• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.117-131
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• 2003

The feature tenseness has long been a controversial issue. Many scholars have hardly accepted tenseness as a distinctive feature, due to the absence of its consistent and objective phonetic evidence especially in English. Instead, they claim that voicing is the primary feature and even say that no other feature can-be independent of voicing. However, voicing feature does not explain everything and significant aerodynamic and physiological correlates of the feature tenseness have been reported in English as well as in some other languages that have the tense/lax distinction in their obstruents. It is suggested that voicing is a simple and direct feature while tenseness is a complex and indirect feature and its autonomy as a distinctive feature should be acknowledged. This will enable us to describe the phonetic reality more properly across languages as well as in individual languages.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.53-68
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• 2000

Although Korean stops and affricates show a three-way contrast of phonemes into lax, tense and aspirated, Korean fricatives have only two types, so-called 'lax' and tense. Considering that all the other obstruents maintain a three-way distinction but fricatives, it might be interesting to investigate whether the lax fricatives are really 'lax' in their phonetic and phonological realizations, as assumed. From an acoustic analysis, I found that Korean lax fricatives had a heavy aspiration along with a high pitch for the following vowel, being more comparable to the aspirated category. By contrast, their durational properties were found to be short, or lax-like. In other words, Korean lax fricatives are phonetically neither lax nor aspirated, but both. This dual nature of the lax fricatives takes a better account of the fact that why lax fricatives are subject to tensification, but not aspiration phonologically. Is that simply because there is no aspirated fricative in Korean? I suggest that Korean lax fricatives undergo tensification because of their being short in duration, and that they are not subject to the aspiration rule because they are indeed aspirated sounds.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.65-92
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• 1993

Not all linguistic units are of equal importance in the functioning of language. The present study aims to examine He functional load of phonemes in standard Korean, To achieve this goal, B analysed continuous texts selected from the textbooks of elementary school on a personal computer. The total number of syllables studied in this thesis is 101,637. The characteristics of the Korean syllable structures are as follows. 1) In a syllable head, /n/ occurs most frequently. 2) The frequencies of syllables with an onset are much higher than those with no onset ( 85% : 15% ), 3) In a syllable head, obstruents are preferred because their consonantal strength are great, (57%) 4) In a syllable nucleus, /a/ occurs most frequently. 5) The rate of occurrence of the monophthongs is 90.2%, and that of the diphthongs is 9.8%. Especially the three basic vowels(/i,a,u/) occur at the rate of 46.6%. 6) In a syllable coda, /n/ occurs most frequently. 7) The open syllables are favored (open syllable 68.7%, closed syllable 31.3%).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.223-232
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• 2004

This study investigated and compared the acoustic characteristics of the Korean stop sound [k'] in three different phonological environments: the tensified lenis stop [k'] as observed in /prek+kaci/, the fortis stop /k'/ as in /pre+k'aci/, and the fortis stop /k'/ following an obstruent as in /prek+k'aci/. The specific research question was whether or not the tensified lenis stop shares all the acoustic features with the other two kinds of fortis stops. The acoustic measures adopted in this study were H1*-H2*, VOT, length of stop closure, and $F_0$. The major findings were that the three stops showed no significant difference in all the acoustic measures except the length of stop closure. The fortis stop /k'/ following an obstruent showed significantly longer duration of stop closure than the other two stops, both of which showed no significant difference. Based on these phonetic results, this study argued that, for the proper phonological description of post-obstruent tensification, the phonological feature [slack vocal folds] of a lenis stop should be changed into [stiff vocal folds, constricted glottis] that the fortis stops should have.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.27-39
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• 2003

This study attempts to verify the reliability of automatically generated segment labels as compared to those obtained by conventional labelling by hand. First of all, an autolabeller is constructed using the standard HMM speech recognition technique. For evaluation, we compare the automatically generated labels with manually annotated labels for the same speech data. The comparison is performed by calculating the temporal difference between an autolabel boundary and its corresponding hand label boundary. When the mismatched duration between two labels falls within 10 msec, we consider the autolabel as correct. The results suggest that overall 78% of autolabels are correctly obtained. It is found that the boundary of obstruents is better aligned than that of sonorants and vowels. In case of stop sound classes, strong stops in manner-of-articulation wise and velar stops in place-of-articulation wise show better performance in boundary alignment. The result suggests that more phone-specific consideration is necessary to improve autosegmentation performance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.105-116
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• 2004

