• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.93-105
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• 2000

The English schwa sound has special characteristics which are distinct from other vowels. It is non-phonemic and occurs only in an unstressed syllable. Compared with the English schwa, the Korean /e/ is a full vowel which has phonemic contrast. This paper had three aims. One was to see whether there is any relationship between English full vowels and their reduced vowel schwas. Second was to see whether there is any possible target in the English schwa sounds which are derived from different full vowels. The third was to compare the English non-phoneme vowel schwa and the Korean full vowel /e/ in terms of articulatory positions and duration. The study results showed that there is no relationship between each of the full vowels and its schwa. The schwa tended to converge into a possible target which was F1 456 and F2 1560. The Korean vowel /e/ seemed to have its distinct position speaker-individual which is different from the neutral tongue position. The evidence that the Korean /e/ is a back vowel was supported by the Seoul dialect speaker. In duration, the English schwa was much shorter than the full vowels, but there was no significant difference in length between the Korean /e/ and other Korean vowels.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.165-165
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• 2000

In the phoneme level, English stop sounds are classified with the feature of 'voicing': voiceless and voiced (p/b, t/d, k/g). But when realized, a voiceless stop is not alwats the same sound. For example, the two 'p' sounds in 'people' are different. The former is pronounced with much aspiration, while the latter without it. This allophonic differnece between [$P^h$] and [p] out of an English phoneme /p/ can be well explained to Koreans because in Korean these two sounds exist as two different phonemes {/ㅍ/ and /ㅃ/ respectively). But difficulties lie in teaching the English voiced stop sounds (/b, d, g/) to Koreans because in Korean voiced stops do not exist as phonemes but as allophones of lenis sounds (/ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/). For example, the narrow transcription of '바보' (a fool) is [baboo]. In the word initial position, Korean lenis stops are pronounced voiceless and even with a slight aspiration while in the inrervocalic environments they become voiced, That is in Korean voiced stops do not occur independently and neither they have their own letters. To explain all these more effectively to Koreans, it is very helpful to use Korean Phenetic Alphabet (KPA) which is devised by Dr. LEE Hyunbok (a professor of phonetics at Seoul National Univ. and chairman of Phonetic Society of Koera.)(omitted)

• MALSORI
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• v.68
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• pp.33-47
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a hybrid acoustic and pronunciation model adaptation method based on context dependency for Korean-English speech recognition. The proposed method is performed as follows. First, in order to derive pronunciation variant rules, an n-best phoneme sequence is obtained by phone recognition. Second, we decompose each rule into a context independent (CI) or a context dependent (CD) one. To this end, it is assumed that a different phoneme structure between Korean and English makes CI pronunciation variabilities while coarticulation effects are related to CD pronunciation variabilities. Finally, we perform an acoustic model adaptation and a pronunciation model adaptation for CI and CD pronunciation variabilities, respectively. It is shown from the Korean-English speech recognition experiments that the average word error rate (WER) is decreased by 36.0% when compared to the baseline that does not include any adaptation. In addition, the proposed method has a lower average WER than either the acoustic model adaptation or the pronunciation model adaptation.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.323-329
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• 2010

The edit distance problem is finding the minimum number of edit operations to transform a string into another one. It is one of the important problems in algorithm research and there are some algorithms that compute an optimal edit distance for the one-dimensional languages such as the English alphabet. However, there are a few researches to find the edit distance for the more complicated language such as the Korean or Chinese alphabet. In this paper, we define the measure of the edit distance for the Korean alphabet with the phoneme classification system to improve the previous edit distance algorithm and present an algorithm for the edit distance problem for the Korean alphabet.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.93-109
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• 2007

