• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.29-41
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• 2005

This paper is to show the diphthong system of Jeju dialect speakers in their 70s or more on the basis of the acoustic analysis of their phonetic data. It is revealed through the analysis of their phonetic data that they clearly distinguish such diphthongs as [we], [w$\epsilon$], [yc] and [yo]. However, this paper shows that they are phonetically insensitive to the separation between [ye] and [y$\epsilon$] and they seldom make a precise pronunciation of diphthong [iy], which male speakers tend to pronounce to be [i] and female speakers to be [i].

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

• MALSORI
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• no.40
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• pp.1-12
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• 2000

This paper investigated how $/\int/$ in English and German is perceived and interpreted in the loanwords in Korean. $/\int/$ in these languages does not show one-to-one correspondence in Korean: $/\int/$ in the coda position in English and German is perceived as [swi] in Korean while $/\int/$ in the onset position is perceived as [syu]. This paper examined phonetic characteristics of $/\int/$ in English and German through its acoustic analysis and attempted to figure out which factor could explain this surface distribution of [swi] and [syu]; phonological (onset vs. coda) or phonetic (coarticulation) factor. Two acoustic features of $/\int/$ in English and German were examined: duration and energy Peak frequency of the frication noise. German $/\int/$ Perceived as [swi] in Korean showed higher energy Peak frequency and longer duration than that perceived as [syu] in Korean. English iii perceived as [swi] also showed longer duration than that Perceived as [syu] in Korean but energy Peak frequency showed different behavior. English $/\int/$ showed coarticulation with the preceding vowel rather than being affected by its position in the syllable in English. This paper concludes that 1)Phonetic characteristics used are duration and energy Peak frequency of its frication noise when $/\int/$ in English and German are adopted in Korean, 2)duration is used prior to energy peak frequency, which can be used as an enhancing feature.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.7-19
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• 2007

The present study investigated some phonetic attributes which distinguish two Korean stop types $^-aspirated$ and $lax^-$ in a prosodic position which has previously received little attention, namely medial in an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables which are initial in an accentual phrase (Jun, 1993) is said to depend on the type of stop (aspirated or lax), while that of syllables which are medial in an accentual phrase are not. In Experiment 1, nine native Korean speakers read sentences with a controlled prosodic pattern in which aspirated or lax stops occurred in accentual phrase-medial position. Acoustic analysis revealed significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. The results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops than previously demonstrated. Phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean will need to be revised to account for these results.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.101-110
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• 2018

This study aimed to show that Selkirk's concept of resyllabification offers a better analysis than Kahn's ambisyllabification to account for phonetic resyllabification. We conducted two production experiments to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the English /s/ in real words and nonce words. Ten English native speakers and six English native speakers participated in experiment 1 and experiment 2, respectively. Three acoustic cues - frication duration, center of gravity and aspiration duration of word-medial /s/ - were measured. We found that these three cues of the word-medial /s/ were realized significantly differently depending on the stresshood and openness of the preceding syllable. We preferred Selkirk's resyllabification to Kahn's ambisyllabification to explain this result because the word-medial and intervocalic /s/ behaved as the coda (as opposed to the onset) when the preceding syllable was stressed and open. The result thus suggested that two conditions must be met for the resyllabification rule to apply in English: a word-medial consonant is resyllabified only when its preceding syllable is stressed and open.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.157-172
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• 1996

