The effect of word-final stops’ voicing on the vowel duration and its relation with Korean speakers' english proficiency

Abstract

It has been well known that the vowels preceding voiced stops are produced durationally longer than the vowels preceding voiceless stops in English. Based on this phonetic phenomenon, this research investigates to determine whether there is any relation between the Koreans' English proficiency and the difference in the ratio of the English vowel duration before the voiced stops to the English vowel duration before the voiceless stops. For analysis, the Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC, made in 2004) and the Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC, made in 2017) were utilized where the 32 Korean elementary school students from Seoul and Gyeonggi province articulated the target items such as bag/back and cab/cap. These speakers were categorized into one of the three different proficiency groups (Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice) according to their speaking ability. From the findings, native English speakers were found producing the vowels before the word-final voiced stops 1.421 times longer than the vowels before the word-final voiceless stops. Similarly, in the case of the Korean speakers, they produced the vowels before the word-final voiced stops longer than the vowels before the word-final voiceless stops. However, the study couldn't discover any possible relationship between their English proficiency and the ratio of the vowel duration before the word-final voiced stops to the vowel duration before the word-final voiceless stops in English (the ratio—Advanced: 1.275, Intermediate: 1.209 and Novice: 1.25).