• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.67-70
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• 2006

Prosody can be used to resolve syntactic ambiguity of a sentence. English relative clause construction with complex NP(the N1, N2, and RC sequence) has syntactic ambiguity and the clause can be interpreted as modyfying N1(high attachment) or N2(low attachment), Speakers and listeners can disambiguate those sentences based on the prosody. In this paper, we investigate the Korean English learners production on the prosodic structure of English relative clause construction. The production experiment shows that the beginner learners use the phrasing frequently and the advanced learners depend on both the phrasing and the accent. One of the characteristic of the Korean English learners' intonation is that the Korean accentual phrase tone pattern LHa is transferred to their production.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.33-39
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• 2010

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners' processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean listeners' comprehension patterns for syntactically ambiguous speech strings varying in 1) the relative height of F0 peaks across prosodic units, and 2) the types of prosodic phrasing, to see whether pitch range reset informs the recovery of syntactic structure even though it is not reflected in the intonational hierarchy in Korean. The results show that the hierarchical level of prosodic phrasing affects the parsing pattern of syntactic ambiguity. The pitch range reset also cued the location of syntactic boundaries, but this effect was confined to phrases across AP.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.89-104
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• 2004

This paper investigates previous theories on English focus realization and attempts to find out the overall acoustic characteristics of English focus. It has been argued in previous studies that English focus can be defined as a new information that is not recoverable from the context (Halliday 1967), a complementary element of presupposition (Jackendoff 1972), and what is predicated about the topic in a sentence (Sgall 1973, Gundel 1974). The phonetic realization of English focus in an utterance has been said to be either L+H*/H*, or falling accent. Yet it is a more or less simplified pattern not based on real data obtained from native speakers of English, and it does not consider the various pragmatic and contextual situations. In our experiments we found that native speakers uttered English focus sentences in different ways according to the different focus structure. Another notable result is that Korean speakers, when provided with the same experimental material, are neither able to distinguish different focus types nor deaccent the elements that are not focused in an utterance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.9-14
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• 2018

This study compared the relative contributions of intensity, F0, duration and vowel spectra of L2 English lexical stress by Japanese and Korean learners of English. Recordings of Japanese, Korean and native English speakers reading eighteen 2 to 4 syllable words in a carrier sentence were analyzed using multiple regression to investigate the influence of each acoustic correlate in determining whether a vowel was stressed. The relative contribution of each correlate was calculated by converting the coefficients to percentages. The Japanese learner group showed phonological transfer of L1 phonology to L2 lexical prosody and relied mostly on F0 and duration in manifesting L2 English stress. This is consistent with the results of the previous studies. However, advanced Japanese speakers in the group showed less reliance on F0, and more use of intensity, which is another parameter used in native English stress accents. On the other hand, there was little influence of F0 on L2 English stress by the Korean learners, probably due to the transfer of the Korean intonation pattern to L2 English prosody. Hence, this study shows that L1 transfer happens at the prosodic level for Japanese learners of English and at the intonational level for Korean learners.

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

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.137-143
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• 2006

The aim of this paper is to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean distant speech. Four speakers (2 males and 2 females) produced 36 2-syllable words in both distant-talking and normal environments. totaling 288 spoken 2-syllable words. The results showed that ratios of second syllable to first syllable in vowel duration and vowel energy were significantly larger in the distant-talking environment compared to the normal environment and f0 range also bigger in the distant-talking environment. In addition, 'HL%' contour boundary tone in the second syllable and/or 'L+H' contour tone in the first syllable were used in the distant-talking environment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.203-217
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• 2000

