• 음성과학
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• 제11권3호
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• pp.55-68
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• 2004

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the relationship between English pronunciation and listening comprehension of English diphthongs and low vowels of Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Of 22 test sentences for listening comprehension, 15 sentences were recorded by native speakers and seven sentences were edited from Springboard by Oxford University Press. For the listening comprehension test, 90 subjects from two groups, Chungnam dialect speakers and Gyungnam dialect speakers, were selected. They listened to 22 sentences produced by audio cassette tape and completed a cloze exercise. By the results of this experiment, we observed that Korean collegians of Gyungnam province showed a better listening comprehension of words including front low vowels when they preceded voiced sounds than those of Chungnam province. When the back low vowel came in an open syllable, we also recognized the same result; Gyungnam province collegians showed better listening comprehension of words including back low vowels than those of Chungnam province. As the results of Hee-Suk Park & Jung-Soak Kim(2003) showed that Gyungnam province collegians pronounced the English low vowels longer than Chungnam province collegians, we discovered that there was a positive relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension, especially in Gyungnam province collegians. However regarding words including English diphthongs we discovered almost no relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.43-50
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• 2017

These days voice models of speech recognition software are sophisticated enough to process the natural speech of people without any previous training. However, not much research has reported on the use of speech recognition tools in the field of pronunciation education. This paper examined Google speech recognition of a short English paragraph produced by Korean college students in clear and casual speech styles in order to diagnose and resolve students' pronunciation problems. Thirty three Korean college students participated in the recording of the English paragraph. The Google soundwriter was employed to collect data on the word recognition rates of the paragraph. Results showed that the total word recognition rate was 73% with a standard deviation of 11.5%. The word recognition rate of clear speech was around 77.3% while that of casual speech amounted to 68.7%. The reasons for the low recognition rate of casual speech were attributed to both individual pronunciation errors and the software itself as shown in its fricative recognition. Various distributions of unrecognized words were observed depending on each participant and proficiency groups. From the results, the author concludes that the speech recognition software is useful to diagnose each individual or group's pronunciation problems. Further studies on progressive improvements of learners' erroneous pronunciations would be desirable.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.127-138
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• 2000

The aim of this paper is to find the speech problems of English Laterals by Korean learners and to contribute to the effective pronunciation education with visualizing the pronunciation. In this paper we analyzed 18 words including lateral sounds which were divided into such as: initial, initial consonant cluster, intervocalic, final consonant cluster, and final. To analyse the words we used High speed speech analysis system. We examined acoustic characteristics of English lateral spectrogram by using voice sustained time(ms), FL1, FL2, FL3. Before we started, we had expected that the result would show us that the mother tongue interfere in the final sounds because we have similar sounds in Korea. The results of our experiments showed that initially, voice sustained time showed many more differences between Korean and native pronunciation. Also, it was seen that Korean pronunciation used the syllable structure of the own mother tongue. For instance, in the case of initial consonant cluster CCVC, Koreans often used CC as a syllable and VC as another. This was due to the mother tongue interference. For this reason in the intervocalic and in the final, we saw the differences between Korean and native. Therefore we have to accept the visualized analysis system in the instruction of pronunciation.

• 한국컴퓨터정보학회논문지
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• 제20권12호
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• pp.145-152
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• 2015

In this paper, a standardized phonological rule should be embodied for all people who want to use Hangul beyond nationality. This researcher suggested a phonological process protocol in unicode for the purpose of developing a computer system-based program as one of methods to pronounce Hangul correctly. First of all, to solve a problem of standardizing Hangul pronunciation, it is necessary to develop a phonological process system. In other words, when a mobile phone or a keyboard is used, inputted strings should be changed exactly by an automatic device made according to the phonological rule. For this, a phonological process table is the most important and unicode which digitalizes Hangul is the most effective. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to complete a phonological process table, suggest an algorithm by the table, and develop a computer program pursuing correct Hangul pronunciation. For the methodology of this study, the features of unicode was used to solve a problem of coding each syllable by phonemes after strings were inputted from the phonological process program. This study suggested a protocol that sounds of inputted strings were automatically changed via recombination using a phonological process table. The ultimate purpose of the study was to help pronounce Hangul correctly according to the pronunciation rule.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제50호
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• pp.23-39
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• 2004

Current 'Pronunciation Methods of Standard Korean(PMSK)' has several problems. Some of those are from conflicts with linguistic reality, and the rest are from their internal inconsistencies. So, we feel that it should be revised as soon as possible. But it seems that the revision is not the best way, because linguistic change will make us revise it continually. The only way to establish its reasonable alternative is that we should update our descriptive dictionary whenever we need to.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제49호
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• pp.95-105
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• 2004

An automatic pronunciation correction system provides learners with correction guidelines for each mispronunciation. For this purpose we develope a speech recognizer which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Koreans speak a foreign language. In order to develope the methods for automatic assessment of pronunciation quality, we propose a language model based score as a machine score in the speech recognizer. Experimental results show that the language model based score had higher correlation with human scores than that obtained using the conventional log-likelihood based score.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2003년도 10월 학술대회지
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• pp.29-32
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• 2003

This paper proposes an automatic pronunciation correction system which provides users with correction guidelines for each pronunciation error. For this purpose, we develop an HMM speech recognizer which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Korean speaks foreign language. And, we collect speech database of native and nonnative speakers using phonetically balanced word lists. We perform analysis of mispronunciation types from the experiment of automatic mispronunciation detection using speech recognizer.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제13권3호
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• pp.23-40
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• 2007

This paper discusses why Korean speakers have problems in pronouncing some medial sonorant clusters in English. We argue that the main reasons lie in the sonority sequence requirement difference between the two languages. English does not have any specific sonority sequence preference between the medial sonorant sequences while Korean has a strict requirement between the two sonorants over a syllable boundary. This sonority sequence requirement difference between the two languages acts as an interference for Korean speakers in learning English pronunciation. This barrier for Korean speakers in acquiring correct pronunciation is implemented in a constraint ranking difference in the Optimality Theory, which is not familiar for Korean speakers. Understanding the details of sonorant production mechanisms along with the different constraint ranking will facilitate the learning process of Korean speakers learning English.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국음향학회 2000년도 하계학술발표대회 논문집 제19권 1호
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• pp.119-122
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• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accent, pronunciation, and intonation in English spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation. we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation and calculate the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input and reference. For the intonation evaluation. we propose nine pattern of slope to estimate pitch contour, then we grade test sentences by accumulated error obtained by the distance measure and estimated slope. Our result shows that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with perceptual measure. As the result of the intonation evaluation. system represent the similar order of grade for the four sentences having different intonation patterns compared with perceptual evaluation.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권2호
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• pp.141-149
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• 2009

An emphasis on teaching suprasegmental features of English, specifically English rhythm, is essential in order to improve the 'intelligibility' of the pronunciation of Korean EFL learners among interlocutors who use English as a Lingua Franca(ELF). By redefining the ELF suggested by Jenkins (2000, 2002), this paper argues that Lingua Franca Core (LFC) must include suprasegmental features such as 'stress-based rhythm' and word stress. However, because 'isochrony' is difficult to measure in a foot, the rhythm unit must be expanded to an intonational phrase which has prominence in it and the rhythm of the unit can be measured by calculating the duration of each segment in context The rhythmic pattern of Korean learners of English and that of native speakers or other non-native English speakers can then be calculated and compared by using correlation coefficients of the segmental duration. In terms of sociolinguistic factors, improving the 'comprehensibility' and 'accentedness' of Korean EFL learners' pronunciation is also important in international communication, which calls for more emphasis on suprasegmental features.