Redefining Lingua Franca Core for Korean Learners of English

Chung Hyunsong 한국음성학회 2010 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.2 No.4

Jenkins (2000, 2007) suggested lingua franca core (LFC) of English as an international language (EIL) context. According to her, intelligibility of English pronunciation of L2 English speakers and English learners is more important than pronunciation accuracy in English communication. Her suggestion has been widely accepted in Korean classroom situations, so the systematic teaching of English pronunciation has been rarely emphasized. In this paper it is argued that the LFC of English is widely misinterpreted in Korea while some of her suggestions themselves are also misleading. This paper tries to redefine Jenkins' LFC and provide suggestions for teaching LFC in Korea.

Sums-of-Pruducts Models for Korean Segment Duration Prediction

Chung, Hyunsong 한국음성과학회 2003 음성과학 Vol.10 No.4

Sums-of-Products models were built for segment duration prediction of spoken Korean. An experiment for the modelling was carried out to apply the results to Korean text-to-speech synthesis systems. 670 read sentences were analyzed, trained and tested for the construction of the duration models. Traditional sequential rule systems were extended to simple additive. multiplicative and additive-multiplicative models based on Sums-of-Products modelling. The parameters used in the modelling include the properties of the target segment and its neighbors and the target segment's position in the prosodic structure. Two optimisation strategies were used: the downhill simplex method and the simulated annealing method. The performance of the models was measured by the correlation coefficient and the root mean squared prediction error (RMSE) between actual and predicted duration in the test data. The best performance was obtained when the data was trained and tested by "additive-multiplicative models." The correlation for the vowel duration prediction was 0.69 and the RMSE, 31.80 ms, while the correlation for the consonant duration prediction was 0.54 and the RMSE, 29.02 ms. The results were not good enough to be applied to the real-time text-to-speech systems. Further investigation of feature interactions is required for the better performance of the Sums-of-Products models.

한국인 영어학습자의 영어리듬구현 연구

정현성(Chung Hyunsong) 한국음성학회 2009 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.1 No.2

한국인 영어 학습자의 발음 정확성 자동 측정 방법에 대한 연구

정현성(Chung Hyunsong),장태엽(Jang Tae-yeoub),윤원희(Yun Weonhee) 한국영어교과교육학회 2006 영어교과교육 Vol.5 No.1

  The purpose of this research is to develop a device that can automatically measure pronunciation accuracy of English speech produced by Korean learners of English. Pronunciation accuracy will be measured mainly in two areas; suprasegmental and segmental areas. In suprasegmental area, intonation and word stress of Korean English learners will be traced and compared with those of native speakers by way of statistical methods using tilt parameters. Durations of phones are also examined to measure speakers" fluency of their pronunciations. In doing so, statistical duration modelling from a large speech database using CART will be used. For segmental measurement of pronunciation accuracy, acoustic probability of a phone, which is a byproduct of the forced alignment, will be a basis of scoring the accuracy. The final score will be a feedback to the learners to improve their pronunciation.

한국인 영어 학습자의 발음 정확성 자동 측정방법에 대한 연구

정현성 ( Hyunsong Chung ),장태엽 ( Tae Yeoub Jang ),윤원희 ( Weonhee Yun ),윤일승 ( Ilsung Yun ),사재진 ( Jaejin Sa ) 한국외국어대학교 언어연구소 2008 언어와 언어학 Vol.0 No.42

This paper presents a method of automatically assessing non-native speech produced by Korean learners of English. After an input utterance is processed by an automatic aligner to produce information on phoneme and word boundaries, the key modules are designed to output separate scores in each level of segmentals and prosody. For segmental evaluation, the HMM log likelihood scoring method has been adopted to properly compare input speech with native pronunciation. For prosodic scoring, rhythm metrics are employed to capture the rhythm characteristics of the learners`` native language that are expected to remain in their English utterances. The results of correlation analyses between the automatic scores and human raters`` scores suggest that the proposed method can be further applied to enhance performance of pronunciation self-education tools for EFL learners.

