• Korean Linguistics
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• v.72
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• pp.257-282
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• 2016

The aim of this paper is to research phonological and morphological features in Korean Voices from Berlin. The Korean Voices from Berlin was recorded in 1917 at Berlin by 5 Korean prisoners engaged in World War I, some of them came from North Hamgyeong Province, the others came from Pyeongan Province, therefore these data show a North Korean regional dialect. The data are composed of three materials, counting numbers, reciting scriptures and singing folksongs. The results of this research are as follows. 1) The consonant system of Korean voices is similar to standard Korean. The 19 consonants are classified according to 5 manners of articulations and 5 points of articulations. 2) The liquid /l/ has three allophones, [ɾ] appeared in an onset position, [l] in a word medial coda position or preceded by [l], [ɹ] in a word final coda position. 3) The vowel system of Korean voices is similar to early 20th Korean's. It has 8 monophthongs, /a, ʌ, o, u, ɯ, i, e, ${\varepsilon}$/. 4) The 1 to 10 numbers in Korean voices are similar to Middle-Korean numerals. 5) The genitive particle '/ɯi/의' is pronounced [i], [ɯ], [${\varepsilon}$], especially [ɯ] is appeared in Sino Korean. 6) The /l/-deletion of conjugations are similar to Middle-Korean, /l/ deletion always occurred, if [+cor] consonants are followed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.65-73
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• 2010

No systematic study has examined the relationship between acoustic variability and /w/-deletion in Korean. Most previous studies on /w/-deletion have described /w/-variants in categorical terms, i.e., /w/-deletion or a full glide (Silva 1991; Kang 1997; Yun 2005). These studies are based either on impressionistic judgements without a systematic acoustic analysis or on an exclusive examination of internal acoustic variability of /w/ such as F2, without examining the availability of external acoustic cues such as voice onset time (VOT) of a consonant. However, given the important influence of the adjacent sounds for segmental realizations, it is necessary to examine possible acoustic variability in the differentiation of /w/-variants. The present study aims to address this issue by evaluating the acoustic properties of /CwV/, including VOT and formant transitions. In the analysis, 432 tokens in word-initial position (216 /CwV/ words and 216 /CV/ words) were examined. The results indicated that /w/ exhibits four different variants. Firstly, /w/ is realized as a full glide. Such a variant is characterized by a VOT difference and significant differences in F1 and F2 at voicing onset compared with /CwV/ and /CV/. Secondly, /w/ can be maintained but coarticulated with the following vowel. Such a variant is demonstrated by differences in VOT and F2. Thirdly, /w/ is categorically deleted, which is indicated by the absence of any differences in VOT, F1, and F2. Fourthly, /w/ overlaps a consonant. The F2 difference without VOT difference is manifested in the variant. In contrast to VOT, F1, and F2 differences, pitch plays little role in determining /w/-variants in Korean. These findings suggest that allophones can be produced along a gradient continuum of acoustic cues, exhibiting sounds intermediate between the full realization of a given category and its deletion. Furthermore, each variant can be cued by a set of internal and external acoustic cues.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.472-472
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• 1996

The material of database for speech recognition should include phonetic phenomena as much as possible. At the same time, such material should be phonetically compact with low redundancy[1, 2]. The phonetic phenomena in continuous speech is the key problem in speech recognition. This paper describes the processing of a set of sentences collected from the database of 1993 and 1994 "People's Daily"(Chinese newspaper) which consist of news, politics, economics, arts, sports etc.. In those sentences, both phonetic phenometla and sentence patterns are included. In continuous speech, phonemes always appear in the form of allophones which result in the co-articulary effects. The task of designing a speech database should be concerned with both intra-syllabic and inter-syllabic allophone structures. In our experiments, there are 404 syllables, 415 inter-syllabic diphones, 3050 merged inter-syllabic triphones and 2161 merged final-initial structures in read speech. Statistics on the database from "People's Daily" gives and evaluation to all of the possible phonetic structures. In this sentence set, we first consider the phonetic balances among syllables, inter-syllabic diphones, inter-syllabic triphones and semi-syllables with their junctures. The syllabic balances ensure the intra-syllabic phenomena such as phonemes, initial/final and consonant/vowel. the rest describes the inter-syllabic jucture. The 1560 sentences consist of 96% syllables without tones(the absent syllables are only used in spoken language), 100% inter-syllabic diphones, 67% inter-syllabic triphones(87% of which appears in Peoples' Daily). There are rougWy 17 kinds of sentence patterns which appear in our sentence set. By taking the transitions between syllables into account, the Chinese speech recognition systems have gotten significantly high recognition rates[3, 4]. The following figure shows the process of collecting sentences. [people's Daily Database] -> [segmentation of sentences] -> [segmentation of word group] -> [translate the text in to Pin Yin] -> [statistic phonetic phenomena & select useful paragraph] -> [modify the selected sentences by hand] -> [phonetic compact sentence set]