It is reported that the orthognathic patients suffer from not only aesthetic problems but also resonance disorder and articulation disorder because of the abnormality of the oral cavity. This study was designed to investigate the resonance of nasality and the intelligibility of speech for acoustic characteristics of patients' speech before and after orthognatic surgery. 8 orthognathic patients participated in the study. The nasality of words containing Korean consonants, Korean consonants and frequency and intensity of the fricative /s/ were measured using Nasometer and CSL (Computerized Speech Lab). Results were as follows: First, the nasality of post orthognathic surgery patients decreased in spontaneous speech. There was a significant difference in the nasality for all words between pre and post orthognatic surgery patients. Second, the nasality of each Korean consonant phoneme of post orthognathic surgery patients decreased. There was also a significant difference of the nasality for each Korean consonant phoneme between pre and post orthognatic surgery patients. Third, the decreased nasality for Korean consonant phonemes showed in plosives, affricates, fricatives, liquids, and nasals after surgery. But the significant difference showed only in plosives and fricatives. Finally, frequency and intensity for the fricative /s/ of post orthognathic patients increased.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.7-26
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• 1997

An electromyographic device was used to investigate the relationship between a linguistic hypothesis of tense-lax distinction and muscular activity. Muscle action potentials of the orbicularis oris muscle and the depressor anguli oris muscle were obtained from four subjects using CVCVCV and CVCVC words in English and VCV and CVC words in Korean. Findings: The hypothesis that the speaker may select at least one of muscles involved in the articulation of a phoneme so that the selected muscle could be activated for tense-lax distinction, and either a timing variable or an amplitude variablethe and/or both from the selected muscle distinguish(es) /p/ from /b/ in English and /$p^{h},\;p^{l}$/ from /p/ in Korean, with the English /p/ and the Korean /$p^{h},\;p^{l}$/ being tense, and the Korean unaspirated /p/ and the English /b/ lax, has been verified, except for the case with subject 2 in stressed syllables in English. (2) Thus, the linguistic hypothesis of tense-lax distinction was strongly supported by the muscular activities during the Korean bilabial stops, with /$p^{h}\;and\;p^{l}$/ being tense and /p/ lax. (3) Considering the intermuscle compensation and the interspeaker variabilities in the choice of a muscle or muscles, in English the usability of the feature 'tensity' appeared to be positive rather than negative although further investigations with more subjects remain to take on the muscles associated with the onset/offset of the labial closure, including the respiratory muscles related with the aspiration. The phoneme-sensitive EMG manifestations of stress and possible reasons for the interspeaker variabilities are discussed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.74-81
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• 1995

This paper describes the development of speech databases for the Korean language which were constructed at Communications Research Laboratory in KAIST. The procedure and environment to construct the speech database are presented in detail, and the phonetic and linguistic properties of the databases are presented. the databases were intended for use in designing and evaluating speech recognition algorithms. The databases consist of five different sets of speech contents : trade-related continuous speech with 3,000 words, variable-length connected digits, phoneme-balanced 75 isolated words, 500 isolated Korean provincial names, and Korean A-set words.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06a
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• pp.1033-1038
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• 1994

This paper describes recognition results using the modified Learning Vector Quantization (MLVQ2) method which we proposed previously. At first, we investigated the property of duration of 29 Korean consonants and found that the variances of th duration were extremely big comparing to other languages. We carried out preliminary recognition experiments for three stop consonants P, T and K. From the recognition results, we defined the optimum conditions for the learning. Then we applied the MLVQ2 method to the recognition of Korean consonants. The training was carried out using the phoneme samples in the 611 word vocabulary uttered by 2 male speakers, where each of the speakers uttered two repetitions. The recognition experiment was carried out for the phoneme samples in two repetitions of the 611 word vocabulary uttered by another male speaker. The recognition scores for the twelve plosives were 68.2% for the test samples. The recofnition scores for the 29 Korean consonants were 64.8% for the test samples.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.883-891
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• 1994

In this paper, we introduce new thinning algorithm which is useful for handwritten Korean character by using pixel directivity. At first, the directivity detection is performed before thinning. Each pixel is classified into the straight line of the oblique line based on its directivity. The algorithm using Rutovitz corossing number is applied to the straight line. And the algorithm using Hilditch crossing number is applied to the oblique line. The proposed algorithm is compared with six convention algorithms. Comparison criteria are similarity, noisy branch, and phoneme segmentation rate. Experiments with 570 characters have been conducted. Experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm is superior to six conventional algorithm with respect to similarity and phoneme segmentation rate.