This study aims to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean discourse sentences, especially focusing the initial and final part of a sentence. 50 disourse sentences were read in two different styles; one, sentence by sentence, the other, continuous of all 50's. First, we tried to get two kinds of ratios from the acoustic results: first, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in first word in a sentence; second, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in last word in a sentence. We, then, calculated statistical values of the ratios including mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and p-values in t-test. With respect to duration, there were little difference between two different styles. If any, we could see tiny unharmonious durational aspect in the initial of continuous reading. More concisely, there could be observed some deviation from standard. In case of F0, there was prominent statistical difference between ratios of last words in two styles. This difference might play a role as a prosodic feature. Energy seems to show similar pattern with that of F0. The results showed that final syllable in last word was pronounced with about 85 % of initial syllable in the same context and the last words in continuous speech were strongly articulated compared with those of sentence by sentence reading.

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

The prosodic properties of Korean and English stress were examined with focus on syllable duration and pitch by loan words. 14 loan words were selected by the criteria of the numbers of syllables and stress positions. 3 Korean males using Seoul dialect and 3 American males using general American English served as subjects. Each tokens were uttered 3 times and second one was chosen to be analysed by CSL. We measured the duration and F0 of each syllable. In English, duration is the most salient acoustic correlates of stress, and pitch is the second. In Korean, by contrast, it seems that neither duration nor pitch is the acoustic features of stress, from our data

When we hear someone's voice, even without having met the person before, we usually make up a certain mental image of the person. This study aims at investigating the relationship between the voice and the image information carried within the voice. Does the mental picture created by the voice closely reflect the real image and if not, is it related with the real image at all\ulcorner To answer the first question, a perception experiment was carried out. Speech samples reading a short sentence from 8 males and 8 females were recorded and pictures of subjects were also taken. Ajou University students were asked to participate in the experiment to match the voice with the corresponding picture. Participants in the experiment correctly match 1 female voice and 4 male voices with their corresponding pictures. However, it is interesting to note that even in cases of mismatch, the results show that there is a very strong tendency. In other words, even though participants falsely match a certain voice with a certain picture, majority of them chose the same picture for the voice. It is the case for all mismatches. It seems that voice does give the listener a certain impression about physical characteristics even if it might not be always correct. By showing that there is a clear relationship between voice and image, this study provides a starting point for further research on voice characteristics: what characteristics of the voice carry the relevant information\ulcorner This kind of study will contribute toward the understanding of the affective domain of human voice and toward the speech technology.

The study on the intonational characteristics is concentrated on the lowering of the pitch level that is described as declination and downstep. The Taegu dialect, which has phonological accentual system, has these phonetic characteristics in affirmative sentences or Yes-No Question sentences. But there is the opposite phenomenon in WH question sentences in Taegu dialect. When the accent of interrogative word in the sentence intial position is LHL, intonation pattern shows a continuous upward movement, indicating that intonation pattern of Taegu dialect is influenced by not only grammatical system but also accentual system.

The writer discusses the necessity of clear distinction between transliteration and transcription. Romanization problems in Korea have been entangled for decades by confusing and mixing those two. For the transliteration of Hanngul a new system with the utmost simplicity and perfect convertibility is suggested here. For the transcription of Korean sounds another system is suggested which can transcribe even the chroneme as well as all the phonemes. So it surpasses the current Hanngul orthography. Korean sentences containing many pairs of homographic heteronyms are romanized in the two ways side by side for the contrasting of the two systems.

This research, based on the support for the existence of 'Clitic Group', proves the 'Clitic Cadence' as the solid evidence to the point that music underlies poetic rhythm in the words or poetic lines which, in turn, underly speech rhythm. Through the relation of stress-beat and clitic cadence to musical schema, such as measure, motive and period, the study clarifes the figurations of cliticization, sometimes procliticized and sometimes encliticized, even if the former appears more often than the latter. Above all, this research puts emphasis on the separate position of clitics not criticized but positioned in strong positions in music, Finally, it suggests some use of clitics to teachers and learners of English for stress-beating for rhythmization of English.

