• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The initial syllables of a pair of Sino-Korean words are generally differentiated in their meaning by either short or long durations. They are realized differently by the dialect and generation of speakers. Recent research has reported that the temporal distinction has gradually faded away. The aim of this study is to examine whether college students with Kyungsang dialect made the distinction temporally using a statistical method of Mixed Effects Model. Thirty students participated in the recording of five pairs of Korean words in clear or casual speaking styles. Then, the author measured the durations of the initial syllables of the words and made a descriptive analysis of the data followed by applying Mixed Effects Models to the data by setting gender, length, and style as fixed effects, and subject and syllable as random effects, and tested their effects on the initial syllable durations. Results showed that college students with Kyungsang dialect did not produce the long and short syllables distinctively with any statistically significant difference between them. Secondly, there was a significant difference in the duration of the initial syllables between male and female students. Thirdly, there was also a significant difference in the duration of the initial syllables produced in the clear or casual styles. The author concluded that college students with Kyungsang dialect do not produce long and short Sino-Korean syllables distinctively, and any statistical analysis on the temporal aspect should be carefully made considering both fixed and random effects. Further studies would be desirable to examine production and perception of the initial syllables by speakers with various dialect, generation, and age groups.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.85-92
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• 2015

This study aimed to establish characteristics related to voice and speech through the natural base frequency analysis of esophagus vocalization. In the study, 8 subjects were selected for esophagus vocals, and 10 other subjects were selected for a control group. MDVP(Multi-dimensional Voice Program, Model 4800, USA, 2001), Multi Speech(Model 3700, Kaypantax, USA, 2008) were used as experiment equipment. The speech samples selected for evaluation were vowels and sentences (both declarative and interrogative). For acoustic analysis, the intonation form of fo, jitter, energy, shimmer, HNR, and intonation patterns of the speech sample were measured. The results were as follows: First, the natural intrinsic frequency of extended vowels in the esophagus vocal group was lower than the frequency in the normal vocal group. In particular, the intrinsic frequency difference for high vowel /i/ was much greater than the frequency difference for low vowel /a/. Second, the jitter values of the esophagus vocal group were higher than the control group. In particular, there was a large difference between the jitter values for /a/ and /i/, with the jitter values being highest for /i/. Third, there was no significant difference in vocal strength between the esophagus vocal patient group and the control group. Fourth, the shimmer values of the voices in the esophagus vocal group were higher than shimmer values in the control group. In particular, there was a large difference in shimmer values for low vowel /a/. Fifth, the HNR values of the esophagus vocal group were showed significantly lower than the control group. In particular, the largest difference in HNR values between the two groups was for high vowel /i/. Sixth, the pitch contours of interrogative and declarative sentences of the esophagus vocal patient group showed a different form or only had with small differences compared to the pitch contours of the normal vocal group, thus presenting an inconsistent pattern.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.139-145
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• 2015

The present study investigates the effects of syllable structure and prosodic prominence on the patterns of tonal alignment and scaling of the phrase-initial rise in Seoul Korean. Two syllable structures (Onset (/#CVC.../ as in minsa) vs. No-onset (/#VC.../ as in insa)) and two prominence conditions (Focus vs. Neutral) were considered. Results showed that the alignment of the L and the H tones in the phrase-initial rise was affected by syllable structure but not by prominence. The time of L was before the vowel onset of the first syllable in the Onset condition (i.e., within the onset consonant) and it was after the vowel onset in the No-onset condition. The difference was attributable to the fact that the initial L was anchored at a fixed distance from the phrase boundary, which was about 30ms after the onset of the syllable in both cases. The time of H was also consistently observed about 20ms after the second vowel onset (i.e., /a/ in minsa/insa). Moreover, the rise time (the duration from the L to the H tones) was longer as the local syllable duration became longer due to different syllable structure and prominence conditions. Taken together, the results provide a support for the segmental anchoring hypothesis, which claims that both the beginning and the end of F0 movement are consistently aligned with segmental 'anchor' points with relatively high stability (Ladd et al., 1999). Results also showed that the scaling of the early rise was slightly influenced by syllable structure but not by prominence. The differences between the results of the current study and a previous study (Cho, 2011) are further discussed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.93-99
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• 2015

