• 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.

• Therapeutic Science for Rehabilitation
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.69-81
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• 2019

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of prosody of ambiguous sentences in patients with right hemisphere damage(RHD). Methods: Sentences with each word prosodically focused were used to investigate. Several acoustic parameters such as intensity, F0, and duration were measured to identify characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the right hemisphere and normal controls. All speech samples were recorded using the Praat 4.3.14 software. Data were analyzed with the independent sample t-test using SPSS 18.0. Results: The results of this study are as follows: First, intensity of the first syllable of the focus word was different between the two groups in several sentences. Second, F0 was different between the two groups in all sentences. Third, duration was different between the groups in several sentences. Accordingly, prosody were varied and values of acoustic parameters differed due to the focus of utterance. The group with right hemisphere damage showed restricted prosody. Conclusions: Intensity, duration, and F0 are all used as elements of prosody in emphasizing structural and pragmatic meaning, but according to the focus, strength and duration were related to F0. In contrast, F0 has a significant linguistic difference, but there was a significant difference between the RHD and normal people, so F0 can be a discriminatory factor of rhyme evaluation of the right hemisphere damaged and it is necessary to accumulate more strong evidence through future research.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2017

The relationships between the ability to understand changes in meaning depending on the prosody of spoken words and the ability to perceive pitch and melodic contour in cochlear implants (CI) recipients were examined. Fifteen postlingual CI recipients were measured in terms of speech prosody perception, speech perception, pitch discrimination (PD), and melody contour identification (MCI). The speech prosody perception test consists of words with positive (PW) and neutral meaning (NW). Participants were asked to identify the meaning of words depending on the conditions of positive and negative prosody. The MCI consists of subtests 1 and 2 with different chance levels to choose. Then, the relationships between speech prosody perception, speech perception, PD, and MCI performance were analyzed. There was a significant difference in identifying the meaning of words expressed in a different prosody between the PW and NW conditions. Speech prosody perception showed a significant correlation with MCI 1 while there was no significant relationship with speech perception. Although speech perception may be possible after CI, limited spoken word comprehension due to decreased sensitivity for prosodic changes may persist in CI recipients. In addition, there was a limitation in perception of melodic contour change compared to pitch discrimination, which is related to speech prosody perception.