• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.30
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• pp.97-124
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• 2013

For a long period, vowel reduction has been accepted as one of the most common pronunciation rules in Russian phonology. However, since the rules have been modified in many ways after the influx of loanwords, [a, e, i, o, u, ${\star}$]-including [e, o]-can now be pronounced in unstressed position, obeying the rule of vowel reduction. Especially in Modern Russian, along with the destruction of the consonant pronunciation norm due to some relatively complex changes it underwent palatalization, consonant pronunciation has been simplified, and as a response to such a phenomenon, the specialization of vowel pronunciation rule is now occurring. In other words, in the interrelation between consonants and vowels, as the pronunciation rules for consonants are simplified and thus the contrast between consonants is weakened, the degree of dependence on pronunciation of segment in the vowel pronunciation rule has been elevated. Therefore, the analysis says that the degree of vowel reduction depends on a vowel's distance from a stressed syllable is not enough; the influence of surrounding phonemes-including consonants-or the formative characteristics of words themselves should also be considered. The introduction of Max-noncorner/UnderLex, a/an Licence constraint that is related to non-declension nouns, and that of IdentC[back] and ShareCV[back], which are faithfulness constraint and share constraint respectively that are related to the nature of consonants stresses that vowel pronunciation rules should not be simply viewed as rules for vowels; The rules should be analyzed with emphasis on their correlation with surrounding phonemes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1043-1065
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• 2011

This study investigates i-umlaut which occurred in the period of pre Old English (OE) in two aspects: what motivates i-umlaut in OE and how the phenomenon can be analyzed within the framework of OT. Unlike root-controlled vowel harmony, i-umlaut in OE is triggered by the suffixal i or j in the unstressed syllable whereby a stressed root vowel becomes fronted or raised. In this study, it is proposed that i-umlaut in OE is driven by the weak trigger i or j to improve its poor perception: I-umlaut improves the poor perceptibility of the weak trigger by extending its feature-either [-back] or [-low]-onto the vowel in the stressed syllable. This study provides an OT-theoretic analysis utilizing the licensing account to vowel harmony proposed by Walker (2004, 2005). The licensing constraints, IDENT-IO(F) and the locally conjoined constraints are proposed and their interaction correctly captures the pattern of i-umlaut in OE. Also, it is shown that the licensing account proposed in this paper is superior to the previous analyses as well as the nonlicensing approaches in that it can provide a perceptual motivation couched in i-umlaut in OE.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.93-105
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• 2000

The English schwa sound has special characteristics which are distinct from other vowels. It is non-phonemic and occurs only in an unstressed syllable. Compared with the English schwa, the Korean /e/ is a full vowel which has phonemic contrast. This paper had three aims. One was to see whether there is any relationship between English full vowels and their reduced vowel schwas. Second was to see whether there is any possible target in the English schwa sounds which are derived from different full vowels. The third was to compare the English non-phoneme vowel schwa and the Korean full vowel /e/ in terms of articulatory positions and duration. The study results showed that there is no relationship between each of the full vowels and its schwa. The schwa tended to converge into a possible target which was F1 456 and F2 1560. The Korean vowel /e/ seemed to have its distinct position speaker-individual which is different from the neutral tongue position. The evidence that the Korean /e/ is a back vowel was supported by the Seoul dialect speaker. In duration, the English schwa was much shorter than the full vowels, but there was no significant difference in length between the Korean /e/ and other Korean vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.25-31
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• 2018

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the pronounced words present in the Buckeye Corpus and compared the frequency distribution of these processes by sex and age groups to provide a clearer understanding of spoken English to linguists and phoneticians. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus using R. Next, the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated using R scripts, and a frequency distribution by vowel process types, as well as sex and age groups, was created. The results revealed that 95% of the orthographic words contained the same number of syllables, whereas 5% had different numbers of vowels, thereby proving that speakers tend to preserve vowels in spontaneous speech. In addition, deletion processes were preferred in natural speech. Most vowel deletions occurred with an unstressed syllable. Chi-square tests were performed to calculate dependence in the distribution of phonological process types for male and female groups and young and old groups. The results showed a very strong correlation. This finding indicates that vowel processes occurred in approximately the same pattern in natural and spontaneous speech data regardless of sex and age, as well as whether or not the vowel processes were identical. Based on these results, the author concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can greatly enhance practical understanding of spoken English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.45-53
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• 2011

