• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.49-61
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• 2016

The present study investigates the perception of Korean phonation types by native speakers of Aymara. Perception tests were conducted on two sets of Korean speech materials to determine correspondence between Korean and Aymara 3-way contrasts and to find out which of the consonantal and vocalic part of the syllable is more influential in the perception of Korean phonation types. A set of manipulated stimuli, as well as a set of 12 spontaneous words, were prepared for the tests. The first syllable of the 12 Korean bisyllabic words of 3 series of phonation types(Lenis, Aspirated, and Fortis) in 4 places of articulation were split into consonantal and vocalic parts. And then the two parts were combined to form 9 tokens of CV sequences respectively for each place of articulation. Native speakers of Aymara were forced to match Korean stimuli with one of the 15 Aymara words which represent 3 series of consonant types(plain, aspirated, and ejective) in 5 places of articulation(bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar, and uvular). Results showed that the consonantal part is more influential than the vocalic part to the Aymara subjects' perception of Korean phonation types when the consonantal part is Aspirated in its phonation type, but the vocalic part is more influential than the consonantal part when the consonantal part is Lenis or Fortis in its phonation type. Response analysis showed that Aymara subjects tend to match Korean stops to Aymara ones in such a way that Lenis corresponds to aspirated, Aspirated to aspirated, and Fortis to plain.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.117-122
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• 2009

A variety of cross-linguistic studies has documented that the acoustic properties of speech addressed to young children include exaggeration of pitch contours and acoustically salient features of phonetic units. It has been suggested that phonetic modifications of child-directed speech facilitate young children's learning of speech sounds by providing detailed phonetic information about the target word. While there are several studies reporting vowel modifications in speech to infants (i.e., hyper-articulated vowels), there has been little research about consonant modifications in speech to young children (except for VOT). The present study examines acoustic properties of Korean stops in Korean mothers' speech to their children (seven children aged 27 to 38 months). Korean tense, lax, and aspirated stops are all voiceless in word-initial position, and are perceptually differentiated by several acoustic parameters including VOT, $f_0$ of the following vowel, and the amplitude difference of the first and second harmonics at the voice onset of the following vowel. This study compares values of these parameters in Korean child-directed speech to those in adult-directed speech from same speakers. Conclusions focus on the acoustic properties of Korean stops in child-directed speech and how they are modified to help Korean young children learn the three-way phonetic contrast.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2020

The perceptual assimilation of a nonnative phonological contrast can change with linguistic experience, resulting in naïve listeners and novice second language (L2) learners potentially assimilating the members of a nonnative contrast to different native (L1) categories. While it has been shown that this sort of change can affect the discrimination of the nonnative contrast, it has not been tested whether such a change could have consequences for the production of the contrast. In this study, L1 speakers of Mandarin Chinese who were (1) naïve to Korean, (2) novice L2 learners, or (3) advanced L2 learners participated in a Korean non-word repetition task using word-initial sibilants. The initial CVs of their repetitions were then played to L1 Korean listeners who categorized the initial consonant. The naïve talkers were more likely to repeat an initial /s^ha/ as an affricate, whereas the L2 learners repeated it as a fricative, in line with how these listeners have been shown to assimilate Korean sibilants to Mandarin categories. This result suggests that errors in the production of new words presented auditorily to nonnative listeners may be driven by how they perceptually assimilate the nonnative sounds, emphasizing the need to better understand what drives changes in perceptual assimilation that accompany increased linguistic experience.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-103
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• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.25-39
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• 2007

The present study investigated some perceptual phonetic attributes of two Korean stop types, aspirated and lax, in medial position of an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables (Jun, 1993) is argued to depend on the type of stop (aspirated vs. lax) only in the initial position of an accentual phrase. In Kang & Dilley (2007), we showed that significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in medial position of an accentual phrase exist in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. In the present perception experiment, we investigated whether these phonetic attributes contribute to the perception of these two types of stops: The closure durations and/or F0's of post-stop vowels on accentual-phrase medial words were altered and twenty native Korean speakers then judged these words as beginning with an aspirated or lax stop. Both closure duration and F0 significantly affected judgments of stop identity. These results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues that distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops in production also plays a role in perception. To account for these results we suggest some phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.213-221
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• 2010

The number of North Korean refugees entering South Korea is continuously increasing. North Korean speakers show significant differences in vowel and consonant phonetics, length of vowels, and the rhythm and intonation of sentences. The object of this research was to examine the effectiveness of a speech intervention program for North Korean refugees using visual feedback through acoustical analysis for intonation. The subjects were three adults with no speech disabilities who had been in South Korea for less than five years. They had not received any prior treatment for inflection change. The program was set in a discourse situation and used Praat to evaluate intonation and provide visual feedback as demonstrating proper intonation changes through pitch contour. The results after intervention are as follows. First, intonation was significantly improved according to a 5-point subjective evaluation scale. Second, the pitch contour was similar to the contour of standard South Korean pronunciation. The subjects were very satisfied with this initial treatment and showed a high level of motivation. In subsequent study, the development of intervention and the comparison of interventions will be needed as well.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.13-23
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• 2012

