Starting as a poet, I learned about the sounds of words with David Abercrombie. Then, remembering my background in physics, I moved to studying acoustic phonetics and speech synthesis. From there I learned about psychology and how. to test perceptual theories. A meeting with a physiologist led to work on the use of the respiratory muscles in speech. Later I landed in Africa teaching English phonetics and learning about African languages. When I went to UCLA to set up a lab I was able to find bright students who helped make computer models of the vocal tract and taught me linguistic theory. And I was able to continue wandering around the world, describing the sounds of a wide range of languages.

It has been claimed that Korean mid-vocalic voiceless unaspirated lax stops are phonetically realized with voicing throughout the oral closure phase. Acoustic measurements were undertaken to examine the claim with four Korean native speakers using /$V_1CV_2$/ words where the vowel ($V_1\;=\;V_2$) was /i, a, u/ and the C was voiceless unaspirated lax stops /p, t, k/. Findings: (1) During mid-vocalic stops /k/ and /p/ the vowel /u/ was accompanied generally by a significant increase in voice cessation time as percentage of the oral closure interval (PCT) than the vowel /a/, regardless of subjects, whereas in mid-vocalic alveolar stop /t/ the effects of vowels on PCT were subject-dependent, (2) The effects of vowels on PCT were significantly greater in mid-vocalic /k/ than /p/, regardless of subjects, (3) The mean PCT, averaged across six tokens, ranged from 17% to100%, giving overall mean 61% in which the standard deviation was ${\pm}30$, and (4) Overall % of the total of mid-vocalic unaspirated lax stops were produced with a substantial period of devocing and voicing lag. Considering these results, it is difficult to agree with the existing claims that Korean voiceless unaspirated lax stops are phonetically realized with voicing throughout the oral closure phase. Other phonetic variables, including the durations of pre/post-stop vowels, voice onset time, voice cessation time, and the duration of oral closure, were measured.

This study is concerned with articulatory and acoustic experiments about the change of the stop /t/ into its counterpart affricate before derivational and inflectional suffixes beginning with /(h)i/. The present phonetic results show that the stop consonant is articulatorily and acoustically completely neutralized into the underlying plain affricate. Thus this study provides another instance of complete neutralization of manner of articulation in Korean in addition to Kim and Jongman (1996).

This paper aims to acoustically analyze the merger of back vowels in North Korean dialects which I believe, are here investigated for the first time since 1945. North Korean back vowels are distinctive from South Korean back vowels because they merge mainly on the back vowel space, while front vowels merge mainly in Seoul standard language and other South Korean dialects. In this paper the future of the vowel systems caused by the merger of the vowels in Korean dialects will also be investigated. North Korean dialects examined include dialects of the Pyungan, the Hamkyung, and the Hwanghae Provinces. North Korean back vowels are distinctive from South Korean back vowels because they merge mainly on the back vowel space, while front vowels merge mainly in Seoul standard language and other South Korean dialects.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an English prosody training system using PC for Korean learners of English. The program is called Intonation Training Tool (ITT). It operates on DOS 5.0. The hardware for this program requires over IBM PC 386 with 4 MBytes main memory, SVGA (1 MByte or more) for graphic, soundblaster 16 and over 14 inch monitor size. The ITT program operates this way: the learners can listen as well as see the English teacher's stress and intonation patterns on the monitor. The learner practices the same patterns with a microphone. This program facilitates the learner's stress and intonation patterns to overlap the teacher's patterns. The learner can find his/her stress and intonation errors and correct these independently. This program is expected to be a highly efficient learning tool for Korean learners of English in their English prosody training in the English class without the aid of a native English speaker in the classroom.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phonetic characteristics of the 'focus' phrases associated with the particle '-man' in Korean. The particle '-man' is a bound morpheme which, like other postpositions such as the subject marker '-ka' and the object marker '-lil', the so-called 'case markers' in Korean, typically attaches to a noun (phrase). The semantics of '-man' roughly corresponds to that of only, its counterpart in English, and is thus classified as a 'delimiter' (Yang 1973). It is assumed in this paper that '-man', like only in English, should have a 'focus' associated with it (von Stechow 1991, Rooth 1992). In general, '-man' attached phrases get the focus, but sometimes the association is not clear-cut, especially in the cases of emphatic use of '-man' or when the context strongly favors other phrase as the focus (Choe 1996). In this paper, we compare the phonetic characteristics of the '-man' marked phrases with those to which '-ka'/'-lil' is attached, and conclude that the focused '-man' phrases show higher fundamental frequencies than their equally focused 'case' -marked counterparts. However, when the context clearly forces the focus to fall on phrases other than the '-man' or '-ka'/'-lil' attached ones, there is no meaningful difference in fundamental frequency between the '-man' and '-ka'/'-lil' attached phrases. We also compare the phonetic characteristics of the regular use of '-man' with those of the emphatic '-man'. According to our experiments, the emphatic '-man' does not bring forth its phonetic effects, namely, higher fundamental frequencies, on the' -man' attached words or phrases but rather in various other ways such as higher fundamental frequencies in '-man', lengthening of the following word-initial syllable, or the inclusion of the following word in the same accentual phrase. Finally, it is claimed that '-man' associated focus phenomena, especially the emphatic use of '-man', show some typical acoustic characteristics of the other well-known focus phenomena, namely, wh-interrogatives.

