• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.45-52
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• 2018

This study investigates the effect of Japanese (L1) on the production of the Korean rhythmic structure. Korean and Japanese have typologically different rhythmic structure as a syllable-timed language and mora-timed language, respectively. This rhythmic difference comes from the different phonological properties of the two languages. Due to this difference, Japanese speakers that are learning Korean may produce a different rhythm than native Korean speakers' rhythm. To investigate the influence of the native language's rhythm on the target language, we conducted an acoustic analysis using acoustic metrics such as %V, VarcoV, and VarcoS. Four Korean native speakers and ten advanced Japanese Korean learners participated in a production test. The analyzed material consisted of six Korean sentences that contained various syllable structures. The results showed that KS and JS's rhythms are different in %V as well as in VarcoV. In the case of VarcoS, significant rhythmic difference was observed in the VC and CVC syllable, in which the coda segment is nasal sound. This study allowed us to observe the influence of L1 on production of L2 rhythm.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.509-536
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• 2001

The traditional typology of English poetic meters makes a binary division between strong-stress (or accentual) meters and accentual-syllabic (or syllable-stress or syllable-accent) meters. According to this typology, Old and Middle English alliterative poetry was composed in strong-stress meter; the iambic pentameter from Chaucer to Yeats and on to the present has been an accentual-syllabic meter. Intersecting with this literary typology is a linguistic typology that classifies languages of the world as stress-timed or syllable-timed or some mix of the two. English is a clear example of a stress-timed language. Whereas most descriptions of strong-stress meter focus on the counting of stresses, the present study focuses on the patterns of unstressed syllables between the stresses (possibly at isochronous intervals). The implications of this analysis suggest a new typology in which certain forms of English verse follow strict grammatical stress (mainly Old and Middle English, but for reasons different from “strong-stress” expectations) and other forms are shaped by a compromise of grammatical stress and the metrical template. Within this later group, iambic pentameter contrasts with trochaic, anapestic, and dipodic meters in lending itself more readily to modulation. Some of this modulation comes from an easy incorporation into iambic pentameter of elements associated with Old and Middle English meters.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.95-112
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• 2005

We investigate Korean learners' speech-timing of English before and after instruction in comparison with native speech, in an attempt to resolve disagreements in the literature as to whether speech-timing is measurable (Lehiste, 1977; Roach, 1982; Dauer, 1983 vs. Low et al., 2000; Yun 2002; Jian, 2004). We measured the pair-wise variability between the adjacent stressed and unstressed syllables within a foot as well as that among adjacent feet in approximately 555 English sentences, which were read by 29 native speakers and 41 Korean learners in the intermediate proficiency level. The results show that in comparison with native American English, Korean learner speech is before instruction significantly (p<.001) smaller for the pair-wise variability between the adjacent stressed and unstressed syllables within a foot; and significantly (p=.01) bigger for the variability among adjacent feet within the utterance. The learner speech after instruction showed significant (p=.01) improvement in the pair-wise variability of syllable sequence toward native speech values. The variability among adjacent feet was progressively smaller for learner speech before and after instruction and for native speech (p=.03). We thus conclude that the speech timing difference between Korean English and American English is measurable in terms of the duration. of stressed and unstressed syllables and that the latter is stress-timed and the former is syllable-timing interfered.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• MALSORI
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• no.31_32
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• pp.195-205
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• 1996

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic structure of Korean related to the syllable duration varying with its positional difference. An attempt is made in this study to analyze and describe the concrete correlation between the syllable lengthening and its position in the utterance at the initial and final positions. Using the syllable [na] at the final and initial position of a prosodic phrase in the Korean version of 'the North Wind and the Sun', it has found that the ratio of phrase final versus phrase initial syllable lengthening was approximately 1.8:1 for 4 subjects taking part in the test. In the case of nonsense data, we found that the ratio was approximately 1.6:1 for 2 out of 3 subjects. The results of this study might indicate that Korean tends to have a high rate of final lengthening. We can tentatively classify it, therefore, as a stress-timed language. Still, there is no denying that further studies should be done before we can be absolutely certain about the classification of languages along the dichotomy scale.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.71-79
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• 2019

This study aims to investigate the rhythmic patterns in the English speech produced by Chinese learners of English who learn English as a foreign language (EFL learners). Utilizing interval-based rhythm metrics, namely, VarcoC, VarcoV, nPVI-C, nPVI-V, and %V, the study compared the rhythmic differences in English speech between ten native speakers from the United States and forty Chinese EFL learners from mainland China. A sentence elicitation task consisting of thirty picture prompts and corresponding thirty stimuli sentences with at least five vocalic and four consonantal intervals was conducted. Statistical results reveal that both Chinese advanced learners and beginners had significantly lower degree of stress-timed in their English speech, indicating that the acquisition of the L2 speech rhythm was influenced by the learners' L1 rhythmic pattern. In addition, the results also show that the Chinese advanced learners had significantly higher degree of stress-timed in their English speech than beginners and showed no significant difference with native speakers in VarcoC and nPVI-C. These results indicate that the direction of L2 speech rhythm development was from more syllable-timed to more stress-timed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.27-35
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• 2023

