• The Journal of Korean Medical History
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.23-36
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• 2010

In this paper, this writer looked into the initial law and fortification, which are two of the most important phonetic changes of Sino-Korean words. Pronunciation and inscription rules of Oriental Medical terminologies have also been studied. Moreover, several problems of meaningful rendering of Oriental Medical Chinese terminologies into Korean have been looked into. As a result, the following conclusions could be drawn. 1. The initial law only applies to Sino-Korean words that consist of more than one syllable. It does not apply to words borrowed from foreign languages. Especially, compound words like Jang-ssi-yu-gyeong(張氏類經) or Im-sin-yuk-hyeol(姙娠衄血) consist of already existing words such as Jang-ssi(張氏), Yu-gyeong(類經), Im-sin(姙娠), and Yuk-hyeol(衄血), and thus the initial law applies to these words. They are inscribed and pronounced 'Jang-ssi-yu-gyeong' and 'Im-sin-yuk-hyeol'. 2. Fortification of Sino-Korean words can be applied variously according to the structure and meaning of the words. Words such as '科', '格', '氣', '法', '病', '症', and '證' are often fortified and at the same time used frequently in Oriental Medicine. Also, many other words are derived from these words. However, there has not been a scholastic consent among the Oriental Medical society as to in which circumstances these words will be fortified. Therefore, a standardization process to stipulate the pronunciation of Oriental Medical terminologies is necessary. 3. Meaningful rendering of Oriental Medical Chinese terminologies into Korean also needs scholastic investigation. Especially, the word 兪 should be meaningfully rendered and pronounced 'su' just like the words 輸 and 腧, but is wrongly pronounced 'yu'. Other than this, the words 井滎兪經合, 秦艽, 膻中, 共振丹, 成無已, and 麗澤通氣湯 should respectively be pronounced 'jeong-hyeong-su-gyeong-hap', 'jin-gyo', 'dan-jung', 'gong-sin-dan', 'Seong-mu-yi', and 'Yi-taek-tong-gi-tang'. Moreover, there are four pronunciations to the word 梴 of 李梴. This should also be standardized. This writer proposes that in the future, correct meaningful rendering of Chinese terminologies into Korean and phonetic signs be inscribed in dictionaries regarding Oriental Medical terminologies.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.579-584
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• 2010

Purpose : The number of the repatriated Korean students who had overseas study at early ages is increasing. They received foreign education, they can speak international languages, but they have many difficulties in articulation and intonation of the Korean language. This study aims to measure closure and aspiration duration, length of consonants, length of subsequent vowels, and ratio of consonants against subsequent vowels in vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) syllables. Methods : This study compares the acoustic and phonetic characteristics of repatriated and native students, the ratio of articulation error of Korean plosives, the closure and aspiration duration, and the ratio of the aspiration duration against the closure duration. Results : The ratio of articulation error of Korean plosives between repatriated and native students is 19% and 2%, respectively. The closure duration was significantly longer in repatriated students than in native students. The aspiration duration was significantly longer in repatriated students than in native students. No difference was found in the ratio of aspiration duration against closure duration between the native and repatriated students. Conclusion : This study can be a good reference for estimating the phonetic difficulties of Korean elementary students who had overseas study at early ages.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.656-664
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• 2002

We present a statistical analysis of Korean phonological variations using a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (GPT) system. The GTP system used for experiments generates pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes. These rules are derived form morphophonological analysis and government standard pronunciation rules. The GTP system is optimized for continuous speech recognition by generating phonetic transcriptions for training and constructing a pronunciation dictionary for recognition. In this paper, we describe Korean phonological variations by analyzing the statistics of phonemic change rule applications for the 60,000 sentences in the Samsung PBS Speech DB. Our results show that the most frequently happening obligatory phonemic variations are in the order of liaison, tensification, aspirationalization, and nasalization of obstruent, and that the most frequently happening optional phonemic variations are in the order of initial consonant h-deletion, insertion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants, and deletion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonant's, These statistics can be used for improving the performance of speech recognition systems.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2022

