• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.29-33
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• 2005

This study aims to establish a speech corpus for Korean as a foreign language (L2 Korean Speech Corpus, L2KSC) and to examine the aspects of the foreign learners acquisition of the phonetic and phonological systems in the Korean Language. In the first year of this project, L2KSC will be established through the process of reading list organizing, recording, and slicing, and the second year includes an in-depth study of the aspects of foreign learners Korean acquisition and a contrastive analysis of phonetic and phonological systems. The expectation is that this project will provide significant bases for a variety of fields such as Korean education, academic research, and technological development of phonetic information.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.430-431
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• 1996

Among the scholars of second language (L2) acquisition who have used prosodic considerations in syntactic analyses, pausing and intonation contours have been used to define utterances in the speech of second language learners (e.g., Sato, 1990). In recent research on conversational analysis, it has been found that lexically marked causal clause combining in the discourse of native speakers can be distinguished as "intonational subordination" and "intonational coordination(Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, forthcoming.)". This study uses Pienemann's Processability Theory (1995) for an analysis of the speech of native speakers of Japanese (L1) learning English. In order to accurately assess the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development, it is shown that pitch, loudness, and timing must all be considered together with the syntactic analysis of interlanguage speech production. Twelve Japanese subjects participated in eight fifteen minute interviews, ninety-six dyads. The speech analyzed in this report is limited to the twelve subjects interacting with two different non-native speaker interviews for a total of twenty-four dyads. Within each of the interviews, four different tasks are analyzed to determine the stage of acquisition of English for each subject. Initially the speech is segmented according to intonation contour arid pauses. It is then classified accoding to specific syntactic units and further analysed for pitch, loudness and timing. Results indicate that the speech must be first claasified prosodic ally and lexically, prior to beginning syntactic analysis. This analysis stinguishes three interlanguage lexical categories: discourse markers, coordinator $s_ordinators, and transfer from Japanese. After these lexical categories have been determined, the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development can be more accurately assessed.d.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.3-18
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• 2009

Do loanword properties emerge in the acquisition of a foreign language and if so, how? Classic studies in adult language learning assumed loanword properties that range from near-ceiling to near-chance level of appearance depending on speech proficiency. The present research argues that such variations reflect different phonological types, rather than speech proficiency. To investigate the difference between learner speech and loanword phonology, the current research analyzes the speech data from five different proficiency levels of 92 Korean speakers who read 19 pairs of English words and sentences that contained loanwords. The experimental method is primarily an acoustical one, by which the phonological cause in the loanwords (e.g., the insertion of [$\Box$] at the end of the word stamp) would be attested to appear in learner speech, in comparison with native speech from 11 English speakers and 11 Korean speakers. The data investigated for the research are of segment deletion, insertion, substitution, and alternation in both learner speech and the native speech. The results indicate that learner speech does not present the loanword properties in many cases, but depends on the types of phonological causes. The relatively easy acquisition of target pronunciation is evidenced in the cases of segment deletion, insertion, substitution, and alternation, except when the loanword property involves the successful command of the target phonology such as the de-aspiration of [p] in apple. Such a case of difficult learning draws a sharp distinction from the cases of easy learning in the development of learner speech, particularly beyond the intermediate level of proficiency. Overall, learner speech departs from loanword phonology and develops toward the native speech value, depending on phonological contrasts in the native and foreign languages.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.27-36
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• 2014

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of Korean vowels. Specifically, I examined the Chinese learners' Korean monophthongs /i, e, ɨ, ${\Lambda}$, a, u, o/ that were created at the time of 1 month and 12 months, tried to verify empirically how they learn by dealing with their mother tongue, and Korean vowels through dealing with pattern of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (henceforth PAM) of Best (Best, 1993; 1994; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the Speech Learning Model (henceforth SLM) of Flege (Flege, 1987; Bohn & Flege, 1992, Flege, 1995). As a result, most of the present results are shown to be similarly explained by the PAM and SLM, and the only discrepancy between these two models is found in the 'similar' category of sounds between the learners' native language and the target language. Specifically, the acquisition pattern of /u/ and /o/ in Korean is well accounted for the PAM, but not in the SLM. The SLM did not explain why the Chinese learners had difficulty in acquiring the Korean vowel /u/, because according to the SLM, the vowel /u/ in Chinese (the native language) is matched either to the vowel /u/ or /o/ in Korean (the target language). Namely, there is only a one-to-one matching relationship between the native language and the target language. In contrast, the Chinese learners' difficulty for the Korean vowel /u/ is well accounted for in the PAM in that the Chinese vowel /u/ is matched to the vowel pair /o, u/ in Korean, not the single vowel, /o/ or /u/.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.197-217
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• 1999