Flemming and Johnson (2007) claim that there is a fundamental distinction between the mid central vowel [ə] and the high central vowel [?] in that [ə] occurs in an unstressed word-final position while [?] appears elsewhere. Compared to English counterparts, Korean [ə] and [?] are full vowels and they have phonemic contrast. The purpose of this paper is to explore the acoustic quality of two English reduced vowels produced by Korean learners and native speakers of English in terms of their two formant frequencies. Sixteen Korean learners of English and six native speakers of English produced four types of English words and two types of Korean words with different phonological and morphological patterns. The results show that Korean learners of English produced the two reduced vowels of English and their Korean counterparts differently in Korean and English words.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.19-38
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• 2001

The question of how / ... VCV .../ sequences should be syllabified is a much discussed, yet unresolved, issue in English phonology. While most researchers recognize an over-all universal tendency towards open syllables, there seem to be at least two different views as regards the analysis of / ... VCV .../ when the second vowel is unstressed: ambisyllabicity (e.g., Kahn 1976) and resyllabification (e.g., Borowsky 1986). Basically, we adopt the latter view and will present further evidence in its favor. This does not exclude low-level “phonetic” ambisyllabification, however. Following Nespor and Vogel (1986), we also assume that the domain of syllabification or resyllabification is the phonological word. With the new conception of the syllable structure of English, we attempt a reanalysis of Aitkin's Law as well as fe-tensing in New York City and Philadelphia.

• MALSORI
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• no.67
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• pp.1-16
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• 2008

Stress effects upon Korean vowels were investigated with reference to rhythm. We measured three acoustic correlates (Duration: VOT, Vowel Duration; F0; Intensity) of stress from the seven pairs of stressed vs. unstressed Korean vowels /i, ${\varepsilon}(e)$, a, o, u, i, e/. The results of the experiment revealed that stress gave only inconsistent and weak effects on duration, which supports that Korean is not a stress-timed language as far as strong stress effects on duration are still considered crucial in stress-timing. On the other hand, Korean stressed vowels were most characterized with higher F0 and next with stronger intensity. But speakers generally showed tactics to reversely use F0 and intensity in stressing an utterance rather than proportionately strengthening both of the two acoustic correlates of stress. There was found great inter-speaker variability especially in the variations of duration.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.33-40
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• 2020

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.3-14
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• 2011

It has been posited that in English, native listeners use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS) for the segmentation of continuous speech. Strong syllables tend to be perceived as potential word onsets for English native speakers, which is due to the high proportion of strong syllables word-initially in the English vocabulary. This study investigates whether Koreans employ the same strategy when segmenting speech input in English. Word-spotting experiments were conducted using vowel-initial and consonant-initial bisyllabic targets embedded in nonsense trisyllables in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. The effect of strong syllable was significant in the RT (reaction times) analysis but not in the error analysis. In both experiments, Korean listeners detected words more slowly when the word-initial syllable is strong (stressed) than when it is weak (unstressed). However, the error analysis showed that there was no effect of initial stress in Experiment 1 and in the item (F2) analysis in Experiment 2. Only the subject (F1) analysis in Experiment 2 showed that the participants made more errors when the word starts with a strong syllable. These findings suggest that Koran listeners do not use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for segmenting English speech. They do not treat strong syllables as word beginnings, but rather have difficulties recognizing words when the word starts with a strong syllable. These results are discussed in terms of intonational properties of Korean prosodic phrases which are found to serve as lexical segmentation cues in the Korean language.