• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.1-17
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate and quantitatively describe the acoustic characteristics of current Korean monophthongs. Recordings were made of 33 men and 27 women producing the vowels /i, e, ${\epsilon}$, a, ${\partial}$, o, u, i/ in a carrier phrase "This character is ___." A listening test was conducted in which 19 participants judged each vowel. F1, F2, and F3 were measured from the vowels judged as intended vowels by more than 17 people from the listening test. Analysis of formant data shows some interesting results including the undeniable confirmation of the 7-vowel system in modern Korean. It turns out that quite different sounding Korean vowels and English vowels happen to have very similar formant measurements. Also the difference between "citation-form reading" vs. "natural utterance reading" is discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.169-186
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• 2000

This paper aims to confirm the mispronunciation of native Korean students due to the phonetic and phonological system differences between English and Korean, and to find the works-to-do by experiment. Many Korean students tend to differentiate the sounds of word-final stop consonants not by vowel duration or the allophones but by the phoneme of the consonant itself. In English, Stop sounds change through the conditions of the aspirated, unaspirated, or unreleased sounds. But in Korean they are not allophones of phonemes but distinct phonemes. Therefore, many Korean students are apt to add an extra vowel sound /i/ after the final stop consonant in the eve form due to both the unperception of the differences between the phonemes and the allophones of stop consonants, and the influence of the Korean sound-sequence relationship. Since the replacement of the allophones and extra vowel addition does not change the meaning, the importance was almost lost. Nevertheless, this kind of study is essential for the precise learning and the use of the English language.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.3-13
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• 2003

The devoicing vowel is a phonological process whose contrast in sonority is lost or reduces in a particular phonetic environment. Phonetically, the vocal fold vibration originates from the abduction/adduction of the glottis in relation to supraglottal articulatory movements. The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean vowel devoicing by means of experimental instruments. The interrelated laryngeal adjustments and aerodynamic effects for this voicing can clarify the redundant articulatory gestures relevant to the distinctive feature of sonority. Five test words were selected, being composed of the high vowel /i/, between the fricative and strong aspirated or lenis affricated consonants. The subjects uttered the test words successively at a normal or at a faster speed. The EMG, the sensing tube Gaeltec S7b and the High-Speech Analysis system and MSL II were used in these studies. Acoustically, three different types of speech waveforms and spectrograms were classified, based on the voicing variation. The intraoral air pressure curves showed differences, depending on the voicing variations. The activity patterns of the PCA and the CT for devoicing vowels appeared differently from those showing the partially devoicing vowels and the voicing vowels.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.48
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• pp.391-417
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• 2017

Southeast Asian languages are famous for having a large number of vowel sounds with an average of more than 20 vowel sounds in this certain language family. In addition, there are approximately 1,500 languages in this area, which accounts for approximately 20% of total languages in the world. For this reason, vowel systems of Southeast Asian languages should be explored to determine the nature of vowel structures of human natural languages. In this study, we analyze vowel systems of three languages, Tagalog, Malay and Thai, that have only primary or normal vowels and thus are relatively simple structures based on descriptive and analytic universals. We would also like to confirm if the six criteria of the tentative evaluation model taken from several previous literature is appropriate in applying analysis of vowel system universals under the method of the Greenbergian Universals or statistic universals. What we have found from this research are (i) the three languages have high level of universals with some exceptional cases such as three-vowel system of Tagalog, and (ii) some of the six criteria, together with some cases of analytic universals, are not quite suitable for understanding language-specific universals that are different from other languages.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.71-73
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• 2007

The Purpose of the study is to give Korean-English leaners better knowledge on vowel sounds in their learning English. The traditional description of the cardinal vowel system developed by Daniel Johns in 1917 is not enough to provide English learners with clear ideas in producing native like vowel sounds. For the reason, three Korean-native subjects, one male, one female and one child are chosen to produce 7 cardinal vowels and compare them with native English and American speaker's vowel sounds. The difference of produced vowels sounds is quantified and visualized by employing Sona-match program. The results have been fairly remarkable. Firstly, Korean-English learner's vowel sounds are articulated differently from their intention of vowel production. Secondly, the tongue positions of Koreans are placed slightly more down and forward to the lips than those of English and Americans. However, the front vowel /i/ sound is quite close to English and Americans. Lastly the mid-vowel /${\partial}$/ sound is not produced in any articulations of Korean-native speakers. It is thought that the mid vowel, /${\partial}$/ is a type of a weak sound regarded as 'schwa' which needs a great deal of exposure to the language to acquire a physical skill of articulation.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.617-624
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• 2017

