• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.55-66
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• 2006

A purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of English stress produced by the two groups of South Kyungsang (henceforth, SK) Korean speakers: high-proficiency and low-proficiency with reference to English native speakers. Another purpose is to compare results from the high- and low-proficiency SK Korean subjects with those of the native speakers, and to provide an analytical account of how approximate the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' production is to the native speakers' and how different the low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' is from the native speakers'. Results indicated that the native speakers' main strategy used in producing stressed syllables was duration while the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' was predominantly pitch-oriented. The low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' pitch patterns showed regularity, emphasizing the penultimate syllable with pitch. In comparing duration among the three groups, both groups of the SK Korean subjects became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.125-131
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• 2015

The current study explores whether speaker variability in the fronted articulations of Seoul Korean affricates can be explained by cognitive differences measured by individual autistic traits. The goal was to explore Yu's (2010; 2013) proposal that individual differences in cognitive style can be an important factor in speakers' use of sound variants. The spectral peak frequencies (SPF) of affricates relative to those of fricatives, reported in Kong et al. (2014), were used to acoustically represent the relative degree of anterior place of constriction. When these individual SPFs were related to the scores of Autistic-Spectrum Quotients (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), a correlation was found for the male speakers, but not for the female speakers, such that speakers of more anterior affricate productions scored low in AQs. Discussion is made with respect to how these findings are in line with Yu's proposal.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

The purposes of this study are to: (1) Compare the vowel production of English front vowels produced by Korean speakers using regional dialects and; (2) Investigate and compare the effectiveness of pronunciation training for each regional dialect group. To test these objectives, the English front vowels produced by five Youngnam dialect male speakers, five Youngnam dialect female speakers, five Kangwon dialect male speakers, and five Kangwon dialect female speakers were scrutinized. These dialect groups' vowel formants and length of English front vowels were evaluated, and the post-pronunciation training values were compared with those of pre-training values. The results indicate that pronunciation training is more effective for Youngnam dialect speakers, whilst both dialect groups have more success mastering the pronunciation of /${\varepsilon}$/ over /${\ae}$/.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.26-33
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• 2012

The animal naming test (ANT) is known to be influenced not only by age, gender, and education but only by ethnicity, culture, and language. Thus, population-specific norm considering these variables needs to be developed for Korean-speaking elderly. We evaluated 185 healthy elderly people with five measures. Education was the single statistically independent correlate of the total number of words ($R^2$ = .312, p = .038). After adjusting for education, there was slightly significant negative correlation (r = -.215, p = .049) between age and total number of words. Mean number of words produced was $13.71{\pm}3.09$. The production frequency was negatively correlated with the typicality rating (r = -0.41, p < .05). The concrete and exact scoring rule could be set up in the comparison of naming performance between a normal and patient with neuro-linguistic disorder and its data could be utilized in a differential diagnosis for patients with neurological disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.23-32
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• 2010

This study aimed at discovering whether Korean language learners who had never been exposed to Korean phones before could distinguish Korean phones and whether learners who had comparatively better ability of identifying phonetic differences displayed a better result in acquiring Korean phonemes. The study conducted two experiments on 25 learners. In Experiment I, an oddball test (ABX) was performed to investigate the learners' ability to discriminate Korean phones on the first day of the course. In Experiment II, an identification test was administered to analyze the ability of identifying Korean phones on the same learners after three weeks of language instruction. The results revealed that the true-beginner learners demonstrated different phonetic discrimination abilities, but these abilities did not seem to correlate with the rate of acquisition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2016

This study examined how native Korean speakers realize the acoustic characteristics of /d, t/ flaps in American English. Fourteen subjects, who had lived in foreign countries for less than one year, read words containing the alveolar stops in flapping environments. /d/ (91%) became flaps more frequently than /t/ (42%). The closure durations for /d/ flaps were significantly longer than /t/ flaps, and the durations of the preceding vowels were not significantly different between /d/ and /t/ flaps. Female learners demonstrated a higher percentage of /t/ flapping than their male counterparts. Differences in flap patterns were observed among individual learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 2012

