• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.51-66
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• 2001

This paper compares different uses of downgraders by Korean English speakers (KES) with those by American English native speakers (AENS) in their requestive e-mail. Three different situations in which social power and distance were controlled were set up to examine and compare the participants' politeness strategies in requestive e-mail. It was found that the KESs' use of downgraders appeared differently from the AENSs' use qualitatively and quantitatively across three situations. The AENSs used downgraders almost three times as more, resulting in a much more mitigated and polite effect in requests. The AENSs' requests were mostly modified by syntactic modifiers, such as aspect, tense, conditional, and consultative devices. On the other hand, the KESs' requests were modified mostly by politeness markers and conditionals in a limited number of requests.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.47-55
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• 2020

The current study was designed to investigate which type of phrase boundary tones high-intermediate Korean learners of English used in their spontaneous speech. These boundary tones were compared to those used in native speakers' spontaneous speech to examine whether the learners successfully acquired the use of boundary tones. To achieve this purpose, 10 Korean learners of English and four native speakers of English participated in the current study. The participants were asked to summarize the stories of short videos, and the tonal and the phrasing patterns of the obtained spontaneous speech were analyzed using Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that both the native speakers and the Korean learners frequently marked their intonational phrase boundaries with high boundary tones. However, regarding the prosodic phrase positions within a sentence, Korean learners frequently used steep rising tones (i.e., H-H%) while native speakers used gradual rising tones (i.e., L-H%) for sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the findings suggested that high-intermediate Korean learners understood the forward-looking function of the high boundary tones and that they were able to make use of these tones to mark intonational phrases in their spontaneous speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.235-252
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to characterize the intonational realizations of vocatives in comparison with those of appositives in English statements and questions, and to compare the realizations produced by English native speakers with those of Korean students. Unlike Pierrehumbert(1980), in which the tag expressions do not have pitch accents, Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) proposed that the vocatives have a special status in tonal alignment and duration and that they form an independent phrase with pitch accent. Our results reinforce Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986): both English native speakers and Korean students realize the vocatives in terms of rising tone, and the appositives in terms of both falling tone in statements and rising tone in questions. Moreover, they pronounced the nouns before vocatives longer than those before appositives. However, native speakers impose the low phrase tone before vocatives in statements and the high tone in questions; whereas, Korean students either put the low phrase tone on pitch contours of both statements and questions, or tend to pause before vocatives, thereby constituting an intonational phrase.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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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.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.47-66
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• 2006

This study examined the effect of English-language experience on Korean- and Japanese-English late learners' production of English unstressed vowels in terms of four acoustic phonetic features: F0, duration, intensity and vowel reduction. The learners manifested some improvement with experience. The native-like attainment of a phonetic feature, however, was related to the phonological status of that feature in the speakers' native language. The results suggest that the extent to which the non-native speakers' production of English unstressed vowels improved with English-language experience varied as a function of their native language background.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.7-16
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• 2005

The purpose, this experimental study was to identify pronunciation difficulties between male and female Korean speakers in their articulation of English vowels. Ten English mono-syllabic words were spoken six times by six male and six female college students. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by Pitch Works. Results show that Korean female speakers uttered English vowels more similar to those uttered by English native speakers than did Korean male speakers. While Korean male speakers could not readily distinguish between /i/ and /I/, /u/ and /v/, and /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/, respectively, Korean female speakers had difficulty only with /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/. The tentative results suggests that on the whole Korean speakers have difficulty in discriminating tense vowels from lax vowels, and they also have articulatory problems pronouncing low and back vowels such as /ae/. /a/ and /c/.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.11-17
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• 2018

This study reports on a production experiment designed to investigate how Korean speaking learners of English produce English forms ending in stops. In a repetition experiment, Korean participants listened to English nonce words ending in a stop and repeated what they heard. English speakers were recruited for the same task as a control group. The experimental result indicated that the transcriptions of the Korean productions by English native speakers showed vowel insertion in only 3% of productions although the pronunciation of English final stops showed that noise intervals after the closure of final stops were significantly longer for Korean speakers than for English speakers. This finding is inconsistent with the loanword data where 49% of words showed vowel insertion. It is also not compatible with the perceptual similarity approach, which predicts that because Korean speakers accurately perceive an English final stop as a final consonant, they will insert a vowel to make the English sound more similar to the Korean sound.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to investigate Korean native speakers' perception of English sounds according to groupings of phonetic contrasts. The four groupings looked at were vowels, voicing (voiced-unvoiced), fricatives with difference in place of articulation, and other clusters of specific sound contrasts, such as stop-fricatives and liquids. The position of a sound in syllable was also examined. According to the results of ANOVA and a post-hoc analysis, the perception of vowels, in the medial position was different from that of consonants in the initial and final position. Vowels proved to be the most difficult group to perceive correctly. With the consonants, there was not a big difference whether the contrasts came initially or finally. The order of difficulty was liquids, fricatives, stop-fricatives, and finally voicing.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1163-1190
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• 2010

Korean EFL learners' stylistic sensitivity was examined through the two types of letter writing, professional and personal. The base of comparison with the English native speakers' stylistic sensitivity was the linguistic style markers that were statistically found by Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional model of variation of English language. The main finding was that Korean university students were sensitive to stylistic difference in the correct direction, though their linguistic repertoire was limited to the easy and simple linguistic features. Also, the learners were skewed in the involved style in both types of the letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the general developmental direction from informal to formal linguistic style. Learners were also skewed in the explicit style in both types of letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the learners' heavy reliance on one particular linguistic feature. As a whole, the learners' stylistic sensitivity heavily relied on the small number of linguistic features that they have already acquired, which happen to be simple and basic linguistic features.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.65-80
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• 2007

This experimental study is designed to investigate the acoustic cues produced by English native speakers in order to disambiguate the ambiguous sentences. This study also investigates whether Korean learners of English and English native speakers can perceive the appropriate meanings from the sentences produced with those acoustic cues. In the perception test, English native speakers successfully found out the proper meaning, utilizing the intonational cues, while Korean learners had difficulties in distinguishing the differences in meaning. The break interval was manipulated in order to see whether the pause duration facilitates or interferes with disambiguation. Though phrasing played an important role in disambiguation, the break interval itself did not have influence on it. The result, therefore, suggests that the tonal realization of phrasal accents and boundary tones seem to be more significant than the break interval in the perception of phrasing.