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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1443-1464
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 07 Nov 2022 Revised 18 Dec 2022 Accepted 30 Dec 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202212.1443

Production of Coda Obstruent Clusters by Korean and English Speakers: Acoustical and Dynamic Time Warping Analyses

Hyesun Cho
Associate Professor, Department of Education, Graduate School of Education, Dankook University hscho@dankook.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Coda obstruent clusters in English are known to be difficult for Korean learners of English to produce due to phonotactic differences between Korean and English syllables. In English, the coda obstruent clusters undergo reduction, so the medial consonant in CCC clusters is deleted by native speakers of English. In this study, coda obstruent clusters produced by Korean and English speakers are compared for their acoustic properties (center of gravity and intensity) and the similarity distance obtained by the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The CoG and intensity was overall lower in Korean speakers than in English speakers. The DTW similarity distance between the clusters produced by English speakers and those produced by Korean speakers was greater than the distance between the clusters produced by English speakers only. In addition, the DTW similarity distance between the clusters produced by English speakers and the error tokens by Korean speakers was greater than the distance between the clusters produced by English speakers and the non-error tokens by Korean speakers. The current study further employed the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifier for L1 and error detection using the DTW distance measures. The results showed that the DTW similarity distance was an adequate measure to capture the differences due to speakers’ L1 and error production.

Keywords:

coda obstruent clusters, dynamic time warping, intensity, center of gravity

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