• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2014

An automatic speech recognition system is one of the popular research problems. There are many research groups working in this field for different language including Japanese. Japanese vowel recognition is one of important parts in the Japanese speech recognition system. The vowel classification system with the Mamdani fuzzy inference system was developed in this research. We tested our system on the blind test data set collected from one male native Japanese speaker and four male non-native Japanese speakers. All subjects in the blind test data set were not the same subjects in the training data set. We found out that the classification rate from the training data set is 95.0 %. In the speaker-independent experiments, the classification rate from the native speaker is around 70.0 %, whereas that from the non-native speakers is around 80.5 %.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.168-168
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• 1996

In this paper I will examine some concrete examples of the obstacles faced by non-native speakers of Japanese when learning the language. I will go on to suggest ways in which these obstacles may be overcome. Nowadays there are numerous Japanese language books available for non-native speakers. However, most of these introductory Japanese language books focus on topics such as pronunciation, accent and intonation. Notable, these introductory textbooks provide insufficient emphasis on prosodic features of the Japanese language. The Japanese language has been considered by many teachers as relatively easy compared to other languages, due to its simple phonetic structure. This may be a partial explanation of the reason why the teaching of prosodic features has generally been given insufficient emphasis. To teach Japanese efficiently at a university level I have combined an emphasis on the teaching of prosodic features together with my experience of television announcing. This has entailed using television news programmes and contemporary reading materials in my class. Using taped material I intend to describe a case-study of teaching of Japanese articulation.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.430-431
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• 1996

Among the scholars of second language (L2) acquisition who have used prosodic considerations in syntactic analyses, pausing and intonation contours have been used to define utterances in the speech of second language learners (e.g., Sato, 1990). In recent research on conversational analysis, it has been found that lexically marked causal clause combining in the discourse of native speakers can be distinguished as "intonational subordination" and "intonational coordination(Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, forthcoming.)". This study uses Pienemann's Processability Theory (1995) for an analysis of the speech of native speakers of Japanese (L1) learning English. In order to accurately assess the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development, it is shown that pitch, loudness, and timing must all be considered together with the syntactic analysis of interlanguage speech production. Twelve Japanese subjects participated in eight fifteen minute interviews, ninety-six dyads. The speech analyzed in this report is limited to the twelve subjects interacting with two different non-native speaker interviews for a total of twenty-four dyads. Within each of the interviews, four different tasks are analyzed to determine the stage of acquisition of English for each subject. Initially the speech is segmented according to intonation contour arid pauses. It is then classified accoding to specific syntactic units and further analysed for pitch, loudness and timing. Results indicate that the speech must be first claasified prosodic ally and lexically, prior to beginning syntactic analysis. This analysis stinguishes three interlanguage lexical categories: discourse markers, coordinator $s_ordinators, and transfer from Japanese. After these lexical categories have been determined, the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development can be more accurately assessed.d.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Cognitive Science Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2005

Current theories of cross-language speech perception claim that patterns of perceptual assimilation of non-native segments to native categories predict relative difficulties in learning to perceive (and produce) non-native phones. Perceptual assimilation patterns by Japanese listeners of the three-way voicing distinction in Korean syllable-initial obstruent consonants were assessed directly. According to Speech Learning Model (SLM) and Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), the resulting perceptual assimilation pattern predicts relative difficulty in discrimination between lenis and aspirated consonants, and relative ease in the discrimination of fortis. This study compared the effects of two different training conditions on Japanese adults’perceptual categorization of Korean three-way distinction. In one condition, participants were trained to discriminate lenis and aspirated consonants which were predicted to be problematic, whereas in another condition participants were trained with all three classes of 'learnability' did not seem to depend lawfully on the perceived cross-language similarity of Korean and Japanese consonants.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.77-81
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• 2006

