• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.153-161
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• 2014

The current study reports the results from a cross-modal naming experiment investigating the effects of a prosodic boundary location on the comprehension of ambiguous dative NPs in Korean (Yeongmi-ka Ceonghi-eykey norae-rul pwulecwu-n pwuin-ul ${\cdots}$). The underlined dative NP, Ceonghi-eykey, can temporarily be attached to the embedded rel-marked verb, pwulecwu-n ('sing-rel') or to the matrix verb to appear later. Participants heard sentence fragments manipulated for the location of Intonation Phrase boundary (the biggest prosodic boundary in the model of Seoul Korean) and right after that, had to name visually presented naming targets, which resolve the ambiguity of dative NPs. The prosodic manipulation did not result in difference in naming time, suggesting that the location of a prosodic boundary failed to influence the way Korean listeners interpreted ambiguous dative NPs. Possible reasons for the null effect were discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.157-172
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• 1996

This study aims to suggest some theoretical methodology for analysis of the prosodic patterns in Korean Read Speech. The engineering effort relevant to the phonetic study has focused to the importance of prosodic phrasing which may play a major role in analyzing the phonetic DB. Before establishing the prosodic phrase as the prosodic unit, we should describe the features of the boundary signal in a target sentence. With this in mind, the general characteristics of Read Speech and the ToBI(tones and Break Indices), which has been currently in vogue with respect to the prosodic labelling system were presented as the first step. The concrete analysis was carried out with the fable 'North Wind and the Sun' Korean version, where about 25 prosodic units were discriminated by perceptual approach for 5 subjects. Establishing various informations which can be used for deciding a boundary position systematically, we can proceed to the next, viz. acoustic analysis of prosodic unit. The most important which we primarily study for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech may be, at first, detecting the boundary signals in the speech file and accordingly reestablishment it within the raw text.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.7-10
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• 2000

Studies of prosody and sentence processing have demonstrated that prosodic phrasing can exhibit strong effects on processing decisions in English. In this paper, we tested Korean sentence fragments containing syntactically ambiguous Adj-N1-N2 strings in a cross-modal naming task. Four accentual phrasing patterns were tested: (a) the default phrasing pattern, in which each word forms an accentual phrase; (b) a phrasing biased toward N1 modification; (c) a phrasing biased toward complex-NP modification; and (d) a phrasing used with adjective focus. Patterns (b) and (c) are disambiguating phrasings; the other two are commonly found with both interpretations and are thus ambiguous. The results showed that the naming time of items produced in the prosody contradicting the semantic grouping is significantly longer than that produced in either default or supporting prosody, We claim that, as in English, prosodic information in Korean is parsed into a well-formed prosodic representation during the early stages of processing. The partially constructed prosodic representation produces incremental effects on syntactic and semantic processing decisions and is retained in memory to influence reanalysis decisions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.35-51
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• 2000

The goal of this paper is to examine how Case Drop (the drop of the case markers) correlates with the prosodic structure in Korean. On the assumption that intervocalic Lenis Stop Voicing (LSV) applies within the domain of the Accentual Phrase (AP), voicing analyses are performed on intervocalic lenis stop consonants before and after Case Drop. A statistical analysis reveals that the drop of the nominative and accusative case markers significantly alter the AP structure. Pitch values will then be extracted to verify that such changes in the AP structure conform to the pitch properties proposed for the AP (Jun 1993, 1998). The results show that the AP structure suggested by LSV does not always coincide with that imposed by the pitch properties.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.29-37
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• 2009

This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.168-176
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• 2001

This paper discusses two important issues of corpus-based synthesis: synthesis unit generation based on phrase break strength information and pruning redundant synthesis unit instances. First, the new sentence set for recording was designed to make an efficient synthesis database, reflecting the characteristics of the Korean language. To obtain prosodic context sensitive units, we graded major prosodic phrases into 5 distinctive levels according to pause length and then discriminated intra-word triphones using the levels. Using the synthesis unit with phrase break strength information, synthetic speech was generated and evaluated subjectively. Second, a new pruning method based on weighted vector quantization (WVQ) was proposed to eliminate redundant synthesis unit instances from the synthesis database. WVQ takes the relative importance of each instance into account when clustering similar instances using vector quantization (VQ) technique. The proposed method was compared with two conventional pruning methods through objective and subjective evaluations of synthetic speech quality: one to simply limit the maximum number of instances, and the other based on normal VQ-based clustering. For the same reduction rate of instance number, the proposed method showed the best performance. The synthetic speech with reduction rate 45% had almost no perceptible degradation as compared to the synthetic speech without instance reduction.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.19-23
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• 2006

This paper is for the comparison of prosodic phrasing in Korean spontaneous speech and read speech. For this comparison, The subjects read the transcriptions from their own spontaneous speech. The number of IP in spontaneous speech is more than in read speech, while The number of AP has no difference between them. A accentual phrase in spontaneous speech has less syllable than read speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.7-19
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• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.185-200
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• 2002

The current study confirmed the existence of an ip prosodic level in French intonation structure, as previously proposed by Sun-Ah Jun & $C\acute{e}cile$cile Fougeron (2000). However, in contrast to the previous suggestion of the plateau realized in an ip in several syntactic structures, the current study supposed that the plateau doesn't come from the different type of syntactic structures but arise from the unspecified syllables without any PA in an ip. Because if we limited ip phrasal tone to the syntactic structure, it would be difficult to find the more general reasons of ip level. Besides /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ we also used /$Hi^*$/ for the focused syllable in the current study. In emphasized sentences, in general, /$Hi^*$/ appeared in the first or second syllable of a leftward AP in an ip and /$H^*$/ in the final syllable of a rightmost AP of an ip, In contrast to these PAs, /$Hi^*$/ might appear in any syllable in an ip, but not to far from /$H^*$/ because the duration time and length t of plateau realized between /$Hi^*$/ and /$H^*$/ or /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ would make an essential harmonious rhythmic unit, Therefore, the current study determined the duration time and the number of syllables realized in each plateau in an ip level composed of more than one AP. As a phrase constituent structure, there is a practical need for intermediate prosodic units to allow for generalization over the many possible combinations of prosodic patterns that can occur. Further evidence is still needed to analyze and relate the different pitch ranges of the plateau of an ip according to the syntactic structure, to identify the considerable character in the French prosodic hierarchy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.39-49
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean intonation phrase (IP) boundary tones in the reading of a Korean text. Korean IP boundary tones play various roles in speech communication. They indicate prosodic constituents' boundaries while simultaneously performing pragmatic and grammatical functions. In order to express and understand Korean utterances correctly, it is necessary to understand the Korean IP boundary tone system. To investigate the IP boundary tone produced by Chinese speakers, we have specifically examined the type of boundary tones, the degree of internal pitch modulation of boundary tones, and the pitch difference between penultimate syllables and boundary tones. The results of each analysis were compared to the IP boundary tones produced by Korean native speakers. The results show that IP boundary tones were realized higher than penultimate syllables.