• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.99-108
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• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2E
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• pp.43-50
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• 2009

To get more natural synthetic speech generated by a Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) system, we have to know all the possible prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. We should find out these rules from linguistic, phonetic information or from real speech. In general, all of these rules should be integrated into a prosody-generation algorithm in a TTS system. But this algorithm cannot cover up all the possible prosodic rules in a language and it is not perfect, so the naturalness of synthesized speech cannot be as good as we expect. ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) can be trained to learn the prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. To train and test ANNs, we need to prepare the prosodic patterns of all the phonemic segments in a prosodic corpus. A prosodic corpus will include meaningful sentences to represent all the possible prosodic rules. Sentences in the corpus were made by picking up a series of words from the list of PB (phonetically Balanced) isolated words. These sentences in the corpus were read by speakers, recorded, and collected as a speech database. By analyzing recorded real speech, we can extract prosodic pattern about each phoneme, and assign them as target and test patterns for ANNs. ANNs can learn the prosody from natural speech and generate prosodic patterns of the central phonemic segment in phoneme strings as output response of ANNs when phoneme strings of a sentence are given to ANNs as input stimuli.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.113-133
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• 1998

The system proposed in this paper prosodically transcribes the intonation patterns, prosodic structures, phrasings, and other prosodic aspects of Korean utterances, on four parallel tiers: a tone tier, an orthographic tier, a break index tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs two phrase accents (L* and H *), three accentual phrase boundary tones (L-, H-, LH-), and four intonational phrase boundary tones (L%,H%,LH%,LHL%) in order to provide a phonological transcription of pitch events associated with accented syllables and phrase boundaries. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, which mark a prosodic grouping of words and its prosodic structure in an utterance. Among the five indices, the break index 3 and the break index 4 align with an accentual phrase boundary tone and an intonational phrase boundary tone, respectively, in the tone tier.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.165-180
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• 2001

In this paper prosodic characteristics of French language are analysed with a corpus of radio interview. Intonation patterns are interpreted in terms of raising pattern, focal raising pattern and falling pattern. Accentual prominence is classified in two types, rhythmic accent and focal accent. Focal accent permit to explain the cohesion in a utterance or between two utterances. As a prosodic variable of discourse pauses are described by their form of realization (filled pause, silent pause, hesitation etc), their distribution and their function in utterance.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.23-42
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• 1997

This study has two main purposes. One is to explore the relationship between syntactic aspects and prosodic aspects in Standard Korean. The other is to provide speech synthesis with the information about such relationship. This study will focus on the prosodic behavior of subjective particles'-i/-ga', '-eun/-neun'. The prosodic features of subjective particles are described respectively. How do the elements such as the position of particles in a sentence, the sentence constituents, the length of the sentence and the rhythmic boundaries influence on the prosodic behavior are also investigated.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.7-10
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• 2000

Studies of prosody and sentence processing have demonstrated that prosodic phrasing can exhibit strong effects on processing decisions in English. In this paper, we tested Korean sentence fragments containing syntactically ambiguous Adj-N1-N2 strings in a cross-modal naming task. Four accentual phrasing patterns were tested: (a) the default phrasing pattern, in which each word forms an accentual phrase; (b) a phrasing biased toward N1 modification; (c) a phrasing biased toward complex-NP modification; and (d) a phrasing used with adjective focus. Patterns (b) and (c) are disambiguating phrasings; the other two are commonly found with both interpretations and are thus ambiguous. The results showed that the naming time of items produced in the prosody contradicting the semantic grouping is significantly longer than that produced in either default or supporting prosody, We claim that, as in English, prosodic information in Korean is parsed into a well-formed prosodic representation during the early stages of processing. The partially constructed prosodic representation produces incremental effects on syntactic and semantic processing decisions and is retained in memory to influence reanalysis decisions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.207-214
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• 2001

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.65
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• pp.211-236
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• 2014

The aim of this study is to investigate categorical characteristics of 'mak' and their discourse functions through analyzed the prosodic features of 'mak'. The previous studies of 'mak' focused on grammatical or semantic characteristics, but this study focuses on the prosodic features of 'mak' based on speech data. As a result, adverb 'mak' and discourse marker 'mak' are distinguished from prosodic boundary, duration, pause and sort of number tonal patterns. Functions of discourse marker 'mak' is as follows: Maintenance of utterance, Attention, Delay, Expression negative manner. These functions have salient prosodic features related to their functions. Consequently prosodic features are important to analyze categorical characteristics and to establish functions of 'mak'.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.101-113
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• 2010

The present study investigated how the kinematics of the /a/-to-/i/ tongue movement in Korean would be influenced by prosodic boundary. The /a/-to-/i/ sequence was used as 'transboundary' test materials which occurred across a prosodic boundary as in /ilnjəʃ$^h$a/ # / minsakwae/ ('일년차#민사과에' 'the first year worker' # 'dept. of civil affairs'). It also tested whether the V-to-V tongue movement would be further influenced by its syllable structure with /m/ which was placed either in the coda condition (/am#i/) or in the onset condition (/a#mi). Results of an EMA (Electromagnetic Articulagraphy) study showed that kinematical parameters such as the movement distance (displacement), the movement duration, and the movement velocity (speed) all varied as a function of the boundary strength, showing an articulatory strengthening pattern of a "larger, longer and faster" movement. Interestingly, however, the larger, longer and faster pattern associated with boundary marking in Korean has often been observed with stress (prominence) marking in English. It was proposed that language-specific prosodic systems induce different ways in which phonetics and prosody interact: Korean, as a language without lexical stress and pitch accent, has more degree of freedom to express prosodic strengthening, while languages such as English have constraints, so that some strengthening patterns are reserved for lexical stress. The V-to-V tongue movement was also found to be influenced by the intervening consonant /m/'s syllable affiliation, showing a more preboundary lengthening of the tongue movement when /m/ was part of the preboundary syllable (/am#i/). The results, together, show that the fine-grained phonetic details do not simply arise as low-level physical phenomena, but reflect higher-level linguistic structures, such as syllable and prosodic structures. It was also discussed how the boundary-induced kinematic patterns could be accounted for in terms of the task dynamic model and the theory of the prosodic gesture ($\pi$-gesture).