• 음성과학
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• 제10권4호
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• pp.41-55
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• 2003

This paper investigates the tonal patterns of English information structure composed of topic and focus. It has been argued in previous theories that there is a significant relationship between English topic-focus structure and intonation. The English topic is marked with L+H* pitch accent and focus is marked with H* pitch accent. These theories, however, are oversimplified ones since they do not consider the contextual differences of topic and focus. To examine more concrete tonal patterns of English topic and focus, we classified topic into two subcategories of reminding topic and old-information topic. Focus was categorized into three: information focus, contrastive focus, and reference focus. The overall results show that native English speakers are inclined to use both the L+H* and H* pitch accent for the topic and focus of an utterance. We also observe a tendency to deaccentuate the topics given as old information and to mark the topics given as noun phrase with H* pitch accent. As for the intonation of focus, H* pitch accent is the most frequent type of accent, but L+H* also shows a high percentage of implementation especially in the context of correction or contrast.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.153-166
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• 2005

This paper attempts to examine the accent implementation and perception of noun phrases and compound nouns in English sentences, arguing that primary stress of noun phrase and compound noun is realized in relative prominence in intonation. The production test examines how the stress patterns of the noun phrases and compound nouns are realized in intonation of the English native speakers' utterances. The perception test investigates English and Korean listeners' comprehension of the intonation of the noun phrases and compound nouns. And the results of this experimental study show that speakers and listeners produce and perceive the primary stress as a relatively prominent accent even if in contrast of English listeners, Korean learners have difficulty in using the cue of pitch accent location and figuring out compound nouns and noun phrases.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.69-87
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• 2002

This paper investigates how focus contributes to the phonological and phonetic realization of Japanese intonation. Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988) pointed out that textual prominence results in the H-tone peak raising on the focused item and IP (Intonational Phrase) initiation before the focused item. Similarly Kori (1989) suggested that the F0 peaks on the words after the focused item tend to be suppressed. Although they give a general description of the characteristics of focus phenomena in Japanese intonation, they fail to explain the F0 peak interaction between H phrasal tone and lexically specified pitch accent in more-than-3-mora words whose accent locations varies from early to late. In this paper, we perform the experiment to investigate the following three points. First, we would like to look at the systematic intonational differences between focused and neutral APs; specifically, focused APs, either accented or unaccented, are compared with the neutral counterparts in terms of F0 pattern. Second, we investigate F0 patterns of a focused AP with more than 3 morae, as the accent of the word varies from early to late. Since an AP with a late accent has a H- on the second mora as well as H*+L on its accent mora, it is expected that these peaks will show systematic F0 pattern when it is focused. Our third concern is F0 patterns of a post focus AP with more than 3 morae, that is, whether a post-focus word is dephrased or just downstepped as the word accent location varies from early to late. This paper is significant in that it tries to clarify the F0 peak interaction between H-and lexical pitch accent H*+L in a variety of focus contexts in Japanese intonation.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2003년도 5월 학술대회지
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

Intonation as suprasegmental phonetic features conveys meanings on the postlexical or utterance level in a linguistically structured way. It includes three aspects: tunes, relative prominence, and intonational phrasing. In this article, I will treat how prosodic phrasing is functionally related to the listening comprehension of English by analysing the students' errors of listening comprehension. When utterance meaning is conveyed, it is realized to be divided into intonational phrases. The small intonational phrase is regarded as an intermediate phrase which has a primary accent and a phrase tone or audible break. Most students' errors of listening occurred with linking pronunciation in the intermediate phrases of the fast speech. Thus through the smallest unit with tune we can help students improve their pronunciation and listening ability of English.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.319-338
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• 2003

The aim of this paper is to examine the sentence final tonal patterns of English wh-questions through phonetic experiments, based on Intonational Phonology, and to explain the meaning of the final phrase tones of English wh-questions. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) suggested that it is pitch accents rather than boundary tones which play a crucial role in the meaning of a sentence, and that most of the general questions have H-H% tonal patterns in the sentence final. However, they could not explain why wh-questions had final falling tonal patterns (L-L%). While Bartels (1999) suggested that L phrase tone has the meaning of 'ASSERTION' and it could be applied to the explanation of the meaning of wh-questions' final tonal patterns. However, her suggestions are only theoretical explanation without any experimental support. In this paper, based on Bartels (1999), the data was classified into the following three classes: 1) echo wh-questions, 2) reference questions, and 3) common wh-questions. Using this data, a production test by three English native speakers was conducted. The results show that reference questions and common wh-questions have L phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate, and echo wh-questions have H phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국음향학회 1994년도 FIFTH WESTERN PACIFIC REGIONAL ACOUSTICS CONFERENCE SEOUL KOREA
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• pp.949-956
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• 1994

In this paper, we introduce a new speech synthesis method for Japanese and Korean arbitrary sentences using the natural speech data-base. Also, application of this method to a CAI system is discussed. In our synthesis method, a basic sentence and basic accent-phrases are selected from the data-base against a target sentence. Factors for those selections are phrase dependency structure (separation degree), number of morae, type of accent and phonemic labels. The target pitch pattern and phonemic parameter series are generated using those selected basic units. As the pitch pattern is generated using patterns which are directly extracted form real speech, it is expected to be more natural than any other pattern which is estimated by any model. Until now, we have examined this method on Japanese sentence speech and affirmed that the synthetic sound preserves human-like features fairly well. Now we extend this method to Korean sentence speech synthesis. Further more, we are trying to apply this synthesis unit to a CAI system.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.187-202
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• 2000

The negative sentence may have an ambiguity depending on which constituent of the sentence is negated. In case of sentence final adverbials, whether they are included in the scope of negation generates the semantic ambiguity. Since sentences with ambiguous meanings have the same word order, the differences of the meanings in different contexts should be manifested with intonational cues. This article represents how intonation contributes to the disambiguation in negative sentences with ambiguity and which phonological/phonetic cues are specifically used in the course of the disambiguation.

• 음성과학
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• 제6권
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• pp.119-143
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• 1999

In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

• 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.