This study aims to suggest some theoretical methodology for analysis of the prosodic patterns in Korean Read Speech. The engineering effort relevant to the phonetic study has focused to the importance of prosodic phrasing which may play a major role in analyzing the phonetic DB. Before establishing the prosodic phrase as the prosodic unit, we should describe the features of the boundary signal in a target sentence. With this in mind, the general characteristics of Read Speech and the ToBI(tones and Break Indices), which has been currently in vogue with respect to the prosodic labelling system were presented as the first step. The concrete analysis was carried out with the fable 'North Wind and the Sun' Korean version, where about 25 prosodic units were discriminated by perceptual approach for 5 subjects. Establishing various informations which can be used for deciding a boundary position systematically, we can proceed to the next, viz. acoustic analysis of prosodic unit. The most important which we primarily study for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech may be, at first, detecting the boundary signals in the speech file and accordingly reestablishment it within the raw text.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.3-10
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Korean alveolar sibilant sounds of children with cerebral palsy by acoustic analysis. Thirteen children with spastic cerebral palsy aging from 6 to 10 years old, were selected by an articulation test, and compared with a control group of thirty children. The meaningless monosyllable CV, disyllable VCV(/asa/) and frame sentence including target syllables CV were measured. C was from the /s, s'/, and V was from the set /a, i, u, ${\varepsilon}$, o, ɯ, ʌ/. Multi-Speech was used for data recording and analysis. As a result, the frication duration of lenis-glottalized alveolar sibilant of children with cerebral palsy was significantly shorter than that of the control group in CV, VCV and frame sentence. The vowel duration in the following lenis-glottalized alveolar sibilant of children with cerebral palsy was significantly longer than that of the control group in CV, VCV and frame sentence. The children with cerebral palsy showed frequency and intensity of friction intervals which were significantly lower than in the control group in CV, VCV and frame sentence. In the comparison of the lenis-glottalized alveolar sibilant by the children with cerebral palsy group's phonation types, the frication duration showed a significant difference between the phonation types in CV, VCV and between the phonetic contexts. The glottalized-sibilant was longer than the lenis-sibilant in all the phonetic contexts. The subsequent vowel duration showed a significant difference between the phonation types in VCV and between the phonetic contexts(p<.05). The vowel duration in the following glottalized-sibilant was longer than the vowel duration in the following lenis-sibilant in all the phonetic contexts. In the frequency there was a significant difference between the phonation types in CV, and in the intensity there was a significant difference between the phonation type in CV and VCV. The children with spastic cerebral palsy had difficulty in articulating the alveolar sibilant due to poor control ability in laryngeal, respiration and articulatory movements which require fine motor coordination. This study quantitatively analyzes the acoustic parameters of the alveolar sibilant in various phonetic contexts. Therefore, the results are expected to help provide fundamental data for an intervention of articulation treatment for children with cerebral palsy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2023

The purpose of this study is to determine how the Korean diphthong /jo/ shows phonetic variation in various linguistic environments. The pronunciation of /jo/ is discussed, focusing on the relationship between phonetic variation and the distribution range of vowels. The location in a word (monosyllable, word-initial, word-medial, word-final) and word class (content word, function word) were analyzed using the speech of 10 female speakers of the Seoul Corpus. As a result of determining the frequency of appearance of /jo/ in each environment, the pronunciation type and word class were affected by the location in a word. Frequent phonetic reduction was observed in the function word /jo/ in the acoustic analysis. The word class did not change the average phonetic values of /jo/, but changed the distribution of individual tokens. These results indicate that the linguistic environment affects the phonetic distribution of vowels.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.111-125
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• 1997

This experimental phonetic analysis aims to describe standard Korean simple vowels with a view to presenting the vowel quality change from generation to generation, especially between the 50's and the 20's. This change reflects that the contemporary vowel system has both stable and unstable aspect: the former can be affirmed in the vowels with extreme positions in the vowel quadrilateral. and the latter in some vowels(e.g.,'ㅔ/ㅐ') which have the non-quantal vowel characteristics in the current vowel system. Formant values are measured to show these. And the results of acoustic analysis are presented graphically in the vowel quadrilateral for the convenience' sake. The comparison between the articulatory vowel quadrilateral and the acoustic one shows a lot concerning the current vowel quality change.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.24-30
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• 2001

This article is concerned with automatic segmentation for Korean speech signals. All kinds of transition cases of phonetic units are classified into 3 types and different strategies for each type are applied. The type 1 is the discrimination of silence, voiced-speech and unvoiced-speech. The histogram analysis of each indicators which consists of wavelet coefficients and SVF (Spectral Variation Function) in wavelet coefficients are used for type 1 segmentation. The type 2 is the discrimination of adjacent vowels. The vowel transition cases can be characterized by spectrogram. Given phonetic transcription and transition pattern spectrogram, the speech signal, having consecutive vowels, are automatically segmented by the template matching. The type 3 is the discrimination of vowel and voiced-consonants. The smoothed short-time RMS energy of Wavelet low pass component and SVF in cepstral coefficients are adopted for type 3 segmentation. The experiment is performed for 342 words utterance set. The speech data are gathered from 6 speakers. The result shows the validity of the method.