By analyses of lullabies, nursery rhymes, Christmas carols, and pop songs, the relevances of beat, syllable and note are set up as follows. (1) The relevance of beat to syllable a. A stressed syllable can occupy a strong beat. b. A monosyllabic word carrying a strong beat must have the syllabic structure of a strong syllable. (2) The note duration a. The duration of a note carrying a strong beat tends to be as long as or longer than that of a note carrying a weak beat. b. The note connected with the last position of phonological unit tends to be longer than that of other position without regard to the syllabic structure.

In this paper, articulatory simulator 'Artsim' is used as a tool for the experiments to examine the articulatory characteristics of 6 different vowels. Each vowels are defined by some articulatory points from their vocal tract area functions and shapes of tongues. Each points are varied systematically to synthesize vowels and the synthesized sound is evaluated by human listners. Finally distributions of each vowels within vowel space is obtained. From the experimental results it is verified that our articulatory simulator can be used effectively to investigate the articulatory characteristics of speech.

This study describes an algorithm for the F0 contour generation system for Korean sentences and its evaluation results. 400 K-ToBI labeled utterances were used which were read by one male and one female announcers. F0 contour generation system uses two classification trees for prediction of K-ToBI labels for input text and 11 regression trees for prediction of F0 values for the labels. Evaluation results of the system showed 77.2% prediction accuracy for prediction of IP boundaries and 72.0％ prediction accuracy for AP boundaries. Information of voicing and duration of the segments was not changed for F0 contour generation and its evaluation. Evaluation results showed 23.5Hz RMS error and 0.55 correlation coefficient in F0 generation experiment using labelling information from the original speech data.

This study intended to determine the most appropriate POS(Part of Speech) sets for predicting prosodic boundary strength efficiently. We used 3-level POB bets which Kim(1997), one of the authors, has devised. Three POS sets differ from each other according to how much grammatical information they have: the first set has maximal syntactic and morphological information which possibly affects prosodic phrasing, and the third set has minimal one. We hand-labelled 150 sentences using each of three POS sets and conducted perception test. Based on the results of the test, stochastic language modeling method was used to predict prosodic boundary strength. The results showed that the use of each POS set led to not too much different efficiency in the prediction, but the second set was a little more efficient than the other two. As far as the complexity in stochastic language modeling is concerned, however, the third set may be also preferable.

This is a pilot study on applying the Rise/Fall/connection(RFC) model to Korean intonation tot speech synthesis. RFC model contains successive intonation events, which can be pitch accents and intonation boundary tones. The intonation contour of RFC model is composed of piecewise linear curves of rise, fall, and connection elements, and each element can have any amplitude and duration. In this paper, elements of RFC model is slightly modified to accommodate the characteristics of Korean intonation. Subjective preference test was conducted to compare the modified RFC model with the original one. The results show that the intonation contour produced by the modified RFC model is perceptually indistinguishable from that of the original RFC model, while the former requires less number of labels than the latter.

Database segmented and labeled up to phoneme level plays an important role in phonetic research and speech engineering. However, it usually requires manual segmentation and labeling, which is time-consuming and may also lead to inconsistent consequences. Automatic segmentation and labeling can be introduced to solve these problems. In this paper, we investigate a method to improve the performance of automatic segmentation and labeling system, where Spectral Variation Function(SVF), modification of silence model, and use of energy variations in postprocessing stage are considered. In this paper, SVF is applied in three ways: (1) addition to feature parameters, (2) postprocessing of phoneme boundaries, (3) restricting the Viterbi path so that the resulting phoneme boundaries may be located in frames around SVF peaks. In the postprocessing stage, positions with greatest energy variation during transitional period between silence and other phonemes were used to modify boundaries. In order to evaluate the performance of the system, we used 452 phonetically balanced word(PBW) database for training phoneme models and phonetically balanced sentence(PBS) database for testing. According to our experiments, 83.1% (6.2% improved) and 95.8% (0.9% improved) of phoneme boundaries were within 20ms and 40ms of the manually segmented boundaries, respectively.

This study discusses Korean speech database that has been designed and constructed for common use, especially focusing on designing a list of words or sentences that covers various phonological environments. As the results, PBW(Phonetically Balanced words) and PBS(Phonetically Balanced Sentences) was selected from balanced text corpus using maximum entropy method. And, implemented workbench for spoken language data acquisition is presented in this paper. The workbench consists of grapheme to phoneme converter, utterance list selection module, speech data editing module, multi-layer labelling module, and phoneme context search module.