• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.27
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• pp.497-523
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• 2012

Characteristics of the Listening and Pronunciation of Korean Obstruents of Chinese Learners -Based on the Phonetic Experiments Using Kalvin and Praat- This study aims at investigating the characteristics of confrontation in three ways, lax/ fortis/ aspirated consonants, in Korean obstruents through experimental phonetic analysis for the Chinese Korean language learners. On one hand, as a result of comparing Korean and Chinese obstruent systems, there is no big difference regarding the articulatory location. On the other hand, in regards to the articulatory method there is a difference. In a Korean obstruent system, the confrontation presented in three ways by the strength of aspiration. On the contrary, the Chinese obstruent system showed confrontation in two ways by the existence of aspiration. To examine the difficulty of the learners caused by the above-mentioned reason objectively, this paper studied the relationship between input and output of sound through the experimental phonetic analysis such as Kalvin and Praat. To research the input of sound, the listening ability of the learners was examined by 'Choosing Consonant' among the Menu of Kalvin. As a result of that experiment, many errors were shown. They recognized the fortis as lax in the area of affricates and plosives. In the area of fricatives, they recognized affricatives as fricatives. To investigate the output of sound, the section of aspiration and the section of friction of a plosive, an affricate and a fricative in Praat, were expressed numerically. The learners' VOT of lax and affricate represented that lax was pronounced close to the fortis, and the VOT of fricatives was not shown the section of aspiration and friction clearly, and also the result showed that they pronounced a fricative like affricative-aspirated one. The result shows that the learners' pronunciation is related to the listening ability. The consequence is caused by the characteristics of the difference between Korean obstruents and Chinese ones. If the training pronunciation is conducted based on above result, it would be a better methodology in teaching Korean.

• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.37-44
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• 2017

Eye-typing is one kind of human-computer interactive input system which is implemented by location data of gaze. It is widely used as an input system for paralytics because it does not require physical motions other than the eye movement. However, eye-typing interface based on Korean character has not been suggested yet. Thus, this research aims to implement the eye-typing interface optimized for Korean. To begin with, design objectives were established based on the features of eye-typing: significant noise and Midas touch problem. Multilevel input system was introduced to deal with noise, and an area free from input button was applied to solve Midas touch problem. Then, two types of eye-typing interfaces were suggested on phonological consideration of Korean where each syllable is generated from combination of several phonemes. Named as consonant-vowel integrated interface and separated interface, the two interfaces are designed to input Korean in phases through grouped phonemes. Finally, evaluation procedures composed of comparative experiments against the conventional Double-Korean keyboard interface, and analysis on flow of gaze were conducted. As a result, newly designed interfaces showed potential to be applied as practical tools for eye-typing.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.1092-1096
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• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonant in the same position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in summer. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of near minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the word with singleton graphemes were relatively high both in perception and production (78.6% and 76.1%, respectively), while those for the word with doubleton graphemes were low both in perception and production (55.3% and 61.7%, respectively). Also, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.27-33
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• 2011

This paper explores two articulatory characteristics of inter-consonantal coordination observed in lingual-lingual (/kt/, /ks/) and labial-lingual (/pt/) sequences. Using electromagnetic articulometry (EMMA), temporal aspects of the lip movement and lingual movement (of the tongue tip and the tongue dorsum) were examined. Three sequences (/ks/, /kt/, /pt/) were investigated in two respects: gestural overlap in C1C2 and formation duration of coronals in C2 (/t/ or /s/). Results are summarized as follows. First, in a sequence of two stop consonants gestural overlap did not vary with order contrast or a low-level motor constraint on lingual articulators. Gestural overlap between two stop consonants was similar in both /kt/ (lingual-lingual; back-to-front) and /pt/ (labial-lingual; front-to-back). Second, gestural overlap was not simply constrained by place of articulation. Two coronals (/s/ and /t/) shared the same articulator, the tongue tip, but they showed a distinctive gestural overlap pattern with respect to /k/ in C1 (/ks/ (less overlap) < /kt/ (more overlap)). Third, temporal duration of the tongue tip gesture varied as a function of manner of articulation of the target segment in C2 (/ks/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)) as well as a function of place of articulation of the segmental context in C1 (/pt/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)). There are several implications associated with the results from Korean non-assimilating contexts. First, Korean can be better explained in the way of its language-specific gestural pattern; gestural overlap in Korean is not simply attributed to order contrast (front-to-back vs. back-to-front) or a physiological motor constraint on lingual articulators (lingual-lingual vs. nonlingual-lingual). Taking all factors into consideration, inter-gestural coordination is influenced not only by C1 (place of articulation) but also C2 (manner of articulation). Second, the jaw articulator could have been a factor behind a distinctive gestural overlap pattern in different C1C2 sequences (/ks/ (less overlap) vs. /kt/ and /pt/ (more overlap)). A language-specific gestural pattern occurred with reference to a physiological motor constraint on the jaw articulator.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.51-60
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• 2018

