Jeong-Im Han

The acquisition of phonetic details: Evidence from the production of English reduced vowels by Korean learners

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acquisition of non-contrastive phonetic details of a second language. Reduced vowels in English are realized as a schwa or barred- i depending on their phonological contexts, but Korean has no reduced vowels. Two groups of Korean learners of English who differed according to the experience of residence in English-speaking countries and a group of English native speakers were asked to produce English reduced vowels in word-initial, word-internal and word-final positions. The mean duration ratios, and the mean values and distribution patterns of F1/F2 of the reduced vowels were compared between the three groups, which revealed that Korean learners without residence experience tended to produce each variant of English reduced vowels as the corresponding full vowels, whereas those with experience displayed similar patterns to the natives. The present results suggest that it is possible for second language (L2) learners to learn the statistical properties in L2.

Cross-generational Change of /o/ and /u/ in Seoul Korean I: Proximity in Vowel Space

This study examined cross-generational changes in the vowel system of Seoul Korean. Acoustic analyses of the vowel formants of /o/ and /u/, and their Euclidean distances in the vowel space were undertaken to explore an on-going merger of these two vowels as proposed in previous acoustic studies and a phonological analysis by Chae (1999). A robust cross-generational change of /o/ and /u/ was found, more evident for female speakers than for male speakers. For female speakers, with each successive generation, /o/ became increasingly approximated with /u/, regardless of the syllable positions that the target vowels were posited, whereas the cross-generational differences in the Euclidean distances were only shown in the second syllable position for the male speakers. These results demonstrate that 1) women are more advanced than men in the on-going approximation of /o/ and /u/; 2) the approximation of /o/ and /u/ is common in the non-initial position. Taken together, the merger of /o/ and /u/ appears to be in progress in Seoul Korean.

Cross-generational Change of /o/ and /u/ in Seoul Korean II: Spectral Interactions in Normalized Vowel Space

This is a follow-up study on Han and Kang (2013) which argued that the Euclidean distances between /o/ and /u/ in Seoul Korean decreased in the first syllable position as speakers were among younger female speakers but not for male speakers, whereas in the second syllable position both gender groups showed a cross-generational decreasing effect of the Euclidean distance between /o/ and /u/. This study normalized the same data in Han and Kang (2013) which measured 12 speakers (six males and six females) for each Age group and investigated the spectral changes vowels /o/ and /u/ between age and gender, using the log-mean normalized statistical results. This study also examined overlap fraction values generated in SOAM 2D (F1 x F2) (cf. Wassink, 2006), which may also indicate the proximity of two vowels in question. The results showed that /o/ and /u/ vowels were making closer with /o/ raising for female speakers in V₁ and V₂ positions but only in the V₂ position for male speakers. That is, females led the upward movement of peripheral /o/ vowel, just like the raising of ‘e’ and ‘o’ in New York City (Labov, 1991). The results also showed that younger speakers used a rather narrow vowel space for the vowels. This also contributed to the proximity of the vowels /o/ and /u/, resulting in rather large overlap fraction values for younger speakers between these two vowels.

The influence of spelling on the production and storage of words with allophonic variants of /h/ in Korean

This study examined the role of orthography in the production and storage of spoken words. Korean speakers learned novel Korean words with potential variants of /h/, including [ɦ] and o. They were provided with the same auditory stimuli but with varying exposure to spelling. One group was presented with the letter for o ( ), the second group, the letter for [ɦ] ( ), and the third group, auditory input only. In picture-naming tasks, the participants presented with produced fewer words with [ɦ] than those presented with . In a spelling recall task, the participants who were not exposed to spelling displayed various types of spellings for variants, but after exposure to spelling, they began to produce spellings as provided in the task. These results suggest that orthographic information influences the production of words via an offline restructuring of the phonological representation.

Cross-Generational Differences of /o/ and /u/ in Informal Text Reading

This study is a follow-up study of Han and Kang (2013) and Kang and Han (2013) which examined cross-generational changes in the Korean vowels /o/ and /u/ using acoustic analyses of the vowel formants of these two vowels, their Euclidean distances and the overlap fraction values generated in SOAM 2D (Wassink, 2006). Their results showed an on-going approximation of /o/ and /u/, more evident in female speakers and non-initial vowels. However, these studies employed non-words in a frame sentence. To see the extent to which these two vowels are merged in real words in spontaneous speech, we conducted an acoustic analysis of the formants of /o/ and /u/ produced by two age groups of female speakers while reading a letter sample. The results demonstrate that 1) the younger speakers employed mostly F2 but not F1 differences in the production of /o/ and /u/; 2) the Euclidean distance of these two vowels was shorter in non-initial than initial position, but there was no difference in Euclidean distance between the two age groups (20’s vs. 40-50’s); 3) overall, /o/ and /u/ were more overlapped in non-initial than initial position, but in non-initial position, younger speakers showed more congested distribution of the vowels than in older speakers.

