It is no easy task for adult Chinese students to acquire good Korean pronunciation skills. In order to provide them with effective pronunciation training it is important to understand Chinese students’ pronunciations of the Korean language. Previous...
It is no easy task for adult Chinese students to acquire good Korean pronunciation skills. In order to provide them with effective pronunciation training it is important to understand Chinese students’ pronunciations of the Korean language. Previous literatures examining the language acquisition process of Chinese individuals have revealed that they face difficulties in pronouncing Korean plosives and affricates. But much of the literature consists of comparative analyses of the acoustic-phonetic systems or sound differences between the Korean and Chinese languages. Also, while there is a good number of research dealing with the acoustic-phonetic analysis of plosives, there is a lack of research on that of affricates. In addition, there is hardly any research that conducted Korean plosive’ and affricate’ acoustic-phonetic pronunciation experiments on Chinese participants in Korean as Foreign Language(KFL) programs to examine their developmental processes. Thus this seeks to examine how Chinese KFL student pronounce plosives and affricates in word-initial and word-medial positions, analyze plosive and affricate pronunciation characteristics and degrees of improvement during each period of learning, and use the data implications to improve Korean pronunciation education materials. This research selected 108 Chinese students and calculated measurements of plosive and affricate pronunciations via a series of production analysis , acoustic-phonetics experiments.
According to the production analysis of plosives results, second year students had improved accuracy in pronunciations of aspirate than lenis and fortis, and third year students revealed more accuracy in pronunciations of fortis and aspirate rather than lenis. In fourth year students, lenis pronunciation was more accurate than fortis and aspirate in word-initial positions, but aspirate was more accurate than lenis and fortis in word-medial positions. According to the acoustic-phonetics experiment, second and third year students could not properly distinguish between lenis and fortis, and during lenis pronunciation students maintained a high pitch so that it sounded as fortis. Unlike second and third students, fourth year students were able to distinguish between lenis and fortis but could not do so between lenis and aspirate, and revealed a significant difference with native Koreans in terms of lenis pronunciation.
Based on both the production analysis and acoustic-phonetics experiments of plosives results, Chinese students display a noticeable improvement in pronunciation of plosives as the duration of study becomes longer. All students have difficulty with lenis pronunciation. But as the duration of study lengthened, lenis pronunciation in the word-initial position improved while there was no improvement in the word-medial position regardless of study duration. In terms of fortis, second year students had difficulty pronouncing fortis due to failure to acquire the tense consonant trait necessary for fortis pronunciation. In general as the duration of study became longer these phenomena improved in both word-initial and word-medial positions. But as the measurement results demonstrated, fourth year students continue to receive less than 4 points which reveal significant differences in fortis pronunciation compared to that of native Koreans. The measurement scores for aspirate were higher than lenis and fortis, but in the word-initial position the scores decreased as the duration of study lengthened.
According to the production analysis of affricates results, first year students demonstrated more accurate pronunciation of fortis and aspirate than lenis in the word-initial position, and more accurate pronunciation of lenis than fortis and aspirate in the word-medial position. For second year students, the pronunciation of fortis and aspirate was more accurate than lenis in the word-initial position, and the pronunciation of fortis was more accurate than lenis and aspirate in the word-medial position. For third year students, in the word-initial position fortis pronunciation was more accurate than lenis and aspirate, while in the word-medial position lenis pronunciation was more accurate than fortis and aspirate.
Based on both the production analysis and acoustic-phonetics experiments of affricates results, Chinese students display a noticeable improvement in pronunciation of affricates as the duration of study becomes longer. All students experienced difficulty with lenis pronunciation. In terms of fortis pronunciation, first year students had difficulty with fortis due to failure to acquire the tense consonant trait necessary for pronunciation. In general as the duration of study became longer these phenomena improved in both word-initial and word-medial positions. But as the measurement results demonstrate, third year students continue to receive less than 4 points which reveal significant differences in fortis pronunciation compared to that of native Koreans. The measurement scores for aspirate were higher than lenis and fortis, but in the word-initial position the scores decreased as the duration of study lengthened.
There are many students in China who are learning Korean, but due to the fact there is a lack of experimental research that target these students there is no precise diagnosis of the pronunciation development of students. This research is significant in the sense that by classifying Chinese students according to study periods and conducting measurements of Korean affricate and plosive pronunciations via a series of production analysis , acoustic-phonetics experiments , this research sought to engage in an objective and scientific examination of the problems and improvement measures for pronunciation.
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