• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 대한음성학회 2005년도 추계 학술대회 발표논문집
• /
• pp.249-253
• /
• 2005

This paper summarizes some recent findings with respect to how prosodic structure is manifested in fine-grained phonetic details and how such phonetic manifestation of prosodic structure may be exploited in spoken word recognition.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제9권2호
• /
• pp.69-76
• /
• 2017

The current study investigated whether Korean learners' English-learning environments, especially target English accent (General American English (GAE) vs. Southern British English (SBE)) and English-language experience affected their production of English vowels. Thirty six EFL learners, 27 ESL-US learners, and 33 ESL-UK learners produced 8 English vowels with a bVt frame (beat, bit, bet, bat, bought, bot, boat, boot). The learners' productions were acoustically analyzed in terms of F1 and F2 frequencies. The overall results revealed that the learners' target accent had an effect on their production of some English vowels. The EFL and ESL-US learners' (especially, female learners') production of bought, bot, boat, and boot, which show characteristic differences between the GAE and SBE accents, was closer to that of the native American English (AE) speakers than the native British English (BE) speakers. In contrast, the ESL-UK learners' production of bought and bot demonstrated the opposite pattern. Thus, the impact of target accent was not demonstrated across the board. The effect of the learners' different English-language experience was also rather limited. This was because the EFL learners' production was not much different from the ESL-US learners' production, in spite of the ESL-US learners' residence in the US for more than 9 years. Furthermore, the Korean learners, irrespective of their different English-language experience, tended to produce bit and bat with lower F1 than the native AE and BE speakers, thus resulting in bit and bat to be produced similarly to beat and bet, respectively. This demonstrates the learners' persistent L1 effects on their English vowel production despite the learners' residence in the English speaking countries or their high English proficiency.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제11권3호
• /
• pp.7-21
• /
• 2004

The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제10권2호
• /
• pp.25-31
• /
• 2018

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the pronounced words present in the Buckeye Corpus and compared the frequency distribution of these processes by sex and age groups to provide a clearer understanding of spoken English to linguists and phoneticians. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus using R. Next, the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated using R scripts, and a frequency distribution by vowel process types, as well as sex and age groups, was created. The results revealed that 95% of the orthographic words contained the same number of syllables, whereas 5% had different numbers of vowels, thereby proving that speakers tend to preserve vowels in spontaneous speech. In addition, deletion processes were preferred in natural speech. Most vowel deletions occurred with an unstressed syllable. Chi-square tests were performed to calculate dependence in the distribution of phonological process types for male and female groups and young and old groups. The results showed a very strong correlation. This finding indicates that vowel processes occurred in approximately the same pattern in natural and spontaneous speech data regardless of sex and age, as well as whether or not the vowel processes were identical. Based on these results, the author concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can greatly enhance practical understanding of spoken English.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 대한음성학회 2003년도 10월 학술대회지
• /
• pp.83-88
• /
• 2003

This study carried out an experimental English pronunciation assessment to see the differences in the relationship between the different rater categories. The result shows that i) correlation between Korean and Native American raters is high(r=.98) enough to be considered reliable, ii) previous instructions about assessment rubric and the knowledge about English phonetics and phonology exert little influence on the rating scores, iii) correlation between the automatic ILT(Interactive Language Tutor) rating using speech recognition technology and Natives' rating is stronger than that between ILT and Koreans' rating.

• 한국정보처리학회논문지
• /
• 제4권8호
• /
• pp.2025-2037
• /
• 1997

대화체 음성언어번역시스템의 일부인 개념기반 번역시스템은 음성인식의 결과를 이용하여 다른 언어로 번역해 주는 시스템이다. 본 논문은 여행계획 영역에 대해 한국어를 해석하여 영어, 일본어, 한국어로 번역해 주는 시스템에 대해 기술한 것이다. 개념기반 번역은 비정형 문장이 많은 대화체 문장을 처리하기 위해 형태소 분석 등의 구문정보를 이용하지 않고, 의미단위의 번역을 시도한 것으로 화자의 의도를 정확히 번역해 주는 것을 목표로 한다. 개념기반 번역은 280여개의 개념과 개념간의 계층구조에 의해, 인식결과를 개념구조로 변환한 후 다른 언어로 생성해 준다. 효율적인 한국어 처리를 위해 기준단어를 이용한 토큰분리기와 문법자동 수정기를 개발하였다. 그리고 자연스러운 생성문을 위해 각 언어에 대한 후처리기를 개발하였다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제8권4호
• /
• pp.103-113
• /
• 2016

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• 제45권1호
• /
• pp.18-27
• /
• 2023

We present an English-Korean speech translation corpus, named EnKoST-C. End-to-end model training for speech translation tasks often suffers from a lack of parallel data, such as speech data in the source language and equivalent text data in the target language. Most available public speech translation corpora were developed for European languages, and there is currently no public corpus for English-Korean end-to-end speech translation. Thus, we created an EnKoST-C centered on TED Talks. In this process, we enhance the sentence alignment approach using the subtitle time information and bilingual sentence embedding information. As a result, we built a 559-h English-Korean speech translation corpus. The proposed sentence alignment approach showed excellent performance of 0.96 f-measure score. We also show the baseline performance of an English-Korean speech translation model trained with EnKoST-C. The EnKoST-C is freely available on a Korean government open data hub site.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제18권1E호
• /
• pp.27-31
• /
• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권2호
• /
• pp.245-253
• /
• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accents and pronunciations in English words spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation, we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation, and perform the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input patterns and reference patterns. Based on these spectral distances, we decide whether to recommend the pronunciation correction or not. Our results show that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with the perceptual measure.