• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.3819-3828
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• 2015

The present study discusses some of important issues in the word recognition such as the roles of the form(orthographic & phonologic) and semantic information by investigating the processes of Korean heteronym. The priming paradigm has been applied to see whether or not there would be facilitatory effect from form and/or semantic information. In experiment 1, orthographically-related or phonologically-related prime stimuli were presented and a lexical decision task for Korean heteronym was conducted. The same procedure was applied for the experiment 2, except the prime stimulus which was semantically-related. The results showed that orthographic and phonologic information did not influence the processing of the heteronym while semantic information facilitated its processing, suggesting that the semantic information plays an important role in the processes of the Korean heteronym.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.272-277
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• 2008

Functional MRI technique was used in this study for examining the language switching mechanisms between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). Language switching mechanism is regarded as a complex task that involves an interaction between L1 and L2. The aim of study is to find out the brain activation patterns during the phonological process of reading real English words and English words written in Korean characters in a bilingual person. Korean-English bilingual subjects were examined while they covertly read four types of words native Korean words, Korean words of a foreign origin, English words written in Korean characters, and English words. The fMRI results reveal that the left hemispheric language-related regions at the brain, such as the left inferior frontal, superior temporal, and parietal cortices, have a greater response to the presentation of English words written in Korean characters than for the other types of words, in addition, a slight difference was observed in the occipital-temporal lobe. These results suggest that a change in the brain circuitry underlying the relational processes of language switching is mainly associated with general executive processing system in the left prefrontal cortex rather than with a similarity-based processing system in the occipital-temporal lobes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.103-111
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• 2013

Traditionally it has been assumed that written abilities are completely dependent on phonology. Therefore spoken and written language skills in aphasic patients have been known to exhibit similar types of impairment. However, a number of latest studies have reported the findings that support the orthographic autonomy hypothesis. The purpose of this study was to examine whether fluent aphasic patients have discrepancy between speaking and writing skills, thereby identifying whether the two skills are realized through independent processes. To this end, this study compared the K-FAST speaking and writing tasks of 30 aphasia patients. In addition, 16 aphasia patients, who were capable of producing sentences not only in speaking but also in writing, were compared in their performances at each phase of the sentence production process. As a result, the subjects exhibited different performances between speaking and writing, along with statistically significant differences between the two language skills at positional and phonological encoding phases of the sentence production process. Therefore, the study's results suggest that written language is more likely to be produced via independent routes without the mediation of the process of spoken language production, beginning from a certain phase of the sentence production process.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.99-108
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• 2006

Three experiments were conducted to determine the exact locus of the frequency effect in speech production. In Experiment 1. a picture naming task was used to replicate whether the word frequency effect is due to the processes involved in lexical access or not. The robust word frequency effect of 31ms was obtained. The question to be addressed in Experiment 2 is whether the word frequency effect is originated from the level where a lemma is selected. To the end, using a picture-word interference task, the significance of interactions between the effects of target frequency, distractor frequency and semantic relatedness were tested. Interaction between the distractor frequency and semantic relatedness variables was significant. And interaction between the target and distractor frequency variables showed a significant tendency. In addition, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that the mechanism underlying the word frequency effect is encoded as different resting activation level of lemmas. Experiment 3 explored whether the word frequency effect is attributed to the lexeme level where phonological information of words is represented or not. A methodological logic applied to Experiment 3 was the same as to Experiment 2. Any interaction was not significant. In conclusion, the present study obtained the evidence supporting two assumptions: (a) the locus of the word frequency effect exists in the processes involved in lemma selection, (b) the mechanism for the word frequency effect is encoded as different resting activation level of lemmas. In order to explain the word frequency effect obtained in this study, the core assumptions of current production models need to be modified.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.559-602
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• 2010

This study examines the concepts and functional characteristics of consciousness in comparison of memory and attention from the perspective of information processing. It also provides an understanding of the relationships between the three as hypothetical constructs. Consciousness is regarded as too ambiguous a concept to be understood and accepted as a mental construct without the inclusion of memory and attention in any conceptualization. We need one criterion to count satisfactorily as an explanation of consciousness in information processing. Consciousness would be a subjective awareness of momentary experience and also have the characteristic of an operating system performing control and consolidation in information processing. This could be called cognitive consciousness which refers to a subjective awareness and an executive control system, even though those are not equivalent concepts. Consciousness, memory and attention, three mental constructs could operate dependently or independently depending on the specific tasks conditioned in many information processing levels whose modules with three mental constructs could operate in hierarchy. In this premise, working memory could not be a unitary system, contrary to those of Baddeley and Hitch(1974) and Baddeley(1992, 2000), just being a mental workplace consisting of two components: the phonological loop, and the visual-spatial sketchpad without the episodic buffer and a central executive which are the characteristics of consciousness. In the continuum of information processing, the conscious processes and the unconscious processes seem not to be totally different and contrasting processes.

