• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.63-71
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• 2003

This study aims to experiment on learning French intonation, based on the visualization of melody, which was employed in the early sixties to reeducate those with communication disorders. The visualization of melody in this paper, however, was used to the foreign language learning and produced successful results in many ways, especially in learning foreign intonation. In this paper, we used the PitchWorks to visualize some French intonation samples and experiment on learning intonation based on the bitmap picture projected on a screen. The students could see the melody curve while listening to the sentences. We could observe great achievement on the part of the students in learning intonations, as verified by the result of this experiment. The students were much more motivated in learning and showed greater improvement in recognizing intonation contour than just learning by hearing. But lack of animation in the bitmap file could make the experiment nothing but a boring pattern practices. It would be better if we can use a sound analyser, as like for instance a PitchWorks, which is designed to analyse the pitch, since the students can actually see their own fluctuating intonation visualized on the screen.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the viability of employing the intonation exaggeration technique proposed in [4] in teaching English prosody to university students. Fifty-six female university students, twenty-two in a control group and the other thirty-four in an experimental group, participated in a teaching experiment as part of their regular coursework for a five-and-a-half week period. For the study material of the experimental group, a set of utterances was synthesized whose intonation contours had been exaggerated whereas the control group was given the same set without any intonation modification. Recordings from both before and after the teaching experiment were made and one sentence set was chosen for analysis. The parameters analyzed were the pitch range, words containing the highest and lowest pitch points, and the 3-dimensional comparison of the three prosodic features [2]. An AXB and subjective rating test were also performed along with a qualitative screening of the individual intonation contours. The results showed that the experimental group performed slightly better in that their intonation contour was more similar to that of the model native speaker's utterance. This appears to suggest that the intonation exaggeration technique can be employed in teaching English prosody to students.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.26-32
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• 1996

In this paper we make a rule of pitch variation for a natural synthetic female voice. Intonation phrase, which is the basic unit the rule is applied to, mostly consists of a syllable or syllables. The pitch values of the first, second, and final syllables make up the pitch contour of the intonation phrase. Those of the first and second syllable are determined by the initial consonants of the respective syllables, and that of the final syllable by the type of the function word. There are two kinds of boundaries between intonation phrases. One is a boundary with pause, and the other is a boundary without pause. The pitch contour of the intonation phrase with the boundary phenomena determines the pitch pattern of a sentence.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.119-122
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• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accent, pronunciation, and intonation in English spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation. we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation and calculate the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input and reference. For the intonation evaluation. we propose nine pattern of slope to estimate pitch contour, then we grade test sentences by accumulated error obtained by the distance measure and estimated slope. Our result shows that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with perceptual measure. As the result of the intonation evaluation. system represent the similar order of grade for the four sentences having different intonation patterns compared with perceptual evaluation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.39-53
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• 1997

As the segmental phonetic output is derived from its underlying form, the phonetic surface of intonation could also be derived from its underlying tone melody. In order to show clearly the phonological processes (in fact, we need more than just phonological processes) involved in the generation of intonational surface, we need to formalize the description of those processes. This paper firstly examines different types of sentence-final intonation contour in Korean, and then attempt to formalize the intonational behavior of those contours. In this attempt, we will investigate what kinds of linguistic information participate in deciding the shapes of the. contours and what kinds of tonological processes the underlying tone melody undergoes before it takes the surface shape. In this analysis of intonation contours, we focus on the linguistic structure rather than the acoustic property, adopting just two tones L and H as phonological tones, with four phonetic pitches.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.85-94
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• 2009

This paper investigates the intonation patterns of Korean spontaneous speech through an analysis of four dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The speech corpus, which is a subset of spontaneous speech database recorded and distributed by ETRI, is labeled in APs and IPs based on K-ToBI system using Momel, an intonation stylization algorithm. It was found that unlike in English, a significant number of APs and IPs include hesitation lengthening, which is known to be a disfluency phenomenon due to speech planning. This paper also claims that the hesitation lengthening is different from the IP-final lengthening and that it should be categorized as a new category, as it greatly affects the intonation patterns of the language. Except for the fact that 19.09% of APs show hesitation lengthening, the spontaneous speech shows the same AP patterns as in read speech with higher frequency of falling patterns such as LHL in comparison with read speech which show more LH and LHLH patterns. The IP boundary tones of spontaneous speech, showing the same five patterns such as L%, HL%, LHL%, H%, LH% as in read speech, show higher frequency of rising patterns (H% and LH%) and contour tones (HL%, LH%, LHL%) while read speech on the contrary shows higher frequency of falling patterns and simple tones at the end of IPs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-105
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• 2015

This research mainly focuses on intonational characteristics of synchronous English speech. Intonation contours were extracted from 1,848 utterances produced in two different speaking modes (solo vs. synchronous) by 28 (12 women and 16 men) native speakers of English. Synchronous speech is found to be slower than solo speech. Women are found to speak slower than men. The effect size of speech rate caused by different speaking modes is greater than gender differences. However, there is no interaction between the two factors (speaking modes vs. gender differences) in terms of speech rate. Analysis of pitch point features has it that synchronous speech has smaller Pt (pitch point movement time), Pr (pitch point pitch range), Ps (pitch point slope) and Pd (pitch point distance) than solo speech. There is no interaction between the two factors (speaking modes vs. gender differences) in terms of pitch point features. Analysis of sentence level features reveals that synchronous speech has smaller Sr (sentence level pitch range), Ss (sentence slope), MaxNr (normalized maximum pitch) and MinNr (normalized minimum pitch) but greater Min (minimum pitch) and Sd (sentence duration) than solo speech. It is also shown that the higher the Mid (median pitch), the MaxNr and the MinNr in solo speaking mode, the more they are reduced in synchronous speaking mode. Max, Min and Mid show greater speaker discriminability than other features.

• MALSORI
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• no.66
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• pp.21-39
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to analyze the intonational slope characteristics of the Korean news utterances. Prosodic phrases were analyzed in terms of the K-ToBI labeling system. In addition, the change of intonation contour that occurs throughout the sentences was discussed in terms of types of media and gender. Results showed that the overall declination of the intonation contour of radio and male revealed a gentler slope than that of TV and female, respectively. While the regression of the top line slope showed male's higher $R^2$ with the number of words, the base line slope of the radio and female was proved to be highly influenced from the number of syllables, words, and prosodic phrases. A lot more independent variables statistically affected to the base line slope. This means that the base line slope was strongly related to the variables, the top line slope, otherwise, could be more freely fluctuated due to the light correlation with them.

• MALSORI
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• no.54
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• pp.45-61
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a method of generating intonation contour for Korean text-to-speech (TTS) system and a method of synthesizing emotional speech, both based on Soft template mark-up language (Stem-ML), a novel prosody generation model combining mark-up tags and pitch generation in one. The evaluation shows that the intonation contour generated by Stem-ML is better than that by our previous work. It is also found that Stem-ML is a useful tool for generating emotional speech, by controling limited number of tags. Large-size emotional speech database is crucial for more extensive evaluation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.59-68
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• 2002

This paper analyzes the prosodic features distinctively associated with Korean topic constructions (marked by nun or its variant un) and subject constructions (marked by ka or its variant i) as a way of explicating the role that prosody plays in differentially constituting their discourse messages. Using both spoken data elicited in controlled settings and spontaneous conversational data, an attempt is made to identify differentiating prosodic features and intonation contours associated with distinct meanings and functions of nun- and ka-constructions evoked in a variety of discourse contexts.