• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.107-110
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• 1994

In this paper, we describe the features of the fundamental frequency contour of Korean read speech, and propose a new stylization method to characterize the Fø pattern of segments. Our algorithm consists of three stylization processes : the segment level, the syllable level, and the sord level. For stylization of Fø contour in the segment level , we applied least square error minimization method to determine Fø values at initial, medial, and final position in a segment. In the syllable level, we determine the stylized Fø pattern of a syllable using the mean Fø value of each word and style information for each word, syllable and segment, we reconstruct Fø contour of sentences. The simulation results show that the error is less than 10% of the actual Fø contour for each sentence. In perception test, there is little difference between the synthesized speech with the original difference between the synthesized speech with the original Fø contour and the synthesized speech with the stylized Fø contour.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.51-60
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• 2018

This study aims to compare the word decoding skills, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills, and letter knowledge of first graders with developmental dyslexia (DD) and those who were typically developing (TD). Eighteen children with DD and eighteen TD children, matched by nonverbal intelligence and discourse ability, participated in the study. Word decoding of Korean language-based reading assessment(Pae et al., 2015) was conducted. Phoneme-grapheme correspondent words were analyzed according to whether the word has meaning, whether the syllable has a final consonant, and the position of the grapheme in the syllable. Letter knowledge asked about the names and sounds of 12 consonants and 6 vowels. The children's PA of word, syllable, body-coda, and phoneme blending was tested. Object and letter RAN was measured in seconds. The decoding difficulty of non-words was more noticeable in the DD group than in the TD one. The TD children read the syllable initial and syllable final position with 99% correctness. Children with DD read with 80% and 82% correctness, respectively. In addition, the DD group had more difficulty in decoding words with two patchims when compared with the TD one. The DD group read only 57% of words with two patchims correctly, while the TD one read 91% correctly. There were significant differences in body-coda PA, phoneme level PA, letter RAN, object RAN, and letter-sound knowledge between the two groups. This study confirms the existence of Korean developmental dyslexics, and the urgent need for the inclusion of a Korean-specific phonics approach in the education system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.51-65
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• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.83-93
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• 2004

The objectives of this study are to analyze Korean speakers' pronunciations of various Japanese /p/ patterns and to provide desirable pronunciation models. This is a part of an ongoing research that aims to propose a useful method of teaching Japanese pronunciation of /p/ to Koreans. The experimental data consist of /p/ phonemes in word initial, word medial, and 'yoon' positions. Yoon must be written in small size after a letter and it only makes a syllable with the preceding letter in Japanese. There were 22 different phoneme positions. They were pronounced by 48 Japanese majoring students (24 females and 24 males), who were in their twenties and were raised in Daejeon and vicinity. The individual pronunciations were collected and digitized into 528 files. The results show that Koreans pronounced the Japanese phoneme /p/ in a variety of ways, according to the auditory environments in which the phoneme was tested: as [ph] in word initial, [pp] or [ph] in word medial, and [ph] in 'yoon', unlike native speakers who pronounced Japanese /p/ as [ph] in word initial, [pp] in word medial and, and [pp] or [ph] in 'yoon'.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.28-33
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• 2000

This paper investigates the durational difference between syllable final segment and syllable initial one within word level. The Korean consonant (m) and (nn) were focused mainly. It could hardly say that there was significant difference between preceding consonant and following one, but it was observed that the preceding consonant tended to be shorter than the following one in the (mm) case. This might be explained by the fact that bilabial sound should appear at the first step of language acquisition. This leads to the conclusion that the articulation of preceding (m) shall be easier than others. In the case of alveolar geminate (nn), there was considerable statistic difference between preceding and following segments. It tends to be that the preceding consonant has longer duration.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.69-76
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• 1994

Acoustic cues of some consonantal phonology were tested in Korean words. All Korean consonants were recorded and acoustically analyzed in controlled phonological environments :ⅰ) word-initial, ⅱ) inter-vocalic, and ⅲ) word-final positions. The observed acoustic regulations are : ⅰ) The lengths of obstruents are longer word-initially than word-finally, ⅱ) The lengths of sonorants are longer word-finally than in word-initial or inter-vocalic positions, ⅲ) The formants of the lateral sound /l/ are higher word-finally than intervocalically. The phonological explanations of these acoustic regulations can be found in the rules of ⅰ) inter-vocalic voicing of plain stops, ⅱ) syllable-final unreleasing of obstruents, ⅲ) word-initial aspiration of stops, and ⅳ) liquid alternation between [r] and [l]. Numerical data of all these acoustic regulations are reported in order to facilitate their application toward improving naturalness for speech synthesis and accurateness for speech recognition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.7-21
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• 2004

The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

• MALSORI
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• no.37
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• pp.49-71
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• 1999

The Purpose of this paper is to gather pairs of heteronyms in modern Korean and transcribe them in the IPA and the Roman alphabet in order to propose that all of them should be differentiated in Hanngul orthography. More than a quarter of the whole Korean vocabulary consists of words with a long vowel and the number of minimal pairs distinguished only by the chroneme reaches nearly ten thousand (i.e. twenty thousand words). The letter h syllable-finally is used here to represent the long vowel in Romanization except the vowel '으‘[?:] which is transcribed by doubling the letter u (i.e. uu). Another factor bringing forth lots of heteronyms in Korean is the lack of full indication as to the non-automatic reinforcement in the initial consonant of a word (or a morpheme) when preceded by another within a phrase (or a word). These reinforced word-initial consonants are written with the letter c and an apostrophe (like c'g- , c'd- , c'b-, c's-, c'j-) in Romanization here. The reinforced morpheme-initial consonant within a word is written with the letters k t, p, ss and cz for ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ and ㅉ sounds respectively. The contrasted pronunciations of pairs of heteronyms beginning with ㅅ /s/sup h// and ㅆ /s/ sounds are transcribed here for exemplification.