• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

Many speech recognition systems have used pronunciation lexicon with possible multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word. The pronunciation lexicon is of often manually created. This process requires a lot of time and efforts, and furthermore, it is very difficult to maintain consistency of lexicon. To handle these problems, we present a model based on morphophon-ological analysis for automatically generating Korean pronunciation variants. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korean, we have derived about 700 phonemic contexts that would trigger the multilevel application of the corresponding phonological process, which consists of phonemic and allophonic rules. In generating pronunciation variants, morphological analysis is preceded to handle variations of phonological words. According to the morphological category, a set of tables reflecting phonemic context is looked up to generate pronunciation variants. Our experiments show that the proposed model produces mostly correct pronunciation variants of phonological words. Then we estimated how useful the pronunciation lexicon and training phonetic transcription using this proposed systems.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.133-138
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to provide deeper understanding of how it is possible for people to understand PC communication language they have never seen or heard before without any problem. In order to answer this question, we focused on the vowel variation through which new variants are created (for PC communication), and hypothesized that there is a phonetic constraint which requires the vowel of the variant to be phonetically similar (to the maximum) to the vowel of the original word. Through the corpus analysis of the dictionary of PC communication language, we show that our hypothesis is justified by the fact that most of the variants we collected from the dictionary, that is, 90% of them, conformed to the phonetic constraint we postulated.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2021

While recent acoustic studies have reported associations of fronted sibilants (fricatives /s s⁎/ and affricates /tɕ tɕ⁎/) with gender in Seoul Korean, there have not been any studies examining the relationship of the variants with adult speakers' ages. The current study analyzes sibilant productions from 39 adult speakers born between 1942 and 2008 (19 females) in terms of spectral peak frequencies (SPFs) in frication, an acoustic index of place of articulation (POA). The results indicate some phonetic contexts where higher sibilant SPFs, i.e., fronter POAs, are associated with younger adults and those fronted variants are realized in a gender-differentiated manner -- tense affricates and word-initial tense fricatives before /i/ in the females' productions, and word-medial tense fricatives before /a/ in the males' productions. The findings confirm that the distributions of the fronted sibilants are accounted for not only by the speakers' gender but also by their ages, indicating that the fronted variants are innovative forms of realizing sibilants in Seoul Korean. In addition, the current results convincingly show that the fronted sibilant variants are not mere reflections of individuals' physiological differences since they are not observed across all of the examined phonetic contexts.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.24-27
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• 2006

This paper describes how a domain dependent pronunciation lexicon is generated and optimized for Korean large vocabulary continuous speech recognition(LVCSR). At the level of lexicon, pronunciation variations are usually modeled by adding pronunciation variants to the lexicon. We propose the criteria for selecting appropriate pronunciation variants in lexicon: (i) likelihood and (ii) frequency factors to select variants. Our experiment is conducted in three steps. First, the variants are generated with knowledge-based rules. Second, we generate a domain dependent lexicon which includes various numbers of pronunciation variants based on the proposed criteria. Finally, the WERs and RTFs are examined with each lexicon. In the experiment, 0.72% WER reduction is obtained by introducing the variants pruning criteria. Furthermore, RTF is not deteriorated although the average number of variants is higher than that of compared lexica.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.80-83
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper is to build a pronunciation lexicon with estimated likelihoods of the phonetic rules based on the phonetic realizations and therefore to improve the performance of CSR using the dictionary. In the baseline system, the phonetic rules and their application probabilities are defined with the knowledge of Korean phonology and experimental tuning. The advantage of this approach is to implement the phonetic rules easily and to get stable results on general domains. However, a possible drawback of this method is that it is hard to reflect characteristics of the phonetic realizations on a specific domain. In order to make the system reflect phonetic realizations, the likelihood of phonetic rules is reestimated based on the statistics of the realized phonemes using a forced-alignment method. In our experiment, we generates new lexica which include pronunciation variants created by reestimated phonetic rules and its performance is tested with 12 Gaussian mixture HMMs and back-off bigrams. The proposed method reduced the WER by 0.42%.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.23-29
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• 2016