This study deals with a general review of $Gar\acute{i}funa$ and Patois, creole languages which developed out of the sociohistorical situation of the last centuries and are mainly spoken in the West Indies and Carribean Coasts. In this paper, I present some notes and ideas on the linguistic developments and features of these languages. Especially I describe their function connected with a variety of social circumstances and their phonetical/phonological changes from the base languages. This is a result of fieldwork conducted in Honduras, Belize, Cuba and Mexico, from January 1996 to February 1998, using some surveys and collecting words from different materials and texts. And I hope this paper will contribute to research in 'mixed' languages as well as to historical linguists. I am very grateful to Mr. Mauricio $Tom\acute{a}s$, the only uriversity student in $Traves\acute{i}a$, a small town in nothern Honduras and to Mr. Carlos Marcos, a medical student who is from a Haitian family in Santiago de Cuba. Without their cooperation, I couldn't have conducted this research.

A study of boundary tones, which are realized at the final syllable of an Intonational Phrase, is important in that sentential meaning is often differentiated solely by the use of different boundary tones in Korean. The purposes of this paper are three-fold: Firstly, it aims at finding out the different characteristics of boundary tones between designed corpus and natural speech. Secondly, it is to show that gender and dialectal differences are crucial factors in determining different realizations of boundary tones. Finally, this study is to provide a basis for better speech synthesis and speech recognition through the analysis of the morphemes where boundary tones are realized. This study has shown that nine different kinds of boundary tones are realized based on the contextual, gender and dialectal differences. In addition to the boundary tones suggested in Jun (1993), three more boundary toes are introduced: L-%,H-%,LHLH%.

This study was done to investigate the English front vowels /e/ and /${\ae}$/. These vowels are difficult for Koreans to discern and pronounce. So they show a foreign accent in pronouncing them. In order to find out the reason for Koreans' foreign accent, experiments are carried out with the help of acoustic instruments. The results of the experiment show that there is a considerable difference, especially in vowel length, between the way Korean and Americans pronounce the two English vowels, /e/ and /${\ae}$/. When Americans pronounced English front vowel /e/ and /${\ae}$/ there was a big difference in vowel length between the two vowels. But for Koreans there was only a little difference between two vowels and as a result Koreans showed a foreign accent when they spoke these two English front vowels. Therefore we need to consider the difference of vowel lengths between /e/ and /${\ae}$/ in teaching English pronunciation.

The purposes of this study are two-folds: to find out the acoustic features of Korean stops in various utterance positions and their influence on the neighbouring segments. Korean stops($/p,\;p',\;p^{h};\;t,\;t',\;t^{h};\;k,\;k',\;k^{h}/$) are examined from CV, $V_1CV_2,\;V_1NCV_2,\;V_1LCV_2$ sequences. Three speakers (two male and one female speakers of Seoul dialect) served as subjects for the present study. VOT, closure duration of the target stops and duration of the neighbouring segments were measured from acoustic data. The results can be summarized as follows. First, stops show different temporal aspects depending on their place of articulation as well as their voice types. Velar stops tend to have shorter closure duration and longer VOT due to relatively slower movement of the articulator (i.e. tongue body) and higher supraglottal air pressure during the closure, respectively. Second, temporal aspects of the neighbouring segments appear to be influenced by the voice type of stop. The preceding segment tends to be longer when a stop has shorter duration. On the other hand, the following segment tends to be shorter, when a stop has longer VOT.