• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.159-175
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• 2004

This paper investigated the types of errors on English pronunciation and intelligibility of Korean EFL students, and the relationship between the pronunciation accuracy and intelligibility. Thirty one students were evaluated by six English native speakers in terms of overall intelligibility and accuracy In five areas such as nuclear stress, word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels. According to the findings of the study, pronunciation errors were made by the subjects more frequently In word stress than any other area of pronunciation accuracy. The Pearson correlation analysis showed that intelligibility was related with word stress, syllable structure, consonants and vowels, and the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that, among the above five areas of pronunciation accuracy, word stress best accounted for the intelligibility of a given sentence. In the conclusion, the importance of teaching pronunciation of in those five areas with a special focus on word stress was emphasized m terms of intelligibility.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.303-318
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• 2003

This paper attempts to investigate the tonal implementations of English stress clash, arguing that a preceding stress shifts leftward when two lexical stresses conflict across word boundaries or that H* and L* pitch accents are alternatively manifested on the stressed syllables, establishing intonational peak and valley contours. We claim that the H*/L* alternation might be a tonal strategy to avoid stress clash, and that pitch could be solely manipulated to display a rhythmic effect with maintaining lexical stress. In the experiment, we examined two-word combinations whose boundaries involve stress clash, and divided them into two categories. One has the preceding words involving a heavy syllable ahead of stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress and the other, a light syllable, in which case stress shift is completely prevented. We analyzed the distribution of pitch accents in the word combinations, focusing on the pitch configurations in the cases where stress should not be shifted. Results show that approximately 50% of the stimuli show stress shift in the heavy syllable combinations of the preceding words; the preceding stress is moved leftward within the word. The other 50% and the light syllable combinations show various pitch accents patterns; H* and L* alternation, deaccentuation of either stressed syllable, or L-insertion between two H* pitch accents, etc. We interpret this as a rhythmic effect of tone to avoid stress clash and suggest that a true stress clash would be confined into cases without H*/L* contours.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.57-69
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• 2001

Syntactic ambiguity can be understood by context usually, especially in reading and writing. Because phonological structure including stress, intonation and phonological phenomena can be pronounced differently according to different syntactic structures, syntactic ambiguity can be solved by phonological structure in listening and speaking. The objectives of this study was to survey how Korean English teachers apply phonological structures in order to solve syntactic ambiguity. The results of this study is as follows: First, Korean English leachers applied Compound Stress Rules well, when the second word was not branched. But they did not apply Compound Stress Rules well, when the second word was branched. Second, several Korean English teachers did not apply Nuclear Stress Rules well. They usually put the strongest stress on the first word. Third Korean English teachers did not differentiate appropriate applying situation of palatalization. They applied palatalization at both the single and the separated Phonological Phrase. Fourth, Korean English teachers did not apply stress shifting when stress crash happened. Because they did not apply stress shifting, they put the strongest stress on inappropriate syllable.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2006

This study examines the phonetic realizations of English word stress to identify the influence of experiment method on experiment results. Stimuli uttered by native and Korean ESL beginners in authentic conversations are extracted to be shuffled according to their positions in utterances and information structure. Results indicate that the acoustic characteristics of English word stress are realized depending on its position in utterances. The native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity at sentence-final positions unlike the previous experiments and the traditional definition that stressed syllables are uttered in longer duration with higher pitch and stronger intensity; at sentence-medial positions, the native speakers correlate the stressed syllables in longer duration with higher pitch and no regularity in intensity or in shorter duration with lower pitch and intensity depending on their conversational intention. Korean ESL beginners correlate the stressed syllables in shorter duration regardless of positions in sentences with no regularity in pitch and intensity. This study, thus, shows that a different experiment method may result in different results on the phonetic realizations of English word stress.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1-11
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• 2021