The present study tested if individual speakers showing great sound change in segments (i.e., vowels and fricatives) also had innovative changing patterns in suprasegmental properties (i.e., lexical pitch accents) in Kyungsang Korean. The acoustic analysis at a group level first confirmed the presence of group level differences in distinguishing /ɨ-ʌ/ and /s-s'/ both of which had different phonemic distinction from Seoul Korean. Younger speakers had more innovative segmental change than older speakers, and even within the younger generation, female speakers produced more innovative phonetic variants than male speakers. Regarding the individual observation within the younger group, the younger speakers with large acoustic distinction in vowels and fricatives also showed acoustically less distinct accent patterns, indicating the innovative sound change pattern consistent across segment and suprasegmental properties. The group and individual observations suggested that linguistic innovators introduced new phonetic variants with consistent degree of changing pattern between segment and suprasegmental properties.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.1-30
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• 2004

Although Standard Korean is based on Seoul Korean, the phonetic realization of syllable codas in Seoul Korean has not been satisfactorily investigated. This paper aims to study how Seoul speakers pronounce syllable codas in certain phonetic contexts and what pronunciation they prefer among variants. It is noted that the realization of a syllable coda is different word by word and generation by generation. It is also noted that the syllable coda of a word is realized differently depending on the following vowel. And we discussed how the Principles of Standard Korean Pronunciation should be revised in the future, based on the results of this study.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.312-320
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• 2000

This presentation aims to explore some possibility of non-segmental phonetics usually ignored in phonetics education. In pedagogical phonetics, especially ESL/EFL oriented phonetics speech sounds tend to be classified in two criteria 1) 'pronunciation' which deals with segments and 2) 'prosody' or 'suprasegmentals', a criterion that deals with non-segmental elements such as stress and intonation. However, speech involves more dynamic processing. It is non-linear and multi-dimensional in spite of the linear sequence of symbols in phonetic/phonological transcriptions. No word is without pitch or voice quality apart from segmental characteristics whether it is spoken in isolation or cut out from continuous speech. This simply tells the dichotomy of pronunciation and prosody is merely a useful convention. There exists some room to consider dynamic non-segmental phonetics. Examples of non-segmental phonetic investigation, some of the analyses conducted within the frame of Firthian Prosodic Analysis, especially of the relation between vowel variants and foot types, are examined and we see what kind of auditory phonetic training is required to understand impressionistic transcriptions which lie behind the non-segmental phonetics.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.81-85
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• 2002

We present a statistical analysis of Korean phonological variations using automatic generation of phonetic transcription. We have constructed the automatic generation system of Korean pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes. These rules are derived from knowledge-based morphophonological analysis and government standard pronunciation rules. This system is optimized for continuous speech recognition by generating phonetic transcriptions for training and constructing a pronunciation dictionary for recognition. In this paper, we describe Korean phonological variations by analyzing the statistics of phonemic change rule applications for the 60,000 sentences in the Samsung PBS(Phonetic Balanced Sentence) Speech DB. Our results show that the most frequently happening obligatory phonemic variations are in the order of liaison, tensification, aspirationalization, and nasalization of obstruent, and that the most frequently happening optional phonemic variations are in the order of initial consonant h-deletion, insertion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants, and deletion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants. These statistics can be used for improving the performance of speech recognition systems.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.52
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• pp.341-369
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• 2018

Li ShangYin (李商隱) was a poet who represented the late Tang period and authored more than 590 poems. In this paper, I have searched for various phonetic and semantic relationships through the attention of scholars' annotation about Li ShangYin (李商隱)'s poetry. As a result, we found 12 types of "examples that explain the phonetic and semantic relationships of poetic words" and five types of "examples that explain the features of poetic words and prosody." Especially, through analysis of "examples that explain the phonetic and semantic relationships of poetic words", it is divided into two types. The first type is that the scholars' annotation about Li ShangYin (李商隱)'s poetry and phonetic and semantic relationships of poetic words are matched, and the second type is that the scholars' annotation about Li ShangYin (李商隱)'s poetry and phonetic and semantic relationships of poetic words are inconsistent. In this study, I applied the theory of level and oblique tones for more detailed analysis of each type.