• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.69-76
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• 1994

Acoustic cues of some consonantal phonology were tested in Korean words. All Korean consonants were recorded and acoustically analyzed in controlled phonological environments :ⅰ) word-initial, ⅱ) inter-vocalic, and ⅲ) word-final positions. The observed acoustic regulations are : ⅰ) The lengths of obstruents are longer word-initially than word-finally, ⅱ) The lengths of sonorants are longer word-finally than in word-initial or inter-vocalic positions, ⅲ) The formants of the lateral sound /l/ are higher word-finally than intervocalically. The phonological explanations of these acoustic regulations can be found in the rules of ⅰ) inter-vocalic voicing of plain stops, ⅱ) syllable-final unreleasing of obstruents, ⅲ) word-initial aspiration of stops, and ⅳ) liquid alternation between [r] and [l]. Numerical data of all these acoustic regulations are reported in order to facilitate their application toward improving naturalness for speech synthesis and accurateness for speech recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.3-8
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• 2015

Denasalization that nasals are replaced by stops is an unusual error pattern related to manner of articulation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prevalence of denasalization and to scrutinize the nasal production according to phonological context for typically developing children and children with speech sound disorders(SSD). 220 typically developing children and 48 SSD children from 2~6 years of age were tested with a formal word test, and those who demonstrate denasalization were selected. In addition, the nasal production of SSD children with denasalization were analyzed for the correctness and the error types using the formal word test and spontaneous conversation. The results were as follows: (1) Denasalization was shown in below 10% of 2-3 years of age with typically developing children and in above 20% of 2-5 years of age with SSD. (2) The SSD children who demonstrate denasalization were categorized into 4 types according to the error context of nasals; nasal errors with all word positions, nasal errors with word-final and word-medial positions, nasal errors with word-medial position preceding vowels, and nasal errors with word-medial position preceding obstruents. These results indicate that denasalization is a clinically important error pattern, and word-medial position preceding obstruents is an essential context for denasalization in terms of Korean phonotactics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.17-26
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• 2023

This study aimed to reveal how Vietnamese adult learners at three different proficiency levels perceive Korean word-initial obstruents and whether errors can be corrected through perceptual training. To this end, 105 Vietnamese beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners were given perceptual training on Korean word-initial. The training materials were created by actively utilizing Korean minimal pairs as natural stimuli recorded by native speakers. Learners in the experimental group performed five 20-40 minute self-directed perceptual training sessions over a period of approximately two weeks, while learners in the control group only participated in the pretest and posttest. The results showed a significant improvement in the perception of sounds that were difficult to distinguish before training, and both beginners and advanced learners benefited from the training. This study confirmed that large-scale perceptual training can play an important role in helping Vietnamese learners learn the appropriate acoustic cues to distinguish different sounds in Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.53-68
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• 2000

Although Korean stops and affricates show a three-way contrast of phonemes into lax, tense and aspirated, Korean fricatives have only two types, so-called 'lax' and tense. Considering that all the other obstruents maintain a three-way distinction but fricatives, it might be interesting to investigate whether the lax fricatives are really 'lax' in their phonetic and phonological realizations, as assumed. From an acoustic analysis, I found that Korean lax fricatives had a heavy aspiration along with a high pitch for the following vowel, being more comparable to the aspirated category. By contrast, their durational properties were found to be short, or lax-like. In other words, Korean lax fricatives are phonetically neither lax nor aspirated, but both. This dual nature of the lax fricatives takes a better account of the fact that why lax fricatives are subject to tensification, but not aspiration phonologically. Is that simply because there is no aspirated fricative in Korean? I suggest that Korean lax fricatives undergo tensification because of their being short in duration, and that they are not subject to the aspiration rule because they are indeed aspirated sounds.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.117-122
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• 1996

This paper proposes a derivational account of tensing and neutralization of obstruents in Korean within the theory of Government Phonology (GP) (Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud 1990, henceforth KLV; Park 1996). We begin by outling the relevant tensing and neutralization data in Korean. We point out several problems that need to be addressed in any account of these data. We then set out the central notions of GP, pointing out how adherence to the requirement that government relations remain constant throughout a derivation under the Projection Principle prevents a GP account of tensing and neutralization in Korean, which requires government relations to switch between lexical and phonetic representations. To address this problem, we propose abandoning the Projection Principle, extending lexical representations in GP along the lines of the Markedness Theory approach (Michaels 1989), and adopting the economy principles for derivation of the Minimalist approach (Chomsky 1993; Chomsky & Lasnik 1991). finally, we summarize the analysis of obstruent phenomena in Korean within GP extended in these ways.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.217-232
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• 2000

In this study, I investigate the role of post-consonantal fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue for automatic distinction of types of Korean stops and affricates. Rather than examining data obtained by restricting contexts to a minimum to prevent the interference of irrelevant factors, a relatively natural speaker independent speech corpus is analysed. Automatic and statistical approaches are adopted to annotate data, to minimise speaker variability, and to evaluate the results. In spite of possible loss of information during those automatic analyses, statistics obtained suggest that vowel F0 is a useful cue for distinguishing manners of articulation of Korean non-continuant obstruents having the same place of articulation, especially of lax and aspirated stops and affricates. On the basis of the statistics, automatic classification is attempted over the relevant consonants in a specific context where the micro-prosodic effects appear to be maximised. The results confirm the usefulness of this effect in application for Korean phone recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.91-99
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• 2010

This paper reports on an identification test where KFL learners identified the Korean three-way laryngeal contrast in the phrase-initial position, when the phrase-initial tone was systematically manipulated. It turns out that heritage learners have some sensitivity to phrase-initial tone and show a plain-aspirated alternation in their identification according to the phrase-initial tone, as native speakers do, whereas non-heritage students do not show such tone sensitivity. However, after a weekly prosody training, second-year non-heritage students have shown a significant improvement in their performance. This paper clearly shows that the phrase-initial tone plays a critical role in distinguishing laryngeal features of Korean obstruents, and also suggests that prosody including the tone-segment correlation should be incorporated in the KFL curriculum.