• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2007

Old Korean regulated poems have a typical prosodic structure characterized by a pitch contour. This work applies Jun's finding in Seoul Korean(Jun 1993, 2000, 2005) to old Korean regulated poems, and reports some other significant phonetic characteristics, arguing that old Korean regulated poems have a regular rhythm based on the pitch contour implementing the typically hierarchical prosodic structure. The major prosodic units defined are a foot, a phrase, and a line. Next, this work proposes pitch contour characterizing prominence in a unit, boundary tones, and pauses at the boundary position, as the basic and significant cues of rhythm of a Korean poem. Specifically, some significant characteristics are discussed as follows: first, the tonal pattern of a foot is HL, starting high and ending low; second, the lowering boundary tones of HL% and L% are perceived at the end of a phrase and a line; and finally, a gradient degree of pause is observed at each unit-final position.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.6C
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• pp.505-511
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• 2005

Autonomic machines interacting with human should have capability to perceive the states of emotion and attitude through implicit messages for obtaining voluntary cooperation from their clients. Voice is the easiest and most natural way to exchange human messages. The automatic systems capable to understanding the states of emotion and attitude have utilized features based on pitch and energy of uttered sentences. Performance of the existing emotion recognition systems can be further improved withthe support of linguistic knowledge that specific tonal section in a sentence is related with the states of emotion and attitude. In this paper, we attempt to improve recognition rate of emotion by adopting such linguistic knowledge for Korean ending boundary tones into anautomatic system implemented using pitch-related features and multilayer perceptrons. From the results of an experiment over a Korean emotional speech database, the improvement of $4\%$ is confirmed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.27-36
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• 2020

The aim of this study is to investigate the perceptive aspects of the polysemic sentence final ending "-(eu)lgeol" produced by Chinese Korean learners. "-(Eu)lgeol" has two different meanings, that is, a guess and a regret, and these different meanings are expressed by the different prosodic features of the last syllable of "-(eu)lgeol". To examine how Korean native speakers perceive "-(eu)lgeol" sentences produced by Chinese Korean learners and the most saliant prosodic variable for the semantic discrimination of "-(eu)lgeol" at the perceptive level, we performed a perceptual experiment. The analysed material constituted four Korean sentences containing "-(eu)lgeol" in which two sentences expressed guesses and the other two expressed regret. Twenty-five Korean native speakers participated in the perceptual experiment. Participants were asked to mark whether "-(eu)lgeol" sentences they listened to were (1) definitely regrets, (2) probably regrets, (3) ambiguous, (4) probably guesses, or (5) definitely guesses based on the prosodic features of the last syllable of "-(eu)lgeol". The analysed prosodic variables were sentence boundary tones, slopes of boundary tones, pitch difference between sentence-final and penultimate syllables, and pitch levels of boundary tones. The results show that all the analysed prosodic variables are significantly correlated with the semantic discrimination of "-(eu)lgeol" and among these prosodic variables, the most salient role in the semantic discrimination of "-(eu)lgeol" is pitch difference between sentence-final syllable and penultimate syllable.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07b
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• pp.514-516
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• 2005

인간을 상대하는 자율장치는 고객의 자발적인 협조를 얻기 위해 암시적인 신호에 포함된 감정과 태도를 인지할 수 있어야 한다. 인간에게 음성은 가장 쉽고 자연스럽게 정보를 교환할 수 있는 수단이다. 지금까지 감정과 태도를 이해할 수 있는 자동시스템은 발성문장의 피치와 에너지에 기반한 특징을 활용하였다. 이와 같은 기존의 감정인식 시스템의 성능은 문장의 특정한 억양구간이 감정과 태도와 관련을 갖는다는 언어학적 지식의 활용으로 보다 높은 향상이 가능하다. 본 논문에서는 한국어 문미억양에 대한 언어학적 지식을 피치기반 특징과 다층신경망을 활용하여 구현한 자동시스템에 적용하여 감정인식률을 향상시킨다. 한국어 감정음성 데이터베이스를 대상으로 실험을 실시한 결과 $4\%$의 인식률 향상을 확인하였다.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.79-85
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• 2005

In this Paper, we are trying to compare the normal speech with emotional speech -happy, sad, and angry states- through the changes of fundamental frequency. Based on the distribution charts of the normal and emotional speech, there are distinctive cues such as range of distribution, average, maximum, minimum, and so on. On the whole, the range of the fundamental frequency is extended in happy and angry states. On the other hand, sad states make the range relatively lessened. Nevertheless, the ranges of the 10 frequency in sad states are wider than the normal speech. In addition, we can verify that ending boundary tones reflect the information of whole speech.