• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.103-116
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• 2003

This study examines whether gender influences voice cessation time (voicing duration) of lax (voiced) obstruents. Females more frequently show a posterior glottal opening throughout a vibratory cycle and have larger open quotients and less vocal fold contact than males. The gender differences imply that females can yield less voicing in their speech. In line with this, we hypothesized that the male voice is more voiced than the female voice in intervocalic lax (voiced) obstruents. This hypothesis was supported by the results of the present experiment, i.e., males exhibited significantly longer voicing and higher percentage of voicing relative to consonant duration than females during the intervocalic lax obstruents /p, t, k, c/ of Korean. Based on the results and the literature review, it is further hypothesized that the vocal folds are more likely adducted for males while abducted for females. The experimental data also indicated that males speak faster than females.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.21-33
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• 2000

There are two hypotheses with reference to voicing in Korean intervocalic lax stops /p, t, k/ and affricate /c/: (1) the phonologically voiceless lax stops /p, t, k/ and affricate /c/ are realised as voiced allophones in the intervocalic position; (2) the shorter the lax consonant, the higher the percentage of voicing. But the literature reveals that there are views rejecting or doubting them. To clarify these, an experiment was carried out, using a Sun Sparcstation, twelve native speakers of Korean and speech materials embedded in a sentence frame. The results showed that the extent of voicing in lax stops and affricate was too inconsistent to support the full voicing hypothesis, and shorter duration (faster speech) did not necessarily cause a higher percentage of voicing.

• 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.

• 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.

• MALSORI
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• no.spc1
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• pp.13-23
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• 2002

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

This study examines the duration of Korean lax and tense stops in the prosodic word-medial position, their interactions with nearby segments, and the phonological implications of these interactions. It first examines the lengthening of consonants at the function of the short lax stop. Experiment 1 shows that the sonorant C1 is significantly longer before a short lax stop C2 than before a long tense stop. Experiment 2 shows that the short lax stop C1 cancels the contrast between the lax and tense obstruent at C2, making them appear as long tense obstruents (Post-Stop Tensing Rule). We suggest that such lengthening phenomena occur in Korean to robustly preserve the contrastive length difference between C and CC. Second, this study examines the vowel shortening, known as Closed-Syllable Vowel Shortening, before a long tense stop or before the consonant sequence. Experiment 3 suggests that it be interpreted as temporal adjustment to make the interval from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel of near-equal length. Conclusively, we suggest that Korean speech be planned and controlled with two specific intervals. One is the duration of contrastive consonant intervals between vowels, and the other is the duration from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel.

• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.117-131
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• 2003

The feature tenseness has long been a controversial issue. Many scholars have hardly accepted tenseness as a distinctive feature, due to the absence of its consistent and objective phonetic evidence especially in English. Instead, they claim that voicing is the primary feature and even say that no other feature can-be independent of voicing. However, voicing feature does not explain everything and significant aerodynamic and physiological correlates of the feature tenseness have been reported in English as well as in some other languages that have the tense/lax distinction in their obstruents. It is suggested that voicing is a simple and direct feature while tenseness is a complex and indirect feature and its autonomy as a distinctive feature should be acknowledged. This will enable us to describe the phonetic reality more properly across languages as well as in individual languages.