• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2003

This paper proposes an empty constituent, a silent beat, to express long duration of stressed syllable in the word final position and rhythmic correspondence in English. This empty constituent has an important consequence. It helps reveal one of the characteristics English feet have: they must be non-final in nouns as well as in verbs. In addition, the silent beats overcome the shortcomings of empty constituents proposed previously, namely null vowels (Burzio 1994) and invisible suffixes (Hammond 1999).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.7-21
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• 2004

The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.137-154
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• 2005

The purpose of this paper is to analyze vowel lengthening triggered by resyllabification. In general, short vowels become long when a following consonant is deleted, as shown in stehli 'steel' > st$\bar{e}$li and *fimf 'five' > five. We can account for the phenomenon in a straightforward way within the framework of CV phonology (Clements & Keyser, 1983) : deletion of a coda consonant C slot and then the preceding vowel spreads onto it, resulting in a long vowel. The analysis, however, cannot hold for words like ealhes 'temple', where deletion of an onset segment eventually triggers vowel lengthening in the preceding syllable. In order to account for this, I propose resyllabification. That is, ealhes first becomes eales by /h/-deletion. Next, the /l/ in coda is resyllabified as the onset of the following syllable, leaving its C slot unoccupied. Finally, the vowel spreads onto the empty slot, producing a long vowel.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.73-81
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• 2001

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study of intonation contrasts perception by speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian. Six series of re-synthesized two-syllable rise-fall contours with manipulated parameters of the rise in the first and the fall in the second syllable were employed in the experiment. Modifications of pitch height were executed in 2 st steps, and of duration in 30ms steps. The subjects, who were native speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian, identified the sentence type of presented re-synthesized stimuli. The results of the experiments demonstrate overall similarity of the perception strategies across the three groups of subjects, especially regarding the thresholds of declarative' sentence type judgement. Non-declarative judgements are more language-specific. The results can be employed for the teaching of English, Japanese and Russian as foreign languages as well as for speech synthesis and recognition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.55-66
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• 2006

A purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of English stress produced by the two groups of South Kyungsang (henceforth, SK) Korean speakers: high-proficiency and low-proficiency with reference to English native speakers. Another purpose is to compare results from the high- and low-proficiency SK Korean subjects with those of the native speakers, and to provide an analytical account of how approximate the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' production is to the native speakers' and how different the low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' is from the native speakers'. Results indicated that the native speakers' main strategy used in producing stressed syllables was duration while the high-proficiency SK Korean subjects' was predominantly pitch-oriented. The low-proficiency SK Korean subjects' pitch patterns showed regularity, emphasizing the penultimate syllable with pitch. In comparing duration among the three groups, both groups of the SK Korean subjects became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.139-148
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• 2000

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study of intonation contrasts perception by speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian. Six series of re-synthesized two-syllable rise-fall contours with manipulated parameters of the rise in the first and the fall in the second syllable were employed in the experiment. Modifications of pitch height were executed in 2 st steps, and of duration - in 30ms steps. The subjects, who were native speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian, identified the sentence type of presented re-synthesized stimuli. The results of the experiments demonstrate overall similarity of the perception strategies across the three groups of subjects, especially regarding the thresholds of 'declarative' sentence type judgement. Non-declarative judgements are more language-specific. The results can be employed for the teaching of English, Japanese and Russian as foreign languages as well as for speech synthesis and recognition.

• Journal of Convergence Society for SMB
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.51-57
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• 2016

This study aims at investigating and comparing the vowel lengths of the eight stressed syllable vowels among the Korean college students with the English native speakers. To do this English sentences were uttered and recorded by twenty Korean subjects. Acoustic features were measured from a sound spectrogram with the help of the Praat software program and analyzed through statistical analysis. From the results of the experiment, I was able to find out that the differences of the lengths of the first syllable stressed vowels were significant. Especially in the pronunciation of the English front low vowel /${\ae}$/, native subjects pronounced significantly longer than Korean subjects, and this result could be used as a teaching material in pronunciation class.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2012

Recent studies on acoustic correlates of stress in English compounds and English phrases have revealed the difference of changes in acoustic manifestation between English compounds and English phrases with different intonation patterns. However, little effort has been made to compare Korean compounds and Korean phrases in different intonational environments. Therefore, this study focuses on the analysis of acoustic characteristics of Korean compounds and Korean phrases produced in different intonational sentence patterns (Subject, Question, Clause-Final, and Statement-Final). Measurements of vowel duration, intensity (dB) and pitch (in semitones) were compared. The results of the experiment in which 30 native speakers of Korean pronounced Korean compounds and Korean phrases (obtained from $8{\times}30$ sentences) in controlled prosodic and intonational environments reveal clear patterns that distinguish Korean compounds from Korean phrases and support the evidence of acoustic salience for phrases. Duration differences turned out to be a significant cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases in all but the Clause Final position. According to the size effect, duration ratio is the most reliable cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases followed by the pitch differences between the first syllable and the second syllable and the intensity ratio. Implications for Korean and English intonation training were also discussed.