The major purpose of this thesis is to compare and analyze English and Korean native speakers' pronunciations of English intervocalic stop-sonorant sequences. The stop-sonorant sequences are divided into three categories: stop-nasal, stop-liquid, and ...
The major purpose of this thesis is to compare and analyze English and Korean native speakers' pronunciations of English intervocalic stop-sonorant sequences. The stop-sonorant sequences are divided into three categories: stop-nasal, stop-liquid, and stop-glide sequences. The subjects include twelve native speakers of English and ten native speakers of Korean. Korean speakers' pronunciations were recorded two times, once before and once after their pronunciation training in order to see whether there would be any improvement. Their pronunciations were recorded and analyzed by WaveSurfer which is one of the speech analysis programs transforming speakers' spoken utterances into visible spectrograms. The specific items of the speech analysis such as frequencies and percentages were put into the forms of diagrams.
The speech analysis shows that sonority assimilations in English stop-sonorant sequences rarely appear in English speakers' pronunciations, whereas full or partial assimilations occur with some frequency. Korean speakers' pronunciations are affected by cross-syllable sonority restrictions. The restrictions motivate sonority assimilation in stop-sonorant sequences. Before Korean subjects were trained in stop-sonorant pronunciations, the frequency of sonority assimilations was very high in their pronunciations. After the pronunciation training, however, the frequency of sonority assimilations decreased noticeably. Accordingly, the experiment shows that there was a substantial improvement in Korean speakers' pronunciations of English stop-sonorant sequences.
On the contrary, the speech analysis shows that there could be some minor negative effects on Korean speakers' pronunciations after they had the pronunciation training. It was found out that the overall length of stop closure in stop-sonorant sequences tended to increase. It is probably due to their strong intention to keep the preceding stops unreleased, which helps them not to have sonority assimilation. In a few cases, the length of the stop closure of Korean speakers' pronunciations was found to be excessively longer than that of English speakers' pronunciations. In spite of these minor negative effects, Korean speakers, in most cases, have shown remarkable improvement in their mispronunciations incurred by negative transfers from the Korean language.
，韩语论文范文，韩语论文范文 |
