• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.1E
• /
• pp.27-31
• /
• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.7-19
• /
• 2007

The present study investigated some phonetic attributes which distinguish two Korean stop types $^-aspirated$ and $lax^-$ in a prosodic position which has previously received little attention, namely medial in an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables which are initial in an accentual phrase (Jun, 1993) is said to depend on the type of stop (aspirated or lax), while that of syllables which are medial in an accentual phrase are not. In Experiment 1, nine native Korean speakers read sentences with a controlled prosodic pattern in which aspirated or lax stops occurred in accentual phrase-medial position. Acoustic analysis revealed significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. The results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops than previously demonstrated. Phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean will need to be revised to account for these results.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.8
• /
• pp.9-16
• /
• 1999

Generally, a speaker structures utterances very clearly by grouping words into phrases. This facilitates the listener's recovery of the meaning of the utterance and the speaker's intention. To this purpose, a speaker uses, among other things, prosodic information such as intonation pause, duration, intensity, etc. The research described here is concerned with the relationship between the strength of prosodic boundaries in spoken utterances as perceived by untrained listeners(Perceptual boundary strength, PBS)-In this paper, the preceptual boundary strength is used as the same meaning of the prosodic boundary strength-and prosodic information. We made a rule determinating the prosodic boundaries and verified the usefulness of the prosodic phrase as a recognition unit. Experiments results showed that the performance of speech recognition(SR) is improved in aspect of recognition rate and time compared with that using sentences as recognition unit. In the future we will suggest the methods that estimate more appropriate boundaries and study more various methods of prosody assisted SR.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.155-163
• /
• 2009

In text-to-speech systems, the conversion of text into prosodic parameters is necessarily composed of three steps. These are the placement of prosodic boundaries. the determination of segmental durations, and the specification of fundamental frequency contours. Prosodic boundaries. as the most important and basic parameter. affect the estimation of durations and fundamental frequency. Break prediction is an important step in text-to-speech systems as break indices (BIs) have a great influence on how to correctly represent prosodic phrase boundaries, However. an accurate prediction is difficult since BIs are often chosen according to the meaning of a sentence or the reading style of the speaker. In Japanese, the prediction of an accentual phrase boundary (APB) and major phrase boundary (MPB) is particularly difficult. Thus, this paper presents a method to complement the prediction errors of an APB and MPB. First, we define a subtle BI in which it is difficult to decide between an APB and MPB clearly as a variable break (VB), and an explicit BI as a fixed break (FB). The VB is chosen using the classification and regression tree, and multiple prosodic targets in relation to the pith and duration are then generated. Finally. unit-selection is conducted using multiple prosodic targets. In the MOS test result. the original speech scored a 4,99. while proposed method scored a 4.25 and conventional method scored a 4.01. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the naturalness of synthesized speech.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.323-332
• /
• 1996

The current speech technology has been aiming to acquire much clearer and more natural synthetic speech sound. The naturalness can be developed by an adequate phrasing of target sentence, of course, which seems to be strongly related to both syntactic and phonetic aspect simultaneously. The present study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relatedness between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing through dialogue speech, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern with respect to the purpose of acquiring more natural synthetic sound. The prosodic phrase, here, means a prosodic unit which can be clearly identified as having an evident break boundary at its final position in a sentence in the sense of both perceptual and acoustical viewpoint. The end of each prosodic phrase is, accordingly, marked as the point of major boundary in a sentence.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.143-169
• /
• 2000

This chapter presents an overview of Korean intonational structure and proposes a revised version of K -ToBI (Korean TOnes and Break Indices), a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. In the new version of K-ToBI, a tone tier is separated into two tiers: a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels tones marking the prosodic structure of an utterance, and a phonetic tone tier labels individual tones of an AP and an IP conforming to the surface pitch contour. Labelling surface tonal patterns will provide us data to test the underlying tonal patterns and to build phonetic implementation rules.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.46
• /
• pp.127-143
• /
• 2003

This paper presents segmental labeling conventions proposed by SiTEC (Speech Information Technology Engineering Center) 2002 and proposes a new directions of a revision for a simpler version. The paper also reviews one of the prosody labelling conventions for Korean, K-ToBI convention(ver. 3.1) and proposes a couple of modifications and suggestions.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.31-42
• /
• 2004

This paper presents methods using Gaussian normalization for converting pitch contours based on prosodic phrases along with experimental tests on the Korean database of 16 declarative sentences and the first sentences of the story of 'The Three Little Pigs'. We propose a new conversion method using Gaussian normalization to the pitch deviation of pitch contour subtracted by partial declination lines: by using partial declination lines for each accentual phrase of pitch contour, we avoid the problem that a Gaussian normalization using average values and standard deviations of intonational phrase tends to lose individual local variability and thus cannot modify individual characteristics of pitch contour from a source speaker to a target speaker. From the results of the experiments, we show that this slanted Gaussian normalization using these declination lines subtracted from pitch contour of accentual phrases can modify pitch contour more accurately than other methods using Gaussian normalization.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.65
• /
• pp.51-65
• /
• 2008

The aim of this study is to compare ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) children with normal children in terms of the prosodic features. Materials are collected by the reading of Korean read sentences. They are composed of 10 declarative sentences, each of which was consisted of 5-6 words. Subjects are consisted of 10 ASD and 10 normal male children with a receptive vocabulary age of 5;0-6;5 years. We found out that both groups showed the differences not only in the tonal patterns at the end of the prosodic phrases, but also in both the degree of rising and falling slope related to pitch contour. While HL% and HLH% were highly emerged in sentence final position in normal group, HL% and HLH% were prominent in ASD group in the same position. LH% and LHL% IP types were observed only in ASD group in sentence medial position. The slope showing the variation in the fundamental frequency at the end of the prosodic phrase was twice as steep in the group of ASD children as in the group of normal children.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.89-110
• /
• 2002

Intonation is very difficult to describe and it is furthermore difficult to compare intonation between different languages because of their differences of intonation systems. This paper aims to compare some intonation phenomena between Korean, French and English. In this paper I will refer to ToBI (the Tone and Break Indices) which is a prosodic transcription model proposed originally by Pierrehumbert (1980) as a description tool. In the first part, I will summarize different ToBI systems, namely, K-ToBI (Korean ToBI), F-ToBI (French ToBI) and ToBI itself (English ToBI) in order to compare the differences of three languages within prosody. In the second part, I will analyze some tokens registered by Korean, French and American in different languages to show the difficulties of learning other languages and to find the prosodic cues to pronounce correctly other languages. The point of comparison in this study is the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Korean and in French and the intermediate phrase (ip) in English, which I will call ' subject phrase ' in this study for convenience.