• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.23-32
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• 2014

This study presents the prosodic characteristics of 'Motherese' and 'Teacherese (child care teacher and kindergarten teacher)'. 21 mothers and 24 teachers spoke to children in the child care center or kindergarten. Children are in their 4;00-6;11. Speech and articulation rate, number of accentual phrases (APs), number of intonational phrases (IPs), pitch-related factors (f0, pitch range, f0 standard deviation), and intonation slope (mean Absolute, f0, q-tone slope) were measured. 2 groups spoke 2 sentential types (interrogative_ alternative question, declarative_ coordinated sentence) in 2 situations (one accompanied with the children, the other done without children, but pretending as if they were in front of the children). The results indicate that teachers show more noticeable prosodic characteristics than mothers do.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.7-19
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• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.7
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• pp.461-471
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic data for development of Korean teaching programs for immigrant women from multicultural families through the acoustic analysis of their prosodic phrasing and intonation pattern. The results showed that immigrant women showed some differences in most of the prosodic characteristics from a Korean women's group: Immigrant women realized the first word of a sentence in an intonational phrase while Korean women did in an accentual phrase. They also haven't yet correctly learned the tone type of the first of an accentual phrase which differs depending on the type of its first segment yet. As a result, they showed many diverse intonation patterns compared to Korean women. Furthermore, the immigrant women's groups showed some differences between them in a few prosodic characteristics. Philippine women, whose residence duration in Korea is relatively longer than that of Vietnamese women, were more similar to Korean women: Vietnamese women read a sentence with a larger number of intonational phrases than Philippine women did. And they realized sentence-final boundary tone of a yes-no question not only in 'H%' but also in 'HL%' while, like Korean women, Philippine women did only in 'H%'.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.27-40
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• 2022

This study identifies distinguishing features and variability of intonation patterns in Korean phonological phrases. Syllable count and segmental content, which are phonological conditions, of the intonation of phonological phrases were examined. Based on the four syllables, the intonation of a phonological phrase can be set to LHLH as the basic form, and syllable count acts as a condition for making a variation. The "3 syllables or less condition" changes the intonation from a curved line to a straight line. Variation occurs in pitch bandwidth and fluctuation according to segmental content. The first segment affects the phonological phrase formation bandwidth, and the following segment affects the pitch fluctuation. If the first segment has [+aspirate], [+tense], [+continuant], the intonation is formed in the high band, otherwise, it is formed in the low band. If the second or after segment in the intonation realized in the high band has [-aspirate], [-tense], [-continuant], the pitch is lowered to the lowest level of the low bandwidth. In the intonation realized in the low band, [+aspirate], [+tense], [+continuant] is blocked by the second descent of LHLH.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.49-68
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• 2024

This study aims to acoustically analyze Korean language characteristics and convert these findings into musical elements, providing foundational data for evidence-based music-language rehabilitation. We collected voice data from thirty men and thirty women aged 19-25, each providing six-syllable prosodic units composed of two accentual phrases, including both declarative and interrogative sentences. Analyzing this data with Praat, we extracted syllabic acoustic properties and conducted statistical analyses based on acoustic properties, sentence type, gender, and particle presence. Significant differences were found in syllable frequency and duration based on accentual phrases and prosodic units (p < .001), with interrogative showing higher frequencies and declaratives longer durations (p < .001). Female frequencies were significantly higher than males' (p < .001), with longer durations observed (p < .001). Particle syllables also showed significantly stronger intensities (p < .001). Finally, we presented melodies converted from these acoustic properties into musical scores based on pitch, duration, and accent. The insights from this analysis of six-syllable Korean sentences will guide further research on developing a system for melodizing large-scale Korean speech data, expected to be crucial in music-based language rehabilitation.

• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.69-84
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• 2007

Japanese is a language having intonations, which are indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the accentual phrases (APs) 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, 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 which can enhance the quality of synthesized speech by reducing the errors in predicting break indices (BI), are proposed. The method is to use a new definition for the phonetic symbols, which combine the phonetic values of Japanese words with the accents information. Since a stream of defined phonetic symbols includes the information on the changes in intonations, the BI can be easily predicted by dividing the intonation phrase (IP) into several APs. As a result of an experiment, the accuracy of break generations was 98 % and the proposed method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.11-22
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• 2010

The present study attempts to investigate declination in Korean and its relevant aspects to the length of utterance, the clause boundary, and focus. More specifically, I examine the relation of declination with the length of utterance, the declination reset at the clause boundary, and the effect of focus on declination. Results showed that the length of utterance had no relation with the first and last pitch values of the utterance but that they were consistent regardless of the length of utterance. However, the declination slope changed to be relatively gentle from the fourth accentual phrase to the end of the whole intonational phrase. There was a reset of declination in such a way that the first pitch in the second phrase was always lower than that of the first phrase, but the first pitch in the third phrase was not always lower than that of the second phrase when the whole utterance was composed of three phrases. Finally, the pitch values of the focusing words decreased as their position went back in a sentence. One declination line was formed in the case of focused utterance, but in the case of an utterance that contained a clause boundary, a new declination line was formed at the start of each new clause. These findings can be applied to developing a Korean speech synthesizer that contains natural prosody; they can be also utilized for teaching Korean prosody.