• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.101-108
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• 2014

This study investigates the effects of Japanese learners' Korean segmental production on pronunciation evaluation by Korean native raters. Read speech from 24 learners whose native language is Japanese are transcribed at the phonemic level, and confusion matrices are generated based on the phonemic transcriptions. The deviance from the canonical pronunciation found in the learners' speech is analyzed in terms of phoneme substitutions, vowel insertions, and consonant deletions. Each learner's pronunciation is rated impressionistically by 5 Korean native raters. The result shows that the deviance from the canonical pronunciation is strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores. Especially, the rates of phoneme substitutions and vowel insertions which are very strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.75-78
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• 2003

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon for Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished pronunciation variation rules according to the locations such as within a morpheme, across a morpheme boundary in a compound noun, across a morpheme boundary in an eojeol, and across an eojeol boundary. In 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiment, an absolute improvement of 1.16％ in WER from the baseline performance of 23.17％ WER is achieved by modeling cross-morpheme pronunciation variations with a context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.338-349
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• 2000

Pronunciation teaching is once again coming into the foreground of ELT. Japan is, however, lagging far behind many countries in the development of pronunciation curricula and in the actual speech performance of the Japanese learners of English. The reasons for this can be found in the prevalence of communicative methodologies unfavorable for pronunciation teaching, in the lack of trained professionals, and in the large numbers of students in Japanese foreign language classes. This paper offers a way to promote foreign language pronunciation teaching in Japan and other countries by means of employing computer and internet facilities. The paper outlines the major directions of using modem speech technologies in pronunciation classes, like EVF (electronic visual feedback) training at segmental and prosodic levels; automated error detection, testing, grading and fluency assessment. The author discusses the applicability of some specific software packages (CSLU, SUGIspeech, Multispeech, Wavesurfer, etc.) for the needs of pronunciation teaching. Finally, the author talks about the globalization of pronunciation education via internet resources, such as computer corpora and speech and pronunciation training related web pages.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.41-44
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• 2002

This paper is related to the enhancement of speech recognition rate using enhanced pronunciation dictionary. Modern large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition systems have pronunciation dictionaries. A pronunciation dictionary provides pronunciation information for each word in the vocabulary in phonemic units, which are modeled in detail by the acoustic models. But in most speech recognition system based on Hidden Markov Model, actual pronunciation variations are disregarded. Without the pronunciation variations in the speech recognition system, the phonetic transcriptions in the dictionary do not match the actual occurrences in the database. In this paper, we proposed the unvoiced rule of semivowel in allophone rules to pronunciation dictionary. Experimental results on speech recognition system give higher performance than existing pronunciation dictionaries.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.339-368
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• 2014

In Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, phoneme-based pronunciation teaching such as tone, consonants, vowels is the most common teaching methods. Based on main character of Chinese grammar: 'lack of morphological change' in a narrow sense, was proposed by Lv Shuxiang and Zhu Dexi, I designed 'Communicative oriented Chinese pronunciation teaching method'. This teaching method is composed of seven elements: one kind is the 'structural elements': phoneme, word, phrase, sentence; another kind is the 'functional elements': listening, speaking and translation. This pronunciation teaching method has four kinds of practice methods: 1) phoneme learning method; 2) word based pronunciation practice; 3) phrase based pronunciation practice; 4) sentence based pronunciation practice. When the teachers use these practice methods, they can use the dialogue and Korean-Chinese translation. In particular, when the teachers use 'phoneme learning method', they must use Korean and Chinese phonetic comparison results. When the teachers try to correct learner's errors, they must first consider the speech communication.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.241-248
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) method on generating the Korean standard pronunciation. Previous studies on the phonological processing have been focused on the phonological rule applications and the finite state automata (Johnson 1984; Kaplan and Kay 1994; Koskenniemi 1983; Bird 1995). In case of Korean computational phonology, some former researches have approached the phonological rule based pronunciation generation system (Lee et al. 2005; Lee 1998). This study suggests a corpus-based and data-oriented rule learning method on generating Korean standard pronunciation. In order to substituting rule-based generation with corpus-based one, an aligned corpus between an input and its pronunciation counterpart has been devised. We conducted an experiment on generating the standard pronunciation with the TBL algorithm, based on this aligned corpus.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.29-36
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• 2010

The purposes of this study are (1) to see if language transfer effect is found in Korean speakers' pronunciation of English stops and to correct them and (2) to investigate the effectiveness of mimicry training and Speech Analyzer training on subjects' pronunciation of English stops. For these purposes, 20 Korean speakers' VOT values of English stops were measured using Speech Analyzer and their post-training production was compared with their pre-training production. The result shows that Korean speakers have no difficulty in correcting pronunciation errors of English voiceless stops and voiced stops and such a result indicates that language transfer effect is not noticed as expected. In addition, the result of pronunciation training shows that the training using Speech Analyzer is more effective than mimicry training.