• 한국음향학회지
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• 제13권5호
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• pp.69-76
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• 1994

국어 자음을 단어내 음운환경별로 실험해 본 결과, 국어의 자음변이 규칙이 반영된 일관성있는 음가변화를 발견하였다. 발견된 음가변화는, ⅰ) 장애음의 길이는 모음간보다 단어초가 길고, ⅱ) 공명음의 길이는 단어초와 모음간보다 단어말이 길며, ⅲ) /ㄹ/의 F2와 F3는 모음간이 낮고 단어말은 높다는 것이다.ⅰ) 이들 음향특징의 근거가 되는 국어의 자음변이 규칙은, ⅰ) 평음의 유성화 현상, ⅱ) 음절말 불파음화 현상, ⅲ) 단어초 기음화 현상, ⅳ) /ㄹ/ 음소의 [r]과 [l] 교체현상이다. 본 실험결과 제시된 변화값은 음성인식 및 합성에 응용될 때 인식의 정확성과 합성의 자연성을 향상시킬 수 있다.

• 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.99-107
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• 2001

The purpose of this study was to investigate the syllable and phoneme frequencies in the spontaneous speech of some Korean children. Sixty four normally developing children aged from 2 to 5 were involved (male: female=1 : 1, 16 children in each age group). Fifty connected utterances were analyzed using the KCLA (Korean Computerized Language Analysis) 2.0 and Exel. The findings were as follows: 1) /i/ was the most frequently used syllable and was followed by /yo/, /k/, /s'/, /nen/ and so on. 2) The most frequently used Korean phonemes were syllable-initial consonant /k/, syllable- medial vowel /a/ and syllable-final consonant /n/. 3) All seven syllable final consonants (/p,t,k,m,n,n,l/) were used more frequently in the word-medial position than in the word-final position. Three syllable initial consonants(/k, I, s'/) were used more frequently in the word-medial position than in the word-initial position. The syllable and phoneme frequencies in the Korean children's spontaneous speech will provide valuable information in interpreting the severity of phonological disorder and in developing tools for the Korean phonological assessment and intervention.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.9-14
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• 2016

This study investigated the patterns of coda deletion in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. More specifically, the current study focused on three factors in promoting coda deletion, namely, word position, consonant type, and morpheme type. The results revealed that, first, coda deletion frequently occurred when affixes were attached to the ends of words, rather than in affixes in word-internal positions or in roots. Second, alveolar consonants [n] and [l] in the coda positions of high-frequency affixes [nɨn] and [lɨl] were most likely to be deleted. Additionally, regarding affix reduction in the word-final position, all subjects seemed to depend on this articulatory strategy to a similar degree. In sum, the current study found that affixes without primary semantic content in spontaneous speech tend to undergo the process of reduction, favoring the occurrence of specific pronunciation variants.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.29-36
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• 2022

The English word-final /rl/ cluster poses a particular problem for Korean learners of English because it is the sequence of two sounds, /r/ and /l/, which are not contrastive in Korean. This study compared the similarity distances between English and Korean speakers' /rl/ productions using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The words with /rl/ (pearl, world) and without /rl/ (bird, word) were recorded by four English speakers and four Korean speakers, and compared pairwise. The F2-F1 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of velarized /l/, and F3 trajectories, the acoustic correlate of /r/, were examined. Formant analysis showed that English speakers lowered F2-F1 values toward the end of a word, unlike Korean speakers, suggesting the absence of /l/ in Korean speakers. In contrast, there was no significant difference in F3 values. Mixed-effects regression analyses of the DTW distances revealed that Korean speakers produced /r/ similarly to English speakers but failed to produce the velarized /l/ in /rl/ clusters.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제35_36호
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• pp.1-12
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• 1998

This study aims to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean discourse sentences, especially focusing the initial and final part of a sentence. 50 disourse sentences were read in two different styles; one, sentence by sentence, the other, continuous of all 50's. First, we tried to get two kinds of ratios from the acoustic results: first, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in first word in a sentence; second, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in last word in a sentence. We, then, calculated statistical values of the ratios including mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and p-values in t-test. With respect to duration, there were little difference between two different styles. If any, we could see tiny unharmonious durational aspect in the initial of continuous reading. More concisely, there could be observed some deviation from standard. In case of F0, there was prominent statistical difference between ratios of last words in two styles. This difference might play a role as a prosodic feature. Energy seems to show similar pattern with that of F0. The results showed that final syllable in last word was pronounced with about 85 % of initial syllable in the same context and the last words in continuous speech were strongly articulated compared with those of sentence by sentence reading.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제22권5호
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• pp.388-402
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• 2003