In case of PAS test, the air is sometimes leaked although the mask is tightly attached to the face, which is not reliable on the measured values. Therefore, this study aimed to assist the clinical practice suggesting the test method of PAS without air leakage. In the healthy subjects with 12 males and 12 females over 19 years old, three types of tests were performed on the voicing efficiency among the protocol of PAS Model 6600. They are; first, to attach the mask tightly to the face holding the handle of PAS with the subject's two hands (Method 1); second, to attach the mask tightly to the face holding the handle of PAS with the subject's one hand and pushing the body of PAS strongly with the other hand (Method 2); and third, to attach the mask tightly to the face pushing the upper part of the mask by the tester when the subject attached the mask to his or her face holding the handle of PAS with two hands (Method 3). Upon the study analyses, the mean negative pressure, the mean phonogram, subglottic air pressure, and voicing efficiency were shown to be statistically significantly different during PAS test in males depending on the methods. (p<.05) In case of females, only the target airflow rate showed significant difference depending on the methods during PAS test. (p<.001) In conclusion, Method 2 enhanced the noise level and strength while Method 1 was likely to leak the air more compared to the other two methods in males. In case of females, Method 1 showed significant leakage of the air flow. Not to allow the air flow leakage without affecting the outcome of PAS test, it will be the most useful for the tester to push the mask to the subject's face tightly (Method 3).

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.151-163
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• 2015

In this study, we aim to describe kinematic characteristics of Korean /l/-flapping in two speech rates (fast vs. comfortable). Production data was collected from seven native speakers of Seoul Korean (four females and three males) using electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA), which provided two dimensional data on the x-y plane. We examined kinematic properties of the vertical/horizontal tongue tip gesture, the vertical/horizontal (rear) tongue body gesture, and the jaw gesture in an /i/-/i/ context. Gestural landmarks of the vertical tongue tip gesture are directly measured. This serves as the actual anchoring time points to which relevant measures of other trajectories referred. The study focuses on velocity profiles, closing/opening spatiotemporal properties, constriction duration, and constriction minima were analyzed. The results are summarized as follows. First, gradiently distributed spatiotemporal values of the vertical tongue tip gesture were on a continuum. This shows more of a reduction in fast speech rate, but no single instance of categorical reduction (deletion). Second, Korean /l/-flapping predominantly exhibited a backward sliding tongue tip movement, in 83% of production, which is apparently distinguished from forward sliding movement in English. Lastly, there was an indication of vocalic reduction in fast rate, truncating spatial displacement of the jaw and the tongue body, although we did not observe positional variations with speech rate. The present study shows that Korean /l/-flapping is characterized by mixed articulatory properties with respect to flapping sounds of other languages such as English and Xiangxiang Chinese. Korean /l/ flapping demonstrates a language-universal property, such as the gradient nature of its flapping sounds that is compatible with other languages. On the other hand, Korean /l/-flapping also shows a language-particular property, particularly distinguished from English, in that a backward gliding movement occurs during the tongue tip closing movement. Although, there was no vocalic reduction in V2 observed in terms of jaw and tongue body height, spatial displacement of these articulators still suggests truncation in fast speech rate.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.27-37
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• 2015

This study was mainly aimed at investigating on the effects of background noises (i.e., white noise, multi-speaker conversational babble) on stuttering rate and other speech-related measures (i.e., articulation rate, speech effort). Nine Korean-speaking adults who stutter participated in the study. Each of the participants was asked to read a series of passages under each of four experimental conditions (i.e., typical solo reading (TR), choral reading (CR), reading under white noise presented (WR), reading with multi-speaker conversational babble presented (BR). Stuttering rate was computed based on a percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS) and articulation rate was also assessed as another speech-related measure under each of the experimental conditions. To examine the amount of physical effort needed to read, the speech effort was measured by using the 9-point Speech Effort Self Rating Scale originally employed by Ingham et al. (2006). Study results showed that there were no significant differences among each of the passage reading conditions in terms of stuttering rate, articulation rate, and speech effort. In conclusion, it can be argued that the two different types of background noises (i.e., white noise and multi-speaker conversational babble) are not different in the extent to which each of them enhances fluency of adults who stutter. Self ratings of speech effort may be also useful in measuring speech-related variables associated with vocal changes induced under each of the fluency enhancing conditions.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.43-51
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• 2013