This paper presents a technique of imposing the prosodic features of a native speaker's utterance onto the same sentence uttered by a non-native speaker. Three acoustic aspects of the prosodic features were considered: the fundamental frequency (F0) contour, segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The fundamental frequency contour and the segmental durations of the native speaker's utterance were imposed on the non-native speaker's utterance by using the PSOLA (pitch-synchronous overlap and add) algorithm [1] implemented in Praat[2]. The intensity contour transfer was also done in Praat. The technique of transferring one or more of these prosodic features was elaborated and its implications in the area of language education were discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2013

This study investigated the rhythmic accommodation of Korean English learners' interlanguage talk. Twelve Korean speakers, 6 native English speakers and 6 non-native English speakers in London participated in multiple conversations on different topics which produced 36 conversational data in interlanguage talk (ILT) settings. 190 utterances from the 36 conversational data were analyzed to investigate the rhythmic patterns of Korean English learners when they communicated with English speakers with different language backgrounds. Save for the final-syllable, the normalized duration of consecutive syllables was compared in order to derive a variability index (VI). It was found that there was no significant variability in the measurement of the syllable-to-syllable duration for the utterances of Korean English learners, regardless of their interlocutor's language background. Conversely, it was found that there was evidence that Korean English learners showed rhythmic accommodation in ILT when they conversed with non-native English speakers. The speaking rate became significantly slower when Korean English learners talked to non-native English speakers, than when they talked to other Korean English learners. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between speaking rate and the VI in the utterances of Korean English learners in ILT.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.97-105
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• 2006

The objective of this study was to analyze the acoustic patterns of Japanese /t/ produced by 40 Korean speakers in order to find an effective method of teaching it to Koreans. The experimental data consisted of 400 /t/ phonemes in word initial or non-initial positions of 10 words. Informants were in their twenties and raised in Daejeon and the surrounding area. Results showed that there were distinctive trends in duration and intensity of the major and non-major groups productions. Both groups pronounced the phoneme longer than the native speakers with more open mouths but with less loudness. The formant analysis showed that F1 values of the Japanese /t/ pronounced by Japanese major group were lower than those of the non-major. Its F2 values by the major group were higher than those of the non-major, which would suggest that the Koreans produced the tongue blade in more frontal position than the native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2020

Non-tonal language speakers may have difficulty learning second language lexical tones. In the present study, we explored this issue with Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese (i.e., non-tonal first language speakers) by examining their perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones. In the perception experiment, the Korean learners were asked to listen to the tone of each stimulus and assign it to one of four Mandarin lexical tones using the response keys; in the production experiment, the learners provided speech production data for the lexical tones and then their productions were identified by native listeners of Mandarin Chinese. Our results showed that the Korean learners of Mandarin Chinese had difficulty in perceptually distinguishing Tone 2 and Tone 3, with the most frequent production error being the mispronunciation of Tone 3 as Tone 2. We also investigated whether unfamiliar non-native phonemes (i.e., Chinese phonemes) that do not exist in the native language phonemic inventory (i.e., Korean) may hinder the processing of the non-native lexical tones. We found no evidence for such effects, neither for the perception nor for the production of the tones.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.53-61
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• 2011

The present work is a follow-up study to that of Han, Choi, Lim and Lee (2011), where an asymmetry in the source segments eliciting the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) was found such that the vowels which did not match any vowel of the Korean language were likely to elicit more ISIB than matched vowels. In order to identify the source of the stronger ISIB in non-matched vowels, acoustic analyses of the stimuli were performed. Two pairs of English front vowels [i] vs. [I], and $[{\varepsilon}]$ vs. $[{\ae}]$ were recorded by English native talkers and two groups of Korean learners according to their English proficiency, and then their vowel duration and the frequencies of the first two formants (F1, F2) were measured. The results demonstrated that the non-matched vowels such as [I], and $[{\ae}]$ produced by Korean talkers seemed to show more deviated acoustic characteristics from those of the natives, with longer duration and with closer formant values to the matched vowels, [i] and $[{\varepsilon}]$, than those of the English natives. Combining the results of acoustic measurements in the present study and those of word identification in Han et al. (2011), we suggest that relatively better performance in word identification by Korean talkers/listeners than the native English talkers/listeners is associated with the shared interlanguage of Korean talkers and listeners.