This study aimed to investigate the effect of Chinese on the production of Korean rhythm. Korean and Chinese are typologically classified into different rhythmic categories; because of this, the phonological properties of Korean and Chinese are similar and different at the same time. As a result, Chinese can exert both positive and negative influences on the realization of Korean rhythm. To investigate the influence of the rhythm of the native language of L2 learners on their target language, we conducted an acoustic analysis using acoustic metrics like of the speech of 5 Korean native speakers and 10 advanced Chinese Korean learners. The analyzed material is a short paragraph of five sentences containing a variety of syllable structures. The results showed that KS and CS rhythms are similar in %V, VarcoV, and nPVI_S. However, CS, unlike KS, showed characteristics closer to those of a stress-timed language in the values of %V and VarcoV. There was also a significant difference in nPVI_V values. These results demonstrate a negative influence of the native language in the realization of Korean rhythm. This can be attributed to the fact that all vowels in Chinese sentence are not pronounced with the same emphasis due to neutral tone. In this sense, this study allowed us to observe influences of L1 on L2 production of rhythm.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.52-64
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• 1993

This paper aims to explore the rhythmic phenomena of standard Korean by an experimental phonetic method. A total of 16 informants taking part in this experiment were divided into four groups : old males(OM) and old females(OF) in their fifties and young males(YM) and young females(YF) in their twenties. The informants were asked to read speech data consisting of two rhythmic units, each of which began with a stressed syllable with a long wowel. Starting with the frame / 'ma:1 'ma:nta /, the first rhythmic unit was expanded up to five syllables in all while keeping the second rhythmic unit constant with a view to investigate the pattern of increase in the interstress time interval. The results of this study are as follows: 1. There is a considerable difference between yen and old generations with respect to the duration of interstress interval . The young generation tends to speak faster than the old generation. This observation is supported by difference in the interstress intervals as exhibited by OM(389.66), OF(473), YM(275.55), YF(285.83) in the test frame '말 많다' ['ma:1 'ma:nta]. 2. Young and old generations showed a different tendency in the increase rate of duration between mono-syllables and polysyllables. In other words, the rhythm of young generation shows the tendency of syllable-timed language whereas that of old generation clearly leans towards the stressed-timed language.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.11
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• pp.2800-2812
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable-word boundary misalignment cost on word segmentation in Korean continuous speech. Previous studies have demonstrated the important role of syllabification in speech segmentation. The current study investigated whether the resyllabification process affects word recognition in Korean continuous speech. In Experiment I, under the misalignment condition, participants were presented with stimuli in which a word-final consonant became the onset of the next syllable. (e.g., /k/ in belsak ingan becomes the onset of the first syllable of ingan 'human'). In the alignment condition, they heard stimuli in which a word-final vowel was also the final segment of the syllable (e.g., /eo/ in heulmeo ingan is the end of both the syllable and word). The results showed that word recognition was faster and more accurate in the alignment condition. Experiment II aimed to confirm that the results of Experiment I were attributable to the resyllabification process, by comparing only the target words from each condition. The results of Experiment II supported the findings of Experiment I. Therefore, based on the current study, we confirmed that Korean, a syllable-timed language, has a misalignment cost of resyllabification.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.323-327
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• 1994

There have been three contrastive claims over the classification of Korean. To answer the classification question, timing variables which would determine the durations of syllable, word and foot were investigated with various words either in isolation or in sentence contexts using Soundcoup/16 on Macintosh P.C., and a total of 284 utterances, obtained from six Korean speakers, were used. It was found 1) that the durational pattern for words tended to maintain in utterances, regardless of position , subjects and dialects 2) that the syllable duration was determined both by the types of phoneme and by the number of phonemes, the word duration both by the syllable complexity and by the number of syllables, and the foot duration by the word complexity, 3) that there was a constractive relationship between foot length in syllables and foot duration and 4) that the foot duration varied generally with word complexity if the same word did not occur both in the first foot and in the second foot. On the basis of these, it was concluded that Korean is a word timed language where, all else being equal, including tempo, emphasis, etc., the inherent durational pattern for words tends to maintain in utterances. The main difference between stress timing, syllable timing and word timing were also discussed.