• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.59-65
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• 2010

In this paper, we investigate acoustic characteristics of Korean /s/ when it is followed by both a high front and a round segment regardless of their order to one another. We show that Korean /s/ in this environment has characteristics of a labio-palatalized segment, being affected by both a high front and a round segment if they occur within the domain of a syllable. In the experiment, we show that Korean /s/ before a high front and a round segment shows a spectral shape different from that in other environments. Specifically, it is different from /s/ before a high front segment only, showing peaks around 2.5 kHz. Furthermore, it shows a rapid decrease of amplitude in 4-5 kHz, and sometimes another plateau of high peaks in 5-6 kHz. We also examined center of gravity frequency and band energy difference. Based on the results of this experiment, we argue that Korean /s/ is affected by the following segments within the domain of coarticulation, a syllable and that the degree of coarticulation is different from language to language.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1193-1220
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• 2009

This study examined the impact of sonority profiles, positional differences and L2 proficiency on Korean EFL learners' perception of English biconsonantal clusters, using nonce words. The overall results showed that major predictions of the sonority-based typological markedness on consonant clusters were supported, as obstruent plus sonorant and sonorant plus obstruent sequences were better perceived than obstruent only or sonorant only sequences. Yet, some consonant clusters did not show a preference for sonority profiles. Positional effects were also confirmed, as word-initial biconsonantal clusters were better perceived than wordfinal ones across all the participant groups. Participants' English proficiency turned out to be also important in the perception of consonant clusters, since university students' mean rate of accuracy was highest, followed by that of high school students, which in turn followed by that of middle school students. Further, the effects of other factors like frequency and stimuli on speech perception were also addressed, along with some implications for future research.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.678-689
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• 2023

This paper describes a novel end-to-end deep generative model-based speaker recognition system using prosodic features. The usefulness of variational autoencoders (VAE) in learning the speaker-specific prosody representations for the speaker recognition task is examined herein for the first time. The speech signal is first automatically segmented into syllable-like units using vowel onset points (VOP) and energy valleys. Prosodic features, such as the dynamics of duration, energy, and fundamental frequency (F₀), are then extracted at the syllable level and used to train/adapt a speaker-dependent VAE from a universal VAE. The initial comparative studies on VAEs and traditional autoencoders (AE) suggest that the former can efficiently learn speaker representations. Investigations on the impact of gender information in speaker recognition also point out that gender-dependent impostor banks lead to higher accuracies. Finally, the evaluation on the NIST SRE 2010 dataset demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach for speaker recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.25-53
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• 2018

This study examined the influence of lexical factors on verbal Eojeol recognition. To meet the goal, forty-five L2 Korean learners and twenty-two Korean native speakers took Eojeol decision tasks measured with the lexical factors such as 'number of strokes', 'number of consonants and vowels', 'number of syllables', 'number of morphemes', 'whole Eojeol frequency', 'root frequency', 'first-syllable-sharing frequency', and 'number of dictionary meanings.' As a result, 'whole Eojeol frequency' was the most effective factor to predict Eojeol recognition reaction time for native speakers and L2 learners, which supports the full-list model. Other lexical factors influencing Eojeol recognition reaction time in L2 learners were different following their proficiency level.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.155-164
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• 2014

This paper proposes a new method to determine the recognition units for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) in Korean by applying unsupervised segmentation and merging. In the proposed method, a text sentence is segmented into morphemes and position information is added to morphemes. Then submorpheme units are obtained by splitting the morpheme units through the maximization of posterior probability terms. The posterior probability terms are computed from the morpheme frequency distribution, the morpheme length distribution, and the morpheme frequency-of-frequency distribution. Finally, the recognition units are obtained by sequentially merging the submorpheme pair with the highest frequency. Computer experiments are conducted using a Korean LVCSR with a 100k word vocabulary and a trigram language model obtained by a 300 million eojeol (word phrase) corpus. The proposed method is shown to reduce the out-of-vocabulary rate to 1.8% and reduce the syllable error rate relatively by 14.0%.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.408-411
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• 2003

