• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

We explored Dutch listeners' perception of Korean three-way contrast of fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. The three Korean stops are all voiceless word-initially, whereas Dutch distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, so Korean voiceless stops were expected to be difficult for the Dutch listeners. Among the three Korean stops, fortis stops are phonetically most similar to Dutch voiceless stops, thus they were expected to be the easiest to distinguish for the Dutch listeners. Dutch and Korean listeners carried out a discrimination task using three crucial comparisons, i.e., fortis-lenis, fortis-aspirated, and lenis-aspirated stops. Results showed that discrimination between lenis and aspirated stops was the most difficult among the three comparisons for both Dutch and Korean listeners. As expected, Dutch listeners discriminated fortis from the other stops relatively accurately. It seems likely that Dutch listeners relied heavily on VOT but less on F0 when discriminating between the three Korean stops.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.201-214
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• 2002

In the Japanese language, there is a phonological contrast between not only initial stops, but also non initial in voiced and voiceless sounds. But in the Korean language, voiced sounds do not appear in the initial. Due to this, pronunciation of voiced sounds in the initial will be difficult for Korean. Through this research, I analyzed the minimal pairs by voiced/voiceless sounds of Japanese and Korean, and perception experiment in which Japanese listened to Korean speakers' pronunciations. Japanese pronunciations showed distinct acoustic differences between voiced and voiceless stops, especially in VOT. The duration of vowels after voiced stops was longer than that of voiceless ones. Vowel pitches after voiceless stops were higher. On the other hands, Korean showed three patterns of voiced sounds. There were-VOT values as native speakers, +VOT, and nasal formant tended to occur before prenasalized stops. Koreans pronounced voiceless sounds in strong aspirated, unaspirated, or tense sounds. Finally, Japanese judged sounds with not only -VOT values and prenasalized, but also with +VOT values as voiced. This suggests that we may not consider VOT values as the unique feature of voicing, and that such other phonetic characteristics as the following vowel lengthening should be included here.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2000년도 7월 학술대회지
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• pp.139-148
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• 2000

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study of intonation contrasts perception by speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian. Six series of re-synthesized two-syllable rise-fall contours with manipulated parameters of the rise in the first and the fall in the second syllable were employed in the experiment. Modifications of pitch height were executed in 2 st steps, and of duration - in 30ms steps. The subjects, who were native speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian, identified the sentence type of presented re-synthesized stimuli. The results of the experiments demonstrate overall similarity of the perception strategies across the three groups of subjects, especially regarding the thresholds of 'declarative' sentence type judgement. Non-declarative judgements are more language-specific. The results can be employed for the teaching of English, Japanese and Russian as foreign languages as well as for speech synthesis and recognition.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.11-18
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• 2011

This paper examines the categorical labeling of lexical pitch accent contrasts in North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean listeners. It focuses specifically on investigating whether the pitch accent perception of adults and children has a dialect-specific effect. To evaluate the development of perceptual identification, slopes, intercepts, and positions at categorical boundaries were computed using a logistic regression function. The results showed that differences in slopes and intercepts were significant between North Kyungsang child and adult listeners, but the same was not the case for the positions at boundaries. As far as South Cholla child and adult listeners were concerned, there was a significant difference in slopes, but not intercepts and positions at boundaries. In the present study, the comparison of intercepts and slopes at the boundaries indicated developmental differences between North Kyungsang adult and child listeners. This improvement in categorical proportion seems to be a result of developmental changes in categorical perception. For South Cholla adult and child listeners, however, perception of the non-native contrast becomes less categorical.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제60호
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• pp.1-11
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• 2006

This paper investigated AV benefit of Korean and Japanese EFL learners' perception of the liquid contrast in English. In a perception experiment, the two English consonants /l/ and /r/ were embedded in initial and medial position in nonsense words in the context of the vowels /i, a, u/. Singletons and clusters were included in the speech material. Audio and video recordings were made using a total of 108 items. The items were presented to Korean and Japanese learners of English in three conditions: audio-alone (A), visual-alone (V) and audio-visual presentation (AV). The results showed that there was no evidence of AV benefit for the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast for either Korean or Japanese learners of English. The results suggest that increasing auditory proficiency in identifying a non-native contrast is linked with an increasing proficiency in using visual cues to the contrast.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.13-19
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• 2022

This study analyzed the pronunciations of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/ by 24 Japanese and 40 Korean speakers using the rise and steady+decay durations of their frication part in order to clarify the characteristics of their pronunciations. Discriminant analysis revealed that Japanese speakers' /s/ and /ts/ were well classified by the acoustic boundaries defined by a discriminant function. Using this boundary, Korean speakers' production of /s/ and /ts/ was analyzed. It was found that, in Korean speakers' pronunciation, misclassification of /s/ as /ts/ was more frequent than that of /ts/ as /s/, indicating that both the /s/ and /ts/ distributions shift toward short rise and steady+decay durations. Moreover, their distributions were very similar to those of Korean fricatives and affricates. These results suggest that Korean speakers' classification error might be because of their use of Korean lax and tense fricatives to pronounce Japanese /s/, and Korean lax and tense affricates to pronounce Japanese /ts/.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.11-16
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• 2023

