• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.55-65
• /
• 2012

In this study, the prosodic disambiguation of the syntactic attachment differences was investigated in relation to the effect of lexical bias. Speech materials were composed of N1-conj-N2-PP phrases such as "walkers and runners with dogs." The results show that the use of durational pattern is dominant over the pitch pattern to differentiate the attachment differences. The characteristic pitch contour was the rise and fall over N1 and N2 in the high attachment. The pitch contour in the low attachment was the rise and fall over N2 and N3 although the frequency of such patterns was lower for the low attachment case. For the durational pattern, the lengthening in the N2 region plays a significant role in the disambiguation of the syntactic attachments. The interaction between the lexical bias and the syntactic attachment was not statistically significant in the duration data.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.61-70
• /
• 2012

The current study observes the durational interaction of tautosyllabic consonants and vowels in the word-initial position of English and Korean child-directed speech (CDS). The effect of phonological laryngeal contrasts in stops on the following vowel duration, and the effect of the intrinsic vowel duration on the release duration of preceding stops in addition to the acoustic realization of the contrastive segments are explored in different prosodic contexts - phrase-initial/medial, focal accented/non-focused - in a marked speech style of CDS. A trade-off relationship between Voice Onset Time (VOT), as consonant release duration, and voicing phonation time, as vowel duration, reported from adult-to-adult speech, and patterns of durational variability are investigated in CDS of two languages with different linguistic rhythms, under systematically controlled prosodic contexts. Speech data were collected from four native English mothers and four native Korean mothers who were talking to their one-word staged infants. In addition to the acoustic measurements, the transformed delta measure is employed as a variability index of individual tokens. Results confirm the durational correlation between prevocalic consonants and following vowels. The interaction is revealed in a compensatory pattern such as longer VOTs followed by shorter vowel durations in both languages. An asymmetry is found in CV interaction in that the effect of consonant on vowel duration is greater than the VOT differences induced by the vowel. Prosodic effects are found such that the acoustic difference is enhanced between the contrastive segments under focal accent, supporting the paradigmatic strengthening effect. Positional variation, however, does not show any systematic effects on the variations of the measured acoustic quantities. Overall vowel duration and syllable duration are longer in English tokens but involve less variability across the prosodic variations. The constancy of syllable duration, therefore, is not found to be more strongly sustained in Korean CDS. The stylistic variation is discussed in relation to the listener under linguistic development in CDS.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 1994.06c
• /
• pp.323-327
• /
• 1994

There have been three contrastive claims over the classification of Korean. To answer the classification question, timing variables which would determine the durations of syllable, word and foot were investigated with various words either in isolation or in sentence contexts using Soundcoup/16 on Macintosh P.C., and a total of 284 utterances, obtained from six Korean speakers, were used. It was found 1) that the durational pattern for words tended to maintain in utterances, regardless of position , subjects and dialects 2) that the syllable duration was determined both by the types of phoneme and by the number of phonemes, the word duration both by the syllable complexity and by the number of syllables, and the foot duration by the word complexity, 3) that there was a constractive relationship between foot length in syllables and foot duration and 4) that the foot duration varied generally with word complexity if the same word did not occur both in the first foot and in the second foot. On the basis of these, it was concluded that Korean is a word timed language where, all else being equal, including tempo, emphasis, etc., the inherent durational pattern for words tends to maintain in utterances. The main difference between stress timing, syllable timing and word timing were also discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
• /
• 2007.11a
• /
• pp.405-414
• /
• 2007

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a text-to-speech system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to predict symbolic markers from text (i.e., prosodic phrase boundaries, accent, and intonation boundaries), and then using these markers to generate pitch, intensity, and durational patterns for the synthesis module of the system. In this paper, a novel method for annotating the prosodic structure of Thai sentences based on dependency representation of syntax is presented. The goal of the annotation process is to predict from text the rhythm of the input sentence when spoken according to its intended meaning. The encoding of the prosodic structure is established by minimizing speech disrhythmy while maintaining the congruency with syntax. That is, each word in the sentence is assigned a prosodic feature called strength dynamic which is based on the dependency representation of syntax. The strength dynamics assigned are then used to obtain rhythmic groupings in terms of a phonological unit called foot. Finally, the foot structure is used to predict the durational pattern of the input sentence. The aforementioned process has been tested on a set of ambiguous sentences, which represents various structural ambiguities involving five types of compounds in Thai.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
• /
• v.32B no.8
• /
• pp.1110-1118
• /
• 1995

