• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.77-88
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• 2002

Acoustical correlates of stress can be classified as duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. This study examined the acoustical differences in the first two syllables of stressed English words produced by ten American and Korean speakers. The Korean subjects scored very high on the TOEFL. They read at a normal speed a fable from which the acoustical parameters of eight words were analyzed. In order to make the data comparison meaningful, each parameter was collected at 100 dynamic time points proportional to the total duration of the two syllables. Then the ratio of the parameter sum of the first rime to that of the second rime was calculated to determine the relative prominence of the syllables. Results showed that the durations of the first two syllables were almost comparable between the Americans and Koreans. However, statistically significant differences showed up in the diphthong pronunciations and in the words with the second syllable stressed. Also, remarkably high r-squared values were found between pairs of the three acoustical parameters, which suggests that either one or a combination of two or more parameters may account for the prominence of a syllable within a word.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.23-36
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• 2004

Many languages show reverse durational variation between preceding vowel and following voiced/voiceless (lax/tense) consonants. This study investigated the likely effects of phoneme type (tense vs. lax) on the timing structure (duration of syllable, word, phrase and sentence) of Korean. Three rates of speech (fast, normal, slow) applied to stimuli with the target word /a-Ca/ where /C/ is one of /p, p', $p^h$/. The type (tense/lax) of /C/ caused marked inverse durational variations in the two syllables /a/ and /Ca/ and highly different durational ratios between them. Words with /p', $p^h$/ were significantly longer than that with /p/, which contrasts with many other languages where such pairs of words have a similar duration. The differentials between words remained up to the phrase and sentence level, but in general the higher linguistic units did not statistically differ within each level. Thus, the phrase is suggested as a compensatory unit of phoneme type effects in Korean. Different rates did not affect the general tendency. Distribution of time variations (from normal to fast and slow) to each syllable (/a/ and /Ca/) was also observed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.233-247
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• 2004

This study explores sound alternations in a consonant cluster in which at least one consonant is a sonorant (a son/C cluster, hereafter). In this study, I argue that phonological processes affecting son/C clusters result from low perceptual salience rather than from the Syllable Contact Law as discussed in Vennemann (1988), Clements (1990), Rice & Avery (1991), Baertsch & Davis (2000), among others. That is, as a main factor motivating the alternations in the cluster, I consider contrasts of weak perceptibility triggered by phonetic similarity between two members of a cluster (Kawasaki 1982, Ohala 1992, 1993). Based on the findings from a typological survey in 31 different languages, I show that a speech perception-based account makes a correct prediction regarding the patterning of sonorant/sonorant sequences and that of obstruent/sonorant sequences, while the syllable contact account does not.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.59-65
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• 2010

In this paper, we investigate acoustic characteristics of Korean /s/ when it is followed by both a high front and a round segment regardless of their order to one another. We show that Korean /s/ in this environment has characteristics of a labio-palatalized segment, being affected by both a high front and a round segment if they occur within the domain of a syllable. In the experiment, we show that Korean /s/ before a high front and a round segment shows a spectral shape different from that in other environments. Specifically, it is different from /s/ before a high front segment only, showing peaks around 2.5 kHz. Furthermore, it shows a rapid decrease of amplitude in 4-5 kHz, and sometimes another plateau of high peaks in 5-6 kHz. We also examined center of gravity frequency and band energy difference. Based on the results of this experiment, we argue that Korean /s/ is affected by the following segments within the domain of coarticulation, a syllable and that the degree of coarticulation is different from language to language.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.25-36
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• 1998

The prosodic properties of Korean and English stress were examined with focus on syllable duration and pitch by loan words. 14 loan words were selected by the criteria of the numbers of syllables and stress positions. 3 Korean males using Seoul dialect and 3 American males using general American English served as subjects. Each tokens were uttered 3 times and second one was chosen to be analysed by CSL. We measured the duration and F0 of each syllable. In English, duration is the most salient acoustic correlates of stress, and pitch is the second. In Korean, by contrast, it seems that neither duration nor pitch is the acoustic features of stress, from our data

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.179-184
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phonetic features of the lexical contrastive focus and the segmental contrastive focus. In this paper, I made two variables to study the realization of the contrastive focus. One is the three phonation types of the Korean plosive, a lenis, a fortis and an aspirate. The other is the positions of the segmental contrastive focus syllable in a word. I examined pitch, duration, intensity, VOT, formant, and so on. The realization of focus is different by the phonation types and the positions of the focused syllable.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.305-318
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• 2022

Abusive behaviors have become a common issue in many online social media platforms. Profanity is common form of abusive behavior in online. Social media platforms operate the filtering system using popular profanity words lists, but this method has drawbacks that it can be bypassed using an altered form and it can detect normal sentences as profanity. Especially in Korean language, the syllable is composed of graphemes and words are composed of multiple syllables, it can be decomposed into graphemes without impairing the transmission of meaning, and the form of a profane word can be seen as a different meaning in a sentence. This work focuses on the problem of filtering system mis-detecting normal phrases with profane phrases. For that, we proposed the deep learning-based framework including grapheme and syllable separation-based word embedding and appropriate CNN structure. The proposed model was evaluated on the chatting contents from the one of the famous online games in South Korea and generated 90.4% accuracy.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.554-559
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• 1996

An utterance is normally divided into two or more intonation groups. Bach intonation group has its intonation pattern. Pitch movement of Spanish utterance is basically determined by a combination of two factors: position of the stressed syllables and the intonation pattern. The pitch of a syllable can be affected by that of preceding syllables. This is rather a physiological effect than a phonological one.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.193-208
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• 2000

This paper describes a multi-step method of intonation modeling for corpus-based Korean speech synthesizer. We selected 1833 sentences considering various syntactic structures and built a corresponding speech corpus uttered by a female announcer. We detected the pitch using laryngograph signals and manually marked the prosodic boundaries on recorded speech, and carried out the tagging of part-of-speech and syntactic analysis on the text. The detected pitch was separated into 3 frequency bands of low, mid, high frequency components which correspond to the baseline, the word tone, and the syllable tone. We predicted them using the CART method and the Viterbi search algorithm with a word-tone-dictionary. In the collected spoken sentences, 1500 sentences were trained and 333 sentences were tested. In the layer of word tone modeling, we compared two methods. One is to predict the word tone corresponding to the mid-frequency components directly and the other is to predict it by multiplying the ratio of the word tone to the baseline by the baseline. The former method resulted in a mean error of 12.37 Hz and the latter in one of 12.41 Hz, similar to each other. In the layer of syllable tone modeling, it resulted in a mean error rate less than 8.3% comparing with the mean pitch, 193.56 Hz of the announcer, so its performance was relatively good.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.7-21
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• 2018

The author studied the process of unifying Hanja variant groups of Korea and China for LGR (Label Generation Rule) of Internet Top-Level Hangeul Hanja Domain and possible confusion between Hangeul syllable and Hanja character. Among 3518 Chinese variant groups, Korea and China need not review variant groups which include no or just one Korean Hanja character. Korea and China reviewed 304 Chinese variant groups (9% of the 3518 Chinese variant groups) which include two or more Korean Hanja characters. By doing so, Korea and China succeeded in efficiently unifying variant groups. Unification process of variant groups which is the main core of Korea-China coordination and almost final unification result is summarized in this paper. In addition, the author analyzed systematically whether some Hanja character could be confused with a Hangeul syllable and obtained a good result which was not expected at the beginning. Probably this kind of systematic analysis has not been performed in the past and seems the first attempt, which is one of the contributions of this paper. The author also reviewed how to express K-LGR in XML for submission to ICANN.