• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.127-130
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to examine the difference in acoustic features between Young Voices and Aged Voices, which are actually come from the same age group. The 12 female subjects in their thirties were participated and recorded their sustained vowel /a/, connected speech, and reading. Their voices were divided into Younger Voices and Aged Voices, which means voices sound like younger person and sound like in their age or more aged ones. Praat 4.4.22 was used to record and analyze their acoustic features like Fo, SFF, Jitter, Shimmer, HNR, Pitch-range. And the six female listeners guessed the subjects' age and judged whether they sound younger or as like their actual age. We used the Independent t-Test to find the significant difference between those two groups' acoustic features. The result shows a significant difference in Fo, SFF. The above and the previous studies tell us the group who sounds like younger or baby like voice has the similar acoustic features of actually young people.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.43-58
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• 2006

This study aims to investigate whether Chinese learning Korean and Korean native speakers show any difference in length and formant structures of the Korean liquid 'ㄹ' in the environments of v_v and v_# through the acoustic analysis of 10 Chinese learners' and 10 Koreans' utterances. The acoustic analysis of L2KSC DB shows that the length and formant structures of 'ㄹ' produced by Chinese learners are significantly different from the ones by Koreans. I explain these differences by contrasting the liquids and syllable structure constraints of the two languages, Chinese and Korean. In addition, I relate the F1 and F2's values to the tongue's movement when making a constriction, and conclude that Chinese learners pronounce the 'ㄹ' in the v_# environment with the tongue lower and backer than Koreans do.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.19-33
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper was to examine acoustical characteristics of phonatory offset-onset mechanism in the connected speech of female adults with stuttering and normal nonfluency. The phonatory offset-onset mechanism refers to the laryngeal articulatory gestures. Those gestures are required to mark word boundaries in phonetic contexts of the connected speech. This mechanism included 7 patterns based on the speech spectrogram. This study showed the acoustic features in the connected speech in the production of female adults with stuttering (n=1) and normal nonfluency (n=3). Speech tokens in V_V, V_H, and V_S contexts were selected for the analysis. Speech samples were recorded by Sound Forge, and the spectrographic analysis was conducted using Praat. Results revealed a stuttering (with a type of block) female exhibited more laryngealization gestures in the V_V context. Laryngealization gesture was more characterized by a complete glottal stop or glottal fry both in V_H and in V_S contexts. The results were discussed from theoretical and clinical perspectives.

• MALSORI
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• no.52
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• pp.111-120
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• 2004

This paper focuses on the DSP implementation of an HMM-based speech recognizer that can handle several hundred words of vocabulary size as well as speaker independency. First, we develop an HMM-based speech recognition system on the PC that operates on the frame basis with parallel processing of feature extraction and Viterbi decoding to make the processing delay as small as possible. Many techniques such as linear discriminant analysis, state-based Gaussian selection, and phonetic tied mixture model are employed for reduction of computational burden and memory size. The system is then properly optimized and compiled on the TMS320C6711 DSP for real-time operation. The implemented system uses 486kbytes of memory for data and acoustic models, and 24.5 kbytes for program code. Maximum required time of 29.2 ms for processing a frame of 32 ms of speech validates real-time operation of the implemented system.

• 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.

• MALSORI
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• no.15_18
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• pp.71-80
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• 1989

It is an honour to be speaking on phonetics at the invitation of the Phonetic Society of Korea. Through the Korean Hangout script, invented in the fifteenth century at the instigation of the great King Sejong, and the work Hunminjeongeum which describes it, this country has an important place in the world history of phonetics. Phonetics is the description and analysis of pronunciation. Spoken language can be investigated at three points: in the speaker (articulatory phonetics), in the hearer (auditory phonetics), and in the physical speech signal (acoustic phonetics)... Beginners in English who are Korean mother tongue have to learn to make the sound 'f' as in "coffee", which is a voiceless labio-dental fricative, lip on upper teeth. They also have to learn to make [\theta]sound in "think", a voiceless dental fricative.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.143-146
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• 2004

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the stem-final consonant clusters beginning with the liquid /ㄹ/ in Korean are realized in speech. Most scholars claim that the Korean stem-final consonant clusters are simplified and reduced to a stop consonant when pronounced. An attempt is made in this paper to verify the claim by conducting a series of listening tests and an acoustic analysis. The listening tests show that, contrary to the previous claims, some Koreans actually pronounce the stem-final consonant clusters as a whole. The result of the spectrographical study confirms our auditory observation. It has been found that the duration time taken by the stem-final consonant clusters is clearly longer when both consonants are pronounced than when only a liquid is pronounced. Similarly the vowel length of the previous syllable in the former is found to be longer in scale than the latter.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.311-329
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• 2001

This paper wanted to test the reality of English schwa by phonetic and phonological methods. Phonetically it wanted to see acoustic evidence of the relationship between the full vowels and their reduced vowels in the unstressed positions. Phonologically it wanted to prove how systematic the schwa sound is by the constraint-based grammar. As a result, the schwa phenomenon in English was supported both phonetically and phonologically. In the phonetic analysis no relationship Was found in the distribution of the F1 and F2 of the full vowels and their reduced vowels in the unstressed syllables of the derived words. The reduced vowels tended to converge into a target of F1 516 and F2 1815. The view that the schwa sounds have a target was supported. On the phonological side the constraint-based tableau produced the successful output by using FAITH (V), (equation omitted)V, FAITH V[-BACK+HiC], V[-Low, -TNS]#, REDUCE V[-STR, -TNS] as constraints. No ranking was found. Any violation of the constraints ousted the candidates.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.801-804
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• 2001

This article is concerned with automatic segmentation of two adjacent vowels for speech signals. All kinds of transition case of adjacent vowels can be characterized by spectrogram. Firstly the voiced-speech is extracted by the histogram analysis of vowel indicator which consists of wavelet low pass components. Secondly given phonetic transcription and transition pattern spectrogram, the voiced-speech portion which has consecutive vowels automatically segmented by the template matching. The cross-correlation function is adapted as a template matching method and the modified correlation coefficient is calculated for all frames. The largest value on the modified correlation coefficient series indicates the boundary of two consecutive vowel sounds. The experiment is performed for 154 vowel transition sets. The 154 spectrogram templates are gathered from 154 words(PRW Speech DB) and the 161 test words(PBW Speech DB) which are uttered by 5 speakers were tested. The experimental result shows the validity of the method.