The fundamental frequency of a vowel is known to be affected by the identity of the preceding consonant. The general agreement is that strong consonants trigger higher F0 than weak consonants. However, there has been a disagreement on the shape of this segmentally affected F0 contours. Some studies report that shapes of contours are differentiated based on the consonant type, but others regard this observation as misleading. This research attempts to resolve this controversy by investigating shapes and slopes of F0 contours of Korean word level speech data produced by four male speakers. Instead of entirely relying on traditional human intuition and judgment, I employed an automatic F0 contour analysis technique known as tilt parameterisation (Taylor 2000). After necessary manipulation of an F0 contour of each data token, various parameters are collapsed into a single tilt value which directly indicates the shape of the contour. The result, in terms of statistical inference, shows that it is not viable to conclude that the type of consonant is significantly related to the shape of F0 contour. A supplementary measurement is also made to see if the slope of each contour bears meaningful information. Unlike shapes themselves, slopes are suspected to be practically more practical for consonantal differentiation, although confirmation is required through further refined experiments.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.205-208
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• 2004

The aim of this study is to analyse the adjustment of the proportion of segment duration in imitating voice. When imitating others' voices, how far is his/her original proportion of segment duration adjusted, and what is this adjustment like under various segments? In this study, I classified segments into consonants and vowels and consonants classified into obstruents and sonorants. The result of the analysis is as follows. ; (1)Individual variation in the proportion of obstruent is not significant, and when imitating, and its distribution is not typicalized. (2) Vowels has individual variation in the proportion of segment duration even under imitating. (3) Nasal has the most distinct individual variation even under imitating, compared with vowel and obstruent. For the further study, I should examine the characteristics of quantitative and qualitative changes in liquid (among sonorant) to find out which segment can best describe personnel characteristics of the proportion of segment duration in imitating voice.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.17-26
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• 2014

The present study examined epenthetic vowels produced by Korean learners of English in read sentences, in terms of acoustic measures and extra-phonological factors. The results demonstrated three main findings. First, epenthetic vowels had relatively high F1 values and a wide range of F2 values. Most of the epenthetic vowels were inserted near Korean high central vowels, but some vowels were inserted near front vowels due to co-articulation with surrounding vowels. Second, vowel epenthesis was affected by the context. The results showed that the epenthesis was frequently seen with word junctions between obstruents (e.g., stops-fricatives). Third, Korean learners were not affected by English background and were very weakly affected by orthography. English experience, which is one of the extra-phonological factors, was not related to epenthesis production. However, orthography, the other extra-phonological factor, very weakly affected the amount of epenthesis production. Nine percent of all epenthesis production was affected by the English past-tense suffix '-ed'; approximately 70% of the participants were affected by this suffix. The findings of the present study contributed to understanding vowel epenthesis. First, the study revealed that the epenthetic vowels produced by Korean learners of English were close to the high central vowel, supporting previous studies that the epenthetic vowel is quite close to the shortest vowel. Second, the study examined the various phonetic environments of epenthetic vowels, revealing that vowel epenthesis occurred more frequently in a certain phonetic circumstance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.9-17
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• 2017

The aim of this study is to examine whether Chinese Korean learners (CKL) can correctly produce the aspiration in 'a lenis obstruents /k/, /t/, /p/, /ʧ/+/h/ sound' sequence at the lexical and post-lexical level. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers (KNS), 10 advanced and 10 intermediate CKL participated in a production test. The material analyzed consisted of 10 Korean sentences in which aspiration can be applied at different prosodic boundaries (syllable, word, accentual phrase). The results showed that for KNS and CKL, the rate of application of aspiration was different according to prosodic boundaries. Aspiration was more frequently applied at the lexical level than at the post-lexical level and it was more frequent at the word boundary than at the accentual phrase boundary. For CKL, pronunciation errors were either non-application of aspiration or coda obstruent omission. In the case of non-application of aspiration, CKL produced the target syllable as an underling form and they did not transform it as a surface form. In the case of coda obstruent ommision, most of the errors were caused by the inherent complexity of phonological process.