The perception of Mandarin lexical tones by native Korean speakers differing in their experience with Mandarin

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native learners are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native speakers of standard Korean from the Seoul/Kyunggi area differing in Mandarin experience (NK1, NK2) with native speakers of Mandarin. NK1 (n = 10) had no experience with Mandarin whereas NK2 (n = 10) consisted of highly advanced learners of Mandarin. A group of 10 native Mandarin (NM) speakers was included as controls. Accuracy of perception of six tone pairs (T1–T2, T1–T3, T1–T4, T2–T3, T2–T4, T3–T4) was assessed in a four-alternative forced-choice discrimination test. As expected, the NK2 group with extensive Mandarin learning experience resembled the NM group to a greater extent than did the NK1 group. T2–T3 was the hardest pair for both NK groups, but NK2 had the largest advantage over NK1 for this pair. Apart from T2–T3 which is generally considered difficult, tone pairs involving T1 caused some misperception by the NK groups. This may be related to the difficulty with perceiving a level tone which shows the least fundamental frequency (F0) movement and possibly has limited perceptual salience.

A Phonetic Investigation of Korean Monophthongs in the Early Twentieth Century

The current study presents an instrumental phonetic analysis of Korean monophthong vowels in the early twentieth century Seoul Korean, based on audio recordings of elementary school textbooks Botonghakgyo Joseoneodokbon (Korean Reading Textbook for Elementary School). The data examined in this study were a list of the Korean mono syllables (Banjeol), and a short passage, recorded by one 41-year-old male speaker in 1935, as well as a short passage recorded by one 11-year-old male speaker in 1935. The Korean monophthongs were examined in terms of acoustic analysis of the vowel formants (F1, F2) and compared to those recorded by 18 male speakers of Seoul Korean in 2013. The results show that in 1935, 1) /e/ and /ɛ/ were clearly separated in the vowel space; 2) /o/ and /u/ were also clearly separated without any overlapping values; 3) some tokens of /y/ and /ø/ were produced as monophthongs, not as diphthongs. Based on the results, we can observe the historical change of the Korean vowels over 80-90 years such as 1) /e/ and /ɛ/ have been merged; and 2) /o/ has been raised and overlapped with /u/.

The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB) of English Prosody: The Case of Focal Prominence for Korean Learners of English and Natives

This study investigated the speech intelligibility of Korean-accented and native English focus speech for Korean and native English listeners. Three different types of focus in English, broad, narrow and contrastive, were naturally induced in semantically optimal dialogues. Seven high and seven low proficiency Korean speakers and seven native speakers participated in recording the stimuli with another native speaker. Fifteen listeners from each of Korean high & low proficiency and native groups judged audio signals of focus sentences. Results showed that Korean listeners were more accurate at identifying the focal prominence for Korean speakers` narrow focus speech than that of native speakers, and this suggests that the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit-talker (ISIB-T) held true for narrow focus regardless of Korean speakers` and listeners` proficiency. However, Korean listeners did not outperform native listeners for Korean speakers` production of narrow focus, which did not support for the ISIB-listener (L). Broad and contrastive focus speech did not provide evidence for either the ISIB-T or ISIB-L. These findings are explained by the interlanguage shared by Korean speakers and listeners where they have established more L1-like common phonetic features and phonological representations. Once semantically and syntactically interpreted in a higher level processing in Korean narrow focus speech, the narrow focus was phonetically realized in a more intelligible way to Korean listeners due to the interlanguage. This may elicit ISIB. However, Korean speakers did not appear to make complete semantic/syntactic access to either broad or contrastive focus, which might lead to detrimental effects on lower level phonetic outputs in top-down processing. This is, therefore, attributed to the fact that Korean listeners did not take advantage over native listeners for Korean talkers and vice versa.

Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation

Speech production studies have shown that phonological unit initially used to fill the metrical frame during phonological encoding is language specific, that is, a phoneme for English and Dutch, an atonal syllable for Mandarin Chinese, and a mora for Japanese. However, only a few studies chronometrically investigated speech production in Korean, and they obtained mixed results. Korean is particularly interesting as there might be both phonemic and syllabic influences during phonological encoding. The purpose of this study is to further examine the initial phonological preparation unit in Korean, employing a masked priming task (Experiment 1) and a phonological Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that significant onset (and onset-plus, that is, consonant–vowel [CV]) effects were found in both experiments, but there was no compelling evidence for a prominent role for the syllable. When the prime words were presented in three different forms related to the targets, namely, without any change, with re-syllabified codas, and with nasalised codas, there were no significant differences in facilitation among the three forms. Alternatively, it is also possible that participants may not have had sufficient time to process the primes up to the point that re-syllabification or nasalisation could have been carried out. In addition, the results of a Stroop task demonstrated that the onset phoneme effect was not driven by any orthographic influence. These findings suggest that the onset segment and not the syllable is the initial (or proximate) phonological unit used in the segment-to-frame encoding process during speech planning in Korean.

The Role of Phonetic Similarity and Orthographic Information in Asymmetrical Lexical Encoding in Second Language

This study examined two possible sources of asymmetrical lexical access: phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category and orthographic information. Three groups of native Korean speakers learned Arabic non-words with sound pairs with/without an L1-dominant category (/l-r/ vs. /χ-ħ/), and then their phonetic categorization and lexical encoding abilities were evaluated. One group was presented with the same letters for the target pair (e.g.,  for both /l/ and /r/), the second group, different letters (e.g.,  for /l/,  for /r/), and the third group, auditory input only. The results of discrimination did not show any effect of these two sources, whereas in lexical encoding, (1) a pair with an L1-dominant category was more accurately encoded; and (2) orthographic information hindered the lexical encoding. In the following spelling recall task, the scores from the learners with different letters for the target pair were similar to a ceiling. Thus, orthographic information might help them to have target-like representation, despite difficulties in online processing.