The purposes of this study are (1) to figure out phonetic characteristics of Mongolian, Chinese, and Korean stops by conducting acoustical analyses of them; (2) to examine how Mongolian and Chinese speakers’ production of Korean stops is different fro ...
The purposes of this study are (1) to figure out phonetic characteristics of Mongolian, Chinese, and Korean stops by conducting acoustical analyses of them; (2) to examine how Mongolian and Chinese speakers’ production of Korean stops is different from Korean speakers’ one; (3) to investigate which of the Korean stops is problematic to Mongolian and Chinese people when they perceive them; (4) to justify the effectiveness of the method of teaching pronunciation that focuses on the different values of pitches in Korean stops. First of all, we should notice that Mongolian stops are controversial in that they are either classified into voiced and voiceless stops or aspirated and plain stops. What we found through the experiment was that Mongolian stops were not realized as voiced sounds in any environments, such as syllable-initial position, syllable-final position, and even intervocalic position. Moreover, when voiceless stops were placed intervocalically, the preceding vowel underwent devoicing process. On the basis of these findings, it was claimed that Mongolian stops should be classified into aspirated stops and plain stops rather than voiced and voiceless stops. In addition, the devoiced vowels before aspirated stops in intervocalic position could be explained by spreading the feature of aspirated stops into the preceding vowel. For the study of second language production, we first need to compare Korean phonemes with Mongolian and Chinese ones. It is found that Mongolian and Chinese do not have tense consonants. Thus, we can predict that both Mongolian and Chinese people have some difficulty in perceiving and producing tense consonants. In the perception test, both Chinese and Mongolian subjects failed to identify plain and aspirated sounds, which is different from what we expected. This finding showed that they were likely to identify plain sounds as aspirated ones, and vice versa. Comparing the Chinese and Mongolian subjects, it was found that the Mongolian subjects showed a poorer performance in identifying plain and aspirated sounds than the Chinese subjects. According to production experiment, Korean speakers produced aspirated stops with a higher pitch than plain stops, but there was little difference in pitch between aspirated and plain sounds produced by Mongolian and Chinese speakers. In the word-medial position, while Korean speakers pronounced aspirated sounds with longer closure duration (CD) and plain stops with shorter CD, Mongolian and Chinese speakers did not produce aspirated and plain sounds distinctively in that the CD in plain stops was not significantly different from the one in aspirated stops. In addition, the measured pitch in the word-medial position also confirms that Mongolian and Chinese speakers failed to distinguish aspirated stops from plain stops because there was no significant difference in their pitch values. Given the fact that pitch was the most significant factor in discriminating Korean stops, we divided Mongolian and Chinese learners of Korean into two different groups. For example, one group was taught the pronunciation of Korean stops, focusing on the difference of pitch in Korean stops. The other group was taught the pronunciation of them by employing audio-lingual method of teaching pronunciation. The results of the experiment confirmed that the former teaching method is much more effective than the latter in improving the learners’ pronunciation of Korean stops.