• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.211-221
• /
• 2002

The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers in Tokyo and Sendai dialects of Japanese use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurement was made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese create the same ambiguities. After defining the depth of a syntactic boundary, F0 of the phrase before and after the boundary, and duration of the syllable and pause before the boundary were measured. The results show that Tokyo dialects speakers use F0 after syntactic boundary, and Sendai dialects speakers use of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.23-36
• /
• 2004

Many languages show reverse durational variation between preceding vowel and following voiced/voiceless (lax/tense) consonants. This study investigated the likely effects of phoneme type (tense vs. lax) on the timing structure (duration of syllable, word, phrase and sentence) of Korean. Three rates of speech (fast, normal, slow) applied to stimuli with the target word /a-Ca/ where /C/ is one of /p, p', $p^h$/. The type (tense/lax) of /C/ caused marked inverse durational variations in the two syllables /a/ and /Ca/ and highly different durational ratios between them. Words with /p', $p^h$/ were significantly longer than that with /p/, which contrasts with many other languages where such pairs of words have a similar duration. The differentials between words remained up to the phrase and sentence level, but in general the higher linguistic units did not statistically differ within each level. Thus, the phrase is suggested as a compensatory unit of phoneme type effects in Korean. Different rates did not affect the general tendency. Distribution of time variations (from normal to fast and slow) to each syllable (/a/ and /Ca/) was also observed.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
• /
• 1999.10e
• /
• pp.335-342
• /
• 1999

The experiments reported here investigated whether seeing a speaker's face (visible speech) affects the perception and memory of Korean speech sounds. In order to exclude the possibility of top-down, knowledge-based influences on perception and memory, the experiments tested people with no knowledge of Korean. The first experiment examined whether visible speech (Auditory and Visual - AV) assists English native speakers (with no knowledge of Korean) in the detection of a syllable within a Korean speech phrase. It was found that a syllable was more likely to be detected within a phrase when the participants could see the speaker's face. The second experiment investigated whether English native speakers' judgments about the duration of a Korean phrase would be affected by visible speech. It was found that in the AV condition participant's estimates of phrase duration were highly correlated with the actual durations whereas those in the AO condition were not. The results are discussed with respect to the benefits of communication with multimodal information and future applications.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.185-200
• /
• 2002

The current study confirmed the existence of an ip prosodic level in French intonation structure, as previously proposed by Sun-Ah Jun & $C\acute{e}cile$cile Fougeron (2000). However, in contrast to the previous suggestion of the plateau realized in an ip in several syntactic structures, the current study supposed that the plateau doesn't come from the different type of syntactic structures but arise from the unspecified syllables without any PA in an ip. Because if we limited ip phrasal tone to the syntactic structure, it would be difficult to find the more general reasons of ip level. Besides /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ we also used /$Hi^*$/ for the focused syllable in the current study. In emphasized sentences, in general, /$Hi^*$/ appeared in the first or second syllable of a leftward AP in an ip and /$H^*$/ in the final syllable of a rightmost AP of an ip, In contrast to these PAs, /$Hi^*$/ might appear in any syllable in an ip, but not to far from /$H^*$/ because the duration time and length t of plateau realized between /$Hi^*$/ and /$H^*$/ or /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ would make an essential harmonious rhythmic unit, Therefore, the current study determined the duration time and the number of syllables realized in each plateau in an ip level composed of more than one AP. As a phrase constituent structure, there is a practical need for intermediate prosodic units to allow for generalization over the many possible combinations of prosodic patterns that can occur. Further evidence is still needed to analyze and relate the different pitch ranges of the plateau of an ip according to the syntactic structure, to identify the considerable character in the French prosodic hierarchy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.7
• /
• pp.17-22
• /
• 1999

In this paper we propose a new mixed method of LDA and tri-tone model to predict Korean prosodic break indices(PBI) for a given utterance. PBI can be used as an important cue of syntactic discontinuity in continuous speech recognition(CSR). The model consists of three steps. At the first step, PBI was predicted with the information of syllable and pause duration through the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method. At the second step, syllable tone information was used to estimate PBI. In this step we used vector quantization (VQ) for coding the syllable tones and PBI is estimated by tri-tone model. In the last step, two PBI predictors were integrated by a weight factor. The proposed method was tested on 200 literal style spoken sentences. The experimental results showed 72% accuracy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.2
• /
• pp.15-22
• /
• 2009

