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KMID : 1022420130050040099
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Phonetics and Speech Sciences
2013 Volume.5 No. 4 p.99 ~ p.107
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A Comparative Study of Relative Distances among English Front Vowels Produced by Korean and American Speakers
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Yang Byung-Gon
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Abstract
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The purpose of this study is to examine the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47Korean and American speakers in order to better instruct pronunciation skills of English vowels for Korean English learners. A Praat script was developed to collect the first and second formant values(F1 and F2) of eight words in each sound file which was recorded from an internet speech archive. Then, the Euclidean distances were measured between the three vowel pairs: [i-?], [i-?], and [?-æ]. The first vowel pair [i-?] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel wih differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Secondly, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-?] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [?-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level. The author concluded that Korean speakers should produce the front high vowels distinctively by securing sufficient relative distance of the formant values. Further studies would be desirable to examine how strong the Korean speakers’ English proficiency correlate with the relative distance of target words of comparable productions.
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KEYWORD
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English vowels, formant values, vowel distance, Korean speakers, American speakers, proficiency level
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FullTexts / Linksout information
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