• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.23-36
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• 2004

Many languages show reverse durational variation between preceding vowel and following voiced/voiceless (lax/tense) consonants. This study investigated the likely effects of phoneme type (tense vs. lax) on the timing structure (duration of syllable, word, phrase and sentence) of Korean. Three rates of speech (fast, normal, slow) applied to stimuli with the target word /a-Ca/ where /C/ is one of /p, p', $p^h$/. The type (tense/lax) of /C/ caused marked inverse durational variations in the two syllables /a/ and /Ca/ and highly different durational ratios between them. Words with /p', $p^h$/ were significantly longer than that with /p/, which contrasts with many other languages where such pairs of words have a similar duration. The differentials between words remained up to the phrase and sentence level, but in general the higher linguistic units did not statistically differ within each level. Thus, the phrase is suggested as a compensatory unit of phoneme type effects in Korean. Different rates did not affect the general tendency. Distribution of time variations (from normal to fast and slow) to each syllable (/a/ and /Ca/) was also observed.

• MALSORI
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• no.21_24
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• pp.144-175
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• 1992

This paper aims to discuss determining factors of Korean allophones and to formulate and classify Korean allophonic rules systematically. The relationship between allophones and coarticulation, the most. influential factor of allophonic variation, is thoroughly investigated. Other factors -- speech tempo and style, dialect, and social factors such as age, set, class etc. -- are also briefly discussed. Allophonic rules are classified into two groups -- 3) those relevant to coarticulation and 2) those irrelevant to coarticulation. Rules of the first group are further classified into four subgroups according to the directionality of the coarticulation. Each allophonic nile formulation is explained and discussed in detai1. The allophonic rules formulated and classified in this paper are 1) Devoicing of Voiced Consonants, 2) Devoicing of Vowels, 3) Nasal Approach and Lateral Approach, 4) Uvularization, 5) Palatalization, 6) Voicing of Voiceless Lax Consonants, 7) Frication, 8) Labialization, 9) Nasalization, 10) Release Withholding and Release Masking, 11) Glottalization, 12) Flap Rule, 13) Vowel Weakening, and 14) Allophones of /ㅚ, ㅟ, ㅢ/ (which are realized as diphthongs or as monophthongs depending on phonetic contexts).

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.247-251
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• 1996

This paper is intended as a preliminary study on phonetic and phonological differences between Polish and Korean languages. In this paper an attempt is made to examine the most conspicious difficulties encountered by Polish learners who begin to speak Korean (and in doing so, 1 would hope that it might be of help to future learners of both languages). Since the phoneme inventory and general phonetic rules for both languages are very different, teaching and learning accurate pronunciation is extremely difficult for both the Poles and Koreans without any previous phonetic training. In the case of Polish and Korean we can see how strong and persistent the influences of the mother-tongue are on the target language. As an example I would like to discuss the basic differences between Polish and Korean consonants. The most important consonantal opposition in Polish is voice-/voicelessness (f. ex.; 〔b〕 / 〔p〕, 〔g〕 / 〔k〕) while in Korean, opposition such as voice-/voicelessness is of secondary importance. Therefore Korean speakers do not perceive the difference between Polish voiced and voiceless consonants. On the other hand, Polish speakers can not distinguish Korean lenis / fortis / aspirated consonants (f. ex.; ㅂ 〔b〕 / ㅃ 〔p〕 / ㅍ〔ph〕, ㄱ 〔g〕 / ㄲ 〔k〕 / ㅋ 〔kh〕)) opposition. The other very important factor is palatalization which is of vital importance in Polish and, because of this, Polish speakers are extremely sensitive to it. In Korean palatalization is not important phonetically and Korean speakers do not distinguish between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants. The transcription used here is based on ' The principles of the International Phonetic Association and the Korean Phonetic Alphabet ' (1981) by Hyun Bok Lee.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.186-191
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The overall result showed that the proportion of perception accuracy of the target consonants was rather low, amounting to only 55%. There was also a positional effect since the accuracy rates for perceiving the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate of the target consonant identification was higher in intervocalic position before stress (70%) and initial onset position (67%) than in intervocalic position after stress (45%) and final coda position (36%). Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except intervocalic position after stress. The perception patterns were accounted for by the markedness and perceptual factors in conjunction with stress location.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.37-44
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• 2023

This study investigates perceptual confusions of English fricatives among 121 Korean elementary school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with shorter periods of learning English. The objective is to examine how they perceive English fricative consonants and to provide educational guidelines. Two sets of English fricative identification tasks-voiceless fricatives and voiced fricatives-were administered to participants in a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) setting. Their phonemic awareness of the fricatives was visualized in perceptual confusion maps via multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings are explored in terms of the impacts of Korean EFL learners' L1 linguistic aspects and a comparison with L1 learners. Learners' phonemic awareness patterns are then compared with their relative importance in speech intelligibility based on a functional load hierarchy. The results indicated that Korean elementary EFL learners recognized English fricatives in a manner largely akin to L1 learners, suggesting their ongoing acquisition progress. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the young EFL learners possess sufficient phonemic awareness for most high functional load segments but encounter some difficulties with one high and one low functional pair. The findings of this study offer suggestions for diagnosing language learners' phonemic awareness abilities, thereby aiding in the development of practical guidelines for language instructional design and helping educators make informed decisions regarding teaching priority in L2 classes.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.631-638
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• 2015

Today, the demand for speech recognition systems in mobile environments is increasing rapidly. This paper proposes a novel method for Korean phoneme segmentation that is applicable to a phoneme based Korean speech recognition system. First, the input signal constitutes blocks of the same size. The proposed method is based on a volatility indicator calculated for each block of the input speech signal, and the bulk indicators calculated for each bulk in blocks, where a bulk is a set of adjacent samples that have the same sign as that of the primitive indicators for phoneme segmentation. The input signal vowels, voiced consonants, and voiceless consonants are sequentially recognized and the boundaries among phonemes are found using three devoted recognition algorithms that combine the two types of primitive indicators. The experimental results show that the proposed method can markedly reduce the error rate of the existing phoneme segmentation method.