• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.514-514
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• 1996

Igbo, a new Benue Congo language has a vowel harmony system which, like that of Akan, is based on the pharynx size or tongue root position. In this study we examine Igbo vowel harmony with particular reference to assimilatory patterns of vowels in different harmony sets. This is to gain some insight into the factors involved in Igbo vowel assimilation, and to establish to what extent reports on Akan vowel assimilation are validated in Igbo. Tokens of the eight phonemic vowels of Standard Igbo are recorded from three native speakers of Igbo. The vowels are acoustically investigated (using the LPC analysis of CSL) in individual lexical items and within carefully designed carrier phrases. The F1 and F2 values of the vowels are obtained as these formant values are generally useful in establishing the salient characteristics of vowels. Vowels from the harmony sets are juxtaposed in the carrier phrases to ascertain the extent of assimilation. Results of the investigation show that the F1 values, to a large extend, are enough to characterize these vowels. The (-Expanded) vowels have higher F1 values than their (+Expanded) counterpart. Where there is an overlap in F1 values for some vowels the F1 bandwidth values serve to distinguish between the vowels. The overlap often reported in Akan for /I/ and /e/ on the one hand and /${\mho}$/ and /o/ on the other is not validated in Igbo. While the F1 values for these pairs of vowels are quite similar for one of our speakers, there is an appreciable difference between the F1 values of these vowels for the other two speakers. There is however an overlap for /e/ and /o/ for one of the speakers. Assimilations are generally regressive across word boundaries. It is, however, necessary to point out that the general perceptual impression that one of the vowels completely assimilates to the other, is not borne out by our investigation. Most of our F1 and F2 values for the vowels in individual lexical items are altered in assimilations. This then suggests that assimilation involving these vowels is partial rather than complete. The emerging 'allophones' are acoustically similar to the (+Expanded) vowel involved in the assimilation, that is when vowels from different harmony sets are involved. We conclude that while assimilation of Igbo vowels involves some phonological considerations, phonetic factors appear to be permanent in deciding the final form of the vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.39-46
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• 2009

This study compares the perception of English high tense and lax vowels (/i, I, u, $\mho$/) by English speakers and Korean speakers of English. The four vowels were produced in /hVd/ context by a native speaker of English, and each word's vowel duration was manipulated to range from 170ms to 290ms in 30ms increments. Two English speakers and six Korean speakers of English were asked to listen to pairs of tense and lax vowel words with manipulated vowel durations and to identify the pair by choosing either heed-hid or hid-heed for front vowels and either who'd-hood or hood-who'd for back vowels. The results show that English speakers distinguished tense vowels from lax vowels with 100% accuracy regardless of the different durations, compared to 62% accuracy for Korean speakers of English. Most errors occurred for lengthened lax vowels and shortened tense vowels. The results of this study demonstrate that Korean speakers mainly rely on vowel duration as a cue to discriminate the tense and lax vowels. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this finding are discussed.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.57-69
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• 1997

In this paper, 1 will try to examine the aspects of formants, based on the LPC analysis. In this analysis, five Japanese vowels (a, i, u, e, o) will experience two kinds of experiments: vowels in isolated forms, and vowels in carrier sentences. The analysis results of Japanese vowels of the Japanese natives show a peculiar feature that Japanese vowels form respective vowel groups. Each Japanese vowel makes a statistically significant difference. In the Fl analysis of the vowels grouped by the informant's sex, Japanese vowel (a) shows the greatest standard deviation without regard to the informant's sex. In the F2 analysis of Japanese vowels, each vowel has a statistically significant difference. The fact that the male's [u] shows great standard deviation means that there is a great difference of the frontness of the tongue among the Japanese males in articulating [u]. Isolated vowels and carried vowels show statistically little significance between Fl and F2 frequency values. In another contrastive analysis between the isolated vowel group and the carried vowel group, whether a vowel is articulated in isolation or in a sentence appears to have little effect on its formant frequency.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.41-55
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• 1999

This paper aims to acoustically analyze the merger of back vowels in North Korean dialects which I believe, are here investigated for the first time since 1945. North Korean back vowels are distinctive from South Korean back vowels because they merge mainly on the back vowel space, while front vowels merge mainly in Seoul standard language and other South Korean dialects. In this paper the future of the vowel systems caused by the merger of the vowels in Korean dialects will also be investigated. North Korean dialects examined include dialects of the Pyungan, the Hamkyung, and the Hwanghae Provinces. North Korean back vowels are distinctive from South Korean back vowels because they merge mainly on the back vowel space, while front vowels merge mainly in Seoul standard language and other South Korean dialects.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.67-82
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• 2006