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.514-514
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• 1996

Igbo, a new Benue Congo language has a vowel harmony system which, like that of Akan, is based on the pharynx size or tongue root position. In this study we examine Igbo vowel harmony with particular reference to assimilatory patterns of vowels in different harmony sets. This is to gain some insight into the factors involved in Igbo vowel assimilation, and to establish to what extent reports on Akan vowel assimilation are validated in Igbo. Tokens of the eight phonemic vowels of Standard Igbo are recorded from three native speakers of Igbo. The vowels are acoustically investigated (using the LPC analysis of CSL) in individual lexical items and within carefully designed carrier phrases. The F1 and F2 values of the vowels are obtained as these formant values are generally useful in establishing the salient characteristics of vowels. Vowels from the harmony sets are juxtaposed in the carrier phrases to ascertain the extent of assimilation. Results of the investigation show that the F1 values, to a large extend, are enough to characterize these vowels. The (-Expanded) vowels have higher F1 values than their (+Expanded) counterpart. Where there is an overlap in F1 values for some vowels the F1 bandwidth values serve to distinguish between the vowels. The overlap often reported in Akan for /I/ and /e/ on the one hand and /${\mho}$/ and /o/ on the other is not validated in Igbo. While the F1 values for these pairs of vowels are quite similar for one of our speakers, there is an appreciable difference between the F1 values of these vowels for the other two speakers. There is however an overlap for /e/ and /o/ for one of the speakers. Assimilations are generally regressive across word boundaries. It is, however, necessary to point out that the general perceptual impression that one of the vowels completely assimilates to the other, is not borne out by our investigation. Most of our F1 and F2 values for the vowels in individual lexical items are altered in assimilations. This then suggests that assimilation involving these vowels is partial rather than complete. The emerging 'allophones' are acoustically similar to the (+Expanded) vowel involved in the assimilation, that is when vowels from different harmony sets are involved. We conclude that while assimilation of Igbo vowels involves some phonological considerations, phonetic factors appear to be permanent in deciding the final form of the vowels.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.239-246
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• 2017

This paper compares the speech signal parameters between Korean and Chinese for Korean pronunciation /ㄹ/, which is caused many errors by Chinese leaners. Allophones of /ㄹ/ in Korean is divided into lateral group and tap group. It has been investigated the reasons for these errors by studying the similarity and the differences between Korean /ㄹ/ pronunciation and its corresponding Chinese pronunciation. In this paper, for the purpose of comparison the speech signal parameters such as energy, waveform in time domain, spectrogram in frequency domain, pitch based on ACF, Formant frequencies are used. From the phonological perspective the speech signal parameters such as signal energy, a waveform in the time domain, a spectrogram in the frequency domain, the pitch (F0) based on autocorrelation function (ACF), Formant frequencies (f1, f2, f3, and f4) are measured and compared. The data, which are composed of the group of Korean words by through a philological investigation, are used and simulated in this paper. According to the simulation results of the energy and spectrogram, there are meaningful differences between Korean native speakers and Chinese leaners for Korean /ㄹ/ pronunciation. The simulation results also show some differences even other parameters. It could be expected that Chinese learners are able to reduce the errors considerably by exploiting the parameters used in this paper.