• MALSORI
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• no.38
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• pp.41-70
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• 1999

Researches on perception have, in recent years, been increasingly popular as a means of accounting for cross-linguistic sound patterns (Ohala, 1992; Hemming, 1995; Jun, 1995; Steriade, 1997 among others). In loanword phonology, Silverman(1990, 1992) argues that words from a source language are scanned through the perceptual level and that the features perceived by a speaker are stored in the input to be processed according to his/her native language's phonological constraints. The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of Silverman's proposal by examining the correlation between perception and production of Korean learners of English. We specifically focussed on perception and production of stop release by contrasting English loanwords with English words loarned through education to see if there were any significant differences. The results showed that there was no substantive correlation between the Korean speakers' perception of the loanwords pronounced by English speakers and their own production of those words. In the case of English words, however, the Korean speakers' production was closely related with their perception, although some inter-speaker variations were observed. With Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenksy, 1993) as a theoretical framework of analysis, it was shown that the theory is a useful means of implementing a phonetics-phonology interface and relating perceptual processes with speech production. Specifically, under the assumption that loanwords with [t]~[t/sup h/] alternation (e.g.,'cut') are originally borrowed into Korean as two different input forms, all the alternations could be straightforwardly accounted for in terms of a unified ranking of constraints.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.434-442
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• 2003

Software internationalization, the process of making software easier to localize for specific languages, has deep implications when applied to speech technology, where the goal of the task lies in the very essence of the particular language. A greatdeal of work and fine-tuning has gone into language processing software based on ASCII or a single language, say English, thus making a port to different languages difficult. The inherent identity of a language manifests itself in its lexicon, where its character set, phoneme set, pronunciation rules are revealed. We propose a decomposition of the lexicon building process, into four discrete and sequential steps. For preprocessing to build a lexical model, we translate from specific language code to unicode. (step 1) Transliterating code points from Unicode. (step 2) Phonetically standardizing rules. (step 3) Implementing grapheme to phoneme rules. (step 4) Implementing phonological processes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.109-121
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• 2013

This study examined several kinematic properties of the primary articulator (the tongue dorsum) and the supplementary articulator (the jaw) in the articulation of the voiceless velar stop (/k/) within nonassimilating contexts. We examined in particular the spatiotemporal properties (constriction duration and constriction maxima) from the constriction onset to the constriction offset by analyzing a velar (/k/) followed by the coronal fricative (/s/), the coronal stop (/t/), and the labial (/p/) in across-word boundary conditions (/k#s/, /k#t/, and /k#p/). Along with these measurements, we investigated intergestural temporal coordination between C1 and C2 and the jaw articulator in relation to its coordination with the articulation of consonant sequences. The articulatory movement data was collected by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA). Four native speakers of Seoul Korean participated in the laboratory experiment. The results showed several characteristics. First, a velar (/k/) in C1 was not categorically reduced. Constriction duration and constriction degree of the velar (/k/) were similar within nonassimilating contexts (/k#s/=/k#t/=/k#p/). This might mean that spatiotemporal attributes during constriction duration were stable and consistent across different contexts, which might be subsequently associated with the nontarget status of the velar in place assimilation. Second, the gestural overlap could be represented as the order of /k#s/ (less) < /k#p/ (intermediate) < /k#t/ (more) as we measured the onset-to-onset lag (a longer lag indicated shorter gestural overlap.). This indicates a gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts may not be constrained by any of the several constraints including the perceptual recoverability constraint (e.g., more overlap in Front-to-Back sequences compared to the reverse order (Back-to-Front) since perceptual cues in C1 can be recovered anytime during C2 articulation), the low-level speech motor constraint (e.g., more overlap in lingual-nonlingual sequences as compared to the lingual-lingual sequences), or phonological contexts effects (e.g., similarity in gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts). As one possible account for more overlap in /k#t/ sequences as compared to /k#p/, we suspect speakers' knowledge may be receptive to extreme encroachment on C1 by the gestural overlap of the coronal in C2 since it does not obscure the perceptual cue of C1 as much as the labial in C2. Third, actual jaw position during C2 was higher in coronals (/s/, /t/) than in the labial (/p/). However, within the coronals, there was no manner-dependent jaw height difference in C2 (/s/=/t/). Vertical jaw position of C1 and C2 was seen as inter-dependent as higher jaw position in C1 was closely associated with C2. Lastly, a greater gap in jaw height was associated with longer intergestural timing (e.g., less overlap), but was confined to the cluster type (/kp/) with the lingual-nonlingual sequence. This study showed that Korean jaw articulation was independent from coordinating primary articulators in gestural overlap in some cluster types (/k#s/, /k#t/) while not in others (e.g., /k#p/). Overall, the results coherently indicate the velar stop (/k/) in C1 was robust in articulation, which may have subsequently contributed to the nontarget status of the velar (/k/) in place assimilation processes.