• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.35-46
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• 2006

This study investigated whether there are differences between Korean-English bilingual and Korean monolingual children on phonological awareness skills. Participants were 11 Korean-English bilingual children and 12 Korean monolingual children. The children's ages ranged between 6 and 7 years. The results were as follows. First, the bilingual children significantly outperformed monolingual children on overall phonological awareness tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly higher than monolinguals on all three types of phonological awareness tasks (segmentation, deletion, and blending). Second, there was a significant difference between the groups with respect to phonological units of the tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly better than monolinguals on the phonemic unit tasks, but two groups did not differ significantly on syllabic unit tasks. There was an interaction effect between unit size(syllables and phonemes) and group (bilinguals and monolinguals). Third, there were correlations for both bilingual and monolingual children between overall phonological awareness skills and word recognition skills.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.129-153
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• 2007

When English language teachers are deciding on their priorities for teaching pronunciation, it is imperative to know what kind of differences and errors are most likely to interfere with communication, and what special problems particular first-language speakers will have with English pronunciation. In other words, phoneme discrimination skill is an integral part of speech processing for the EFL learners' learning to converse in English. Training using sound visualization technique can be effective in improving second language learners' perceptions and productions of segmental and suprasegmental speech contrasts. This study assessed the efficacy of a pronunciation training that provided visual feedback for EFL learners acquiring pitch and durational contrasts to produce and perceive English phonemic distinctions. The subjects' ability to produce and to perceive novel English words was tested in two contexts before and after training; words in isolation and words in sentences. In comparison with an untrained control group, trainees showed improved perceptual and productive performance, transferred their knowledge to new contexts, and maintained their improvement three months after training. These findings support the feasibility of learner-centered programs using sound visualization technique for English language pronunciation instruction.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.185-191
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• 2001

This study was designed to determine what components of spoken language have been relatively neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension in Korea and to suggest a model of listening process. Two types of tests were undertaken using spoken and written forms of English with secondary school teachers of English and college students. Findings: Hearing power has been generally neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension. Hearing power which can be thought as an active process is defined as an ability to transfer the sequence of discrete phonetic segments without word boundary into the sequence of words in phonemic representations by using both nonlinguistic factors and linguistic factors including perception rules based on phonetics and phonology. Vocabularies, hearing-speaking power, syntactic structures and idiomatic expressions are to be taught for spoken English. A model of listening process was suggested and discussed.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.259-277
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• 2004

The effects of two literacy programs, Balanced Literacy Instruction(BLI) and Phonics Instruction were studied in 40 three- and four-year old children. BLIwas created to compensate for the limits of the Whole Language Approach(WLA) and of Phonics Instruction(PI). The WLA focuses on writing and communication but lacks concrete instruction methods and overlooks technical aspects of reading and writing. On the contrary, PI is logical, stressing phonemic recognition, skill in distinguishing words, and the rules of consonants and vowels. By combining the best of both PI and WLA to create BLI, this study showed that children who received BLI significantly improved their ability of phoneme recognition, reading, writing and understanding of the content of a book, letting us conclude that BLI is the more effective method for teaching literacy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.67-74
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to explore the cross-linguistic difference in the spectral movement pattern of American English and Korean vowels. Eight American vowels /a/, /e/, /$\varepsilon$/, /i/, /I/, /o/, /u/, and /$\mho$/, and five Korean vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ in a fricative-vowel environment produced by adult speakers of each language were analyzed. The spectral movement patterns of the first two formant frequency values were measured and analyzed. The results showed that Korean vowels had minimal spectral movement, both in F1 and F2 values, as compared to American English vowels. Moreover, no consistent direction of movement was found in the three corner Korean vowels, while American English vowels showed consistent direction of movement for each vowel of the same phonemic category.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.75-78
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• 2003

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon for Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished pronunciation variation rules according to the locations such as within a morpheme, across a morpheme boundary in a compound noun, across a morpheme boundary in an eojeol, and across an eojeol boundary. In 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiment, an absolute improvement of 1.16％ in WER from the baseline performance of 23.17％ WER is achieved by modeling cross-morpheme pronunciation variations with a context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.79
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• pp.63-89
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• 2018

