• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.17-26
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• 2023

This study aimed to reveal how Vietnamese adult learners at three different proficiency levels perceive Korean word-initial obstruents and whether errors can be corrected through perceptual training. To this end, 105 Vietnamese beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners were given perceptual training on Korean word-initial. The training materials were created by actively utilizing Korean minimal pairs as natural stimuli recorded by native speakers. Learners in the experimental group performed five 20-40 minute self-directed perceptual training sessions over a period of approximately two weeks, while learners in the control group only participated in the pretest and posttest. The results showed a significant improvement in the perception of sounds that were difficult to distinguish before training, and both beginners and advanced learners benefited from the training. This study confirmed that large-scale perceptual training can play an important role in helping Vietnamese learners learn the appropriate acoustic cues to distinguish different sounds in Korean.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.135-138
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• 2004

음성처리기술은 정보화 시대를 위한 주요 기술의 하나이다. 이 중에서도 음성합성의 연구는 디지털 신호처리 기술과 컴퓨터의 발달로 활발히 진행되고 있다. 그러나 음성 합성기에 의해 발생된 합성음의 음질은 이해도 면에서는 상당한 진전이 있었지만, 자연감 면에서는 만족한 수준에 도달할 수 없었는데, 이러한 합성시스템의 문제점을 해결하는 방법은 다양하게 적용되는 언어정보와 합성음의 자연감을 결정하는 정확한 운율정보가 필요하다. 그러나 구한 운율 정보가 자연음에 존재하는 모든 운율 법칙을 포함할 수 없고, 또한 추출한 운율 법칙이 틀린 것이면 자연감이나 이해도가 떨어지는 합성음이 만들어지고 이것은 음성 합성 시스템의 실용화에 장애로 작용할 것이다. 본 논문은 한국어 음성 합성 시 문제가 되는 자연감을 높이기 위한 한 방법으로 자연음에 내재하는 운율 변화를 효율적으로 학습할 수 있는 인공 신경망을 제안하였다.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.337-340
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• 2004

The exactly reproduced prosody of a TTS system is one of the key factors that affect the naturalness of synthesized speech. In general, rules about prosody had been gathered either from linguistic knowledge or by analyzing the prosodic information from natural speech. But these could not be perfect and some of them could be incorrect. So we proposed artificial neural network(ANN)s that can be trained to team the prosody of natural speech and generate it. In learning phase, let ANNs learn the pitch and energy contour of center phoneme by applying a string of phonemes in a sentence to ANNs and comparing the output pattern with target pattern and making adjustment in weighting values to get the least mean square error between them. In test phase, the estimation rates were computed. We saw that ANNs could generate the prosody of a sentence.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.424-433
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• 2015

This study tried to investigate the differences between auditory preferences for a discrimination study of minimal pairs with the different onset and the same nucleus of a syllable on the basis of articulator-distance in case of Korean infants and toddlers. As a result we found a main effect for articulator-distance and age but not an effect according to the types of phonation especially in terms of tense. Former results are line with the previous studies having reported the order of consonants acquisition based on the places of articulation suggesting that more sensitive responses for the contiguous and different phonemes may lead earlier acquisition for the same place of articulation of the speech sounds. Specifically, bilabial soudns are followed by alveolar and palatal sounds in order. The latter results also showed that tense consonants got a high rate of recognition beside lax consonants according to the age and sex.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.45-55
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• 2021

This study aims to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Korean affricates produced by dysarthric speakers with cerebral palsy. Korean fricatives and affricates are the consonants that are prone to errors in dysarthric speech, but previous studies have focused only on fricatives. For this study, three affricates /tɕ, tɕ^h, ͈tɕ/ appearing at word initial and intervocalic positions produced by six mild-moderate male speakers of spastic dysarthria are selected from a QOLT database constructed in 2014. The parameters representing the acoustic characteristics of Korean affricates were extracted by using Praat: frication duration, closure duration, center of gravity, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and central moment. The results are as follows: 1) frication duration of the intervocalic affricates produced by dysarthric speakers was significantly longer than that of the non-disordered speakers; 2) the closure duration of dysarthric speakers was significantly longer; 3) in the case of the center of gravity, there was no significant difference between the two groups; 4) the skewness of the dysarthric speakers was significantly larger; and 5) the central moment of dysarthric speakers was significantly larger. This study investigated the characteristics of the affricates produced by dysarthric speakers and differences with non-disordered speakers.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.27
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• pp.497-523
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• 2012

