earticle

영어

In this study, we analyzed 60 Korean learners’ suprasegmental features from the OPIc speech data administered by the ACTFL committee. According to the evaluation method prescribed by the ACTFL committee, the data are classified into six grades from the lowest IL to the highest AL, and it is meaningful that they can examine the spontaneous speech of Korean learners. Pauses, speech rate and F0 range were analyzed using the Praat speech analysis program. Pause duration was measured by detecting the silent period over 250ms. The speech rate was calculated by dividing the time spent on speaking sentence by the syllable per sentence. The F0 range was measured as the pitch curve of the sentence. The result of the study can be derived as follow: Factors that differ among the six groups of different grades and that appear to have high influence on grading are the inter-sentential pause duration, intra-sentential pause duration, and speech rate. In other words, the higher the grade, the shorter the duration of the pauses and the faster the speech rate. There were no statistically significant differences between the grades in the intra-sentential pause frequency and the F0 range.