Duration of English Function Words Produced by Korean EFL Students

This paper investigates whether there is a temporal difference in function word pronunciation of Korean EFL learners as compared to that of native speakers. A new measure, named RCFsyl, is proposed to take the effect of speech rate normalization. Two experiments are conducted: first, proficiency balanced hand-labeled data are examined to check the difference among the four different speaker groups. Then, automatic measurement on a large set of data is attempted to show that the new measure fits practical application. Results confirm that function words are more prolonged as speakers’ proficiency lowered. The proposed measure is found to be useful for capturing temporal characteristics of words.