Production of English tense and lax vowels by young speakers of Korean dialects

Abstract

This study attempts to examine whether there is any difference in the acoustic properties of English tense and lax vowels by young speakers of Korean regional dialect speakers. A production test is developed to analyze acoustic manifestations of four phonetic parameters (F1, F2, vowel duration, and vowel distance) in English speech of Kyunggi Korean (KK) and North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) dialect speakers. The 184 collected data for the production test consisting of high vowels /i, ɪ, u, ʊ/ in CVC structure are taken from 20 female elementary school students (10 for each dialect group). The result shows no significant difference between two regional dialects, which indicates similar features of acoustic properties are uttered by both groups. However, despite this similarity between two groups, results from comparative analysis with native speakers show that NKK uses less vowel space from the calculated acoustic distance (Euclidean distance). Therefore, it can be argued that discrepancy in overall acoustic properties between young NKK and KK is insignificant but still distinguishing acoustic space of vowel would be harder for NKK. Based on these findings pedagogical implication for effective articulation training has been suggested.