• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.51-65
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• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.97-100
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unit of neighbor of Korean words. In English, a word's orthographic neighborhood is defined as the set of words that can be created by changing one letter of the word while preserving letter positions. For example, the words like pike, pole, and tile are all orthographic neighbors of the word 'pile'. In this study, 2 experiments were performed. In these experiments, 4 conditions of prime were included: primes sharing first letter of first syllable(1), first syllable(2), first syllable and the first letter of second syllable with target(3) and with no formal similarity with target(4). In Exp.1, RT was shortest in condition 3. In Exp.2, condition 2 had the shortest RT. We came to the conclusion that in Korean, a word's neighbor is words that share at least one syllable with the word.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.170-172
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable structures of ten Korean numeric sounds produced by ten subjects of the same age. Each sound was normalized and divided into onset, vowel, and coda sections. Then, acoustical measurements of each syllable were done to compare the ten sounds. Results showed that there was not much deviation from the grand average duration and intensity for the majority of the sounds except the two diphthongal sounds on which their boundary points varied among the speakers. Some syllable boundaries were quite obvious while others were ambiguous. There seemed some tradeoff among the syllable components depending on their acoustic features.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.101-119
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• 1998

By analyses of lullabies, nursery rhymes, Christmas carols, and pop songs, the relevances of beat, syllable and note are set up as follows. (1) The relevance of beat to syllable a. A stressed syllable can occupy a strong beat. b. A monosyllabic word carrying a strong beat must have the syllabic structure of a strong syllable. (2) The note duration a. The duration of a note carrying a strong beat tends to be as long as or longer than that of a note carrying a weak beat. b. The note connected with the last position of phonological unit tends to be longer than that of other position without regard to the syllabic structure.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.87-90
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean distant speech. 36 2-syllable words of 4 speakers (2 males and 2 females) produced in both distant-talking and normal environments were used. The results showed that ratios of second syllable to first syllable in vowel duration and vowel energy were significantly larger in the distant-talking environment compared to the normal environment and f0 range also bigger in the distant-talking environment. In addition, 'HL%' contour boundary tone in the second syllable and/or 'L +H' contour tone in the first syllable were used in the distant-talking environment.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.456-463
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• 1996

In this paper, we discussed three cases to see the effects of the characteristics of Hangul writing system. In applications such as computer Hangul shorthands for ordinary people and pushbuttons with Hangul characters engraved, we found that there is much advantage in using Hangul. In case of Hangul Transliteration, we discussed some problems which are related with the characteristics of Hangul writing system. Shorthands use 3-set keyboards in England, America, and Korea. We saw how ordinary people can do computer Hangul shorthands, whereas only experts can do computer shorthands in other countries. Specifically, the facts that 1) Hangul characters are grouped into syllables (syllabic blocks) and that 2) there is already a 3-set Hangul keyboard for ordinary people allow ordinary people to do computer Hangul shorthands without taking special training as with English shorthands. This study was done by the author under the codename of 'Sejong 89'. In contrast like QWERTY or DVORAK, a 2-set Hangul keyboard cannot be used for shorthands. In case of English pushbuttons, one digit is associated with only one character. However, by engraving only syllable-initial characters on the phone pushbuttons, we can associate one Hangul "syllable" with one digit. Therefore, for a given number of digits, we can associate longer words or more meaningful words in Hangul than in English. We discussed the problems of the Hangul Transliteration system proposed by South Korea and suggested their solutions, if available. 1) We are incorrectly using the framework of transcription for transliteration. To solve the problem, the author suggests that a) we include all complex characters in the transliteration table, and that b) we specify syllable-initial and -final characters separately in the table. 2) The proposed system cannot represent independent characters and incomplete syllables. 3) The proposed system cannot distinguish between syllable-initial and -final characters.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.137-147
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable structures of ten Korean numeric sounds produced by ten students. Each sound was normalized by its maximum intensity value and divided into onset, vowel, and coda sections after finding abrupt or visible changes in energy values or cumulative values of lower spectral energy at each pulse point using four Praat scripts. Then, segmental durations and cumulative intensity values of each syllable were obtained to find a statistical summary of the syllable structure. Intensity values at 100 proportional time points were also collected to compare the ten sounds. Results showed as follows: Firstly, there was not much deviation from the grand average duration and intensity for the majority of the sounds except the two diphthongal sounds on which their boundary points varied among the speakers. Secondly, the onset point for the CV or CVC category sounds and the boundary between the vowel and the nasal or lateral sound were easy to identify, which may be automatically traced later. Thirdly, there seems some tradeoff among the sections maintaining the same total duration per each syllable. Further studies on syllables with various onsets or codas would be desirable to make a general statement on the Korean syllable structure.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.51-60
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• 2010

This study is to examine how Korean speakers realize English stress on the homographic words. Experiments were performed by Korean speakers three times, before stress instruction, immediately after instruction, and six weeks after instruction. First, duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the vowel in a stressed syllable of three homographic words produced by Korean speakers were compared with those of native speakers of English. The result shows that when the words were used as nouns, before instruction Korean speakers had shorter duration and lower fundamental frequency in the stressed vowel than the native speakers, which indicates that Korean speakers did not assign the primary stress on the first syllable of the nouns. After instruction, the values of duration and fundamental frequency were increased and the differences between two groups were decreased. Next, the values of these stress features measured three times were analyzed in order to find out how they changed through instruction. The analysis shows that after instruction the values of three features were increased compared to the ones before instruction, and that the biggest change was in duration of the vowel and the next was fundamental frequency. Six weeks after instruction, the values of duration and intensity were decreased than those immediately after instruction. This means that instruction is helpful for Korean speakers to assign the stress for the English homographic words, and that instruction and practice are needed repeatedly.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-6
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• 2018

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers' productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (Rhee et al., 2005). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers' pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers' learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.101-113
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• 2010

The present study investigated how the kinematics of the /a/-to-/i/ tongue movement in Korean would be influenced by prosodic boundary. The /a/-to-/i/ sequence was used as 'transboundary' test materials which occurred across a prosodic boundary as in /ilnjəʃ$^h$a/ # / minsakwae/ ('일년차#민사과에' 'the first year worker' # 'dept. of civil affairs'). It also tested whether the V-to-V tongue movement would be further influenced by its syllable structure with /m/ which was placed either in the coda condition (/am#i/) or in the onset condition (/a#mi). Results of an EMA (Electromagnetic Articulagraphy) study showed that kinematical parameters such as the movement distance (displacement), the movement duration, and the movement velocity (speed) all varied as a function of the boundary strength, showing an articulatory strengthening pattern of a "larger, longer and faster" movement. Interestingly, however, the larger, longer and faster pattern associated with boundary marking in Korean has often been observed with stress (prominence) marking in English. It was proposed that language-specific prosodic systems induce different ways in which phonetics and prosody interact: Korean, as a language without lexical stress and pitch accent, has more degree of freedom to express prosodic strengthening, while languages such as English have constraints, so that some strengthening patterns are reserved for lexical stress. The V-to-V tongue movement was also found to be influenced by the intervening consonant /m/'s syllable affiliation, showing a more preboundary lengthening of the tongue movement when /m/ was part of the preboundary syllable (/am#i/). The results, together, show that the fine-grained phonetic details do not simply arise as low-level physical phenomena, but reflect higher-level linguistic structures, such as syllable and prosodic structures. It was also discussed how the boundary-induced kinematic patterns could be accounted for in terms of the task dynamic model and the theory of the prosodic gesture ($\pi$-gesture).