In spoken language, the characteristics of prosodic realization are related to the meaning of utterance. The pitch pattern of an interrogative sentence which differs from that of declarative sentences can be considered in this respect.. If we consider the question-answer pair, we can find that the most important variation comes from the intended meaning of asking. In this paper, we experiment with four kinds of interrogative sentences and show that the difference in pitch patterns of interrogative sentences can be explained in relation to the focus phenomena that is, the differences of the boundary tones in interrogative sentences are due to the differences in the prosodic domain of focus. For a relevant explanation with the focus phenomena, we divided focus into the categories: emphatic focus, which plays a role in delivering the speaker's intended meaning for the sentence interpretation, and informational focus, delivers the central intended meaning of the utterance. The results can be summarized in three points. First, High boundary tone delivers the meaning of asking. Second, the realization of different boundary tones that are found in wh-question and alternative question are just phonetic variations caused by focusing. Third, the high rise boundary tone in echo questions is related to the meaning of surprise or incredulity, and this relation is a consensus of existing opinion, that is, the speaker's attitude of surprise can raise the pitch range. From these results we can distinguish between boundary type and phonetic variation, and we can also give appropriate meaning to the different boundary tones in interrogative sentences that have been regarded as merely a part of sentence type.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.17-28
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• 2005

This paper argues that news speech entails a distinct intonational pattern from natural speech, effectively reflecting that it primarily focuses on providing new information. We conducted a phonetic experiment to compare the tonal contours between news speech and natural speech, examining the distributions of pitch accents and the overall pitch ranges. We utilized 70 American Press (AP) radio news utterances and 70 natural utterances extracted from TV dramas. Results show that news speech involves 3.38 H*'s (including L+H* and !H*) within an intonational phrase (IP) or intermediate phrase (ip) whereas natural speech, 1.8 in average. The number of IP/ip's per sentence is 3 in news speech, which is shown in the highest rate of 32.07% of the news speech, but it is merely 1, taking up the highest 41.42% in natural speech. Next, declination tends to be prevented in news speech, and the pitch range is much greater in news speech than in natural speech. Finally, a secondary stress syllable is comparatively frequently given a pitch accent in news speech, explicitly distinct from natural speech. These results can be interpreted as stating that news has the particular purpose of providing new information; every content word tends to be given a H* or its related pitch accent like L+H* or !H* because news speech assumes that every word conveys new information. This definitely brings about more IP/ip's per sentence due to a human physiological constraint; that is, more H*'s will cause more respiratory breaks. Also, greater pitch ranges and pitch accents imposed on secondary stress may be attributed to exaggerating new information.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.117-126
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• 2005

This study investigates the prosodic characteristics of Korean through the analysis of a large database. One female and one male speakers each read 650 sentences and they were segmentally and prosodically labeled. Statistical analyses were done on these utterances regarding the tonal pattern and the size of prosodic units, correlation between the size of higher level prosodic units and the number of lower level prosodic units. and the slope and F0 of the falling and rising contours of an accentual phrase. The results showed that the duration and the number of words and syllables of a prosodic unit were significantly different not only between speakers but also between its positions within a higher level prosodic nit. The munber of a prosodic unit showed a high correlation with the duration and the number of syllables of its higher level units. The slope of the falling contour within an accentual phrase was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables. The slope was different depending on the first tone type of an accentual phrase, which could be explained with the F0 rising and the different amount of rising between tones when an accentual phrase starts with an H tone. The slope of the falling contour across an accentual phrase boundary showed a constant and larger value compared to one within an accentual phrase. The rising contours in the beginning and end of an accentual Phrase were similar in their slopes but they differ in the amount of F0 change : the former showed a larger amount of change. The slope of the rising contour which forms an accentual Phrase on its own was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.75-84
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• 2012

HMM-based Text-to-Speech systems generally utilize context dependent tri-phone units from a large corpus speech DB to enhance the synthetic speech. To downsize a large corpus speech DB, acoustically similar tri-phone units are clustered based on the decision tree using context dependent information. Context dependent information includes phoneme sequence as well as prosodic information because the naturalness of synthetic speech highly depends on the prosody such as pause, intonation pattern, and segmental duration. However, if the prosodic information was complicated, many context dependent phonemes would have no examples in the training data, and clustering would provide a smoothed feature which will generate unnatural synthetic speech. In this paper, instead of complicate prosodic information we propose a simple three prosodic boundary types and decision tree questions that use rising tone, falling tone, and monotonic tone to improve naturalness. Experimental results show that our proposed method can improve naturalness of a HMM-based Korean TTS and get high MOS in the perception test.