한국대학생의 영어 비강세모음 Schwa 발음 연구

Abstract

Schwa, the unstressed vowel of English, has been heavily studied in the fields of phonetics and phonology under a variety of theoretical frameworks, as well as in the field of language acquisition. This vowel is naturally produced most often among the English vowels by its native speakers since English is a stress-timed language with alternating stressed full vowels and unstressed reduced vowels. Although the vowel is most often spoken and heard in English, it is difficult to recognize and acquire its proper phonetic characteristics, especially for non-native speakers of English such as native Korean speakers. Korean is a syllable-timed language in which all the vowels are clearly pronounced. This paper investigates how this vowel is spoken by Korean college students and discusses crucial differences in acoustic characteristics of spoken schwa between native speakers of English and those of Korean. (Soongsil University)