A corpus-based analysis of English segments produced by Korean learners

This study investigated English segments produced by Korean learners using a large speech corpus. The study focused on capturing only the most noticeable segmental variations produced by learners and that were not found in smaller-scale studies. Analysis of the Korean learners' most noticeable variation patterns was performed by introducing a method of comparing the variation matrices of both Korean learners and native speakers. This comparison, based on manual transcriptions of a large speech corpus of learners and the TIMIT corpus transcriptions, was made to examine the properties of the learners' segmental production of English. The results demonstrated that Korean learners showed patterns of segmental variation that differed from those of native speakers; the learners were greatly influenced by orthography for vowels, while they tended to be influenced by their native language for consonants. These results illustrate the usefulness of our method in capturing the most noticeable variations of learners that differentiate them from native speakers.