• 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.259-280
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• 2003

The paper discusses the way in which speech sounds are being evaluated and transcribed in various fields of speech sciences, and suggests ways for a more accurate transcription. The academic fields explored are of phonetics, speech processing, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The discussion centers on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), most commonly used in these fields, and other less widely-accepted transcription conventions such as the TOnes and Break Indices (ToBI), the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), an extension of the official Korean Romanization (KORBET), and the American-English transcription system in the TIMIT database (TIMITBET). These transcription conventions are dealt with Korean, English, and Korean-accented English. The paper demonstrates that each transcription can exclusively be recommended for a specific need from different academic fields. Due to its publicity, the IPA is best suited for phonetic evaluation in the fields of phonetics, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The rest of the transcriptions are useful for keyboard-inputting the phonetically evaluated data from all these fields as well as for sound transcription in speech engineering, because they use convenient letter symbols for typing, searching, and programming. Several practical suggestions are made to maintain the transcriptional efficiency and consistency to accommodate the intra-and inter-transcriber variability.

• 음성과학
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• 제6권
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• pp.119-143
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• 1999

In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 2월 학술대회지
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국음향학회 2002년도 하계학술발표대회 논문집 제21권 1호
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• pp.77-82
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• 2002

운율은 음성의 초분절적인 면에 연관하는 음성의 한 성으로서 통상적으로 화자는 음성을 달하는 과정에서 청자의 이해를 돕기 위해 운율을 사용하게 된다. 본 논문은 이러한 운율을 이루는 성분 중의 하나인 운율구의 위치 예측에 대한 성능을 향상시키는 것에 그 목적을 둔다. 한국어 운율 정보에 대한 표기 방법 중의 하나인 K-ToBI를 기반으로 하여, 운율구의 경계와 그에 대한 레벨을 Break Indices 정보로서 나타내었고, 통계학 분야에서 제안된 Support Vector Machine(SVM)을 이용하여 시스템의 예측률 향상을 꾀하였다. 기존의 방법에서 사용된 트리 기반 모델을 이용하여 한국어 운율에 가장 많은 영향을 끼치는 언어 정보들을 추출하였고 이를 실험에 적용하였다. 기존의 트리 모델과 SVM 모델에 대한 예측률을 비교한 결과, 경계 유무 정보 예측과 4단계의 레벨을 가지는 경계 정보의 예측에서 모두 본 방법이 보다 높은 예측률을 보여 주어 본 연구에서 제시한 접근법이 운율구의 경계 정보를 예측하는 데에 있어 더욱 효과적인 접근법임을 실험적으로 입증하였다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.47-55
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• 2020

The current study was designed to investigate which type of phrase boundary tones high-intermediate Korean learners of English used in their spontaneous speech. These boundary tones were compared to those used in native speakers' spontaneous speech to examine whether the learners successfully acquired the use of boundary tones. To achieve this purpose, 10 Korean learners of English and four native speakers of English participated in the current study. The participants were asked to summarize the stories of short videos, and the tonal and the phrasing patterns of the obtained spontaneous speech were analyzed using Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that both the native speakers and the Korean learners frequently marked their intonational phrase boundaries with high boundary tones. However, regarding the prosodic phrase positions within a sentence, Korean learners frequently used steep rising tones (i.e., H-H%) while native speakers used gradual rising tones (i.e., L-H%) for sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the findings suggested that high-intermediate Korean learners understood the forward-looking function of the high boundary tones and that they were able to make use of these tones to mark intonational phrases in their spontaneous speech.