The purpose of this study was to analyze the trends and characteristics of 'stress urinary incontinence' research through word frequency analysis, and their relationships were modeled using word embedding. Abstract data of 9,868 papers containing abstracts in PubMed's MEDLINE were extracted using a Python program. Then, through frequency analysis, 10 keywords were selected according to the high frequency. The similarity of words related to keywords was analyzed by Word2Vec machine learning algorithm. The locations and distances of words were visualized using the t-SNE technique, and the groups were classified and analyzed. The number of studies related to stress urinary incontinence has increased rapidly since the 1980s. The keywords used most frequently in the abstract of the paper were 'woman', 'urethra', and 'surgery'. Through Word2Vec modeling, words such as 'female', 'urge', and 'symptom' were among the words that showed the highest relevance to the keywords in the study on stress urinary incontinence. In addition, through the t-SNE technique, keywords and related words could be classified into three groups focusing on symptoms, anatomical characteristics, and surgical interventions of stress urinary incontinence. This study is the first to examine trends in stress urinary incontinence-related studies using the keyword frequency analysis and word embedding of the abstract. The results of this study can be used as a basis for future researchers to select the subject and direction of the research field related to stress urinary incontinence.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.173-184
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• 2002

The question of Korean rhythmic type is still a controversial issue (syllable-timed; stress-timed; word-timed). As a step toward solving the question, an experiment was carried out to examine compression effects in Korean. There has been a general belief that the increase of the number of following or preceding syllables causes compression of a vowel (or syllable) in many languages, and a marked anticipatory compression effect can be especially indicative of stress timing. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to obtain some evidence to determine whether or not Korean is stress-timed. The durations of the target vowel/a/ of the monosyllabic word /pap/ were measured at both word and sentence level. In general, marked anticipatory and backward compression effects on the target vowel were observed across one-, two- and three-syllable words in citation form, whereas the effects were neither marked nor consistent at sentence level. These results led us to claim that Korean is not stress-timed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.45-52
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to measure the first two vowel formants of the ten young female speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] automatically and then to analyze various potential factors that may affect the formant distribution of the eight peripheral vowels of English. The factors that were analyzed included the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicate that the overall formant patterns of the female speakers were similar to those of earlier works. The effects of the factors on the realization of the two formants were also similar to those from the male speakers with minor differences.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.41-49
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, syllabic stress information, the location in a word, location in utterance, speech rate of three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants. The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The result indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.77-88
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• 2002

Acoustical correlates of stress can be classified as duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. This study examined the acoustical differences in the first two syllables of stressed English words produced by ten American and Korean speakers. The Korean subjects scored very high on the TOEFL. They read at a normal speed a fable from which the acoustical parameters of eight words were analyzed. In order to make the data comparison meaningful, each parameter was collected at 100 dynamic time points proportional to the total duration of the two syllables. Then the ratio of the parameter sum of the first rime to that of the second rime was calculated to determine the relative prominence of the syllables. Results showed that the durations of the first two syllables were almost comparable between the Americans and Koreans. However, statistically significant differences showed up in the diphthong pronunciations and in the words with the second syllable stressed. Also, remarkably high r-squared values were found between pairs of the three acoustical parameters, which suggests that either one or a combination of two or more parameters may account for the prominence of a syllable within a word.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.430-437
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• 2013

The present study examined whether sentence perception scores were changed under various conditions of time alteration (compression and/or expansion) and selective word stress in normal hearing listeners. Twenty young normal hearing adults (ten males) were participated. As stimuli, Korean standard-sentence list for adults (KS-SL-A) modified to semantically anomalous sentences was newly recorded by a female speaker. Seven different time-altered conditions (e.g., ${\pm}60%$, ${\pm}40%$, ${\pm}20%$, 0 %) were controlled. To see the effect of selective word stress (i.e., the emphasis of specific syllables in the sentence), all subjects were tested twice 2 weeks apart. The results showed 1) there was significantly different sentence perception scores among the different time-altered conditions, yet only in the 60 % compression condition; 2) there was no significant difference of the sentence perception scores in the effect of stress; however, there was a positive effect of the selective word stress in the sentences consisting of 6 ~ 7 syllables at the 40 % compression condition; 3) there was no significant gender difference. The pattern of results suggests that the combination of time compression and selective word stress is more effective to understand speech, instead of only using time expansion condition. However, further studies should be needed for standardization.