• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.147-166
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to explain stress shift and its following segmental variations when some suffixes are added to the bases. In the past those were analyzed in stress or vowel laxing phenomenon separately, but rather those should be analyzed in one framework compositively. Therefore in this paper I will introduce a new theory, which is known as Harmonic theory, and confirm that it can solve the problems related with stress and vowel laxing simultaneously. The first thing, as a prosodic approach I am going to analyze vowel laxing according to Liberman & Prince (1977), Burzio (1993), and then next to go to the Harmonic theory approach. Within the theory I will analyze the phonological phenomena harmoniously through the important three levels, M-level, W-level, P-level. Therefore this paper is to show that from the comparison between the prosodic analysis and the Harmonic analysis, what is more natural and harmonious analysis is based on the Harmonic approach.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.71-73
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• 2007

The Purpose of the study is to give Korean-English leaners better knowledge on vowel sounds in their learning English. The traditional description of the cardinal vowel system developed by Daniel Johns in 1917 is not enough to provide English learners with clear ideas in producing native like vowel sounds. For the reason, three Korean-native subjects, one male, one female and one child are chosen to produce 7 cardinal vowels and compare them with native English and American speaker's vowel sounds. The difference of produced vowels sounds is quantified and visualized by employing Sona-match program. The results have been fairly remarkable. Firstly, Korean-English learner's vowel sounds are articulated differently from their intention of vowel production. Secondly, the tongue positions of Koreans are placed slightly more down and forward to the lips than those of English and Americans. However, the front vowel /i/ sound is quite close to English and Americans. Lastly the mid-vowel /${\partial}$/ sound is not produced in any articulations of Korean-native speakers. It is thought that the mid vowel, /${\partial}$/ is a type of a weak sound regarded as 'schwa' which needs a great deal of exposure to the language to acquire a physical skill of articulation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 1988

In this study, the recognition experiments for Korean vowel are performed using peripheral auditory model. In addition, for the purpose of objective comparison, the recognition experiments are performed by extracting LPC cepstrum coefficients for the same speech data. The results are as follows. 1) The time and the frequency responses of the auditory model show that important features of input signal are involved in the responses of inner ear and auditory nerve. 2) The recognition results for Korean vowel show that the recognition rate by auditory model output is higher than the recognition rate by LPC cepstrum coefficients. 3) The adaptation phenomenon of auditory nerve provides useful characteristics for the discrimination of vowel signal.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.67-77
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to investigate how deaf parents influence the speech sounds of their normal-hearing children. Twenty four normal hearing children of deaf adults (CODA) and normal hearing parents (NORMAL) aged 3 to 4 participated in the study. The F1, F2, and the vowel triangle area in 7 vowels and the voice onset times (VOTs) and closure durations in 9 stops were measured. The results of the study are as follows. First, the F1 and F2 for all vowels were higher and the vowel triangle area was larger in CODA than in NORMAL although they were not statistically significant. Second, VOTs in $C_{stop}V$ for $/t^*/$ and in $VC_{stop}V$ for $/t^*/$, $/t^h/$, and $/k^h/$ were longer in CODA than in NORMAL. Most stops in CODA appeared to be longer VOTs for most phonemes. Third, the manner and place of articulation in stops did not make a difference between CODA and NORMAL in VOTs and closed durations. CODA does not demonstrate the speech characteristics of deaf people, however, they seem to speak differently than NORMAL, which means CODA might be influenced by a different linguistic environment created by deaf parents in some way.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.165-173
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• 2002

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress-timed language. But the language investigated in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English in the backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidence in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion-Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effects are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean are discussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.529-533
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• 1996

There are some similar phonological properties shared by different languages. The phenomenon of vowel length is just one of them which shows distinctive futures. In some languages long vowels serve to differentiate meanings. In that case the phonological context it creates is important and so it has to be incorporated into the phonemic inventory of the language, otherwise there will be misunderstanding. In this paper I will try to explain the Turkish vowel system as well as the Korean, and then to show how long vowels take their forms in Turkish and Korean.

• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.75-101
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• 2005

This study investigated the articulatory and acoustic correlates of Korean /1/. In particular, direct comparison between Korean /1/ and English /1/ was made to evaluate the current assumption about Korean /1/ such that Korean /1/ is phonetically similar to English clear /1/. The present study revealed that Korea /1/ is different from English /1/ in several properties. First, F2 for Korean /1/ is around 600-700 Hz higher than F2 for English /1/. The overall higher F2 for Korean /1/ is attributed to the fact that Korean /1/ involves tongue body raising while it lacks a dorsal gesture. Second, F3 value for Korean /1/ becomes significantly lower when the preceeding vowel is a back vowel. This kind of variable F3 pattern was not observed in English /1/. The current study relates the F3 lowering to the retroflexion of Korean /1/ in the back vowel context.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.27-37
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• 1991

A recognition algorithm for Hangul is developed by structural analysis to Hangul in this theses. Four major procedures are proposed : preprocessing, type classification, separation of consonant and vowel, recognition. In the preprocessing procedure, the thinning algorithm proposed by CHEN & HSU is applied. In the type classification procedure, thinned Hangul image is classified into one of six formal types. In the separation of consonant and vowel procedure, starting from branch-points which are existed in a vowel, character elements are separated by means of tracing branch-point pixel by pixel and comparison with proposed templates. In the same time, the vowels are recognized. In the recognition procedure, consonants are extracted from the separated Hangul character and recognized by modified Crossing method. Recognized characters are converted into KS-5601-1989 codes. The experiments show that correct recognition rate is about 80%-90% and recognition speed is about 2-3 character persecond in three types of different input data on computer with 80386 microprocessor.