Characteristics of the Listening and Pronunciation of Korean Obstruents of Chinese Learners -Based on the Phonetic Experiments Using Kalvin and Praat- This study aims at investigating the characteristics of confrontation in three ways, lax/ fortis/ aspirated consonants, in Korean obstruents through experimental phonetic analysis for the Chinese Korean language learners. On one hand, as a result of comparing Korean and Chinese obstruent systems, there is no big difference regarding the articulatory location. On the other hand, in regards to the articulatory method there is a difference. In a Korean obstruent system, the confrontation presented in three ways by the strength of aspiration. On the contrary, the Chinese obstruent system showed confrontation in two ways by the existence of aspiration. To examine the difficulty of the learners caused by the above-mentioned reason objectively, this paper studied the relationship between input and output of sound through the experimental phonetic analysis such as Kalvin and Praat. To research the input of sound, the listening ability of the learners was examined by 'Choosing Consonant' among the Menu of Kalvin. As a result of that experiment, many errors were shown. They recognized the fortis as lax in the area of affricates and plosives. In the area of fricatives, they recognized affricatives as fricatives. To investigate the output of sound, the section of aspiration and the section of friction of a plosive, an affricate and a fricative in Praat, were expressed numerically. The learners' VOT of lax and affricate represented that lax was pronounced close to the fortis, and the VOT of fricatives was not shown the section of aspiration and friction clearly, and also the result showed that they pronounced a fricative like affricative-aspirated one. The result shows that the learners' pronunciation is related to the listening ability. The consequence is caused by the characteristics of the difference between Korean obstruents and Chinese ones. If the training pronunciation is conducted based on above result, it would be a better methodology in teaching Korean.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

The present thesis examines the correlation of VOT and F0 in the three-way distinction of Korean obstruents, conducting production and perception tests. In the production test, one female native speaker of Korean with a Seoul dialect (the author) recorded 15 repetitions of a monosyllabic word list including /ka, kha, k*a, pa, pha, p*a, ta, tha, t*a, ca, cha, c*a/ in random order, VOT and F0 of the following vowels were measured, and the result was significant for the three-way distinction with a strong correlation between VOT and F0, and also in the VOT-F0 plot, no overlapping among the domains was observed. As for the perception test, I manipulated the data recorded in the production test, heightening or lowering their F0 values. In all, 14 subjects (seven males and seven females) participated in the identification test. The result was as follows: the fortis stimuli were not influenced by F0 changes, and the VOT and F0 values at the lenis-aspirated boundary were negatively correlated. From these results I concluded the following: 1) VOT and F0 can distinguish the three domains of Korean obstruents without overlapping; 2) the fortis perception does not need F0 as its acoustic cue; and 3) VOT and F0 in the distinction between the lenis and aspirated are in the phonetic trading relation[2].

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.73-84
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• 2003

This study investigates differences in intensity across the three different Korean obstruent types in terms of the RMS amplitude of both the entire section and the first 512 samples of the immediately following vowel in two positions. The results showed that for the utterance initial position the RMS amplitude of both the entire section and the first 512 samples of the vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for aspirated ones, and weakest for lenis ones, with a significant difference between each pair of them. For the intervocalic position, in contrast, the intensity of the entire vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for lenis ones, and weakest for aspirated ones, with no significant difference between the last two groups, whereas the intensity of the first 512 samples of the vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for lenis ones, and weakest for aspirated ones, with a significant difference between each pair of the three groups. This means that the intensity of the earlier part of the vowel functions as a discriminator of Korean obstruents. The positional difference is due to the different behavior of the lenis obstruents in the intervocalic position, such that the intensity build-up is already on its way with voice lead.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.63-69
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the maximum and optimal listening speed of Korean TTS for the blind. Five blind participants took part in this study. The instruments used in this study were 17 sentence sets (2 sets for an excercise, 10 sets for a repeated test, and 5 sets for a random test), with short meaningful sentences (the same sentences for the repeated test, different sentences for the random test) with 15 differentiated speeds (Range=0.8-3.6, SD=0.2). Each participant's maximum and quickest listening speeds were calculated by objective recall accuracy (determined by the number of correctly recalled syllables/the total number of syllables in a sentence X 100) and subjective recall accuracy (recall accuracy judged by each participant's subjective evaluation). The results showed that the participants' recall accuracy had a tendency to increase as the TTS speed decreased. Participants' subjective recall accuracy was higher than objective recall accuracy in the repeated tests and vice versa in the random tests. The results also revealed that the participants' sentence familiarity had an influence on their Korean TTS listening speed.