• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.59-69
• /
• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the variation of pitch contour observed in the reading of Korean sentences produced by Chinese Korean-learners. In the reading context, Korean sentence intonation can be described by considering accentual phrases' pitch pattern and intonational phrases' boundary tone. But when APs and IPs connect to each other to form sentences, another aspect of speech production must be considered, that is declination of pitch contour. So, in order to examine how Chinese speakers produce Korean sentence intonation, we have analysed the sentences' pitch contours produced by fourteen Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to decline the pitch contour in shorter sentences, but for longer sentences, the declination was not observed. Moreover, even though Chinese speakers produced sentences with declination, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.95-109
• /
• 2004

Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 1998.08a
• /
• pp.356-359
• /
• 1998

This paper proposes the speech synthesis method using Korean prosodic rules as an important technique for Korean speech synthesis. The prosodic model for speech synthesis is composed of accentual phrases and intonational phrases which are derived from hierarchical structure of prosody. This prosodic model controls duration time, intonation and pause of synthesized speech. Synthesis units constitute of demi-syllables and VCV-triphones which can make unlimited vocabularies, and TD-PSOLA is used a sthe synthesis method.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6
• /
• pp.181-195
• /
• 1999

This study proposes a method of recognizing postpositions and suffixes in Korean spoken language, using prosodic information. We detect grammatical boundaries automatically at first, by using prosodic information of the accentual phrase, and then we recognize grammatical function words by backward-tracking from the boundaries. The experiment employs 300 sentential speech data of 10 men's and 5 women's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 1080 accentual phrases and 11 postpositions and suffixes are included. The result shows the recognition rate of postpositions in two cases. In one case in which only correctly detected boundaries are included, the recognition rate is 97.5%, and in the other case in which all detected boundaries are included, the recognition rate is 74.8%.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.51-59
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this study is to examine the pitch pattern of Korean accentual phrases produced by Chinese Korean-learners in the reading of a Korean text. Korean accentual phrase is determined by a specific F0 contour. And the pitch contour of APs differ depending on their length and the nature of initial segment. In order to examine if Chinese speakers are also aware such a phonetic properties, we have examined the AP pitch contours produced by 15 Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers' pitch errors were observed in initial segment-tone interaction and in type of pitch patterns. However, even though Chines speakers produced the same type of pitch patterns, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers. Finally, on the basis of theses results, we proposed a teaching method that visualizes the F0 contour.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.35-46
• /
• 1998

In this paper production and perception data were examined to discover what acoustic features are used in distinguishing wh-questions and yes/no-questions. Production data show that the two question types are distinguished by different accentual phrasing, pitch ranges in wh-phrases, and initial lenis stop voicing of the first syllable in verb phrases. Perception data by synthetic intonation show that the two question types are distinguished by the width of pitch ranges between the first and the second syllable in wh-phrases. Initial lenis stop voicing of the first syllable in verb phrases produces a strong effect on the perceptual discrimination of the two question types.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.64
• /
• pp.39-51
• /
• 2007

The purpose of this study is to investigate prosodic characteristics in the speech of adults with cerebral palsy through a comparison with the speech of normal speakers. Ten speakers with cerebral palsy (6 males, 4 females) and 6 normal speakers (3 males, 3 females) served as subjects. The results revealed that, compared to normal speakers, speakers with cerebral palsy showed a slower speech rate, a larger number of intonational phrases(IPs) and pauses, a larger number of accentual phrases(APs) per IP, a longer duration of pauses, and more gradual slopes of [L +H] in APs. However, the two groups showed similar tone patterns in their APs. The results also showed mild to moderate correlations between speech intelligibility and the prosodic properties which showed significant differences between the two groups, suggesting that they could be important prosodic factors to predict speech intelligibility in the speech of adults with cerebral palsy.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 2008.06a
• /
• pp.983-984
• /
• 2008

This paper proposes a variable break that can offset prediction error as well as a pre-selection methods, based on the variable break, for enhanced unit selection. In Japanese, a sentence consists of several APs (Accentual phrases) and MPs (Major phrases), and the breaks between these phrases must predicted to realize text-to-speech systems. An MP also consists of several APs and plays a decisive role in making synthetic speech natural and understandable because short pauses appear at its boundary. The variable break is defined as a break that is able to change easily from an AP to an MP boundary, or from an MP to an AP boundary. Using CART (Classification and Regression Trees), the variable break is modeled stochastically, and then we pre-select candidate units in the unit-selection process. As the experimental results show, it was possible to complement a break prediction error and improve the naturalness of synthetic speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.33-39
• /
• 2010

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners' processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean listeners' comprehension patterns for syntactically ambiguous speech strings varying in 1) the relative height of F0 peaks across prosodic units, and 2) the types of prosodic phrasing, to see whether pitch range reset informs the recovery of syntactic structure even though it is not reflected in the intonational hierarchy in Korean. The results show that the hierarchical level of prosodic phrasing affects the parsing pattern of syntactic ambiguity. The pitch range reset also cued the location of syntactic boundaries, but this effect was confined to phrases across AP.

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