• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.237-250
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• 2002

Linguistically, 'Focus' is the element which includes new or unpresupposed information. It is usually signalled by prosodic prominence called the 'pitch accent'. The purpose of this study is to observe the realization of the focal accent in VP-ellipsis, especially, to affect the meaning recovery of elided VP. Asher (1999) gave evidence that focal stress should be on the higher verb and the AUX in order to recover the elided VP to the lower one. In this paper, the systematic patterning of focal accent to decide the elided meaning in VP-ellipsis is to be observed. The realization of focal accent by English native speakers is set as the criteria for the meaning recovery of the elided VP and is compared to Koreans'. Moreover, the focal accents of Koreans are observed and compared with respect to their English proficiency levels.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

Intonation as suprasegmental phonetic features conveys meanings on the postlexical or utterance level in a linguistically structured way. It includes three aspects: tunes, relative prominence, and intonational phrasing. In this article, I will treat how prosodic phrasing is functionally related to the listening comprehension of English by analysing the students' errors of listening comprehension. When utterance meaning is conveyed, it is realized to be divided into intonational phrases. The small intonational phrase is regarded as an intermediate phrase which has a primary accent and a phrase tone or audible break. Most students' errors of listening occurred with linking pronunciation in the intermediate phrases of the fast speech. Thus through the smallest unit with tune we can help students improve their pronunciation and listening ability of English.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.378-390
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• 2020

English stress plays such a critical role in understanding spoken English words that its misplacement can lead to a breakdown of communication. Korean learners of English, whose native language is known to lack this feature, are expected to have some difficulty acquiring this English prosodic system. This study explored how Korean is different from English in manifesting prominence at the word level and how the interlanguage of Korean learners of English is dissimilar to both languages in that regard. Four polysyllabic English loanwords in Korean and their English source words were used as stimuli. Ten native English speakers read the English source words while ten Korean learners of English read the English loan words first and then the English source words. The analysis of 120 speech samples revealed that Korean words did not have any salient syllable realized by all stress features: duration, amplitude, and F0. On the contrary, English words had syllables with relative prominence, which was consistently manifested by all the features. Interestingly, in realizing English stress, the interlanguage of the Korean English learners bore more resemblance to that of English than that of their native language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.246-246
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• 1996

Purpose: Some of the properties of the prosodic phrasing and some acoustic and phonological effects of contrastive focus on the tonal pattern of Seoul Korean is explored based on a brief experiment of analyzing the fundamental frequency(=FO) contour of the speech of the author. Data Base and Analysis Procedures: The examples were chosen to contain mostly nasal and liquid consonants, since it is difficult to track down the formants in stops and fricatives during their corresponding consonantal intervals and stops may yield an effect of unwanted increase in the FO value due to their burst into the following vowel. All examples were recorded three times and the spectrum of the most stable repetition was generated, from which the FO contour of each sentence was obtained, the peaks with a value higher than 250Hz being interpreted as a high tone (=H). The result is then discussed within the prosodic hierarchy framework of Selkirk (1986) and compared with the tonal pattern of the Northern Kyungsang dialect of Korean reported in Kenstowicz & Sohn (1996). Prosodic Phrasing: In N.K. Korean, H never appears both on the object and on the verb in a neutral sentence, which indicates the object and the verb form a single Phonological Phrase ($={\phi}$), given that there is only one pitch peak for each $={\phi}$. However, Seoul Korean shows that both the object and the verb have H of their own, indicating that they are not contained in one $={\phi}$. This violates the Optimality constraint of Wrap-XP (=Enclose a lexical head and its arguments in one $={\phi}$), while N.K. Korean obeys the constraint by grouping a VP in a single $={\phi}$. This asymmetry can be resolved through a constraint that favors the separate grouping of each lexical category and is ranked higher than Wrap-XP in Seoul Korean but vice versa in N.K. Korean; $Align-x^{lex}$ (=Align the left edge of a lexical category with that of a $={\phi}$). (1) nuna-ka manll-ll mEk-nIn-ta ('sister-NOM garlic-ACC eat-PRES-DECL') a. (LLH) (LLH) (HLL) ----Seoul Korean b. (LLH) (LLL LHL) ----N.K. Korean Focus and Phrasing: Two major effects of contrastive focus on phonological phrasing are found in Seoul Korean: (a) the peak of an Intonatioanl Phrase (=IP) falls on the focused element; and (b) focus has the effect of deleting all the following prosodic structures. A focused element always attracts the peak of IP, showing an increase of approximately 30Hz compared with the peak of a non-focused IP. When a subject is focused, no H appears either on the object or on the verb and a focused object is never followed by a verb with H. The post-focus deletion of prosodic boundaries is forced through the interaction of StressFocus (=If F is a focus and DF is its semantic domain, the highest prominence in DF will be within F) and Rightmost-IP (=The peak of an IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$). First Stress-F requires the peak of IP to fall on the focused element. Then to avoid violating Rightmost-IP, all the boundaries after the focused element should delete, minimizing the number of $={\phi}$'s intervening from the right edge of IP. (2) (omitted) Conclusion: In general, there seems to be no direct alignment constraints between the syntactically focused element and the edge of $={\phi}$ determined in phonology; all the alignment effects come from a single requirement that the peak of IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$ as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2023

This study investigated the response time and patterns of categorical perception of the wh-scope of an embedded clause with the non-bridge verb, "gung-geum hada 'wonder'," in the matrix verb phrase in Gyeongsang Korean. Using the same procedure as Yun (2022), 72 responses and response times for each stimulus were collected from 24 participants over the course of three trials. The stimuli were recorded readings of 40 speakers (20 male, 20 female). Context was provided to induce a matrix scope interpretation of the embedded wh-phrase in the target sentence. We sorted the 40 stimuli according to the number of matrix scope responses each received, and charted the response times for each stimulus. Although there was considerable overlap for the different types of wh-scope interpretations, there was a clear difference in categorical perception between the matrix and embedded scopes. The 24 participants also differed in their categorical perceptions. The results suggested that response time and wh-scope interpretation were not directly related and that two main weighted factors affected wh-scope interpretation: morpho-syntactic constraints and prosodic structural integrity. The weighting of each of these factors was inversely correlated and varied among subjects.