• 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.209-224
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• 2000

This paper proposes an automatic detection method of intonational and accentual phrases in Korean standard continuous speech. We use the pause over 150 msec for detecting intonational phrases, and extract accentual phrases from the intonational phrases by analyzing syllables and pitch contours. The speech data for the experiment are composed of seven male voices and two female voices which read the texts of the fable 'the ant and the grasshopper' and a newspaper article 'manmulsang' in normal speed and in Korean standard variation. The results of the experiment shows that the detection rate of intonational phrases is 95% on the average and that of accentual phrases is 73%. This detection rate implies that we can segment the continuous speech into smaller units(i.e. prosodic phrases) by using the prosodic information and so the objects of speech recognition can narrow down to words or phrases in continuous speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제23권1E호
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• pp.10-15
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• 2004

In performing speech conversion from a source speaker to a target speaker, it is important that the pitch contour of the source speakers utterance be converted into that of the target speaker, because pitch contour of a speech utterance plays an important role in expressing speaker's individuality and meaning of the utterance. This paper describes statistical algorithms of pitch contour conversion for Korean language. Pitch contour conversions are investigated at two 1 evels of prosodic phrases: intonational phrase and accentual phrase. The basic algorithm is a Gaussian normalization [7] in intonational phrase. The first presented algorithm is combined with a declination-line of pitch contour in an intonational phrase. The second one is Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases to compensate for local pitch variations. Experimental results show that the algorithm of Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases is significantly more accurate than the other two algorithms in intonational phrase.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.21-35
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• 2007

This paper attempts to investigate phonetic substances of the stress patterns of English compounds and noun phrases, showing that the theoretically derived stress structures are not consistent with the accentual patterns in real utterances. Even though it has been long claimed that compounds have the stress pattern [1 3] and that noun phrases, [2 1] as in Chomsky & Halle (1968), their difference has not been yet explored empirically or phonetically. I present a phonetic experiment conducted to see if there is any difference along the tonal contours, mostly focusing on their pitch accent distribution. 36 different compounds and 36 different noun phrases included in carrier sentences were examined, and they were varied in position within a sentence. Results showed that various accentual patterns were produced, and among them, [H* X] predominantly occurs in all three positions in both compounds and noun phrases, whereas the patterns [X H*] and [X X] appear relatively more frequently in final position than in initial and medial position. Furthermore, the pattern [Ac + No], in which the preceding element is pitch-accented with no accent on the following one, is the major stress pattern in both compounds and noun phrases and in all three sentence positions. This suggests that there seems to be no difference in accentual patterns between compounds and noun phrases, which is not consistent with the hypothesis. The results are interpreted as saying that the preceding element alone tends to be prominent with no accent following it both in compounds and noun phrases, and that therefore, theoretically speculated phonological claims are not always phonetically supported.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.31-42
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• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.71-78
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Japanese(L1) on the production of Korean accentual phrases(L2). Korean and Japanese have a similar prosodic structure. But different from Korean, Japanese is a pitch accent language. So each word has its own pitch accent. And pitch accents are maintained in the sentence intonation. This difference will have a negative influence on the production of Korean sentence intonation. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Japanese learners of Korean participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 11 Korean sentences, six of which contain formally identical Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese words. The results show that the initial pitch pattern of Korean accentual phrases was affected by Japanese pitch accent types and this interference was greater for formally identical Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese words. But besides initial tones of accentual phrase, some positive interference was observed in the internal tonal pattern of accentual phrase. In the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range and initial pitch rising of accentual phrases was greater for Japanese learners of Korean than native speakers of Korean.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제47호
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• pp.15-29
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• 2003

When intonation in French is analysed in terms of a multi-dimentional and hierarchical structure, each of the prosodic units such as accent phrases(having different combinations of the basic tonemes L and H), pre-sentencial and post-sentencial long pauses, intonation phrases(containing boundary intonation), as well as intermediate phrases can be considered being realized on a separate tier. Unlike on the tiers where accent phrases and intonation phrases occur, an intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is realised on that of intermediate phrases. This intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is one of the significant factors that lead a basic French metrical rhythm. This paper first shows the types of combinations of the basic tonemes L and H found in French accent phrases. Secondly, this paper examines the roles intermediate phrases and plateaus play in French. Finally, this paper argues that intermediate phrases are the metrical units actually adopted as real utterance units in French.

• 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.77-91
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• 1999

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.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2004년도 춘계 학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.165-170
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• 2004

The aim of this paper is to study the relation between Eojeol and prosodic phrase in Korean. Depending on two adnominal ending form in Korean '-ㄴ' and '-ㄹ', there are some different prosodic phrase: 1) $1{\sim}2$ syllable eojeols : '-ㄴ' has none prosodic phrase in front of the eojeol, an accentual phrase in the end of the eojeol. In contrast, '-ㄹ' has an accentual phrase in front of the eojeol, but none in the end of the eojeol. 2) More than 3 syllable eojeols : '-ㄴ' have accentual phrases on the edge of the eojeol. but '-ㄹ' has an accentual phrase in the end of the eojeol.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권3호
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• pp.17-23
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• 2017

The present study investigates the effect of Accentual Phrase on F0 using a subset of large-scale corpus of Seoul Korean. Four syllable words which were neither preceded nor followed by silent pauses were presumed to be canonical exemplars of Accentual Phrases in Korean. These four syllable words were extracted from female speakers' speech samples. Growth curve analyses, combination of regression and polynomial curve fitting, were applied to the four syllable words. Four syllable words were divided into four groups depending on the categorical status of the initial segment: voiceless obstruents, voiced obstruents, sonorants, and vowels. Results of growth curve analyses indicate that initial segment types have an effect on the F0 (in semitone) in the nucleus of the initial syllable, and the cubic polynomial term revealed that some of the medial low tones in the 4 syllable words may be guided by the principle of contrast maximization, while others may be governed by the principle of ease of articulation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제18권1E호
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• pp.27-31
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• 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.