The Chinese and English Instructor, compiled by T‘ong Ting-kü and published in Canton in 1862, is an English teaching material that utilized many newly-created Chinese characters to phonetically express the pronunciations of English words which were difficult to express with pre-existing Cantonese sounds. These characters featured an existing glyph and a pseudo radical ‘mouth’ 口, such as, 呷, composed of 甲 and 口. The explanatory notes at the beginning of this book listed many such characters. This study investigates the phonological effects of the addition of this component, focusing on the newly-created characters with the mid front unrounded vowel /e/ as their main vowel. The results showed that the values of certain parts of the syllable changed by regularly adding the pseudo radical ‘mouth’ to the existing glyph. It was observed that besides the vowel shift occurring in the main vowel in almost all groups, tone alternation occurred in most groups as well.

Yi, So Young. 2017. “Social and stylistic variation in vowel raising in Seoul Korean”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(3). 165~197. The purpose of this study is to examine extralinguistic factors that influence vowel raising of /o/ in constituent-final -ko and -to in Seoul Korean, focusing mainly on the influence of social variations and stylistic variations on this phenomenon. The Sociolinguistic interview data showed that older speakers used the most raised variant of /o/ in the AP-medial position, which is evidence for age-grading for the following reasons: (i) the linguistic marketplace, which is an important concept in age-grading, supports this idea because older people use the non-standard form of /o/, which is the raised variant, after they leave the workforce, and (ii) the unraised variant does not push out the raised variant, but rather, they co-exist. In addition, stylistic variations related to the formality of the speech setting and the solidarity between interactants affect the vowel, leading to vowel raising (i) in casual speech situation and (ii) in interaction with an addressee with whom the speaker is intimate; these trends are especially salient for younger speakers.

This study investigated the production patterns of vowel epenthesis/deletion in Korean learners’ English contrasts of /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/ and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/ in word-final position, where such errors are frequently observed among the learners. Through a production experiment of 20 pairs of English words contrastive in word-final vowel, a total of 800 tokens were obtained from 20 Korean learners of English of high and low proficiency levels. The results revealed that the learners exhibited phonological processes of vowel epenthesis or deletion and that multiple factors such as voicing of a preceding consonant, frequencies of target words and learners’ proficiency in target language were involved. Voicing of a final palato-alveolar affricate played an important role in vowel epenthesis. With regard to vowel deletion, learners with low proficiency levels showed the influence of voicing of a palato-alveolar affricate by deleting the vowel /i/ more frequently after the voiceless /ʧ/ than after the voiced /ʤ/. Overall, the vowel epenthesis error seems to be motivated by L1 phonology while vowel deletion error was influenced by word frequencies. Further acoustic analysis revealed that higher-level learners’ epenthetic vowels, when compared to lexical vowels, exhibited significant differences with regard to vowel ratio and F1 while the low-level learners’ did not.

Mental fatigue is inevitable in the workplace. Since mental fatigue can lead to decreased efficiency and critical accidents, it is important to manage mental fatigue from the viewpoint of accident prevention. An experiment was performed to evaluate mental fatigue using the formant frequency analysis of human voices. The experimental task was to mentally add or subtract two one-digit numbers. After completing the tasks with four different levels of mental fatigue, subjects were asked to read Korean vowels and their voices were recorded. Five vowel sounds of “아”, “어”, “오”, “우”, and “이” from the voice recorded were then used to extract formant 1 frequency. Results of separate ANOVAs showed significant main effects of mental fatigue on formant 1 frequencies of all five vowels concerned. However, post-hoc comparisons revealed that formant 1 frequencies of “아” and “어” were most sensitive to mental fatigue level employed in this experiment. Formant 1 frequencies of “아” and “어” significantly decrease as the mental fatigue accumulates. The formant frequency extracted from human voice would be potentially applicable for detecting mental fatigue induced during industrial tasks.

이 연구의 목적은 아프가니스탄 초등학생을 대상으로 한국어의 단모음 오류 양상 살펴보는 데 있다. 이를 위해 한국어의 단모음을 음절의 위치에 따라 어두형, 어중형, 어말형으로 총 42문항의 어휘 목록을 작성해 청취 실험을 하였다. 오류의 양상은 다음과 같다. 첫째, 한국어의 단모음 /ㅓ/를 /o/로 대치하는 오류를 보였다. 둘째, 한국어 단모음 /ㅜ/를 /o/로 대치하는 오류를 보였는데, 이는 한국어의 단모음 /ㅜ/를 다리어의 /ʊ/나 /o/로 인식하고 있다고 분석하였다. 특이점은 다리어에 없는 한국어의 단 모음 /ɯ/에 대한 오류율이 낮았다는 점이다. 이 연구를 통해 아프가니스탄 인 한국어 학습자들이 어려움을 겪는 한국어 단모음의 오류 양상을 분석하 여 그 특성을 밝힌 것에 의의가 있다고 할 수 있다.

Though the importance of spectral characteristics of Korean vowels in the hVd syllable has been recognized in the literature, it has never been studied whether static spectral measurements at a (steady-state) central section are enough to characterize Korean vowels in spontaneous speech, or dynamic spectral measurements across the temporal dimension can better characterize vowels. Despite ample reported evidence of the perceptual influence of non-spectral cues on spectral properties of vowels in the literature, no reports have yet been released on the difference in the degree of the perceptual influence of non-spectral cues (e.g., place and manner of the preceding or following phones, F0, speaking rate, prosody, and gender) on spectral properties of vowels. Through Neural Network pattern recognition modeling in a supervised mode, it was found that dynamic spectral models with non-spectral cues better explain vowel perception than static spectral models and furthermore, flanking phone identities, and manner and place of flanking phones are perceptually the most influential while duration, F0 and speaking rate are perceptually far less contributive than argued in the literature.