• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.7
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• pp.461-471
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic data for development of Korean teaching programs for immigrant women from multicultural families through the acoustic analysis of their prosodic phrasing and intonation pattern. The results showed that immigrant women showed some differences in most of the prosodic characteristics from a Korean women's group: Immigrant women realized the first word of a sentence in an intonational phrase while Korean women did in an accentual phrase. They also haven't yet correctly learned the tone type of the first of an accentual phrase which differs depending on the type of its first segment yet. As a result, they showed many diverse intonation patterns compared to Korean women. Furthermore, the immigrant women's groups showed some differences between them in a few prosodic characteristics. Philippine women, whose residence duration in Korea is relatively longer than that of Vietnamese women, were more similar to Korean women: Vietnamese women read a sentence with a larger number of intonational phrases than Philippine women did. And they realized sentence-final boundary tone of a yes-no question not only in 'H%' but also in 'HL%' while, like Korean women, Philippine women did only in 'H%'.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.3-15
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• 2014

An articulatory study (using an Electromagnetic Articulography, EMA) was conducted to explore effects of prosodic boundary strength (Intonational Phrase/IP versus Word/Wd), and focus (Focused/accented, Neutral, Unfocused/unaccented) on the kinematic realization of /m/ in the coda (${\ldots}$am#i${\ldots}$) and the onset (${\ldots}$a#mi${\ldots}$) conditions in Korean. (Here # refers to a prosodic boundary such as an IP or a Wd boundary). Several important points have emerged. First, the boundary effect on /m/s was most robustly observed in the temporal dimension in both the coda (IP-final) and the onset (IP-initial) conditions, generally in line with cross-linguistically observable boundary-related lengthening patterns. Crucially, however, in contrast with boundary-related slowing-down effects that have been observed in English, both the IP-final and IP-initial temporal expansions of Korean /m/s were not accompanied by an articulatory slowing down. They were, if anything, associated with a faster movement in the lip opening (release) phase (into the vowel). This suggests that the mechanisms underlying boundary-related temporal expansions may differ between languages. Second, observed boundary-induced strengthening effects (both spatial and temporal expansions, especially on the IP-initial /m/s) were remarkably similar to prominence (focus)-induced strengthening effects, which is again counter to phrase-initial strengthening patterns observed in English in which boundary effects are dissociated from prominent effects. This suggests that initial syllables in Korean may be a common focus for both boundary and prominence marking. These results, taken together, imply that the boundary-induced strengthening in Korean is different in nature from that in English, each being modulated by the individual language's prosodic system. Third, the coda and the onset /m/s were found to be produced in a subtly but significantly different way even in a Wd boundary condition, a potentially neutralizing (resyllabification) context. This suggests that although the coda may be phonologically 'resyllabified' into the following syllable in a phrase-medial position, its underlying syllable affiliation is kinematically distinguished from the onset.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.24-32
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• 1997

This study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relativity between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern to produce more natural synthetic speech. To get meaningful results, all the word boundaries in the prosodic database were statistically analyzed, and assigned by the proper boundary type. The resulting 10 types of prosodic boundaries were classified into 3 types according to the strength of the breaks, which are zero, minor, and major break respectively. We have found out that the durational information was a main cue to determine the major prosodic boundary. Using the bigram and trigram of syntactic information, we predicted major and minor classification of boundary types. With brigram model, we obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 4.60%, 38.2%, the insertion error rates of 22.8%, 8.4% on each Test-I and Test-II text database respectively. With trigram mode, we also obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 58.3%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 11.8% on Test-I and Test-II text database respectively.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.31-44
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• 1994

The paper introduces several studies of various aspects of Korean phonology and phonetics for speech recognition and synthesis. The phonological and phonetic studies presented in this paper are : i) For a study of segmental phonology, we made an annotated list of Korean allophones and their corresponding alphabetic symbols to type into computers. ii) For a study of segmental phonetics, we present some acoustic regulations in Korean consonants according to their phonological environment within a word. iii) For a study of prosodic phonology, we suggest the phonological functions of prosodic features and their acoustic cues. iv) For a study of prosodic phonetics, we present the characteristic patterns of accent and intonation in Korean. v) Finally, we suggest some ways of using this phonological and phonetic knowledge for possible improvement of speech recognition and synthesis.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.23-31
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• 2011