The neutralization of /$s^h$/ and /$s^*$/ in Gyeongsang dialects is a culturally salient stereotype that has received relatively little attention in the phonetic literature. The current study is a more extensive acoustic comparison of the sibilant fricative productions of Seoul and Gyeongsang dialect speakers. The data presented here suggest that, at least for young Seoul and Daegu speakers, there are few inter-dialectal differences in sibilant fricative production. These conclusions are supported by the output of mixed effects logistic regression models that used aspiration duration, spectral mean of the frication noise, and H1-H2 of the following vowel to predict fricative type in each dialect. The clearest dialect difference was that Daegu speakers' /$s^h$/ and /$s^*$/ productions had overall shorter aspiration durations than those of Seoul speakers, suggesting the opposite of the traditional "/$s^*$/ produced as [$s^h$]" stereotype of Gyeongsang dialects. Further work is needed to investigate whether /$s^h/-/s^*$/ neutralization in Daegu is perceptual rather than acoustic in nature.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.11-19
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• 2000

The present electropalatographic study reports the production of the allophones. i.e., [l] and [r], of Korean tap /r/ and their coarticulatory characteristics in /$C{\'{a}}r#g$/ and /$C{\'{a}}r#i$/ sequences. The finding that tap /r/ involves a complete oral closure with less lingual contact, i.e., apico-frontalveolar coupling. than lateralized /r/ which involves apico-bladealveolar coupling and tongue dorsum lowering for adequate airflow through either side and/or both of the tongue body suggests that the two allophones of the tap /r/ have different lingual gestures. Moreover. in comparison with the tap. the lateral exerts longer lingual contacts. The mean ratio between them is 3.7. In the sequences /Car#g/. the two adjacent antagonistic segments (i.e., /r/ and /g/) show mutual coarticulation effects taking on features of adjacent segment. but either of them is precisely constrained without blocking the formation of involved major lingual gestures for the other segment. In sequences /Car#i/ occurs anticipatory V-to-C coarticulation but not vocalic carryover effects. In both sequences. the allophones reveal insignificant wordinitial consonantal carryover coarticulatory effects and insignificant speaker-specific lingual contacts.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.139-145
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• 2015

Researchers have claimed that Korean younger speakers tend to less clearly differentiate aspirated and lax stops with VOT values while older speakers clearly differentiate these two stops with VOT values. To explain this phenomena, the current study consider both an aging effect and a general sound shift. For this study, VOT values and F0 of Korean stops produced by eight male speakers(years of birth were 1942 ~ 1952) analyzed using Praat. Their productions were compared with the values of participants whose year of birth were 1943 ~ 1952) in Silva(2006)'s research. Silva's research was conducted in 2004 using the same methods. The result shows that 2014's VOT gap between aspirated and lax stops and less F0 gap between aspirated and lax stops than those of 2004. When the F0 values related to physical conditions of the larynx is considered, it could be analyzed as the following: to distinguish the three-way phonation type clearly, older speakers depend on the VOT value more instead of F0 which they have difficulty to control.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.275-288
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• 2001

The sentences with the same surface word order may be realized with the pragmatically different meanings, depending on the contexts under which they could appear. Semantically, their meaning differences have been explained in terms of the different information structures (Steedman 2000), whereas prosodically, they can be explained in terms of the different compositions of intonational components which make their own semantic contributions (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). In other words, the different intonation realizations of the sentences with the same word order reflect the different information structures. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the information structure and the intonational meaning by way of analysing the production of the sentences with ambiguous scopes of the English focus particle 'only'. In contrast to the previous quantitative approaches to the scopes of the focus particle 'only', two independent levels of information structure (Steedman 2000)-theme/rheme, and focus/ background-make it possible to consistently explain the intonational phenomena.