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate formant characteristics of Korean monophthongs spoken by Japanese learners and to compare the characteristics of vowels produced by the Japanese learners with those of the Korean native speakers. The data consisted of three categories: eight vowels in isolation, words including eight vowels in carrier sentences, and words including eight vowels in natural sentences. In this study, formant frequencies of the vowels were measured by Wave Surfer. It was assumed that the formant frequencies of the Korean vowels produced by the Japanese learners could be different from those of the Korean native speakers due to the influence of their own Japanese vowels. Results of this study showed that the Japanese learners had the difficulties to distinguish between the pairs /-/and /ㅜ/, /ㅓ/and /ㅗ/, and /ㅏ/and /ㅔ/. In Japanese vowels, F2 frequency value of /ㅜ/ was similar to that of the Korean /-/. It means that when the Japanese leaners produced Korean /ㅜ/, they might neutralize /-/ and /ㅜ/. Besides, there were not /ㅓ/and /ㅐ/ in Japanese vowels. Therefore, they tended to pronounce /ㅓ/ similar to /ㅗ/ which has the most similar formant frequency value with that of /ㅓ/, and /ㅐ/ was pronounced similar to /ㅔ/ for the same reason.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigates how the phonological and phonetic information of vowels influences prosodic prominence among linguistically untrained listeners using public speech in American English. We first examined the speech material's phonetic realization of vowels (i.e., maximum F0, F0 range, phone rate [as a measure of duration considering the speech rate of the utterance], and mean intensity). Results showed that the high vowels /i/ and /u/ likely had the highest max F0, while the low vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/ tended to have the highest mean intensity. Both high and low vowels had similarly high phone rates. Next, we examined the effects of the vowels' phonological and phonetic information on listeners' perceptions of prosodic prominence. The results showed that vowels significantly affected the likelihood of perceived prominence independent of acoustic cues. The high and low vowels affected probability of perceived prominence less than the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ʌ/, although the former two were more likely to be phonetically enhanced in the speech than the latter. Overall, these results suggest that perceptions of prosodic prominence in English are not directly influenced by signal-driven factors (i.e., vowels' acoustic information) but are mediated by expectation-driven factors (e.g., vowels' phonological information).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.53-58
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to compare the first two vowel formants of the stressed and unstressed English vowels produced by ten young males (in their twenties and thirties) and ten old males (in their forties or fifties) from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. The results indicate that the stressed and unstressed vowels, /i/ and $/{\ae}/$ in particular, from the two groups are different in their formant frequencies. In addition, the vowel space of the unstressed vowels is somewhat smaller than that of the stressed vowels. Specifically, the range of the second formant of the unstressed vowels and that of the first formant of the unstressed front vowels were compressed. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation training for the Korean learners of English vowels. We propose that teachers of English pay attention to the stress patterns of English vowels as well as their formant frequencies.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.55-58
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper was to analyze the effects of nasalization on vowels. Ten males and 7 females produced 5 vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) in conditions: normal and nasalized. In this study we compared normal vowels' formant with nasalized vowels' and examined nasal-formant in the nasalized vowels. The results was as follows: First, there was a significant difference between normal vowels and nasalized in terms of F1 and F2. Second, the nasal formants were observed in nasalized vowels more frequently in females than males. Third, N1 appeared to influence F1 of vowels whereas N2 seemed to have an impact on F2 and/or F3.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.67-74
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to explore the cross-linguistic difference in the spectral movement pattern of American English and Korean vowels. Eight American vowels /a/, /e/, /$\varepsilon$/, /i/, /I/, /o/, /u/, and /$\mho$/, and five Korean vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ in a fricative-vowel environment produced by adult speakers of each language were analyzed. The spectral movement patterns of the first two formant frequency values were measured and analyzed. The results showed that Korean vowels had minimal spectral movement, both in F1 and F2 values, as compared to American English vowels. Moreover, no consistent direction of movement was found in the three corner Korean vowels, while American English vowels showed consistent direction of movement for each vowel of the same phonemic category.