• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.37-43
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• 2012

This study investigates an independent evaluation of prosody and segmentals with reference to the difference in the foreign accent of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese learners of English. For this study, a set of stimuli were made of English sentences read by male and female Korean, Chinese, and Japanese learners of English by prosody swapping technique. Two groups of American and Korean subjects evaluated the difference in the prosody and segmentals of the stimuli by pairwise difference rating. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the evaluation scores of prosody and segmentals across accents for either subject group. The results also showed that both subject groups indicated a greater score with segmentals than with prosody. The results of the present study are significant in that they are opposite to the claim of some previous studies that prosodic factors could have a greater influence on the foreign accent and intelligibility than segmentals.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of foreign-accentedness of English pronunciation across subject groups, evaluated accents, and compared components. This study independently evaluates the prosody and segmentals of the foreign-accented English sentences by pairwise difference rating. Using the prosody swapping technique, segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by native speakers of American English (one male and one female) were combined with the corresponding segmentals and prosody of the English sentences read by male and female native speakers of Chinese, Japanese or Korean (one male and one female from each native language). These stimuli were evaluated by 4 different subject groups: native speakers of American English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. The results showed that the Japanese subject group scored higher in prosody difference than in segmental difference while the other groups scored the other way around. This study is significant in that the attitude toward the difference in segmentals and prosody of the foreign accents of English varies with the native language of the subject group. In other words, for native speakers of some languages, the difference in prosody could have a greater influence on the foreign-accentedness than the difference in segmentals, while for native speakers of other languages the other way around.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.101-107
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• 2010

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of English pronunciation quality between native speakers of English and Korean learners of English. This study employs a novel method of independently evaluating the prosody and segmentals of English sentences. A set of stimuli were made by swapping the prosody and the segmentals of English sentences read by a native speaker of American English and a Korean learner of English. Evaluations of the difference level of stimuli pairs and the goodness of the pronunciation quality showed that both native speakers of English and Korean learners of English give priority to the segmentals but native speakers of English were more sensitive to the difference in prosody in the evaluation of English pronunciation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.75-83
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• 2012

The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.