• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.403-408
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• 2007

In a large corpus-based speech synthesizer, a break, which is a parameter influencing the naturalness and intelligibility, is used as an important feature during a unit selection process. Japanese is a language having intonations, which ate indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the APs(Accentual Phrases) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI(Japanese-Tones and Break Indices), which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method is to conduct a unit search by dividing breaks into two types, such as a fixed break and a flexible break, in order to use the advantages of a large-scale corpus, which includes various types of prosodies. As a result of an experiment, the proposed unit selection method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.788-791
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations. The results showed that there was a strong positional effect since the accuracy rates of the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate for the target consonants was higher in the stressed intervocalic position and initial onset position than in the unstressed intervocalic position and final coda position. Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except the unstressed intervocalic position. This is unexpected in markedness theory given that fricatives are assumed to be more difficult to learn than stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.13-21
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to examine the prosody characteristics of sentence-level utterances which contain homographs with context cues in patients with neurogenic communication disorders. Homographs which may be affected by prosody, especially tonic length features, were used to investigate this matter. The characteristics of tone, duration, pitch, and pitch peak were analyzed to examine the characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the left or right hemisphere and normal controls. The whole process was recorded using Praat 4.3.14 and for statistical analyses, three-way ANOVA and multiple comparative analyses, Chi-Square tests, and a one-way ANOVA were carried out using SPSS 12.0 for Windows. The conclusions of this study are as follows. First, the length of syllables and vowels in homographs in Korean was different depending on the meaning and was not significant between groups. Second, it was found that patients with lesions in the right hemisphere had significant difference on pitch. Third, it was found that frequency of pitch peak and tone in 'short' tone syllables were different between groups. The conclusion of this study found that the prosody of homographs between groups absolutely was not differentiated. Accordingly, more detailed studies of acoustic parameters and other parameters which the prosody characteristic between groups could be found are needed in the future.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.460-466
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• 2010

It is well-known that Korean EFL learners have difficulties in producing English fricatives which are not in the inventory of Korean and consequently tend to replace English fricatives with stops. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Korean students also have difficulties perceiving English anterior coronal consonants including fricatives. To this end, forty Korean college students participated in an identification test which consisted of 24 nonce words with English anterior coronal consonants in 4 different prosodic locations (CV, VC, VCVV,VVCV). It was shown that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV, providing confusion matrices for each target consonant. It was also found that Korean participants had a great difficulty identifying English[$\theta$] and [$\eth$], which are novel in Korean. Importantly, the confusion patterns found in the perception test tended not to be identical with those found in the previous production studies in that both stops and fricatives were misperceived as fricatives while fricatives were misproduced as stops. Further, perceptual devoicing and intervocalic voicing were attested inVC and intervocalic position, respectively. Based on the findings of this study, pedagogical implications were drawn.

• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.33
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• pp.413-435
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• 2008

This study is purposed to analyze the appearances and functions of ellipsis of case markers through the Hangul letters of Hyun-Poong Kwak's family in the early 17th century. Hangul letters appear more colloquial than typography, and ellipsis is the one of main features of it. Generally, 'ellipsis' occurs when a constituent of a sentence deliberately leaves out of a sentence, because it is repeated or can be deduced by the context or occasion. As Hangul letter is written for a specific person, 'ellipsis' occurs more often than typography written for unspecified individuals. The ellipsis of case markers are not an exception. The ellipsis has functions as follow. The first, function is 'brevity.' Communication can be more convenient by ellipsis. Next will be 'informality.' Informality caused by ellipsis can make people express their thoughts and feelings fluently and naturally. It is the reason that spoken language has more frequently occurred ellipses than written language. The third function is 'quickness.' The same information can be delivered more quickly by the sentence using ellipsis than not using. In the 21st Century, ellipsis is misused in netizen communication owing to the quickness. The last function should be 'the effect of a literary style.' The effects can embody through ellipsis such as 'rhythm effect', 'letter style effect', 'translation style effect.' As a result of analyzing ellipsis of case markers, frequency follows the order below.[subjective objective > Locative > Dative > Commutative > Instrumental]