Relative distances among English front vowels produced by Korean and American speakers
Byunggon Yang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
This study examined the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers from an internet speech archive in order to provide better pronunciation skills for Korean English learners. The Euclidean distances in the vowel space of F1 and F2 were measured among the front vowel pairs. The first vowel pair [i-ɛ] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel with differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Second, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-ɪ] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [ɛ-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced the front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level.