한국인 초등학생과 중.장년층의 영어 모음 발음 비교 분석

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing Korean adult and child learners' English pronunciation. In order to conduct this study, 5 Korean child learners, who started to learn English with sounds and have been studying English for 3 years or more, and 5 Korean adult learners over 50 years old, who started to learn English with letters and have been studying English for at least ten years, were selected as participants. English vowels used for the analysis by means of were /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /i/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʊ/ and /u/. We gave them pairs of stimuli letters and pictures. We measured and compared the formants and durations of vowels by child and adult learners. The results showed that child and adult learners distinguished vowel /ɑ/ from vowel /ɔ/ irrespective of the stimulus (pictures or letters). For /i/ and /ɪ/, adult learners distinguished them by duration, but child learners did not. Because of the lack of distinction between /ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/ in the Korean vowel system, both of the groups did not make differences between /ɛ/ and /æ/. Also they did not separate the distinctive English vowels /ʊ/ and /u/. According to this study, adult learners distinguished these vowels better than child learners. So we inferred that the long-term learning of English influenced the pronunciation of vowels produced by adult learners, though they started to learn English relatively late.