Lee Sin-sook

This paper investigated whether L2 learners’ pronunciation difficulties were related to their perceptual deficiency of the target sounds, by conducting experiments on 29 Korean learners’ acquisition of English word stress. It was shown that overall the correct percentage of perception (76.83%) was significantly higher than that of production (55.93%). However, there was no correlation between perception and production, which suggests that second (or foreign) language learners’ good perception ab

Lee, Shinsook and Cho, Mi-Hui. 2006. A Positional Effect in the Perception of English Anterior Obstruents. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 6-4, 849-867. This paper investigated a positional effect in the perception of English anterior obstruents by 40 Korean EFL learners, through an experiment in which nonword target consonants occurred in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, final coda position, intervocalic position before a stressed vowel, and intervocali

This study explored the perception and production of English voiceless fricatives among advanced Korean EFL learners by conducting on-line experiments. Thirty two college students who had overall high English proficiency participated in the experiments and nonce words beginning with one of the voiceless fricatives /f/, /th/, /s/, and /š/ were used in the experiments. In particular, 48 pairs of English nonce words, 24 identical (e.g., findert-findert, thomber-thomber) and non-identical pairs (e.g

This paper investigated Korean learners’ acquisition of English stress in morphologically derived words in order to find out whether the learners acquire English word stress as a lexical phenomenon or as a rule-governed phenomenon and whether they benefit from training on the English stress system. For that purpose, 29 university students’ perception and production of primary stress in 32 real and 32 nonce words were examined. The results seemed to indicate that the learners learn stress placeme

This paper investigates the acoustic properties of English stressed and unstressed vowels by conducting production experiments, in which Korean, Japanese, and English speakers were asked to concatenate base words and their matching suffixes (e.g., úniform + ity--> ùnifórmity). Specifically, the ratios of stressed to unstressed vowels were measured for duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity. The results showed that language backgrounds of the participants played an important role with res

This paper examines the relationship between perception and production of English consonant clusters by Korean learners of English in order to investigate whether L2 learners' (or foreign language learners') pronunciation abilities lag behind their perceptual abilities or whether their pronunciation difficulties are closely related to their perceptional defect of the target sounds. Overall, the results of the experiment have shown that the correct percentage of production (62%) was a little bi

Lee, Shinsook, Joh, Jeongsoon, Lim, Injae, & Ko, Hyunsook. 2011. The Production of English Sounds by Early Learners with Different English Learning Experience. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 36-1, 215-241. This study investigated the production of English stop and fricative sounds by conducting on-line experiments on three groups of Korean children with different English-learning experience. More specifically, to examine the effect of different L2 experience on L2 sound production, 23 Korean EFL

This paper explores whether Korean EFL listeners' perception of English vowels and their English vowel category development can be estimated from cross-language labelling between English and Korean. The paper also investigates whether cross-language labelling makes different predictions for General American English (GAE) vowels and British English (Received Pronunciation, RP) vowels, given that vowel category variation exists between the two accents. Thirty-six university students in Seoul compl

Lee, Shinsook. 2011. The Perceptual Interaction between Schwa Deletion and English Phonotactic Constraints. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 36-3, 699-733. This study explored the perceptual interaction between schwa deletion and English phonotactic constraints by conducting syllable-count experiments on native English speakers and Korean and Japanese learners of English, using English nonce word stimuli. The results of both response accuracy and latency showed that English speakers were abel to d

This paper investigated whether compensation for phonological assimilation is brought on by language-specific mechanisms. To this end, this paper tested Korean obstruent nasalization, which exists in Korean, and English obstruent nasalization, which does not occur in English, by Korean speakers of English and English native speakers, using a word detection task. Overall, it has been shown that compensation for phonological variation is induced by language-specific mechanisms. This is because Kor

The study examined the impact of connected speech process teaching on Korean EFL learners’ listening comprehension based on a communicative framework. For such purpose, the study tested 31 Korean EFL learners’ and 15 native English speakers’ listening comprehension of connected speech processes of linking, vowel reduction/deletion, modal verb/not contraction, h deletion, and place assimilation. Specifically, the participants filled in the blanks after listening to the sentences containing the ta

This study investigated early Korean L2/EFL learners’ perception of English fricative sounds in order to find out whether learners’ different L2 experience influenced the way fricatives were perceived. For this purpose, three groups of children with different L2 experience took part in the study: 20 Korean EFL students, 21 bilingual returnees currently enrolled in an English-immersion program and 19 English-dominant bilinguals residing in the U.S. Their mean age was 9. They took a discrimination

The study examines whether Korean EFL listeners’ identification of English vowels might vary according to the listeners’ different levels of experience with two English regional dialects (General American English [GAE], Standard Southern British English [SSBE]) and also by talker variation (native English talkers, native Korean talkers, i.e., Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB)-talker effects). An English vowel identification test was administered to native Korean listeners, in w

This paper investigated task and stimulus effects by conducting four experiments on Korean EFL learners’ perception of English word-final consonant clusters. Specifically, task effects were examined in terms of choice options (forced-choice vs. multiple-choice) and input forms (auditory form vs. written form). The paper also investigated stimulus effects by examining tri-consonantal clusters as well as bi-consonantal clusters differing in terms of manner of articulation. The overall results show

This study examined the impact of sonority profiles, positional differences and L2 proficiency on Korean EFL learners’ perception of English biconsonantal clusters, using nonce words. The overall results showed that major predictions of the sonority-based typological markedness on consonant clusters were supported, as obstruent plus sonorant and sonorant plus obstruent sequences were better perceived than obstruent only or sonorant only sequences. Yet, some consonant clusters did not show a pref