초등학생 영어학습자 영어 어말 유음의 음향음성학적 분석

Analysis of the acoustics of English word-final liquids by Korean elementary school students

This study investigated the acoustic properties of English word-final liquids produced by Korean elementary school students(grades 4-6) collected from a spoken corpus. In doing so, the formant changes of the single codas /l/ and /r/ and the sequence of the liquids(/rl/) were analyzed. According to the literature, in word-final dark /l/, F2 decreases after a front vowel, but slightly increases after a back vowel. Meanwhile, in /r/, F3 decreases in the word-final position. In the present study, these patterns were observed as predicted among native English speakers, but to a lesser extent among Korean students. Korean speakers’ F2 of /l/ did not decrease after front vowels, and it did not increase after back vowels to the same extent as in the production of native speakers. In terms of formant criteria, although /l/ was slightly more accurate than /r/, the difference did not reach a statistically significant level according to the logistic regression results. The /rl/ sequence was the least accurate. The results revealed that Korean elementary school students produced the English word-final /l/ and /r/ differently from native speakers; therefore, they seemed to require early intervention to acquire accurate pronunciations of English liquids.