Speech recognition is now one of the most widely used technologies in HCI. Many applications where speech recognition may be used (such as home automation, automatic speech translation, and car navigation) are now under active development. In addition, the demand for speech recognition systems in mobile environments is rapidly increasing. This paper is intended to present a method for instant recognition of the Korean vowel 'ㅡ', as a part of a Korean speech recognition system. The proposed method uses bulk indicators (which are calculated in the time domain) instead of the frequency domain and consequently, the computational cost for the recognition can be reduced. The bulk indicators representing predominant sequence patterns of the vowel 'ㅡ' are learned by neural networks and final recognition decisions are made by those trained neural networks. The results of the experiment show that the proposed method can achieve 88.7% recognition accuracy, and recognition speed of 0.74 msec per syllable.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.7
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• pp.312-318
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• 2006

The conventional lip-synch system has a two-step process, speech segmentation and recognition. However, the difficulty of speech segmentation procedure and the inaccuracy of training data set due to the segmentation lead to a significant Performance degradation in the system. To cope with that, the connected vowel recognition method using Head-Body-Tail (HBT) model is proposed. The HBT model which is appropriate for handling relatively small sized vocabulary tasks reflects co-articulation effect efficiently. Moreover the 7 vowels are merged into 3 classes having similar lip shape while the system is optimized by employing a class dependent SCHMM structure. Additionally in both end sides of each word which has large variations, 8 components Gaussian mixture model is directly used to improve the ability of representation. Though the proposed method reveals similar performance with respect to the CHMM based on the HBT structure. the number of parameters is reduced by 33.92%. This reduction makes it a computationally efficient method enabling real time operation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.203-206
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate and quantitatively describe the acoustic characteristics of current Korean monophthongs. Recordings were made of 33 men and 27 women producing the vowels /i, e, ${\varepsilon}$, a, (표현불가), O, u, (표현불가)/ in a carrier phrase "This character is _." A listening test was conducted in which 19 participants judged each vowel. F1, F2, and F3 were measured from the vowels judged as intended vowels by more than 17 people from the listening test. Analysis of formant data shows some interesting results including the undeniable confirmation of 7-vowel system in current Korean.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.15-30
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• 2006

This paper investigates differences between generations in the vowel system of the Daegu dialect in terms of F1 and F2 of the monophthongs. Three different groups of subjects participated in the present study: 20 female native speakers of the Daegu dialect(10 in their 20's and 10 in their 40's), and 10 female native speakers of the Seoul dialect as a control group. It has been assumed that the Daegu dialect has six vowels. However, younger generation appears to have 7 vowels different from older generation. The result of the present study showed that the Daegu dialect has different vowel systems between generations: for 40's have six vowels and 20's have seven vowels. These differences seems to be attributed to the influence of the Seoul dialect.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.3-16
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• 2010

This study aims at setting the hierarchy of difficulty of the 7 Korean monophthongs for Mongolian learners of Korean according to Prator's theory based on the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. In addition to that, it will be shown that the difficulties and errors for Mongolian learners of Korean as a second or foreign language proceed directly from this hierarchy of difficulty. This study began by looking at the speeches of 60 Mongolians for Mongolian monophthongs; data were investigated and analyzed into formant frequencies F1 and F2 of each vowel. Then, the 7 Korean monophthongs were compared with the resultant Mongolian formant values and are assigned to 3 levels, 'same', 'similar' or 'different sound'. The findings in assessing the differences of the 8 nearest equivalents of Korean and Mongolian vowels are as follows: First, Korean /a/ and /$\wedge$/ turned out as a 'same sound' with their counterparts, Mongolian /a/ and /ɔ/. Second, Korean /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/ turned out as a 'similar sound' with each their Mongolian counterparts /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/. Third, Korean /ɨ/ which is nearest to Mongolian /i/ in terms of phonetic features seriously differs from it and is thus assigned to 'different sound'. And lastly, Mongolian /$\mho$/ turned out as a 'different sound' with its nearest counterpart, Korean /u/. Based on these findings the hierarchy of difficulty was constructed. Firstly, 4 Korean monophthongs /a/, /$\wedge$/, /i/, /e/ would be Level 0(Transfer); they would be transferred positively from their Mongolian counterparts when Mongolians learn Korean. Secondly, Korean /o/, /u/ would be Level 5(Split); they would require the Mongolian learner to make a new distinction and cause interference in learning the Korean language because Mongolian /o/, /u/ each have 2 similar counterpart sounds; Korean /o, u/, /u, o/. Thirdly, Korean /ɨ/ which is not in the Mongolian vowel system will be Level 4(Overdifferentiation); the new vowel /ɨ/ which bears little similarity to Mongolian /i/, must be learned entirely anew and will cause much difficulty for Mongolian learners in speaking and writing Korean. And lastly, Mongolian /$\mho$/ will be Level 2(Underdifferentiation); it is absent in the Korean language and doesn‘t cause interference in learning Korean as long as Mongolian learners avoid using it.