This study explores contrastive relation among voiced bilabial fricative [${\ss}$], voiceless bilabial stop [p] and glide [w] in Middle Korean consonant system based on Probabilistic Model. Preceding researches about voiced bilabial fricative [${\ss}$] proposed two influential arguments. One is voiced bilabial fricative [${\ss}$] was an independent phoneme, the other is it was not an independent phoneme but an allophone of voiceless bilabial stop [p] in Middle Korean. This study applies Probabilistic Phonological Relationship Model (PPRM) for solving the problem of dichotomy about contrastive and allophonic relations. The analysis result of the contrastive entropy by PPRM suggests that voiced bilabial fricative [${\ss}$] was just an allophone of voiceless bilabial stop [p] or glide [w] in Middle Korean. Comparing the entropies between [p] and other consonants with the entropies between [${\ss}$] and other consonants, a continuum defined in terms of entropy reveals that [${\ss}$] in Middle Korean was more allophonic than phonemic.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.268-278
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze phonetic items such as the phonemic system, phonological rules, and pronunciation descriptions and notations incorporated in the textbooks. Based on our analysis results, we point out the problems related to pronunciation education, and suggest directions for improvement. First, the presentation order of consonants and vowels in the phonological systems sections of each textbook was different. We recommend that a standard for consonant and vowel presentation order should be prepared, but that this standard should take into consideration the specific purpose of the textbook; the learning strategies and goals, as well as the possibility of teaching and learning. Second, similar to phonemic systems, the presentation order of phonological rules was different for each textbook. To create a standard order for phonological rules, we have to standardize the order of presentation of rules and determine which rules should be presented. Furthermore, when describing phonological rules, the content should be described in common and essential terms as much as possible without the use of jargon. Third, in other matters of pronunciation, there were problems such as examples for pronunciation and lack of exercises. Regarding this, we propose to provide sentences or dialogues as examples for pronunciation, and to link these to various activities and other language functions for pronunciation practice.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.69-76
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• 2016

With the recent increase of the interest in IoT in almost all areas of industry, computing technologies have been increasingly applied in human environments such as houses, buildings, cars, and streets; in these IoT environments, speech recognition is being widely accepted as a means of HCI. The existing server-based speech recognition techniques are typically fast and show quite high recognition rates; however, an internet connection is necessary, and complicated server computing is required because a voice is recognized by units of words that are stored in server databases. This paper, as a successive research results of speech recognition algorithms for the Korean phonemic vowel 'ㅏ', 'ㅓ', suggests an implementation of speech recognition algorithms for the Korean phonemic vowel 'ㅣ'. We observed that almost all of the vocal waveform patterns for 'ㅣ' are unique and different when compared with the patterns of the 'ㅏ' and 'ㅓ' waveforms. In this paper we propose specific waveform patterns for the Korean vowel 'ㅣ' and the corresponding recognition algorithms. We also presents experiment results showing that, by adding neural-network learning to our algorithm, the voice recognition success rate for the vowel 'ㅣ' can be increased. As a result we observed that 90% or more of the vocal expressions of the vowel 'ㅣ' can be successfully recognized when our algorithms are used.

• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.85-106
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• 2003

Recently, the sonnet and the shijo, each representing French and Korean formal poetries, are tend to be read with the eyes only, as were more accustomed to written literature. But even after almost three millennia of written literature and increased use of digitalized poems, poetry retains its appeal to the ear as well as to the eye. To read a poem only by eyes might be wrong because it is designed to be read aloud by mouth and understood by ear, and will decrease the aesthetic sense otherwise. It is essential to find the right way to recite a poem in this dramatically changed society, and is especially important when many shijos are changing into digitalized forms to adapt the new wave of our society. The sonnet and the shijo emphasize the importance of the harmony of sounds and rhythms with certain structure, and have their own prosodies. The emotions of the speaker in poems are expressed with words. When they are pronounced. each phoneme has its own phonemic characteristics. When comparing the The Broken Bell(Baudelaire) and Chopoong ga (Jong Seo Kim) in terms of prosody and phonetics. the speakers emotions are closely related with the phonetic structure of each word. In The Broken Bell, the phonetic value of rhymes, repeated phonemes, concentration of front and back vowels. rhythms of onesyllable words shape the overall image of this poem describing the productivity of bells as appose to the sterility of the soul. Chopoong ga also shows the determined and strong will of the speaker by frequent glottalized sounds. distribution and concentration of certain vowels. and frequent use of plosives. As you see in these examples, phones, beats, and rhythms are not the mere transmitter of meaning but possess their expressive values of their own and should be the first to be considered when reciting a poem.