• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.153-161
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• 2014

The current study reports the results from a cross-modal naming experiment investigating the effects of a prosodic boundary location on the comprehension of ambiguous dative NPs in Korean (Yeongmi-ka Ceonghi-eykey norae-rul pwulecwu-n pwuin-ul ${\cdots}$). The underlined dative NP, Ceonghi-eykey, can temporarily be attached to the embedded rel-marked verb, pwulecwu-n ('sing-rel') or to the matrix verb to appear later. Participants heard sentence fragments manipulated for the location of Intonation Phrase boundary (the biggest prosodic boundary in the model of Seoul Korean) and right after that, had to name visually presented naming targets, which resolve the ambiguity of dative NPs. The prosodic manipulation did not result in difference in naming time, suggesting that the location of a prosodic boundary failed to influence the way Korean listeners interpreted ambiguous dative NPs. Possible reasons for the null effect were discussed.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권2호
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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.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제62호
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• pp.69-84
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• 2007

Japanese is a language having intonations, which are indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the accentual phrases (APs) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI, which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method which can enhance the quality of synthesized speech by reducing the errors in predicting break indices (BI), are proposed. The method is to use a new definition for the phonetic symbols, which combine the phonetic values of Japanese words with the accents information. Since a stream of defined phonetic symbols includes the information on the changes in intonations, the BI can be easily predicted by dividing the intonation phrase (IP) into several APs. As a result of an experiment, the accuracy of break generations was 98 % and the proposed method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• 한국언어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국언어정보학회 2007년도 정기학술대회
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.1-11
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• 2023

경상 방언 내포문 의문사의 작용역 지각 반응 시간과 범주 지각의 양상을 분석하였다. 지각 실험을 위한 자극은 내포문 의문사가 모문 작용역을 갖는 문맥이 주어진 하나의 문장을 40명의 화자가 발화한 것으로, 지각 실험은 24명이 참가하였다. 피험자는 40개의 자극에 대해 모문 작용역(설명 의문문)인지 또는 내포문 작용역(판정 의문문)인지를 선택하게 하는 강제 선택 실험을 3회 진행하고 그 반응 시간을 기록하였다. 모문 작용역 응답 수를 기준으로 자극을 정렬한 후 작용역 응답에 따른 반응 시간을 정렬 순서에 따라 시각화한 결과 모문과 내포문 작용역 응답이 범주적 지각의 결과임이 분명히 나타났으나, 이에 따른 반응 시간의 차이는 크게 나타나지 않았다. 화자에 따른 범주 지각 양상으로 볼 때, 작용역 해석에 영향을 주는 요인은 형태/통사적 제약과 운율 구조적 완결성으로 보이며, 한 요인의 가중치는 다른 요인의 가중치와 반비례 관계에 있는 것으로 해석할 수 있다.

• 한국산학기술학회논문지
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• 제14권8호
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• pp.3992-3998
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• 2013

본 논문은 고음질의 대용량 코퍼스 기반 음성 합성기에 감정 음성 코퍼스를 추가하여 보다 다양한 합성음을 생성할 수 있는 방법에 관한 것이다. 파형 접합형 합성기에서 사용할 수 있는 형태로 감정 음성 코퍼스를 구축하여 기존의 일반 음성 코퍼스와 동일한 합성단위 선택과정을 통해 합성음을 생성할 수 있도록 구현하였다. 감정 음성 합성을 위해 태그를 사용하여 텍스트를 입력하고, 억양구 단위로 일치하는 데이터가 존재하는 경우 감정 음성으로 합성하고, 그렇지 않은 경우 일반 음성으로 합성하도록 하였다. 그리고 음성에서 운율을 구성하는 요소로 휴지기(break)가 있는데, 감정 음성의 휴지기는 일반 음성보다 불규칙한 특성이 있다. 따라서 합성기에서 생성되는 휴지기 정보를 감정 음성 합성에 그대로 사용하는 것이 어려워진다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 가변 휴지기(Variable break)[3] 모델링을 적용하였다. 실험은 일본어 합성기를 사용하였고, 그 결과 일반 음성의 휴지기 예측 모듈을 그대로 사용하면서 자연스러운 감정 합성음을 얻을 수 있었다.