This study aims to compare the word decoding skills, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills, and letter knowledge of first graders with developmental dyslexia (DD) and those who were typically developing (TD). Eighteen children with DD and eighteen TD children, matched by nonverbal intelligence and discourse ability, participated in the study. Word decoding of Korean language-based reading assessment(Pae et al., 2015) was conducted. Phoneme-grapheme correspondent words were analyzed according to whether the word has meaning, whether the syllable has a final consonant, and the position of the grapheme in the syllable. Letter knowledge asked about the names and sounds of 12 consonants and 6 vowels. The children's PA of word, syllable, body-coda, and phoneme blending was tested. Object and letter RAN was measured in seconds. The decoding difficulty of non-words was more noticeable in the DD group than in the TD one. The TD children read the syllable initial and syllable final position with 99% correctness. Children with DD read with 80% and 82% correctness, respectively. In addition, the DD group had more difficulty in decoding words with two patchims when compared with the TD one. The DD group read only 57% of words with two patchims correctly, while the TD one read 91% correctly. There were significant differences in body-coda PA, phoneme level PA, letter RAN, object RAN, and letter-sound knowledge between the two groups. This study confirms the existence of Korean developmental dyslexics, and the urgent need for the inclusion of a Korean-specific phonics approach in the education system.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.1
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• pp.47-56
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• 2003

Korean delimits words by white-space like English, but words In Korean Is a little different in structure from those in English. Words in English generally consist of one word, but those in Korean are composed of one word and/or morpheme or more. Because of this difference, a word between white-spaces is called an Eojeol in Korean. We propose a method for segmenting and classifying Korean words and/or morphemes based on syllables using an instance-based learning. In this paper, elements of feature sets for the instance-based learning are one previous syllable, one current syllable, two next syllables, a final consonant of the current syllable, and two previous categories. Our method shows more than 97% of the F-measure of word segmentation using ETRI corpus and KAIST corpus.

• 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).

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.11 no.6 s.44
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• pp.99-106
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• 2006

Type classification is a very needed step in recognizing huge character set language such as korean characters. Since most previous researches are based on the composition rule of Korean characters, it has been difficult to correctly classify composite vowel characters and problem space was not divided equally for the lack of classification of last consonant which is relatively bigger than other graphemes. In this paper, I Propose a new type classification method in which horizontal vowel is extracted before vortical vowel and last consonants are further classified into one of five small groups based on horizontal projection profile. The new method uses 19 character types which is more stable than previous 6 types or 15 types. Through experiments on 1.000 frequently used character sets and 30.614 characters scanned from several magazines, I showed that the proposed method is more useful classifying Korean characters of huge set.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1990.07a
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• pp.535-538
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• 1990

The main problem in speech recognition is the enormous variability in acoustic signals due to complex but predictable contextual effects. Especially in plosive consonants it is very difficult to find invariant cue due to various contextual effects, but humans use these contextual effects as helpful information in plosive consonant recognition. In this paper we experimented on three artificial neural net models for the recognition of plosive consonants. Neural Net Model I used "Multi-layer Perceptron ". Model II used a variation of the "Self-organizing Feature Map Model". And Model III used "Interactive and Competitive Model" to experiment contextual effects. The recognition experiment was performed on 9 Korean plosive consonants. We used VCV speech chains for the experiment on contextual effects. The speech chain consists of Korean plosive consonants /g, d, b, K, T, P, k, t, p/ (/ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ/) and eight Korean monothongs. The inputs to Neural Net Models were several temporal cues - duration of the silence, transition and vot -, and the extent of the VC formant transitions to the presence of voicing energy during closure, burst intensity, presence of asperation, amount of low frequency energy present at voicing onset, and CV formant transition extent from the acoustic signals. Model I showed about 55 - 67 %, Model II showed about 60%, and Model III showed about 67% recognition rate.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.851-861
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• 1998

Korean language is to be characterized by the rich vocal sound variation. In order to increase the probability of vocal sound recognition and to provide a natural vocal sound synthesis, a systematic and thorough research into the characteristics of Korean language including its vocal sound changing rules is required. This paper addresses an effective way of vocal sound recognition and synthesis by providing the design and implementation of the Korean vocal sound variation rule. The regulation we followed for the design of the vocal sound variation rule is the Phonetic Standard(Section 30. Chapter 7) of the Korean Orthographic Standards. We have first factor out rules for each regulations, then grouped them into 27 groups for eaeh final-consonant. The Phonological Change Processing System suggested in the paper provides a fast processing ability for vocal sound variation by a single application of the rule. The contents of the process for information augmented to words or the stem of innected words are included in the rules. We believe that the Phonological Change Processing System will facilitate the vocal sound recognition and synthesis by the sentence. Also, this system may be referred as an example for similar research areas.