• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.35-46
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• 2021

In this study, we examined the interactive aspects between pitch reduction phenomena considered a universal language phenomenon and native language interference in the production of L2 intonation performed by Chinese learners of Korean. To investigate their interaction, we conducted an acoustic analysis using acoustic measures such as pitch span, pitch level, pitch dynamic quotient, skewness, and kurtosis. In addition, the correlation between text comprehension and pitch was examined. The analyzed material consisted of four Korean discourses containing five and seven sentences of varying difficulty. Seven Korean native speakers and thirty Chinese learners who differed in their Korean proficiency participated in the production test. The results, for differences by language, showed that Chinese had a more expanded pitch span, and a higher pitch level than Korean. The analysis between groups showed that at the beginner and intermediate levels, pitch reduction was prominent, i.e., their Korean was characterized by a compressed pitch span, low pitch level, and less sentence internal pitch variation. Contrariwise, the pitch use of advanced speakers was most similar to Korean native speakers. There was no significant correlation between text difficulty and pitch use. Through this study, we observed that pitch reduction was more pronounced than native language interference in the phonetic layer.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.185-200
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• 2005

The objective of this study is to examine acoustic cues in spoken French for the assessment of pronunciation which is necessary to realization of the multimedia system. The corpus is composed of simple expressions which consist of the French phonological system include all phonemes. This experiment was made on 4 male and female French native speakers and on 20 Korean speakers, university students who had learned the French language more than two years. We analyzed the recorded data by using spectrograph and measured comparative features by the numerical values. First of all, we found the mean and the deviation of all phonemes, and then chose features which had high error frequency and great differences between French and Korean pronunciations. The selected data were simplified and compared among them. After we judged whether the problems of pronunciation in each Korean speaker were either the utterance mistake or the interference of mother tongue, in terms of articulatory and auditory aspects, we tried to find acoustic features as simplified as possible. From this experiment, we could extract acoustic cues for the construction of the French pronunciation training system.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.168-182
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• 2020

Spoofing attacks, especially replay attacks, pose great security challenges to automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems. Current works on replay attacks detection primarily focused on either developing new features or improving classifier performance, ignoring the effects of feature variability, e.g., the channel variability. In this paper, we first establish a mathematical model for replay speech and introduce a method for eliminating the negative interference of the channel. Then a novel feature is proposed to detect the replay attacks. To further boost the detection performance, four post-processing methods using normalization techniques are investigated. We evaluate our proposed method on the ASVspoof 2017 dataset. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the competing methods in terms of detection accuracy. More interestingly, we find that the proposed normalization strategy could also improve the performance of the existing algorithms.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.180-182
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• 2007

The present study was carried out to investigate how two languages are represented and processed for the late Korean-English bilinguals. To this end, we compared the naming times of Korean-English bilinguals on a series of the picture-word interference tasks. The entire experiment is divided into four parts, each of which required participants to name the pictures in Korean or in English with distractor words visually presented either in Korean or English. The distractor words were semantically related or unrelated to the picture. The results showed that, in different language conditions (L1 naming-L2 distractor, L2 naming - L1 distractor), there was only numerical difference between semantic related and unrelated condition. In same language conditions (L1 naming-L1 distractor, L2 naming-L2 distractor), however, significant semantic interference effect occurred. And, the interference effect was stronger in the L1 distractor condition than in the L2 distractor condition. These results suggest that the semantic processing of L1 and L2 for the late bilinguals are independent each other.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1113-1120
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• 2012

This paper deals with the analysis of interior noise and low frequency noise characteristic for the Busan citizens to use public transport, Busan Metro Line 3. The interior noise evaluation index, articulation index(AI) is evaluated the lower value about average 22 % in a whole range, this is difficult to have a conversation. Also, noise criteria(NC) curve is partially evaluated as NC-65 below 2000 Hz, space type is evaluated as factories. Another of interior noise evaluation index, preferred speech interference level(PSIL) is evaluated the upper value about average 66 dB(A) in a whole range, this is evaluated to be interrupted. In the case of low frequency noise(20~200 Hz), the measurement of low frequency noise is assessed largely beyond noise criteria of ISO 226. The low frequency noise should be reduced because low frequency noise affects on psychological stress and displeasure although low frequency noise is not recognized by auditory sense. The low frequency noise criteria and guideline will be enacted from now on in Korea.