This paper examines the production patterns of the acquisition of coda consonants in monosyllabic words in English-speaking children with cochlear implants. The data come from the transcribed speech of children with cochlear implants. This study poses three questions. First, do children with cochlear implants acquire onset consonants earlier than codas? Second, do children's productions have a bimoraic-sized constraint that maintains binary feet? Third, what patterns emerge from production of coda consonants? The results revealed that children with cochlear implants acquire onset consonants earlier than codas. With regard to the bimoraic-sized constraints, the productions of vowel type (i.e., monomoraic and bimoraic) were more accurate for monomoraic vowels than bimoraic ones for some children with cochlear implants, although accuracy in vowel productions showed high proportion regardless of vowel types. The variations of coda production exhibited individual differences. Some children produced less sonorant consonants with high frequency and others produced more sonorant ones. The results of this study were similar to those pertaining to children with normal hearing. In the process of coda consonant acquisition, the error patterns of prosody-sensitive production may be regarded as articulatory challenges to produce higher-level prosodic structures.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.159-172
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• 1997

This paper proposes a prosodic representation system of the Kyungnam dialect of Korean, based on the ToBI system. In this system, diverse intonation patterns are transcribed on the four parallel tiers: a tone tier, a break index tier, an orthographic tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones marked with diacritics in order to represent various pitch events. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, in order to represent degrees of connectiveness in speech by associating each inter-word position with a break index. In this, each break index represents a boundary of some kind of constituent. This system can contribute not only to a more detailed theory connecting prosody, syntax, and intonation, but also to current text-to-speech synthesis approaches, speech recognition, and other quantitative computational modellings.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.67-75
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• 2011

In Korean, 'Aspiration Merger' is the result of the heteromorphemic sequence of lenis stop and /h/ becoming a single aspirated stop word-medially. However, the contrast between lenis stop-plus-/h/ and an underlying aspirated stop is maintained when they span Phonological Phrase boundaries. By varying the position in the prosodic domain such as APP (Across Phonological Phrase) and PPM (Phonological Phrase Medial) positions, the phonetic properties of the two categories are compared. In the results from noise duration and change of intensity, lenis stop-plus-/h/ show a large difference between the APP and PPM positions. The results from a noise duration comparison show that the two categories are completely neutralized into aspirated stop in the PPM position and the complete neutralization is sensitive to prosodic phrasing.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.431-469
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• 2002

The main purpose of this paper is to present data about schm constructions in English and to examine them within the framework of Optimality Theory. American people sometimes reduplicate a word in deprecation using a prefix schm- or shm-, as in fancy-shmancy, and old-shmold. In these data, reduplicants surface as a copy of the whole word except the onset of the first syllable, which is replaced with schm. My data include some examples where the onset of the second syllable, not the first syllable, within the word reduplication is deleted and replaced with fixed segmentism schm, which seems to be infix rather than prefix. Above all, this study presents concrete evidence for the existence and function of ‘syllable’ and ‘foot’ known as prosodic categories by examining schm reduplication. Such extensions of schm-reduplcation also make predictions about types of outputs corresponding to their inputs.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.35-48
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• 2006

The present study examined whether words with higher frequency have more exposure to the lenition process such as intervocalic stop voicing or /h/ reduction in the production of the Korean speakers. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 tested if word-internal intervocalic voicing and /h/ reduction occur more often in the words with higher frequency than less frequent words respectively. Results showed that the rate of voicing was not significantly different between the high frequency group and the low frequency group; rather both high and low frequency words were shown to be fully voiced in this prosodic position. However, intervocalic /h/s were deleted more in high frequency words than in low frequency words. Low frequency words showed that other phonetic variants such as [h] and [w] were found more often than in high frequency group. Thus the results of the present study are indefinitive as to the relationship between the word frequency and lenition with the data at hand.