• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.133-138
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to provide deeper understanding of how it is possible for people to understand PC communication language they have never seen or heard before without any problem. In order to answer this question, we focused on the vowel variation through which new variants are created (for PC communication), and hypothesized that there is a phonetic constraint which requires the vowel of the variant to be phonetically similar (to the maximum) to the vowel of the original word. Through the corpus analysis of the dictionary of PC communication language, we show that our hypothesis is justified by the fact that most of the variants we collected from the dictionary, that is, 90% of them, conformed to the phonetic constraint we postulated.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.7-24
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• 2007

This paper discusses some current issues regarding how prosodic structure is manifested in fine-grained phonetic details, how prosodically-conditioned articulatory variation is explained in terms of speech dynamics, and how such phonetic manifestation of prosodic structure may be exploited in spoken word recognition. Prosodic structure is phonetically manifested in prosodically important landmark locations such as prosodic domain-final position, domain-initial position and stressed/accented syllables. It will be discussed how each of the prosodic landmarks engenders particular phonetic patterns, ow articulatory variation in such locations are dynamically accounted for, and how prosodically-driven fine-grained phonetic detail is exploited by listeners in speech comprehension.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2023

The purpose of this study is to determine how the Korean diphthong /jo/ shows phonetic variation in various linguistic environments. The pronunciation of /jo/ is discussed, focusing on the relationship between phonetic variation and the distribution range of vowels. The location in a word (monosyllable, word-initial, word-medial, word-final) and word class (content word, function word) were analyzed using the speech of 10 female speakers of the Seoul Corpus. As a result of determining the frequency of appearance of /jo/ in each environment, the pronunciation type and word class were affected by the location in a word. Frequent phonetic reduction was observed in the function word /jo/ in the acoustic analysis. The word class did not change the average phonetic values of /jo/, but changed the distribution of individual tokens. These results indicate that the linguistic environment affects the phonetic distribution of vowels.

• Language Facts and Perspectives
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• v.44
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• pp.99-124
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• 2018

This study is about the mismatch between the spoken and written language of Chinese language. In the past, many Chinese intellectuals insisted on abolishing Chinese characters, since they are too difficult for common people to learn, write and remember. However, Chinese characters are still kept as the only formal letter in China, and probably, Chinese characters will not be abolished in the future. On the other hand, problematic situations often happen, because Chinese characters are used to transcribe foreign sounds such as phonetic symbols, even though they are ideograms. The most important part of the characters as an ideogram is the meaning, but sometimes the meaning is ignored for the phonetic representation of foreign sounds. Chinese phonetic loans show this situation well. Therefore, this study discusses various types of Chinese phonetic loans, the problems of variations, and the solution to overcome the problems.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.24-30
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• 2001

This article is concerned with automatic segmentation for Korean speech signals. All kinds of transition cases of phonetic units are classified into 3 types and different strategies for each type are applied. The type 1 is the discrimination of silence, voiced-speech and unvoiced-speech. The histogram analysis of each indicators which consists of wavelet coefficients and SVF (Spectral Variation Function) in wavelet coefficients are used for type 1 segmentation. The type 2 is the discrimination of adjacent vowels. The vowel transition cases can be characterized by spectrogram. Given phonetic transcription and transition pattern spectrogram, the speech signal, having consecutive vowels, are automatically segmented by the template matching. The type 3 is the discrimination of vowel and voiced-consonants. The smoothed short-time RMS energy of Wavelet low pass component and SVF in cepstral coefficients are adopted for type 3 segmentation. The experiment is performed for 342 words utterance set. The speech data are gathered from 6 speakers. The result shows the validity of the method.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.87-90
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• 2007

We encounter new cant in these days. The cant is classified as 'variation cant' which is used in the communication language. Therefore, this Study will focus on the aspects and the actual conditions of the cant in communication language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.89-91
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• 1996

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4E
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• pp.28-36
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• 1996

In this paper, we propose a new evaluation methodology which can more clearly show the performance of the allophone modeling algorithm generally used in large vocabulary speech recognition. The proposed evaluation method shows the running characteristics and limitations of the modeling algorithm by testing how the variation of phonetic environments of training data affects the recognition performance and the desirable number of free parameters to be estimated. Using the method, we experiment results, we conclude that, in vocabulary-independent recognition task, the phonetic diversity of training data greatly affects the robustness of model, and it is necessary to develop a proper measure which can determine the number of states compromizing the robustness and the precision of the HMnet better than the conventional modeling efficiency.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.81
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• pp.267-297
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• 2018

Vowel raising in Korean has been primarily treated as a phonological, categorical change. This study aims to show how the Korean connective suffix {-go} is realized in various environments, and propose a principle of vowel raising based on both acoustic and perceptual data. To that end, we used a corpus of spoken Korean to analyze the types of syntactic constructions, the realization of prosodic boundaries (IP and PP), and the types of boundary tone associated with {-go}. It was found that the vowel tends to be raised most frequently in utterance-final position, while in utterance-medial position the vowel was raised more when the syntactic and prosodic distance between {-go} and the following constituent was smaller. The results for boundary tone also showed a correlation between vowel raising and the discourse function of the boundary tone. In conclusion, we propose that vowel raising is not simply an optional phenomenon, but rather a type of phonetic reduction related to the comprehension of the following constituent.