English native listeners have a tendency to treat strong syllables in a speech stream as the potential initial syllables of new words, since the majority of lexical words in English have a word-initial stress. The current study investigates whether Korean (L1) - English (L2) late bilinguals perceive strong syllables in English continuous speech as word onsets, as English native listeners do. In Experiment 1, word-spotting was slower when the word-initial syllable was strong, indicating that Korean listeners do not perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Experiment 2 was conducted in order to avoid any possibilities that the results of Experiment 1 may be due to the strong-initial targets themselves used in Experiment 1 being slower to recognize than the weak-initial targets. We employed the gating paradigm in Experiment 2, and measured the Isolation Point (IP, the point at which participants correctly identify a word without subsequently changing their minds) and the Recognition Point (RP, the point at which participants correctly identify the target with 85% or greater confidence) for the targets excised from the non-words in the two conditions of Experiment 1. Both the mean IPs and the mean RPs were significantly earlier for the strong-initial targets, which means that the results of Experiment 1 reflect the difficulty of segmentation when the initial syllable of words was strong. These results are consistent with Kim & Nam (2011), indicating that strong syllables are not perceived as word onsets for Korean listeners and interfere with lexical segmentation in English running speech.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.99-107
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers in order to better instruct pronunciation skills of English vowels for Korean English learners. A Praat script was developed to collect the first and second formant values(F1 and F2) of eight words in each sound file which was recorded from an internet speech archive. Then, the Euclidean distances were measured between the three vowel pairs: [i-ɛ], [i-ɪ], and [ɛ-æ]. The first vowel pair [i-ɛ] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel wih differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Secondly, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-ɪ] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [ɛ-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level. The author concluded that Korean speakers should produce the front high vowels distinctively by securing sufficient relative distance of the formant values. Further studies would be desirable to examine how strong the Korean speakers' English proficiency correlate with the relative distance of target words of comparable productions.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권3호
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• pp.73-81
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• 2013

Coda in the word-medial position plays an important role in acquisition of our speech. Accuracy of the coda in the word-medial position is important as a diagnostic indicator since it has a close relationship with degrees of disorder. Coda in the word-medial position only appears in condition of connecting two vowels and the sequence causes diverse phonological processes to happen. The coda in the word-medial position differs in production difficulty by the initial sound in the sequence. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the tendency of producing a coda in the word-medial position with consideration of an optional phonological process in spontaneous speech of three and four year old children. Data was collected from 24 children (four groups by age) without speech and language delay. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Sonorant coda in the word-medial position showed a high production frequency in manner of articulation, and alveolar in place of articulation. When the coda in the word-medial position is connected to an initial sound in the same place of articulation, it revealed a high frequency of production. 2) The coda in word-medial position followed by an initial alveolar stop revealed a high error rate. Error patterns showed regressive assimilation predominantly. 3) The order of difficulty that Children had producing codas in the word-medial position was $/k^{\neg}/$, $/p^{\neg}/$, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/. Those results suggest that in targeting coda in the word-medial position for evaluation, we should consider optional phonological process as well as the following initial sound. Further studies would be necessary which codas in the word-medial position will be used for therapeutic purpose.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.217-225
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• 2013

This paper describes the design and implementation of the kWebAnywhere system based on WebAnywhere, which assists people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access Internet information through Web interfaces. The WebAnywhere is a server-based web reader which reads aloud the web contents using TTS(text-to-speech) technology on the Internet without installing any software on the client's system. The system can be used in general web browsers using a built-in audio function, for blind users who are unable to afford to use a screen reader and for web developers to design web accessibility. However, the WebAnywhere is limited to supporting only a single language and cannot be applied to Korean web contents directly. Thus, in this paper, we modified the WebAnywhere to serve multiple language contents written in both English and Korean texts. The modified WebAnywhere system is called kWebAnywhere to differentiate it with the original system. The kWebAnywhere system is modified to support the Korean TTS system, VoiceText$^{TM}$, and to include user interface to control the parameters of the TTS system. Because the VoiceText$^{TM}$ system does not support the Festival API used in the WebAnywhere, we developed the Festival Wrapper to transform the VoiceText$^{TM}$'s private APIs to the Festival APIs in order to communicate with the WebAnywhere engine. We expect that the developed system can help people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access the internet contents easily.