• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.25-34
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• 2002

One of the most important factor in the performance of Korean text-to-speech system is the prediction of accentual and intonational phrase boundary. The previous method of prediction shows only the 75-85% which is not proper in the practical and commercial system. Therefore, more accurate prediction must be needed in the practical system. In this study, we propose the simple and more accurate method of the prediction of AP, IP.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.143-169
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• 2000

This chapter presents an overview of Korean intonational structure and proposes a revised version of K -ToBI (Korean TOnes and Break Indices), a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. In the new version of K-ToBI, a tone tier is separated into two tiers: a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels tones marking the prosodic structure of an utterance, and a phonetic tone tier labels individual tones of an AP and an IP conforming to the surface pitch contour. Labelling surface tonal patterns will provide us data to test the underlying tonal patterns and to build phonetic implementation rules.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.89-110
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• 2002

Intonation is very difficult to describe and it is furthermore difficult to compare intonation between different languages because of their differences of intonation systems. This paper aims to compare some intonation phenomena between Korean, French and English. In this paper I will refer to ToBI (the Tone and Break Indices) which is a prosodic transcription model proposed originally by Pierrehumbert (1980) as a description tool. In the first part, I will summarize different ToBI systems, namely, K-ToBI (Korean ToBI), F-ToBI (French ToBI) and ToBI itself (English ToBI) in order to compare the differences of three languages within prosody. In the second part, I will analyze some tokens registered by Korean, French and American in different languages to show the difficulties of learning other languages and to find the prosodic cues to pronounce correctly other languages. The point of comparison in this study is the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Korean and in French and the intermediate phrase (ip) in English, which I will call ' subject phrase ' in this study for convenience.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.29-41
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• 2006

This study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of prosodic phrases in Korean contribute to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP), it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment utilizing an artificial language learning paradigm revealed that cues conforming to the aforementioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also indicated that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Nevertheless, results did show that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.47-54
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to analyse prosodic characteristics of accentual phrases (AP, hereafter) produced by Chinese learners of Korean in Korean text reading. The study is restricted only to the initial APs. Subjects are students who have been studying Korean at a beginner level. The results showed that Chinese learners of Korean tended to make errors in the realization of the tonal patterns of the initial 2 syllables of the initial APs. Also they showed different F0 slopes across the initial and second syllables in the initial APs. Chinese learners of Korean, therefore, need to focus on the prosodic characteristics of the initial 2 syllables of Korean APs to realize fluent Korean intonation.

• MALSORI
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• no.66
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• pp.117-130
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• 2008

This paper presents a method for automatically detecting Korean prosodic boundaries using both acoustic and grammatical information for the performance improvement of speech information processing systems. While most of previous works are solely based on grammatical information, our method utilizes not only grammatical information constructed by a Maximum-Entropy-based grammar model using 10 grammatical features, but also acoustical information constructed by a GMM-based acoustic model using 14 acoustic features. Given that Korean prosodic structure has two intonationally defined prosodic units, intonation phrase (IP) and accentual phrase (AP), experimental results show that the detection rate of AP boundaries is 82.6%, which is higher than the labeler agreement rate in hand transcribing, and that the detection rate of IP boundaries is 88.7%, which is slightly lower than the labeler agreement rate.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.85-100
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• 2007

This paper aims to propose how to extract intonation patterns using Momel, a pitch stylization algorithm, and to present results of analyzing speech corpora in comparison with those in earlier researches. Two speech corpora are used: one is the sound files obtained from the K-ToBI web site, and the other consists of 80 passages pronounced by 4 speakers (2 male and 2 female). The results show that Momel provides significant pitch targets which can be labeled as H and L tones within prosodic units such as Accentual Phrase (AP) and Intonation Phrase (IP). The resulting AP patterns and IP boundary tone patterns correspond to those in earlier researches. Thus, this study will contribute to the study of intonation as well as to the development of automatic intonation labeling systems.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.91-94
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• 2007

This paper aims to analyze the pronunciation of Korean Point-of-Interest (POI) data, which consist of 224 sound files, from the phonological point of view, adapting the notion of prosodic word within the framework of Intonational Phonology. Each POI word is broken down into prosodic words, which are defined as the minimal sequence of segments which can be produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP). Then the pronunciation of the POI word considering its prosodic words are analyzed. The results show that: in most cases, a prosodic word is realized as one AP; that, in some cases, two prosodic words are pronounced as one AP: and that no cases are found where 3 prosodic words are realized as one AP.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.19-23
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• 2006

This paper is for the comparison of prosodic phrasing in Korean spontaneous speech and read speech. For this comparison, The subjects read the transcriptions from their own spontaneous speech. The number of IP in spontaneous speech is more than in read speech, while The number of AP has no difference between them. A accentual phrase in spontaneous speech has less syllable than read speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.85-94
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• 2009

This paper investigates the intonation patterns of Korean spontaneous speech through an analysis of four dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The speech corpus, which is a subset of spontaneous speech database recorded and distributed by ETRI, is labeled in APs and IPs based on K-ToBI system using Momel, an intonation stylization algorithm. It was found that unlike in English, a significant number of APs and IPs include hesitation lengthening, which is known to be a disfluency phenomenon due to speech planning. This paper also claims that the hesitation lengthening is different from the IP-final lengthening and that it should be categorized as a new category, as it greatly affects the intonation patterns of the language. Except for the fact that 19.09% of APs show hesitation lengthening, the spontaneous speech shows the same AP patterns as in read speech with higher frequency of falling patterns such as LHL in comparison with read speech which show more LH and LHLH patterns. The IP boundary tones of spontaneous speech, showing the same five patterns such as L%, HL%, LHL%, H%, LH% as in read speech, show higher frequency of rising patterns (H% and LH%) and contour tones (HL%, LH%, LHL%) while read speech on the contrary shows higher frequency of falling patterns and simple tones at the end of IPs.