This study aimed to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of plosives in the VCV syllables by the place of articulation and phonation type spoken by children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) in comparison with children with typical hearing (TH). In all, 15 children with bilateral CIs and 15 children with TH participated in this study, aged between 5 to 10 years. All children produced 9 VCV syllables and their VOT were analyzed by the Praat software. There was no significant difference in mean VOT between children with bilateral CIs and children with TH. However, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the place of articulation, such that the VOT for velars were longer than those for bilabials and alveolars. Additionally, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the phonation type, such that the VOT of aspirated consonants were longer than those of lenis and fortis consonants. The results of this study suggest that children with bilateral CIs can distinguish the acoustic properties of plosive consonants and control the speech timing between the structures of the larynx and the oral cavity at a similar level as children with TH.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.96-106
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• 2009

In this paper, correlation between the headphone's acoustical characteristics and the subjective preferences is analyzed, and a possibility of predicting the subjective preferences using the acoustical characteristics is investigated, The headphone's acoustical characteristics include the total harmonic distortions, the variation of the frequency response which were measured by separate channel and the inter-aural correlation coefficients, Those characteristics were measured in a noise-free anechoic chamber, using a head and torso simulator, The subjective preferences were scored in terms of loudness, clearness, spaciousness, fullness and overall impression, In the subjective listening test, 12 subjects were participated who have plentiful listening experiences, The programs include 5 kinds of musics; korean popular song, pop song, light music, male-voice and classic, The 8 models of the headphones were employed, including 4 closed-type circumaural headphones, 2 open-type supraaural headphones and 2 intra-concha headphones, A significant test was carred on the results from the subjective test, using a two-way ANOVA test, The correlation coefficients between the acoustical parameters and the subjective preferences were computed, Experimental results showed that the variation of the magnitude of frequency response measured from a right channel revealed higher correlation with the subjective preferences. Whereas the inter-aural correlation coefficients have very low correlation coefficients.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2024

This study investigated acoustic features in spectral moment analysis, comparing accurate articulations with distortions of alveolar fricatives such as dentalization, palatalization, and lateralization. A retrospective analysis was conducted on speech samples from 61 children (mean age: 5.6±1.5 years, 19 females, 42 males) using the Assessment of Phonology & Articulation for Children (APAC) and Urimal-test of Articulation and Phonology I (U-TAP I). Spectral moment analysis was applied to 169 speech samples. The results revealed that the center of gravity of accurate articulations was higher than that of palatalization, while palatalization was lower than dentalization. The variance of dentalization was higher than that of both accurate articulations and palatalization. The skewness of dentalization was higher than that of accurate articulations, and the skewness of palatalization was higher than that of accurate articulations. The kurtosis of palatalization was higher than that of both accurate articulations and dentalization. No significant differences were observed for the position of fricatives (initial, medial) and tense type (plain, tense) across all variables of spectral moment analysis for each distortion type. This study confirmed distinct patterns in center of gravity, variance, skewness, and kurtosis depending on the type of alveolar fricative distortion. The objective values provided in this study will serve as foundational data for diagnosing alveolar fricative distortions in children with speech sound disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.29-40
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• 2019

The paper investigates the minimal pair of Korean phonemes quantitatively. To achieve this goal, I calculated the number of consonant minimal pairs in the syllable-initial position as both raw counts and relative counts, and analyzed the part of speech relations of the two words in the minimal pair. "Urimalsaem" was chosen as the object of this study because it was judged that the minimal pair analysis should be done through a dictionary and it is the largest among Korean dictionaries. The results of the study are summarized as follows. First, there were 153 types of minimal pairs out of 337,135 examples. The ranking of phoneme pairs from highest to lowest was 'ㅅ-ㅈ, ㄱ-ㅅ, ㄱ-ㅈ, ㄱ-ㅂ, ㄱ-ㅎ, ${\ldots}$, ㅆ-ㅋ, ㄸ-ㅋ, ㅉ-ㅋ, ㄹ-ㅃ, ㅃ-ㅋ'. The phonemes that played a major role in the formation of the minimal pair were /ㄱ, ㅅ, ㅈ, ㅂ, ㅊ/, in that order, which showed a high proportion of palatals. The correlation between the raw count of minimal pairs and the relative count of minimal pairs was found to be quite high r=0.937. Second, 87.91% of the minimal pairs shared the part of speech (same syntactic category). The most frequently observed type has been 'noun-noun' pair (70.25%), and 'vowel-vowel' pair (14.77%) was the next ranking. It can be indicated that the minimal pair could be grouped into similar categories in terms of semantics. The results of this study can be useful for various research in Korean linguistics, speech-language pathology, language education, language acquisition, speech synthesis, and artificial intelligence-machine learning as basic data related to Korean phonemes.