In this paper, we carried out the word, 4 continuous digits. continuous, and task-independent word recognition experiments to verify the effectiveness of the re-defined phoneme-likely units (PLUs) for the phonetic decision tree based HM-Net (Hidden Markov Network) context-dependent (CD) acoustic modeling in Korean appropriately. In case of the 48 PLUs, the phonemes /ㅂ/, /ㄷ/, /ㄱ/ are separated by initial sound, medial vowel, final consonant, and the consonants /ㄹ/, /ㅈ/, /ㅎ/ are also separated by initial sound, final consonant according to the position of syllable, word, and sentence, respectively. In this paper. therefore, we re-define the 39 PLUs by unifying the one phoneme in the separated initial sound, medial vowel, and final consonant of the 48 PLUs to construct the CD acoustic models effectively. Through the experimental results using the re-defined 39 PLUs, in word recognition experiments with the context-independent (CI) acoustic models, the 48 PLUs has an average of 7.06%, higher recognition accuracy than the 39 PLUs used. But in the speaker-independent word recognition experiments with the CD acoustic models, the 39 PLUs has an average of 0.61% better recognition accuracy than the 48 PLUs used. In the 4 continuous digits recognition experiments with the liaison phenomena. the 39 PLUs has also an average of 6.55% higher recognition accuracy. And then, in continuous speech recognition experiments, the 39 PLUs has an average of 15.08% better recognition accuracy than the 48 PLUs used too. Finally, though the 48, 39 PLUs have the lower recognition accuracy, the 39 PLUs has an average of 1.17% higher recognition characteristic than the 48 PLUs used in the task-independent word recognition experiments according to the unknown contextual factor. Through the above experiments, we verified the effectiveness of the re-defined 39 PLUs compared to the 48PLUs to construct the CD acoustic models in this paper.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.47-58
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to find out how Korean speakers' speech production in English word boundaries differs from English speakers' and to account for what bring about such differences. Seeing two consecutive words as one single cluster, the English speakers generally pronounce them naturally by linking a word-final consonant of the first word with a word-initial vowel of the second word, while this is not the case with most of the Korean speakers; they read the two consecutive words individually. In consequence, phonological processes such as resyllabification and aspiration can be found in the English speakers' word-boundary production, while glottalization, and unreleased stops are rather common phonological process seen in the Korean speakers' word-boundary production. This may be accounted for by Korean speakers' L1 interference, depending on English proficiency.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.55-62
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• 2009

This paper proposes an improved method to verify a keyword segment that results from a word spotting system. First a baseline word spotting system is implemented. In order to improve performance of the word spotting systems, we use a two-pass structure which consists of a word spotting system and an utterance verification system. Using the basic likelihood ratio test (LRT) based utterance verification system to verify the keywords, there have been certain problems which lead to performance degradation. So, we propose a method which uses phone-level log-likelihood ratios (PLLR) patterns in computing confidence measures for each keyword. The proposed method generates weights according to the PLLR patterns and assigns different weights to each phone in the process of generating confidence measures for the keywords. This proposed method has shown to be more appropriate to word spotting systems and we can achieve improvement in final word spotting accuracy.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제19_20호
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• pp.58-87
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• 1990

According to Government Phonology, at 1 phonological positions save the domain's head must be licensed in order to appear in the syllable structure. A non-nuclear head is licensed by the following nucleus, and the nuclei with phonetic content are licensed through government by the nuclear head of the domain at the level of the nuclear projection. Therefore, in the theory of Government Phonology it is claimed that words always end with a nucleus. With regard to the licensing of empty nuclei, Kaye(1990a) proposes the 'Empty Category Principle' and its sub-theory of 'Projection Government'. Government Phonology claims that a nucleus which dominates a vowel that regularly undergoes elision in certain contexts is underlyingly empty. This underlying empty nucleus is not manifested phonetically when it is properly governed by an unlicensed(i, e, a nucleus filled with a full vowel). It is when proper government fails to apply, that the empty nucleus is phonetically Interpreted. The purpose of this paper is to present a principled account of the process of $[i]{\Leftrightarrow}{\emptyset}$ alternation in Korean. Following Kaye's proposal, we assume that [i] of Korean is underlyingly empty. This position is pronounced as [i] if it is unlicensed, and is not phonetically realized if is licensed. Empty nuclei ape devided into two categories: domain-internal and domain-final. Firstly, we consider the question why Korean has little word ending with [i]. As for this, ECP states that domain-final empty nuclei are not pronounced if the language licenses domain-final empty nuclei. Whether a final empty nucleus may occur in the structure is parametric variation. This property is seen from the fact that words may appear to end in consonants in this language. Since Korean abounds with words ending in a consonant, it licenses domain-final empty nuclei. Therefore, it is quite natural that Korean has little word ending with [i]. Secondly, word-internal empty nuclei of Korean respect proper government and inter-onset government. That is, an empty nucleus in word-internal position will be pronounced with the vowel [i] if either proper government or inter-onset government fail to apply. Inter-onset government refers to the government established between two onsets across an empty nucleus. Thirdly, we consider words ending with [i], which seems to be exceptional to the final licensing. Host of them are. either mono-syllabic verbs(for instance, [s'i-] 'to write') or derived adjectives ending with [p'i] (for instance, [kip'i-] 'be happy'). As for the former, the 'inaccessibility for proper government' is applied because the empty nucleus appears in the first syllable. In latter case, domain-final empty nuclei are pronounced as [i] because of government-licensing. That is, final empty nucleus is pronounced to license the preceding onset dominating negatively charmed segments which empty nucleus of Korean cannot license.