In a noisy class, the acoustic-phonetic features of the teacher and the perceptual features of learners are changed comparison with a quiet environment. Acoustical analyses were carried out on a set of French monosyllables consisting of 17 consonants and three vowel /a, e, i/, produced by 1 male speaker talking in quiet and in 50, 60 and 70 dB SPL of masking noise on headphone. The results of the acoustic analyses showed consistent differences in energy and formant center frequency amplitude of consonants and vowels, $F_1$ frequency of vowel and duration of voiceless stops suggesting the increase of vocal effort. The perceptual experiments in which 18 undergraduate female students learning French served as the subjects, were conducted in quiet and in 50, 60 dB of masking noise. The identification scores on consonants were higher in Lombard speech than in normal speech, suggesting that the speaker's vocal effort is useful to overcome the masking effect of noise. And, with increased noise level, the perceptual response to the French consonants given had a tendency to be complex and the subjective reaction score on the noise using the vocabulary representative of 'unpleasant' sensation to be higher. And, in the point of view on the L2(second language) acquisition, the influence of L1 (first language) on L2 examined in the perceptual result supports the interference theory.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.29-41
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.19-28
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• 2022

The current study was designed to explore whether taking English pronunciation classes could improve the realization of English rhythm by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study used various rhythm metrics to examine the extent to which the learners' speech became rhythmically similar to the target language after taking classes that focused on English pronunciation. Sixteen learners who took a 15-week English pronunciation course at a university read an English passage twice (at the beginning and the end of the semester). The rhythm metrics such as Deltas, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indices were calculated for the learners' speech, as well as that of 8 native speakers of English. The results demonstrated that the learners' speech was slower, and they put more frequent within-sentence pauses than the native speakers even after the classes. The analyses also indicated that the speech recorded at the beginning of the semester was rhythmically much more different from the target language than at the end of the semester. After the classes, however, the learners' consonantal intervals became much more target-like, while the vocalic intervals were rhythmically even further from those in the target language. Overall, the findings suggested that the pronunciation classes helped the learners to produce English speech that was rhythmically similar to the native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.81-87
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• 2019

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the realization of speech rhythm in English as spoken by Korean learners of English. The study particularly aims to examine the rhythm metrics of English read speech by learners who speak Busan or the South Kyungsang dialect of Korean. Twenty-four learners whose L1 is Busan Korean and eight native speakers of English read a passage wherein five sentences were segmented and labeled as vocalic and intervocalic intervals. Various rhythm metrics such as %V, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indexes (PVIs) were calculated. The results show that Korean learners read English sentences with significantly more vocalic and consonantal intervals at a slower speech rate than native English speakers. The analyses of rhythm metrics revealed that when the speech rate was not normalized, Korean learners' English showed more variability in the length of consonantal and vocalic intervals. However, speech-rate-normalized rhythm metrics for vocalic intervals indicated that Korean learners transferred their L1 rhythmic structures (a syllable-timed language) into their L2 speech (a stress-timed language). Overall, the results suggest that Korean learners' English reflects the rhythmic characteristics of their L1. The effect of the learners' L1 dialect on the realization of L2 speech rhythm is also speculated.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.77-86
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• 2009

This study observes how the combined intervention program effects on the acquisition reading pronunciation of Korean phonological process words and the acquisition aspects of each phonological process rules to four Korean learners whose first language is Chinese. The training program is the combination of multisensory Auditory, Visual and Kinethetic (AVK) approach, wholistic approach, and metalinguistic approach. The training purpose is to evaluate how accurately they read the words of the phonological process which have fortisization, nasalization, lateralization, intermediate sound /ㅅ/ (/${\int}iot"$/). We access how they read the untrained words which include the four factors above. The intervention effects are analyzed by the multiple probe across subjects design. The results indicate that the combined phonological process rule explanation and the words activity intervention affects the four Chinese subjects in every type of word. The implications of the study are these: First, it suggests the effect of Korean pronunciation intervention in a concrete way. Second, it offers how to evaluate the phonological process and how to train people who are learning Korean language.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.35-48
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• 2001

One of the areas of second language acquisition that enjoyed popularity in recent years is interlanguage pragmatics. The main reason for this popularity lies in the critical role of pragmatic competence in appropriate use of a target language. The aim of this paper was to examine L2 learners' pragmatic behavior in their speech act performance and determine main sources causing pragmatic difficulty. Four major sources of pragmatic errors were identified: linguistic proficiency, L1 transfer, waffling and teaching activities. Each source was discussed with empirical evidence in some detail, and teaching suggestions were provided for developing learners' pragmatic competence in EFL classrooms.