The main purpose of this study is to analyze how the realization of acoustic cues differ in pronunciation, depending upon the two different situations; (ⅰ) words in isolation and (ⅱ) words in the middle of sentences. The second concern of this s...
The main purpose of this study is to analyze how the realization of acoustic cues differ in pronunciation, depending upon the two different situations; (ⅰ) words in isolation and (ⅱ) words in the middle of sentences. The second concern of this study is to compare the pronunciation of Korean English learners with that of native speakers. For this, this study checked sixteen Korean English learners and six native speakers. 31 content words and 31 sentences including the content words were used for the task. Subjects were asked to read them twice. Fundamental frequency of following vowel onset(=pitch), Center of Gravity(=fricatives intensity), intensity of following vowel onset, friction noise duration and duration of following vowel onset were investigated in order to know the difference between word pronunciation and sentence pronunciation of English fricatives. Waveform, spectrogram and spectrum in the Praat program were used to analyze the difference between native speakers’ utterances and Korean English learners’ utterances. The general results of this study were as follows.
First, duration, intensity and pitch of sentence pronunciation were statistically lower than those of word pronunciation in native speakers’ utterances. Especially duration, pitch of many fricatives and following vowels were lower than those of word pronunciation. It means that native speakers weaken content word stress when they pronounce it in the middle of sentence. Also the duration of sentence pronunciation was statistically lower than that of word pronunciation in Korean English learners’. On the contrary some Korean English learners’ pitch of sentence pronunciation was higher than those of word pronunciation. The results from this experiment show that most Korean English learners had problems with realizing pitch appropriately even though they recognized English rhythm. And Korean English learners use duration to weaken stress. It seems that Korean English learners were influenced from their mother tongue which distinguishes a meaning by sound length.
Second, Korean English learners make some mistakes when they pronounce fricatives. They burst fricatives such as plosive sounds and devoiced voicing fricatives. They tended to substitute English fricavives with phonetically similar Korean stops when pronouncing English fricatives which don’t exist in Korean and added vowel /ɰ/ to the word final position. There was not a gap of the error proportion of fricatives pronunciation between words and sentences. The error rate of /ʒ/ was the highest at the word initial position and the error rate of /ð/ was the highest at the word final position.
Here are several suggestions for the students who study English pronunciation in the future. First, Korean English learners are advised to understand the principles of articulatory phonetics and the difference between Korean and English phonetic systems. Especially Korean English learners need to practice English fricatives /ʒ/ and /ð/, because they have trouble pronouncing them at the word initial and final positions. Second, Korean English learners are advised to use the Praat program in order to check the realization of F0 better. Finally, Korean English learners need to focus on studying suprasegmental features of stress and prominence on the sentence level.
，韩语论文题目，韩语论文 |
