영어 연음에 관련된 음운현상 인지에 관한 연구

A Study on the Comprehension of Phonological Processes in English Connected Speech

This paper investigates how well Korean high school students comprehend English connected speech and what phonological processes in connected speech cause most problems of casual speech. To this end, 480 students in Incheon were tested with 20 sentences of casual speech. The phonological processes tested are reduction, assimilation, deletion, and resyllabification. The results show that students have a lot of difficulty in understanding connected speech: Out of 9,600 tokens the average percentage of correct answers was 24.3%. The most difficult phonological process is resyllabification which links a word final consonant and a word-initial vowel to fonn a new syllable. The most comprehensible process was the reduction of phrasal verbs with 'to' such as 'want to' or 'have to'. The level of comprehension is related to the rate of speech as well as to the English level of the students. This study suggests that words have to be presented in English classes not only individually hot also linked with other words. In teaching connected speech, the areas and degrees of difficulty found in this study should also be considered.