The present study examines how a cognitive attention affects Korean learners of English (L2) in perceiving the English stop voicing distinction (/d/-/t/). This study tested the effect of attentional distractor on primary and non-primary acoustic cues, focusing on the role of Voice Onset Time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0). Using the dual-task paradigm, 28 Korean adult learners of English participated in the stop identification task carried with (distractor) and without (no-distractor) arithmetic calculation. Results showed that when distracted, Korean learners' sensitivity to VOT decreased as priorly reported with native English speakers. Furthermore, as F0 is a primary cue for a L1 Korean stop laryngeal contrast, its role in L2 English voicing distinction was also affected by a distractor, without compensating for the reduced VOT sensitivity. These findings suggest that flexible use of multiple cues in L1 is not necessarily beneficial for L2 phonological processing when coping with a adverse listening condition.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.41-58
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• 2003

Coronal/non-coronal asymmetry refers to the typological trend wherein coronals rather than non-coronals are more likely targets in place assimilation. Although the phenomenon has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of unmarkedness in formalistic approaches to sound patterns, the examination of rules and representations cannot answer why there should be such a process in the first place. Furthermore, the motivation of coronal/non-coronal asymmetry has remained controversial to date even in the field of phonetics. The present study investigated the listeners' perception of coronal and non-coronal stops in the context of $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ after critically reviewing the three types of phonetic accounts for coronal/non-coronal asymmetry, i.e., articulatory, perceptual, and gestural overlap accounts. An experiment was conducted to test whether the phenomenon in question may occur, given the listeners' lack of perceptual ability to identify weaker place cues in VC transitions as argued by Ohala (1990), i.e., coronals have weak place cues that cause listeners' misperception. 5pliced nonsense $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ utterances were given to 20 native speakers of English and Korean. Data analysis showed that majority of the subjects reported $C_{2}\;as\;C_{1}$. More importantly, the place of articulation of C1 did not affect the listeners' identification. Compared to non-coronals, coronals did not show a significantly lower rate of correct identifications. This study challenges the view that coronal/non-coronal asymmetry is attributable to the weak place cues of coronals, providing evidence that CV cues are more perceptually salient than VC cues. While perceptual saliency account may explain the frequent occurrence of regressive assimilation across languages, it cannot be extended to coronal/non-coronal asymmetry.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.9-17
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• 2017

The aim of this study is to examine whether Chinese Korean learners (CKL) can correctly produce the aspiration in 'a lenis obstruents /k/, /t/, /p/, /ʧ/+/h/ sound' sequence at the lexical and post-lexical level. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers (KNS), 10 advanced and 10 intermediate CKL participated in a production test. The material analyzed consisted of 10 Korean sentences in which aspiration can be applied at different prosodic boundaries (syllable, word, accentual phrase). The results showed that for KNS and CKL, the rate of application of aspiration was different according to prosodic boundaries. Aspiration was more frequently applied at the lexical level than at the post-lexical level and it was more frequent at the word boundary than at the accentual phrase boundary. For CKL, pronunciation errors were either non-application of aspiration or coda obstruent omission. In the case of non-application of aspiration, CKL produced the target syllable as an underling form and they did not transform it as a surface form. In the case of coda obstruent ommision, most of the errors were caused by the inherent complexity of phonological process.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권1호
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• pp.53-62
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• 2016

In this study, we examined whether Chinese learners of Korean can correctly produce the phonological process on the lexical and post-lexical level. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers and 10 advanced and 10 intermediate Chinese learners of Korean participated in the production test. The materials analyzed constituted 10 Korean sentences in which nasalization can be applied on the syllable boundary, word boundary(w-boundary) as well as accentual phrase boundary(AP-boundary). The results show that for Korean speakers, nasalization was applied 100% at all level whereas for Chinese speakers, the rate of application of nasalization is different according to prosodic constituents and Korean proficiency. Nasalization was more frequently applied at the lexical level than the post-lexical level, and it is more frequent in the w-boundary conditions than in the AP-boundary conditions. However, the rate of nasalization in the w-boundary is close to the lexical level. The pronunciation errors were committed either as non application of nasalization or coda obstruent ommission. In the case of non application of nasalization, Chinese learners of Korean produced the target syllables as underling forms, which were not transformed as surface forms. In addition, we can observe the ommission of coda obstruents in 'lenis obstruents+nasal sound' sequences. As a result, nasalization is blocked by this omission.