• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.155-168
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• 2002

The intervocalic Korean liquid sound has been recognized as a flap in the studies of the Korean language. But there has been very little experimental data corroborating it. The electropalatographic (EPG) experiment was conducted to test this. The subjects were one Korean speaker and one native English speaker who had a pseudopalate and did the EPG experiment at the UCLA phonetics laboratory. The spectrographic evidence of the flaps in both the English t-flap and the Korean liquid flap was also sought. The English and Korean flaps were between mid/low back vowels so that the vowels themselves would not affect palatal contacts of the tongue. The results confirmed that the Korean liquid is realized as a flap in intervocallical position with many similar properties to English flap in both EPG and spectrographic data. The Korean initial liquid sound in borrowed words such as 'rotary' and 'radio' was also a flap. But the Korean liquid in the word-final and geminate positions was a lateral as in words 'dol ' (stone), 'dollo' (with stone), 'nal' (day) and 'nallara' (carry). The intuitive theory of the Korean liquid flap was proved by the EPG and spectrographic data.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.93-106
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• 2001

The pronunciation of English l and r was a consistent problem in learning English in Korea as well as Japan. This problem occurs from the fact that in Korea and Japan there is only one liquid sound. Substituting the Korean liquid for English l and r was a common error. The pronunciation of the dark l causes a further problem in pronouncing the English l sound. To see the relationship between the English l, r, and the Korean liquid sound, an electropalatographic (EPG) experiment was done. The findings were (1) there were no tongue contacts either on the alveolar ridge or on the palate during the articulation of the dark l. (2) The Korean liquid sound was different in the tongue contact points either from English l or r. The English clear l consistently touched the alveolar ridge in the forty tokens, but the Korean liquid sound in the intervocalic and word-final position touched mainly the alveopalatal area. The English r touched exclusively the velum area. The Korean intervocalic /l/ was similar to English flap in EPG and spectrographic data. There was evidence that the word-final Korean /l/ is a lateral.