Prominence of speech, which is often called 'accent,' affects the fluency of speaking American English greatly. In this paper, we present an accurate prominence detection method that can be utilized in computer-aided language learning (CALL) systems. We employed pitch movement, overall syllable energy, 300-2200 Hz band energy, syllable duration, and spectral and temporal correlation as features to model the prominence of speech. After the features for vowel syllables of speech were extracted, prominent syllables were classified by SVM (Support Vector Machine). To further improve accuracy, the differences in characteristics of neighboring syllables were added as additional features. We also applied a speech recognizer to extract more precise syllable boundaries. The performance of our prominence detector was measured based on the Intonational Variation in English (IViE) speech corpus. We obtained 84.9% accuracy which is about 10% higher than previous research.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.9-16
• /
• 2020

The present study examines the degree of suffix reduction that occurs when the Korean suffix [-nɨn] was attached to the root in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. Specifically, it focuses on the degrees of reduction produced by individual speakers. The degree of reduction was assessed as the duration of the suffix [-nɨn] to clarify the continuum between the full and reduced forms. The results revealed that, first, the reduced forms of the suffix [-nɨn] were significantly distinguished from the full forms in the suffixation processes. Second, regarding parts of speech, the differences among individual speakers on the degrees of reduction were clearer when the suffix [-nɨn] was attached to verbs, rather than nouns and pronouns. Finally, the length of a root played a critical role in determining the degree of reduction of the suffix [-nɨn]. The degrees of reduction for individual speakers significantly differed when the suffix [-nɨn] was attached to two-syllable roots than three- and four-syllable roots. In conclusion, individual differences in the degrees of reduction were likely to occur when the roots are verbs and when two-syllable roots.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.3-11
• /
• 2012

The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic realizations of English unstressed vowels produced by advanced Korean learners (KLs) of English compared with English native speakers (NSs) focusing on the comparative study of English words and English loanwords. The result shows that KLs are usually not native-like in producing the English unstressed vowel /ə/ and loanword orthography affects the way the KLs produce /?/. The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the KLs is different from that of the NSs. In duration and pitch, KLs show significantly less difference between the stressed and unstressed vowels than do the NSs. The KLs usually have a high pitch in the stressed and the last syllable while the NSs usually produce peak F0 in the stressed syllable. When the KLs have a similar vowel quality with that of the NSs, they produce a shorter duration of the unstressed vowels. However, there is no correlation between the realization of the pitch and the vowel quality in KLs speech.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.139-144
• /
• 2014

Speech discrimination is affected by the speed of speech. The speed of speech can be adjusted at the pause duration, the pause duration can take the resting time to avoid in overloading information. The study will be examine the effects of aging and audiological rehabilitation, and the auditory processing as basic research to investigate the normative data. 7 boys and 8 girls were participated. They have no problem with speech language pathologically and audiologically. There are 4 sets of test implement, and each test set was made out with 20 3-syllable words. Pause duration of all of these words are adjusted in normal(250 ms), slow(500 ms) and very slow(1000 ms). There are 4 words for a multiple-choice that including one word with written correctly and three words with written 1 phoneme wrong. Participant hear the word, and then have to choose one. Speech discrimination score in 250, 500, 1,000 ms of pause duration were $73{\pm}19.4%$, $84{\pm}12.2%$, $88{\pm}8.8%$, respectively.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.95-112
• /
• 2005

We investigate Korean learners' speech-timing of English before and after instruction in comparison with native speech, in an attempt to resolve disagreements in the literature as to whether speech-timing is measurable (Lehiste, 1977; Roach, 1982; Dauer, 1983 vs. Low et al., 2000; Yun 2002; Jian, 2004). We measured the pair-wise variability between the adjacent stressed and unstressed syllables within a foot as well as that among adjacent feet in approximately 555 English sentences, which were read by 29 native speakers and 41 Korean learners in the intermediate proficiency level. The results show that in comparison with native American English, Korean learner speech is before instruction significantly (p<.001) smaller for the pair-wise variability between the adjacent stressed and unstressed syllables within a foot; and significantly (p=.01) bigger for the variability among adjacent feet within the utterance. The learner speech after instruction showed significant (p=.01) improvement in the pair-wise variability of syllable sequence toward native speech values. The variability among adjacent feet was progressively smaller for learner speech before and after instruction and for native speech (p=.03). We thus conclude that the speech timing difference between Korean English and American English is measurable in terms of the duration. of stressed and unstressed syllables and that the latter is stress-timed and the former is syllable-timing interfered.