정보 검색에서 우리가 자주 쓰는 단어는 표준어인 경우도 있고 통신어인 경우도 있고 외국어인 경우도 있다. 그러나 표준어가 아닌 다른 언어로 검색을 하면 다른 결과가 나타날 수 있다. 예를 들어 컴퓨터에 관한 정보를 찾을 때 ‘컴퓨타’로 검색을 하면 다른 검색 결과가 나오게 된다. 우리나라에서 현재 쓰이고 있는 말들은 이런 애매한 발음의 외래어가 많이 생성되고 소멸된다. 그러므로 이런 외래어들을 전부 사전에 등록할 수는 없고 설사 등록한다 하더라도 용량과 검색시간만 늘어나게 된다. 본 논문에서는 검색엔진에서 이런 외래어에 대한 인식 성능을 높이기 위해 외래어 사전 없이 외래어를 인식하는 방안을 제시한다.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06a
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• pp.984-990
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• 1994

In this paper a new speech synthesis method in the time domain using mono-syllables is proposed. It is to overcome the degradation of the synthetic speech quality by the synthesis method in the frequency domain and to develop an algorithm in the time domain for the prosodic control. In particular when we use a method in a time domain with mono-syllable as a synthesis unit it will be the main issues which are to control th pitch period and to smooth the energy pattern. As a solution to the pitch control, a method using Lagrange interpolation is suggested. As a solution to the other problem, an algorithm which can control the amplitude envelop shape of mono-syllable is proposed. As the results of experiments it was possible to synthesize unlimited Korean speeches including the prosody control. Accoding to the MOS evaluation the quality and the naturality in them was improved to be a good level.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.124-130
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: The study investigated vowel context effects on the perception of stop consonants in Malayalam. It also probed into the role of vowel context effects in determining the frequency of occurrence of various consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in Malayalam. Subjects and Methods: The study used a cross-sectional pre-experimental post-test only research design on 30 individuals with normal hearing, who were native speakers of Malayalam. The stimuli included three stop consonants, each spoken in three different vowel contexts. The resultant nine syllables were presented in original form and five gating conditions. The consonant recognition in different vowel contexts of the participants was assessed. The frequency of occurrence of the nine target syllables in the spoken corpus of Malayalam was also systematically derived. Results: The consonant recognition score was better in the /u/ vowel context compared with /i/ and /a/ contexts. The frequency of occurrence of the target syllables derived from the spoken corpus of Malayalam showed that the three stop consonants occurred more frequently with the vowel /a/ compared with /u/ and /i/. Conclusions: The findings show a definite vowel context effect on the perception of the Malayalam stop consonants. This context effect observed is different from that in other languages. Stop consonants are perceived better in the context of /u/ compared with the /a/ and /i/ contexts. Furthermore, the vowel context effects do not appear to determine the frequency of occurrence of different CV syllables in Malayalam.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.124-130
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: The study investigated vowel context effects on the perception of stop consonants in Malayalam. It also probed into the role of vowel context effects in determining the frequency of occurrence of various consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in Malayalam. Subjects and Methods: The study used a cross-sectional pre-experimental post-test only research design on 30 individuals with normal hearing, who were native speakers of Malayalam. The stimuli included three stop consonants, each spoken in three different vowel contexts. The resultant nine syllables were presented in original form and five gating conditions. The consonant recognition in different vowel contexts of the participants was assessed. The frequency of occurrence of the nine target syllables in the spoken corpus of Malayalam was also systematically derived. Results: The consonant recognition score was better in the /u/ vowel context compared with /i/ and /a/ contexts. The frequency of occurrence of the target syllables derived from the spoken corpus of Malayalam showed that the three stop consonants occurred more frequently with the vowel /a/ compared with /u/ and /i/. Conclusions: The findings show a definite vowel context effect on the perception of the Malayalam stop consonants. This context effect observed is different from that in other languages. Stop consonants are perceived better in the context of /u/ compared with the /a/ and /i/ contexts. Furthermore, the vowel context effects do not appear to determine the frequency of occurrence of different CV syllables in Malayalam.