• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.71-81
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• 2011

This paper investigated how prosodic position and word type affect the phonetic structure of Korean coronal stops. Initial segments of prosodic domains were known to be more strongly articulated and longer relative to prosodic domain-medial segments. However, there are few studies examining whether the properties of prosodic domain-initial segments are affected by the information content of words (real vs. nonsense words). In addition, since the scope of domain-initial effect was known to be local to the initial consonant and the effects on the following vowel have been found to be limited, it is thus worth examining whether the prosodic domain-initial effect extends into the vowel after the initial consonant in a systematic way across different prosodic domains. The acoustic properties of Korean coronal stops (lenis /t/, aspirated /$t^h$/, and tense /t'/) were compared across Intonational Phrase, Phonological Phrase and Word-initial positions both in real and nonsense words. The durational intervals such as VOT and CV duration were cumulatively lengthened for /t/ and /$t^h$/ in the higher prosodic domain-initial positions. However, tense stop /t'/ did not show any variation as a function of prosodic position and word type. The domain-initial lenis stop showed significantly longer duration in nonsense words than in real words. But the prosodic domain-initial effect was not found in the properties of F0 and [H1-H2] of the vowel after initial stops. The present study provided evidence that speakers tend to enhance speech clarity when there is less contextual information as in prosodic domain-initial position and in nonsense words.

• MALSORI
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• no.64
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• pp.39-51
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to investigate prosodic characteristics in the speech of adults with cerebral palsy through a comparison with the speech of normal speakers. Ten speakers with cerebral palsy (6 males, 4 females) and 6 normal speakers (3 males, 3 females) served as subjects. The results revealed that, compared to normal speakers, speakers with cerebral palsy showed a slower speech rate, a larger number of intonational phrases(IPs) and pauses, a larger number of accentual phrases(APs) per IP, a longer duration of pauses, and more gradual slopes of [L +H] in APs. However, the two groups showed similar tone patterns in their APs. The results also showed mild to moderate correlations between speech intelligibility and the prosodic properties which showed significant differences between the two groups, suggesting that they could be important prosodic factors to predict speech intelligibility in the speech of adults with cerebral palsy.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2005

This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.47-63
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• 2010

This study provides a description of the glottal characteristics of the word-initial low vowels /a, $\ae$/ in terms of a set of acoustic parameters and discusses glottal configuration as their acoustic correlates. Furthermore, it examines the effect of prosodic boundary on the glottal properties of the vowels, seeking an account of the possible role of prosodic structure based on prosodic theory. Acoustic parameters reported to indicate glottal characteristics were obtained from the measurements made directly from the speech spectrum on recordings of Korean and English collected from 45 speakers. They consist of two separate groups of native Korean and native English speakers, each including both male and female speakers. Based on the three acoustic parameters of open quotient (OQ), first-formant bandwidth (B1), and spectral tilt (ST), comparisons were made between the speech of males and females, between the speech of native Korean and native English speakers, and between Korean and English produced by native Korean speakers. Acoustic analysis of the experimental data indicates that some or all glottal parameters play a crucial role in differentiating the speech groups, despite substantial interspeaker variations. Statistical analysis of the Korean data indicates prosodic strengthening with respect to the acoustic parameters B1 and OQ, suggesting acoustic enhancement in terms of the degree of glottal abduction and the glottal closure during a vibratory cycle.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.81-88
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• 2014

The normal aging process on speech production and these changes are perceived by listeners. This study examined whether age perception changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations in normal listeners, comparing the prosodic changes according to age and sex in adulthood. The older and younger voices were resynthesized by manipulation of the speaking rate and pitch to shift the perceived age of the groups toward each other. Two-way repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant shift in perceived age of young and old voices. The manipulation of the speaking rate resulted in a significant shift in perceived age for the older and younger groups. A significant shift in age estimates was not observed for the younger male group when pitch was manipulated. There were significant gender-by-age group interactions for prosodic manipulation type. Age-related changes in the prosodic properties of speech may ultimately influence speech perception.

• MALSORI
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• no.37
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• pp.73-85
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• 1999

The prosodic characteristics of Korean particles in read speech were examined in this paper based on K-ToBI labeling system in order to see whether they are prosodically weak form like functions words in English. Acoustic measurements and statistical analysis were done focusing on the distribution of particles over a variety of prosodic positions, prosodic positional effects on the phonetic realization of particles, and acoustic strength of particles compared to those of their surrounding syllables. The panicles were distributed rather equally over all 4 prosodic positions with the highest frequency at IP-medial/AP-final position and the lowest at IP-medial/AP-medial position except that topic marker 'Un/nUn' showed preference for IP-final/AP-final position. There was a significant prosodic positional effect on the duration and F0 of the particles. Duration was the longest at IP-final/AP-final position and interestingly, at IP-medial/AP-medial position while F0 was the highest at IP-final/AP-medial Position as expected. The comparison of the acoustic properties of the particles with those of neighbor syllables showed that duration was generally significantly longer and energy also showed larger values, if not significant, in particles suggesting that the particles in Korean are not prosodically weaker like function words in English.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.455-464
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• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.39-54
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• 2022

This study aims to clarify the prosodic differences in speech types by examining the Korean read speech and spontaneous speech in the Korean part of the L2 Korean Speech Corpus (speech corpus for Korean as a foreign language). To this end, the articulation length, articulation speed, pause length and frequency, and the average fundamental frequency values of sentences were set as variables and analyzed via statistical methodologies (t-test, correlation analysis, and regression analysis). The results found that read speech and spontaneous speech were structurally different in the form of prosodic phrases constituting each sentence and that the prosodic elements differentiating each speech type were articulation length, pause length, and pause frequency. The statistical results show that the correlation between articulation speed and articulation length was highest in read speech, explaining that the longer a given sentence is, the faster the speaker speaks. In spontaneous speech, however, the relationship between the articulation length and the pause frequency in a sentence was high. Overall, spontaneous speech produces more pauses because short intonation phrases are continuously built to make a sentence, and as a result, the sentence gets lengthened.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.49-51
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to investigate prosodic characteristics of cerebral palsic adults' speech. The results showed some correlations between their articulation scores and prosodic properties of their speech: speakers with low articulation scores showed slower speech rate, larger number of IPs and pauses, and longer duration of pauses. They also showed steeper slopes of [L +H] in their APs.