초록 열기/닫기 버튼
It has been widely accepted that vowels before voiced stops are produced longer than the vowels before voiceless stops in English. Based on this fact, this research was to determine whether the English proficiency of Korean elementary school students would be related to the durational differences between the vowels before the voiced stops and the vowels before the voiceless stops. For analysis, K-SEC(2004) and Rated K-SEC(2017) were used in which 32 Korean elementary school students from Seoul and Gyeonggi province pronounced the target items. The chosen speakers in these speech corpus data were classified into one of the three different groups according to their English proficiency levels - Novice, Intermediate, or Advanced. From the findings, it was observed that the speakers in every proficiency group produced the vowels before the voiced stops longer than the vowels before the voiceless stops. However, it was hard to find the possible relation between the speakers’ English proficiency and the durational differences between the vowels before the word-final voiced stops to the vowels before the word-final voiceless stops. Based on these results, the researchers thus concluded that the effect of word-final stops’ voicing on the vowel lengths is not related to the proficiency of Korean leaners of English and for this reason, this suprasegmental feature cannot be a critical determinant to assess Koreans’ English proficiency.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
voiced stop, voiceless stop, coda, vowel length, English proficiency