• MALSORI
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• no.4
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• pp.20-30
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• 1982

The aim of this paper is to analyse difficulties of the pronunciation in swedish vowels encountered by Koreans learners and to seek solutions in order to correct the possible errors. In the course of the analysis the swedish and Korean vowels in question are compared with the purpose of describing differences aha similarities between these two systems. This contrastive description is largely based on the students' articulatory speech level ana the writer's auditory , judgement . The following points are discussed : 1 ) Vowel length as a distinctive feature in Swedish compared with that of Korean. 2) A special attention is paid on the Swedish vowel [w:] that is characterized by its peculiar type of lip rounding. 3) The six pairs of Swedish vowels that are phonologically contrastive but difficult for Koreans to distinguish one from the other: [y:] ~ [w:], [i:] ~ [y:], [e:] ~ [${\phi}$:], [w;] ~ [u:] [w:] ~ [$\theta$], [$\theta$] ~ [u] 4) The r-colored vowel in the case of the postvocalic /r/ that is very common in American English is not allowed in English sound sequences. The r-colored vowel in the American English pattern has to be broken up and replaced hi-segmental vowel-consonant sequences . Korean accustomed to the American pronunciation are warned in this respect. For a more distinct articulation of the postvocalic /r/ trill [r] is preferred to fricative [z]. 5) The front vowels [e, $\varepsilon, {\;}{\phi}$) become opener variants (${\ae}, {\;}:{\ae}$] before / r / or supradentals. The results of the analysis show that difficulties of the pronunciation of the target language (Swedish) are mostly due to the interference from the Learner's source language (Korean). However, the Learner sometimes tends to get interference also from the other foreign language with which he or she is already familiar when he or she finds in that language more similarity to the target language than in his or her own mother tongue. Hence this foreign language (American English) in this case functions as a second language for Koreans in Learning Swedish.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.53-60
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• 1992

Many adaptive beamforming methods have been studied for interference cancellation and speech signal enhancement in telephone conference and auditorium. Main aspect of adaptive beamforming methods for speech signal processing is different from radar, sonar and seismic signal processing because desire output signal should be apt to the human ear. Considering that phase of speech is quite insensible to the human ear, Sondhi proposed a nonlinear constrained optimization technique whose constraint was on the magnitude transfer function from the source to the output. In real environment the phase response of the speech signal affects the human auditorium system. So it is desirable to design linear phase system. In this paper, linear phase beamformer is proposed and sample processing algorithm is also proposed for real time consideration Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm yields more consistent beam patterns and deep nulls to the noise direction than Sondhi's.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.11-22
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to find the influence of Chinese falling-rising tone on the pitch pattern of corresponding Sino-Korean words delivered by Chinese learners of Korean and to examine how the falling-rising tone of corresponding Chinese words affect the pitch patterns of Sino-Korean words. The scope of this research is limited to Chinese learners of Korean, especially when they pronounce same-form-same-meaning Sino-Korean words. In this study, Chinese learners pronounced both Chinese words and corresponding Sino-Korean words. Learners' pitch patterns were recorded and analyzed using software and compared with the tone of corresponding Chinese words. Experimental results showed that Sino-Korean words were affected by Chinese 'falling-rising tone - high and level tone' when they started with lenis sounds. On the other hand, when Sino-Korean words started with aspirated sounds they were affected by Chinese 'falling-rising tone - high and level tone', 'falling-rising tone - falling-rising tone', and 'falling-rising tone - falling tone'. In conclusion, the Chinese learners' pitch patterns of Sino-Korean words are affected by Chinese falling-rising tone, especially when Sino-Korean words start with aspirated sounds.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.113-128
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• 2005

The underlying premise of this study was that L1 production is easily transferred into L2 production. In neutral intonation, there is a consonant-tone correlation in Korean: High tone patterns are correlated with voiceless aspirated and tense consonants and Low-High tone patterns are correlated with lax or other voiced consonants. The purpose of this study was to see whether the correlation in Korean (L1) is transferred into English (L2) production and whether the degree of transfer differs depending on the degree of proficiency. Eight Korean speakers and two American speakers participated in the experiment. F0 contours of words and sentences were collected and analyzed. The results of the present study showed that there is a strong correlation between voicing and tone in L2 utterances. When utterance-initial consonant types were voiceless, the word or the sentence began with the H pattern; otherwise it had the LH pattern. The degree of interference differed depending on the degree of proficiency: less proficient speakers showed a stronger correlation in terms of the magnitude (Hz) and size (ms) of the effects on F0. The results indicate that the consonant-tone correlation in L1 is strongly transferred into L2 production and the correlation transfer can be one of the actual aspects that cause L2 speakers to produce deviant L2 accents and intonation.