• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제9권3호
• /
• pp.49-56
• /
• 2017

Much research attention has been directed to identify how native speakers perceive non-native speakers' oral proficiency. To investigate the generalizability of previous findings, this study examined segmental, phonological, accentual, and temporal correlates of native speakers' evaluation of L2 Korean proficiency produced by learners with various levels and nationalities. Our experiment results show that proficiency ratings by native speakers significantly correlate not only with rate of speech, but also with the segmental accuracies. The influence of segmental errors has the highest correlation with the proficiency of L2 Korean speech. We further verified this finding within substitution, deletion, insertion error rates. Although phonological accuracy was expected to be highly correlated with the proficiency score, it was the least influential measure. Another new finding in this study is that the role of pitch and accent has been underemphasized so far in the non-native Korean speech perception studies. This work will serve as the groundwork for the development of automatic assessment module in Korean CAPT system.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제12권1호
• /
• pp.43-50
• /
• 2020

This study investigated whether listeners' perceptual patterns varied according to base token selected for stimuli manipulation. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) values were orthogonally manipulated, each in seven steps, using naturally produced words that contained a lenis (/kan/) and an aspirated (/k^han/) stop in Seoul Korean. Both native and non-native groups showed significantly higher numbers of aspirated responses for the stimuli constructed with /k^han/, evidencing the use of minor cues left in the stimuli after manipulation. For the native group the use of the VOT and F0 cues in the stop categorization did not differ depending on whether the base token included the lenis or aspirated stop, indicating that the results of previous studies remain tenable that investigated the relative importance of the acoustic cues in the native listener perception of the Korean stop contrasts by using one base token for manipulating perceptual stimuli. For the non-native group, the use patterns of the F0 cue differed as a function of base token selected. Some findings indicated that listeners used alternative cues to identify the stop contrast when major cues sound ambiguous. The use of the manipulated VOT and F0 cues by the non-native group was not native-like, suggesting that non-native listeners may have perceived the minor cues as stable in the context of the manipulated cue combinations.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제4권3호
• /
• pp.25-30
• /
• 2012

This study investigated whether native Korean listeners could use visual cues for the identification of the English consonants /b/ and /v/. Both auditory and audiovisual tokens of word minimal pairs in which the target phonemes were located in word-initial or word-medial position were used. Participants were instructed to decide which consonant they heard in $2{\times}2$ conditions: cue (audio-only, audiovisual) and location (word-initial, word-medial). Mean identification scores were significantly higher for audiovisual than audio-only condition and for word-initial than word-medial condition. Also, according to signal detection theory, sensitivity, d', and response bias, c were calculated based on both hit rates and false alarm rates. The measures showed that the higher identification rate in the audiovisual condition was related with an increase in sensitivity. There were no significant differences in response bias measures across conditions. This result suggests that native Korean speakers can use visual cues while identifying confusing non-native phonemic contrasts. Visual cues can enhance non-native speech perception.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제3권1호
• /
• pp.51-65
• /
• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제11권1호
• /
• pp.87-103
• /
• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제12권1호
• /
• pp.11-17
• /
• 2020

비성조 모국어 화자가 성조 언어를 학습할 때 모국어에 없는 성조 체계 학습에 어려움을 보인다. 본 연구는 비성조 언어인 한국어 모국어 성인 화자가 중국어를 학습할 때 중국어 성조의 지각과 산출에서 어떤 어려움을 보이는지 규명하고자 하였다. 추가적으로 중국어 분절음이 한국어와 유사하지 않을 경우 초분절음인 성조 지각 및 산출에 어려움을 가중시키는지 알아보기 위해 중국어 자음의 한국어 자음과의 유사성을 조작하여 실험을 진행하였다. 실험 결과, 지각과 산출 간 정확도 및 반응시간이 각 성조 별로 차이를 보였다. 즉, 1성과 2성에서는 지각 과제에서 산출 과제에 비해 어려움을 보인 반면 3성에서는 산출 과제에서 지각 과제보다 어려움을 보였다. 오류 패턴 분석 결과, 지각 과제에서 2성과 3성을 서로 혼동을 하는 반면 산출 과제에서는 2성을 3성으로 산출하는 오류는 줄어들고 3성을 2성으로 산출하는 오류가 증가한 것을 보였다. 마지막으로, 한국어 유사성의 조작은 성조의 지각 및 산출에 영향을 주지 않았다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제5권3호
• /
• pp.21-29
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.47-52
• /
• 2014

This study investigated how the degree of attention modulates English learners' perception of Korean stop contrasts. The contributions of VOT and F0 in perceiving Korean stops were examined while availability of attentional resources was manipulated using a dual-task paradigm. Results demonstrated the attentional modulation in the use of VOT, but not in F0: under less attention, the contribution of VOT to the perception of aspirated stops decreased, whereas that of lenis stops increased, which suggests more native-like performance. This implies that the role of attention in perceiving non-native contrasts might differ depending on how equivalent the acoustic and perceptual cues are between L1 and target L2 contrasts.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제14권1호
• /
• pp.105-119
• /
• 2007

The purpose of this study is to examine Korean students' production and perception of word-final stop voicing in light of their overseas experience. Subjects were English native speakers, Korean university students with residence experience in America, Korean university students without residence experience in America, and Korean elementary school students. They participated in both production and perception tests. Results showed that the students' production and perception with residence experience in America appeared quite similar to those of the English native speakers. In the production tests, we noticed somewhat different results in temporal and frequency features. The one-year residence in America had some influence on their frequency features, but not the temporal features in the word final stop production. That difference could be seen in the perception tests, too. We could not find any difference in the identification test of the final release environment between the Korean university students who had studied abroad and those who didn't. Rather the difference could be found in the cue influence test in both the final release and non-release environments.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제8권1호
• /
• pp.19-24
• /
• 2016

The Korean high back vowels /o/ and /u/ have been reported to be in a state of near-merger especially among young female speakers. Along with cross-generational changes, the vowel position within a word has been reported to render different phonetic realization. The current study examines native English speakers' ability to attend to the phonetic cues that distinguish the two merging vowels and the positional effects (word-initial vs. word-final) on the identification accuracy. 28 two-syllable words containing /o/ or /u/ in either initial or final position were produced by native female Korean speakers. The CV part of each target word were excised and presented to six native English speakers. The results showed that although the identification accuracy was the lowest for /o/ in word- final position (41%), it increased up to 80% in word-initial position. The acoustic analyses of the target vowels showed that /o/ and /u/ were differentiated on the height dimension only in word-initial position, suggesting that English speakers may have perceived the distinctive F1 difference retained in the prominent position.