• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.91-104
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• 2003

This study analized the strategies in beginning readers by age and reading ability. Sixty 4-and 5-year old subjects took a reading test based on Bsatjes & Brown(1997) and Park, et a1.(1989). They read contextual and non-contextual storybooks. Errors in oral reading were recorded as mispronunciations, substitutions, omissions, insertions, teacher-assistance and self-corrections. Mispronunciations and substitutions were Specifically evaluated for graphic and contextual reading strategies. Data were analyzed by percentage and mean. Results revealed that children made more mispronunciation errors in reading the non-contextual story book. They used graphic information more than contextual information. Fine-year olds and high-level readers developed the use of graphic and contextual cues simultaneously.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.9-18
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• 2018

This paper presents an acoustic and phonological study of the alveolar flaps in American English. Based on the Buckeye Corpus, the flapping tokens produced by twenty men are analyzed at both lexical and post-lexical levels. The data, analyzed with Pratt speech analysis, include duration, F2 and F3 in voicing during the flap, as well as duration, F1, F2, F3, and f0 in the adjacent vowels. The results provide evidence on two issues: (1) The different ways in which voiced and voiceless alveolar stops give rise to neutralized flapping stops by following lexical and post-lexical levels, (2) The extent to which the vowel features (height, frontness, and tenseness) affect flapping sounds. The results show that flaps are affected by pre-consonantal vowel features at the lexical as well as post-lexical levels. Unlike previous studies, this study uses the Praat method to distinguish flapped from unflapped tokens in the Buckeye Corpus and examines connections between the lexical and post-lexical levels.

• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.57-67
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• 2003

This paper presents a systematic description of exceptional pronunciations for automatic Korean pronunciation generation. An automatic pronunciation generator in Korean is an essential part of a Korean speech recognition system and a TTS (Text-To-Speech) system. It is composed of a set of regular rules and an exceptional pronunciation dictionary. The exceptional pronunciation dictionary is created by extracting the words that have exceptional pronunciations, based on the characteristics of the words of exceptional pronunciation through phonological research and the systematic analysis of the entries of Korean dictionaries. Thus, the method contributes to improve performance of automatic pronunciation generator in Korean as well as the performance of speech recognition system and TTS system in Korean.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.19-38
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• 2010

This study surveyed L2 learners' needs for different components of communicative competence. It aimed to determine what abilities the learners strongly need to achieve communicative competence in different learning contexts. It also examined gender differences in the learners' need for phonological competence. A total of 359 students participated in this study, divided into three learner groups: high school, vocational college, and university students. The data were collected via a questionnaire, which was based on Bachman's (1990) framework of language competence. The study drew some important findings: (a) The vocational trainees expressed a stronger need for illocutionary competence than the high school students and for sociolinguistic competence than the high school and the university groups; (b) The high school and the university groups equated grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and strategic competences in their needs with lesser attention to sociolinguistic competence; (c) To the high school and the university groups, pragmatic competence was assessed higher than organizational competence; (d) Female students showed greater sensitivity to pronunciation ability than did male students. On the basis of these results, pedagogical implications are discussed, along with some helpful suggestions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.45-54
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• 1999

The well-known tendency to delete the labiovelar glide /w/ in some special conditions in Korean was based on perceptual judgment. Among the studies which tried to identify this phenomenon, Silva(1991) and Kang(1997) discovered the important factors of /w/-deletion and tried to give phonological explanations in terms of the Obligatory Contour Principle (McCarthy 1986). This study uses acoustic experiments in order to examine the reality of this phenomenon and tries to explain it on the basis of spectrographic analysis. According to the experiment, it is observed that /w/ is neutralized rather than completely deleted. Therefore, this observation suggests that this phenomena be considered as the /w/-neutralization in the view of acoustic study, instead of the /w/-deletion.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.91-94
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• 2007

This paper aims to analyze the pronunciation of Korean Point-of-Interest (POI) data, which consist of 224 sound files, from the phonological point of view, adapting the notion of prosodic word within the framework of Intonational Phonology. Each POI word is broken down into prosodic words, which are defined as the minimal sequence of segments which can be produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP). Then the pronunciation of the POI word considering its prosodic words are analyzed. The results show that: in most cases, a prosodic word is realized as one AP; that, in some cases, two prosodic words are pronounced as one AP: and that no cases are found where 3 prosodic words are realized as one AP.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.312-320
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• 2000

This presentation aims to explore some possibility of non-segmental phonetics usually ignored in phonetics education. In pedagogical phonetics, especially ESL/EFL oriented phonetics speech sounds tend to be classified in two criteria 1) 'pronunciation' which deals with segments and 2) 'prosody' or 'suprasegmentals', a criterion that deals with non-segmental elements such as stress and intonation. However, speech involves more dynamic processing. It is non-linear and multi-dimensional in spite of the linear sequence of symbols in phonetic/phonological transcriptions. No word is without pitch or voice quality apart from segmental characteristics whether it is spoken in isolation or cut out from continuous speech. This simply tells the dichotomy of pronunciation and prosody is merely a useful convention. There exists some room to consider dynamic non-segmental phonetics. Examples of non-segmental phonetic investigation, some of the analyses conducted within the frame of Firthian Prosodic Analysis, especially of the relation between vowel variants and foot types, are examined and we see what kind of auditory phonetic training is required to understand impressionistic transcriptions which lie behind the non-segmental phonetics.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.53-68
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• 2000

Although Korean stops and affricates show a three-way contrast of phonemes into lax, tense and aspirated, Korean fricatives have only two types, so-called 'lax' and tense. Considering that all the other obstruents maintain a three-way distinction but fricatives, it might be interesting to investigate whether the lax fricatives are really 'lax' in their phonetic and phonological realizations, as assumed. From an acoustic analysis, I found that Korean lax fricatives had a heavy aspiration along with a high pitch for the following vowel, being more comparable to the aspirated category. By contrast, their durational properties were found to be short, or lax-like. In other words, Korean lax fricatives are phonetically neither lax nor aspirated, but both. This dual nature of the lax fricatives takes a better account of the fact that why lax fricatives are subject to tensification, but not aspiration phonologically. Is that simply because there is no aspirated fricative in Korean? I suggest that Korean lax fricatives undergo tensification because of their being short in duration, and that they are not subject to the aspiration rule because they are indeed aspirated sounds.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.109-125
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• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the intonational meaning of various sentences based on the English Intonational Phonology, and to show the superiority of Intonational Phonology in explaining the intonational meanings in comparison with the other existing intonational theories. The American structuralists and British schools which attempt to describe the intonation in terms of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively, analyze intonational meaning from a holistic perspective in which an utterance cannot be divided into smaller parts. On the other hand, Intonational Phonology considers English intonation as composed of a series of High and Low tones, and as a result, intonational meaning is interpreted compositionally as sets of H and L. In this paper, the phonological relations between intonation and its meaning from the compositions of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones which consist of an intonational tune are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2015

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.