• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.27
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• pp.497-523
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• 2012

Characteristics of the Listening and Pronunciation of Korean Obstruents of Chinese Learners -Based on the Phonetic Experiments Using Kalvin and Praat- This study aims at investigating the characteristics of confrontation in three ways, lax/ fortis/ aspirated consonants, in Korean obstruents through experimental phonetic analysis for the Chinese Korean language learners. On one hand, as a result of comparing Korean and Chinese obstruent systems, there is no big difference regarding the articulatory location. On the other hand, in regards to the articulatory method there is a difference. In a Korean obstruent system, the confrontation presented in three ways by the strength of aspiration. On the contrary, the Chinese obstruent system showed confrontation in two ways by the existence of aspiration. To examine the difficulty of the learners caused by the above-mentioned reason objectively, this paper studied the relationship between input and output of sound through the experimental phonetic analysis such as Kalvin and Praat. To research the input of sound, the listening ability of the learners was examined by 'Choosing Consonant' among the Menu of Kalvin. As a result of that experiment, many errors were shown. They recognized the fortis as lax in the area of affricates and plosives. In the area of fricatives, they recognized affricatives as fricatives. To investigate the output of sound, the section of aspiration and the section of friction of a plosive, an affricate and a fricative in Praat, were expressed numerically. The learners' VOT of lax and affricate represented that lax was pronounced close to the fortis, and the VOT of fricatives was not shown the section of aspiration and friction clearly, and also the result showed that they pronounced a fricative like affricative-aspirated one. The result shows that the learners' pronunciation is related to the listening ability. The consequence is caused by the characteristics of the difference between Korean obstruents and Chinese ones. If the training pronunciation is conducted based on above result, it would be a better methodology in teaching Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.45-53
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• 2019

The purpose of this work was to examine the factors affecting the identities of the voiceless plosives, i.e. English [p, t, k] and Korean [p^h, t^h, k^h], from the spontaneous speech corpora. The factors were automatically extracted by a Praat script and the percent correctness of the discriminant analyses was incrementally assessed by increasing the number of factors used in predicting the identities of the plosives. The factors included the spectral moments and tilts of the plosive release bursts, the post-burst aspirations and the vowel onsets, the durations such as the closure durations and the voice onset times (VOTs), the locations within words and utterances and the identities of the following vowels. The results showed that as the number of factors increased up to five, so did the percent correctness of the analyses, resulting in 74.6% for English and 66.4% for Korean. However, the optimal number of factors for the maximum percent correctness was four, i.e. the spectral moments and tilts of the release bursts and the following vowels, the closure durations and the VOTs. This suggests that the identities of the voiceless plosives are mostly determined by their internal and vowel onset cues.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2022

This study aimed to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of plosives in the VCV syllables by the place of articulation and phonation type spoken by children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) in comparison with children with typical hearing (TH). In all, 15 children with bilateral CIs and 15 children with TH participated in this study, aged between 5 to 10 years. All children produced 9 VCV syllables and their VOT were analyzed by the Praat software. There was no significant difference in mean VOT between children with bilateral CIs and children with TH. However, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the place of articulation, such that the VOT for velars were longer than those for bilabials and alveolars. Additionally, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the phonation type, such that the VOT of aspirated consonants were longer than those of lenis and fortis consonants. The results of this study suggest that children with bilateral CIs can distinguish the acoustic properties of plosive consonants and control the speech timing between the structures of the larynx and the oral cavity at a similar level as children with TH.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.213-221
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• 2006

Phone segmentation of speech waveform is especially important for concatenative text to speech synthesis which uses segmented corpora for the construction of synthetic units. because the quality of synthesized speech depends critically on the accuracy of the segmentation. In the beginning. the phone segmentation was manually performed. but it brings the huge effort and the large time delay. HMM-based approaches adopted from automatic speech recognition are most widely used for automatic segmentation in speech synthesis, providing a consistent and accurate phone labeling scheme. Even the HMM-based approach has been successful, it may locate a phone boundary at a different position than expected. In this paper. we categorized adjacent phoneme pairs and analyzed the mismatches between hand-labeled transcriptions and HMM-based labels. Then we described the dominant error patterns that must be improved for the speech synthesis. For the experiment. hand labeled standard Korean speech DB from ETRI was used as a reference DB. Time difference larger than 20ms between hand-labeled phoneme boundary and auto-aligned boundary is treated as an automatic segmentation error. Our experimental results from female speaker revealed that plosive-vowel, affricate-vowel and vowel-liquid pairs showed high accuracies, 99%, 99.5% and 99% respectively. But stop-nasal, stop-liquid and nasal-liquid pairs showed very low accuracies, 45%, 50% and 55%. And these from male speaker revealed similar tendency.