speaker of English, and each word's vowel duration was manipulated to range from 170ms to 290ms in 30ms increments. Two English speakers and six Korean speakers of English were asked to listen to pairs of tense and lax vowel words with manipulated vowel durations and to identify the pair by choosing either heed-hid or hid-heed for front vowels and either who'd-hood or hood-who'd for back vowels. The results show that English speakers distinguished tense vowels from lax vowels with 100% accuracy regardless of the different durations, compared to 62% accuracy for Korean speakers of English. Most errors occurred for lengthened lax vowels and shortened tense vowels. The results of this study demonstrate that Korean speakers mainly rely on vowel duration as a cue to discriminate the tense and lax vowels. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this finding are discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.75-79
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• 2006

In this study, we investigate ways that focus is realized in English utterances produced by native speakers of English and Korean learners. As compared to the previous studies which deal mainly with functional aspects of focus as a part of intonational structure, we attempt to provide more quantitative information on F0 and discover the extent to which Korean learners distinguish focus types in their English utterance production. On the test sentences designed to be disambiguated by correct focus realization, it is found that, even advanced-level Korean learners, unlike native speakers, hardly employ F0 to clarify the specific meaning of English utterances.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.89-104
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• 2004

This paper investigates previous theories on English focus realization and attempts to find out the overall acoustic characteristics of English focus. It has been argued in previous studies that English focus can be defined as a new information that is not recoverable from the context (Halliday 1967), a complementary element of presupposition (Jackendoff 1972), and what is predicated about the topic in a sentence (Sgall 1973, Gundel 1974). The phonetic realization of English focus in an utterance has been said to be either L+H*/H*, or falling accent. Yet it is a more or less simplified pattern not based on real data obtained from native speakers of English, and it does not consider the various pragmatic and contextual situations. In our experiments we found that native speakers uttered English focus sentences in different ways according to the different focus structure. Another notable result is that Korean speakers, when provided with the same experimental material, are neither able to distinguish different focus types nor deaccent the elements that are not focused in an utterance.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.1-18
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• 2001

The purpose of this paper is to slove problems with English pronunciation education and to correct the misbelief that misbelief that English pronunciation can be thught effectiverly by native speakers or good speakers. Best sellers have many mistakes even in the description of sounds and most English education departments in national universities teach English phonetics theoretically only for 1 semester, More than 10 years' investigation into native speakers' and good speakers' teaching methods in various ways confirmed that they couldn't know English phonetics teachers should have a theoretical and practical knowledge of phonetics of English and students' dialects and the abilities to find the same or similar English sounds their students can make in normal or abnormal situations, to make both correct sounds and incorrect ones their students can make and to make them perceive the differences by using various ways.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2013

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is known to be a fronto-centrally negative component of the auditory event-related potentials (ERP). $N\ddot{a}\ddot{a}t\ddot{a}nen$ et al. (1997) and Winkler et al. (1999) discuss that MMN acts as a cue to a phoneme perception in the ERP paradigm. In this study a perception experiment based on an ERP paradigm to check how Korean and American English speakers perceive the American English high front vowels was conducted. The study found that the MMN obtained from both Korean and American English speakers was shown around the same time after they heard F1s of English high front vowels. However, when the same groups heard English words containing them, the American English listeners' MMN was shown to be a little faster than the Korean listeners' MMN. These findings suggest that non-speech sounds, such as F1s of vowels, may be processed similarly across speakers of different languages; however, phonemes are processed differently; a native language phoneme is processed faster than a non-native language phoneme.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.95-108
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• 1997

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.572-583
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• 2019

This study sought to find out what the most ideal and appropriate native English speakers-Korean English teacher cooperative class model and the defining factors for organizing effective cooperative classes in the English education environment of our country. To achieve this goal, a total of 165 sixth graders of five elementary schools in Seoul were subject to the study. For about a month from April 1 to April 30, 2019, the survey and statistical analysis were conducted, including multiple return analysis, correlation analysis, cross analysis, and t/F verification. In summary, the results of the study are as follows. First, it was found that among the recognition of cooperative classes between native English speakers and Korean English teachers, it affected the defining factors in the order of class-related skills, task orientation, teaching-learning strategies, and motivation. Second, based on learner characteristics, the difference in perception of cooperative classes between native English speakers and Korean English teachers was verified, and the perception of native-Korean English teachers' cooperative classes was different depending on gender and the type of English cooperative classes currently participating, but the recognition of native-Korean English-Korean English cooperative classes, which were statistically significant, was not confirmed. Third, according to learner characteristics, the difference in the definition factors of the learner was verified and the difference between the sexes occurred, but the learner-defined factors according to the current type of English cooperative class did not occur. Also, there was no difference in the definition factors of scholars according to the type of English cooperative classes desired.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.167-180
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• 2005

The present study examines the phonetic realizations of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ in English words produced by native and Korean ESL speakers. Traditionally, the stressed elements in utterance are considered to be prominent. In this sense, the unstressed weak vowel /e/ is predicted to be shorter in length, lower in pitch and intensity than the stressed vowels. The experiment shows that native English speakers correlate the unstressed weak vowel /e/ with both shorter duration and lower pitch; Korean ESL speakers correlate it with lower pitch only. We cannot find any significant statistical difference in intensity between /e/ and the stressed vowels in both cases. This study suggests it is important to acquire and produce the correct prosodic correlates of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ for Korean ESL speakers to command more natural English intonation, since /e/ is the most common vowel in English speech and consists of the English foot rhythm along with stressed vowels.