Over the past few years, a wide variety of techniques have been developed which make a reliable recognition of speech signal. Multi-layer perceptron(MLP) which has excellent pattern recognition properties is one of the most versatile networks in the area of speech recognition. This paper describes an automatic speech recognition system which use both MLP and lexicon. In this system., the recognition is performed by a network search algorithm which matches words in lexicon to MLP output scores. We also suggest a recognition algorithm which incorperat durational information of each phone, whose performance is comparable to that of conventional continuous HMM(CHMM). Performance of the system is evaluated on the database of 26 vocabulary size from 9 speakers. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves error rate of 7.3% which is 5.3% lower rate than 12.6% of CHMM.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.71-79
• /
• 2019

This study aims to investigate the rhythmic patterns in the English speech produced by Chinese learners of English who learn English as a foreign language (EFL learners). Utilizing interval-based rhythm metrics, namely, VarcoC, VarcoV, nPVI-C, nPVI-V, and %V, the study compared the rhythmic differences in English speech between ten native speakers from the United States and forty Chinese EFL learners from mainland China. A sentence elicitation task consisting of thirty picture prompts and corresponding thirty stimuli sentences with at least five vocalic and four consonantal intervals was conducted. Statistical results reveal that both Chinese advanced learners and beginners had significantly lower degree of stress-timed in their English speech, indicating that the acquisition of the L2 speech rhythm was influenced by the learners' L1 rhythmic pattern. In addition, the results also show that the Chinese advanced learners had significantly higher degree of stress-timed in their English speech than beginners and showed no significant difference with native speakers in VarcoC and nPVI-C. These results indicate that the direction of L2 speech rhythm development was from more syllable-timed to more stress-timed.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.35_36
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 1998

This study aims to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean discourse sentences, especially focusing the initial and final part of a sentence. 50 disourse sentences were read in two different styles; one, sentence by sentence, the other, continuous of all 50's. First, we tried to get two kinds of ratios from the acoustic results: first, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in first word in a sentence; second, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in last word in a sentence. We, then, calculated statistical values of the ratios including mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and p-values in t-test. With respect to duration, there were little difference between two different styles. If any, we could see tiny unharmonious durational aspect in the initial of continuous reading. More concisely, there could be observed some deviation from standard. In case of F0, there was prominent statistical difference between ratios of last words in two styles. This difference might play a role as a prosodic feature. Energy seems to show similar pattern with that of F0. The results showed that final syllable in last word was pronounced with about 85 % of initial syllable in the same context and the last words in continuous speech were strongly articulated compared with those of sentence by sentence reading.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.11-17
• /
• 2022

English vowels play an important role in verbal communication. However, Korean students tend to experience difficulty pronouncing a certain set of vowels despite extensive education in English. The aim of this study is to apply speech recognition software to evaluate Korean students' pronunciation of English vowels in minimal pair words and then to examine acoustic characteristics of the pairs in order to check their pronunciation problems. Thirty female Korean college students participated in the recording. Speech recognition rates were obtained to examine which English vowels were correctly pronounced. To compare and verify the recognition results, such acoustic analyses as the first and second formant trajectories and durations were also collected using Praat. The results showed an overall recognition rate of 54.7%. Some students incorrectly switched the tense and lax counterparts and produced the same vowel sounds for qualitatively different English vowels. From the acoustic analyses of the vowel formant trajectories, some of these vowel pairs were almost overlapped or exhibited slight acoustic differences at the majority of the measurement points. On the other hand, statistical analyses on the first formant trajectories of the three vowel pairs revealed significant differences throughout the measurement points, a finding that requires further investigation. Durational comparisons revealed a consistent pattern among the vowel pairs. The author concludes that speech recognition and analysis software can be useful to diagnose pronunciation problems of English-language learners.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.24-32
• /
• 1997

This study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relativity between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern to produce more natural synthetic speech. To get meaningful results, all the word boundaries in the prosodic database were statistically analyzed, and assigned by the proper boundary type. The resulting 10 types of prosodic boundaries were classified into 3 types according to the strength of the breaks, which are zero, minor, and major break respectively. We have found out that the durational information was a main cue to determine the major prosodic boundary. Using the bigram and trigram of syntactic information, we predicted major and minor classification of boundary types. With brigram model, we obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 4.60%, 38.2%, the insertion error rates of 22.8%, 8.4% on each Test-I and Test-II text database respectively. With trigram mode, we also obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 58.3%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 11.8% on Test-I and Test-II text database respectively.