The purpose of this study is to analyze the Korean learners' pronunciation of fricatives in English, comparing with those of native speakers, by using the Praat program that transfers speakers’ utterances into an acoustic graph. I analyzed the error...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the Korean learners' pronunciation of fricatives in English, comparing with those of native speakers, by using the Praat program that transfers speakers’ utterances into an acoustic graph. I analyzed the errors in Korean learners’ utterances and found their causes. Furthermore, I found out which consonant of English fricatives was mispronounced the most and proved that result with statistical significance.
The sampling targets were the adults who were 30s. In the study, 15 were Koreans majoring in English language and literature at Kyungpook National University and 5 were native speakers from the USA. They participated in the experiment which gave limited time (2 seconds) in reading experimental sentences consisting of tongue twisters using fricatives /f, v, ɵ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ/ in the syllable initial of each word. Collected sounds were judged their accuracy by wave forms, spectrogram, voiced bar and pitch. The pronunciations of native speakers compared to those of Korean learners are used to satisfy the criteria of the acoustic cues.
The following are the summaries of the findings.
1. Korean learners have difficulty in pronouncing English fricatives which do not exist in Korean and record a relatively high error rate.
2. In a previous study on tongue twisters, subjects tended to replace a consonant with a sequent one or delete a certain sound. But in the result of this study there were no deletion and replacement between sounds. In other words, according to the effect of the front, Korean learners tend to pronounce the sounds /z/, /ʃ/, /ð/ as /s/, /s/, /ɵ/ respectively.
3. The most common error in pronouncing English fricatives was not the replacement of another English sound in the tongue twisters, but rather the interference of the Korean language as the mother tongue. The highest error rate was /z/ which was followed by /ð, ʒ, v, ɵ/.
4. The statistical significance verified the gap between voiced and non-voiced consonants. The average error rate of the voiced was 21.67% compared to that of non-voiced which was 79.30%(t=-3.9478, p=0.007). The fricatives in Korean only exist as non-voiced sounds which make it difficult for Korean learners in pronouncing voiced sound.
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