직장 어린이집 영어 커리큘럼에 나타난 매체 활용 및 유아 음성 언어 분석

정현성(Chung, Hyunsong) 학습자중심교과교육학회 2016 학습자중심교과교육연구 Vol.16 No.10

본 연구는 어린이집 커리큘럼 영어 교육 프로그램의 개선 및 발전을 위해 2013년부터 2015년까지 3년 간 한 민간 직장 어린이집에서 개발하고 진행한 영어 교육 프로그램의 매체 활용 및 유아의 음성 언어를 분석한 논문이다. 매체 분석을 통해 활동 중 교사의 개입을 최소화할 수 있는 노력이 필요하고, 키워드로 동사를 자주 노출시켜줄 필요가 있음이 드러났다. 수에 대한 치밀한 활동 개발도 필요하다. 유아의 음성언어 분석을 통해서는 유아들의 외래어 발음이 화석화되지 않도록 노력할 필요가 있는 것으로 분석되었다. 도서 활동 평가 영상 분석을 통해 합창 반복의 필요성과 유아가 발화할 때까지 기다려주는 교사의 인내, 매체에 대한 교사의 신뢰가 필요함을 알수 있었다. In this research, we analyzed the use of media and the spoken language of children in an English curriculum of a private nursery school. The research was based on the three-year long longitudinal observation on the classroom activities and the evaluation which were conducted between 2013 and 2015. It was revealed in the analysis of the use of media that teachers’ interference should be minimized while the media is used during the classroom activities. Verbs should be exposed extensively to the children in the form of keyword presentation. More sophisticated activities should be given to the children to improve their ability in understanding and speaking numbers. In the analysis of the spoken language of the children, it was found out that more efforts are required to prevent the fossilization of children’s loanword pronunciation.

타언어 화자와의 담화 상에 나타난 한국인 영어 학습자의 리듬

정현성(Chung, Hyunsong) 한국음성학회 2013 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.5 No.3

This study investigated the rhythmic accommodation of Korean English learners’ interlanguage talk. Twelve Korean speakers, 6 native English speakers and 6 non-native English speakers in London participated in multiple conversations on different topics which produced 36 conversational data in interlanguage talk (ILT) settings. 190 utterances from the 36 conversational data were analyzed to investigate the rhythmic patterns of Korean English learners when they communicated with English speakers with different language backgrounds. Save for the final-syllable, the normalized duration of consecutive syllables was compared in order to derive a variability index (VI). It was found that there was no significant variability in the measurement of the syllable-to-syllable duration for the utterances of Korean English learners, regardless of their interlocutor’s language background. Conversely, it was found that there was evidence that Korean English learners showed rhythmic accommodation in ILT when they conversed with non-native English speakers. The speaking rate became significantly slower when Korean English learners talked to non-native English speakers, than when they talked to other Korean English learners. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between speaking rate and the VI in the utterances of Korean English learners in ILT.

아시아 상황의 영어 공통어 자질 연구

정현성(Chung, Hyunsong),이상기(Lee, Sang-Ki),김윤규(Kim, Yoon-Kyu) 한국음성학회 2016 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.8 No.2

This paper investigated the rhythmic features of speakers of English as a lingua franca in Asian contexts. A speech corpus of 150 conversations between speakers of English in Asia with different L1 backgrounds was collected and %V, ΔV, VarcoV, and nPVI-V of each speaker were analyzed. It was found that L1 difference of the speakers and the speakers’ daily use of English influenced %V, while the speakers’ daily use of English influenced ΔV. The gender difference of the speakers also affected the rhythm of the utterances in VarcoV. A weak correlation between the two speakers’ rhythm in each conversation was also found in %V and ΔV. No significant effects were found in nPVI-V. The results revealed that the speakers tended to accommodate the rhythm of their utterance to that of the interlocutors’. Further study on the speaking rate of the speakers is required to overcome some inconsistencies found in the results of the rhythmic metrics used in this study.

The Effect of Audio and Visual Cues on Korean and Japanese EFL Learners' Perception of English Liquids

정현성(Hyunsong Chung) 한국영어어문교육학회 2005 영어어문교육 Vol.11 No.2

This paper investigated the effect of audio and visual cues on Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the lateral/retroflex contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. Korean listeners showed much better identification rates of the /l/-/r/ contrast than Japanese listeners when presented in audio or audio-visual conditions.

Modelling Duration In Text-to-Speech Systems

정현성,Chung Hyunsong The Korean Society Of Phonetic Sciences And Speech 2004 말소리 Vol.49 No.-

The development of the durational component of prosody modelling was overviewed and discussed in text-to-speech conversion of spoken English and Korean, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The possibility of integrating linguistic feature effects into the duration modelling of TTS systems was also investigated. This paper claims that current approaches to language timing synthesis still require an understanding of how segmental duration is affected by context. Three modelling approaches were discussed: sequential rule systems, Classification and Regression Tree (CART) models and Sums-of-Products (SoP) models. The CART and SoP models show good performance results in predicting segment duration in English, while it is not the case in the SoP modelling of spoken Korean.