The sound /w/ has been traditionally regarded as an independent segment in Korean regardless of the phonological contexts in which it occurs. There have been, however, some questions regarding whether it is an independent phoneme in /CwV/ context (cf. Kang 2006). The present pilot study examined how Korean /w/ is realized in $/S^*wV/$ context by performing some perception tests. Our assumption was that if Korean /w/ is a part of the preceding complex consonant like $/C^w/$, it should be more or less uniformly articulated and perceived as such. If /w/ is an independent segment, it will be realized with speaker variability. Experiments I and II examined the identification rates as "labialized" of the spliced original stimuli of $/S^*-V/$ and $/S^{w*}-^wV/$, and the cross-spliced stimuli $/S^{w*}-V/$ and $/S^*-^wV/$. The results showed that round qualities of /w/ are perceived at significantly different temporal point with speaker and context variability. We therefore conclude that /w/ in $/S^*wV/$ context is an independent segment, not a part of the preceding segment. Full-scale examination of the production test in the future should be performed to verify the conclusion we suggested in this paper.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.11
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• pp.2800-2812
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable-word boundary misalignment cost on word segmentation in Korean continuous speech. Previous studies have demonstrated the important role of syllabification in speech segmentation. The current study investigated whether the resyllabification process affects word recognition in Korean continuous speech. In Experiment I, under the misalignment condition, participants were presented with stimuli in which a word-final consonant became the onset of the next syllable. (e.g., /k/ in belsak ingan becomes the onset of the first syllable of ingan 'human'). In the alignment condition, they heard stimuli in which a word-final vowel was also the final segment of the syllable (e.g., /eo/ in heulmeo ingan is the end of both the syllable and word). The results showed that word recognition was faster and more accurate in the alignment condition. Experiment II aimed to confirm that the results of Experiment I were attributable to the resyllabification process, by comparing only the target words from each condition. The results of Experiment II supported the findings of Experiment I. Therefore, based on the current study, we confirmed that Korean, a syllable-timed language, has a misalignment cost of resyllabification.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.40 no.8
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• pp.782-791
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• 1991

In the fields of pattern recognition such as speech recognition, several new techniques using Artifical Neural network Models have been proposed and implemented. In particular, the Multilayer Perception Model has been shown to be effective in static speech pattern recognition. But speech has dynamic or temporal characteristics and the most important point in implementing speech recognition systems using Artificial Neural Network Models for continuous speech is the learning of dynamic characteristics and the distributed cues and contextual effects that result from temporal characteristics. But Recurrent Multilayer Perceptron Model is known to be able to learn sequence of pattern. In this paper, the results of applying the Recurrent Model which has possibilities of learning tedmporal characteristics of speech to phoneme recognition is presented. The test data consist of 144 Vowel+ Consonant + Vowel speech chains made up of 4 Korean monothongs and 9 Korean plosive consonants. The input parameters of Artificial Neural Network model used are the FFT coefficients, residual error and zero crossing rates. The Baseline model showed a recognition rate of 91% for volwels and 71% for plosive consonants of one male speaker. We obtained better recognition rates from various other experiments compared to the existing multilayer perceptron model, thus showed the recurrent model to be better suited to speech recognition. And the possibility of using Recurrent Models for speech recognition was experimented by changing the configuration of this baseline model.

• MALSORI
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• no.29_30
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• pp.61-94
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• 1995

The aim of this paper is to describe the linguistic differences of two Koreas with a special emphasis on the phonetic aspect of Seoul and Pyongyang speech. The sources of the North Korean speech material used in the study are 1) the Pyongyang radio and TV broadcasts, 2) interviews of north Korean defectors and 3) speech material of north Korean scholars collected by the writer in london, Warsaw, France and China between 1989 and 1994. The most noticeable phonetic differences of Seoul and Pyongyang speech are abstracted as follows: 1) The vowels /이/, /에/ and /애/ are higher and fronter in Pyongyang speech than in Seoul speech. 2) The vowels /우/ and /으/ of Pyongyang speech are somewhat fronter than the corresponding vowels of Seoul speech. 3) The Pyongyang vowels /으/ and if are produced with rounded lips compared to the corresponding Seoul vowels. 4) The Pyongyang vowel /h) is much lower in tongue position and at the same time somewhat fronter than the corresponding Seoul vowel. 5) The consonants /r ,i ,n / are pronounced in Pyongyang as alveolar affricates or something close to them whereas they are pronounced in Seoul as post-alveolar affricates. 6) Unlike in Seoul speech there is a very strong tendency in Pyongyang speech to reduce aspiration feature in consonant seouences such as /ㅂ+ㅎ/, /ㄷ+ㅎ/, /ㄱ+ㅎ/. 7) /ㄴ/ and /ㄹ/(flap) freely occur word-initially in Pyongyang speech whereas they are restricted in Seoul speech. 8) Unlike in Seoul speech the phonemic contrast of long and short vowels are generally not functional in Pyongyang speech. Thus the vowels pronounced long in Seoul speech are usually pronounced short in Pyongyang speech.