The purpose of this study is to analyze the Chinese Learners of Korean’s production and cognition of Korean nasal assimilation. Recently, there has been an explosive growth of researches on Korean pronunciation education in terms of both quantity an...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the Chinese Learners of Korean’s production and cognition of Korean nasal assimilation. Recently, there has been an explosive growth of researches on Korean pronunciation education in terms of both quantity and quality. However, most of them only show general acquisition orders or teaching methods on Korean phonological rules.
Phoneme fluctuation in syllable boundary frequently occurs in Korean. As a result, the phonological system of Korean which is an agglutinative language has been considered more complicated than that of Chinese which is an isolating language. Therefore the Chinese learners’ acquisition of Korean phonological phenomena has been limited by the sole explicit explanation about phonological rules. Thus, this study is focusing on the production and cognition aspects of Korean nasal assimilation as an individual phonological phenomenon. To give a general idea, assimilation takes place when a sound becomes like a neighboring sound. In Korean, nasal assimilation occurs when Korean obstruents, namely /ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/, become [ㅁ, ㄴ, ㅇ] respectively under the influence of the nasal sound that follows.
In this study two experiments have been conducted in order to examine the Chinese learners’ production and cognition of Korean nasal assimilation. The participants in this study were divided into three groups according to Korean Language proficiency: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The first experiment was designed to investigate the learners’ production of Korean nasal assimilation while the second one, multiple-choice test, was designed to investigate the cognition. The procedure and content of this study are as follows.
Chapter Ⅰ explains the objective of this study as well as the advanced research. The research problems include the followings: First, how do Chinese learners produce Korean nasal assimilation in various aspects? Second, how do learners recognize the rules of Korean nasal assimilation in various aspects? The aspects of Korean nasal assimilation are categorized as obstruents /ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/, degree of assimilation, and recognition of the morpheme boundary in a word and cluster.
Chapter Ⅱ examines Korean and Chinese syllabic structures and phonological phenomena and demonstrates their contrasts. In addition, limitations of the syllabic structures and arrangements of Korean and Chinese syllables are summarized. Lastly, the phonological phenomena of Korean and Chinese are compared on the basis of the assimilation phenomena.
Chapter Ⅲ formulates the method of this study and establishes the experiment instruments to measure the production and cognition of Korean nasal assimilation of Chinese learners. The test for measuring the production of nasal assimilation is composed of 64 questions in accordance with the three aspects of nasal assimilation. The test for measuring the cognition of nasal assimilation’s rules consists of 32 multiple-choice questions in which the participants were asked to select the correct pronunciations. The experiments have been conducted on 20 beginning level learners, 20 intermediate level learners, and 20 advanced level learners selected through preliminary experiment from among Chinese learners from 7 universities and Korean language institutes affiliated to universities in Seoul.
Chapter Ⅳ analyzes the results of the experiments. The first research problem is about how Chinese learners produce Korean nasal assimilation. As the research subproblem, the results of the cognition on Korean nasal assimilation are analyzed in accordance with the obstruents /ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/, degree of assimilation, and recognition of morpheme boundary in a word and cluster. The results of the analysis reveal that the obstruent on the last syllable does not significantly influence the learners’ production of Korean nasal assimilation.
Then the production of the assimilation divided into partial assimilation and total assimilation according are analyzed. It is revealed that the learners’ production of total assimilation is more accurate than that of partial assimilation. Lastly, how recognition of the morpheme boundary in a word and cluster affect the learner’s production of Korean nasal assimilation is analyzed. When nasal assimilation is realized within a word, the learner’s accuracy of the production of nasal assimilation is high. However, rather than the realization within a word, it is easier for the cognition of the morpheme boundary to take place within a cluster. It turns out that the Chinese learners face difficulty in applying phonological fluctuation that is beyond the syllable boundary because the recognition of the morpheme boundary has an influence on the recognition of the syllable boundary.
Subsequently, the cognition aspect of Korean nasal assimilation of the Chinese learners is analyzed in response to the second research problem. Similar to the analysis result of the production of Korean nasal assimilation, the result of the cognition is analyzed in accordance with the obstruents /ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/, degree of assimilation, and recognition of the morpheme boundary in a word and cluster. In general, the result is similar to that of the production of Korean nasal assimilation.
As a result, a profound interrelation between the production and the cognition of Korean nasal assimilation have been realized. However, the scores of the production and cognition do not always increase even if the proficiency becomes higher. On top of that, the relation between the production and the cognition does not turn out similar in all aspects of nasal assimilation.
Chapter Ⅴ describes the significance and limitations of this study.
This study is meaningful in many aspects. First of all, it focuses on the Korean nasal assimilation as an individual phonological phenomenon. Secondly, the result of this study shows that Korean nasal assimilation is considerably complex in various aspects. Also, this study analyzes both the production and cognition of Korean nasal assimilation. Therefore, this study can become a reference to future studies that aim at expanding the knowledge about the Chinese learners’ acquisition of phonological phenomena.
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