This study investigates rhythmic structures in the utterances composed of only content words. Content words are potentially accentable in utterance, and English necessitates a rhythmic alternation between strong and weak beats. What will happen if only content words are sequenced and they are all one-syllable words? A phonetic experiment was conducted to see if a rhythmic pattern is still produced in content word utterances and how it is manifested along the intonational contours. Results showed that merely 7% of the utterances were produced with every content word accented. Most utterances were rhythmically produced with every two (38%) or three (26%) words accented, and the other patterns such as a H* and L* alternation, two H*’s intervened with L-, and consecutive downstepped H*’s were interpreted as conforming the tonal rhythm [J.-K. Lee and S. Kang, Korean J. Speech Sci., 10(2), 303–317 (2003)]. In two-syllable content word utterances, the patterns where two words were unaccented suggest that strong and weak rhythmic beats should be counted with the number of words rather than syllables at the level of utterance. It is proposed that it is an accentual foot as opposed to a lexical foot at the level of lexical word.

No abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic realizations of English unstressed vowels produced by advanced Korean learners (KLs) of English compared with English native speakers (NSs) focusing on the comparative study of English words and English loanwords. The result shows that KLs are usually not native-like in producing the English unstressed vowel /ə/ and loanword orthography affects the way the KLs produce /ə/. The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the KLs is different from that of the NSs. In duration and pitch, KLs show significantly less difference between the stressed and unstressed vowels than do the NSs. The KLs usually have a high pitch in the stressed and the last syllable while the NSs usually produce peak F0 in the stressed syllable. When the KLs have a similar vowel quality with that of the NSs, they produce a shorter duration of the unstressed vowels. However, there is no correlation between the realization of the pitch and the vowel quality in KLs speech.

No abstract

No abstract