• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.13-19
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• 2022

This study analyzed the pronunciations of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/ by 24 Japanese and 40 Korean speakers using the rise and steady+decay durations of their frication part in order to clarify the characteristics of their pronunciations. Discriminant analysis revealed that Japanese speakers' /s/ and /ts/ were well classified by the acoustic boundaries defined by a discriminant function. Using this boundary, Korean speakers' production of /s/ and /ts/ was analyzed. It was found that, in Korean speakers' pronunciation, misclassification of /s/ as /ts/ was more frequent than that of /ts/ as /s/, indicating that both the /s/ and /ts/ distributions shift toward short rise and steady+decay durations. Moreover, their distributions were very similar to those of Korean fricatives and affricates. These results suggest that Korean speakers' classification error might be because of their use of Korean lax and tense fricatives to pronounce Japanese /s/, and Korean lax and tense affricates to pronounce Japanese /ts/.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.285-295
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• 2010

The frequency in which noise energy is generated, that is, the point where the preceding vowel ends is the cut-off frequency. Thereupon, this study intends to examine the correlations between, cut-off frequencies, cut-off frequencies changed by the following vowel, and cut-off frequencies and nasalance score, of fricatives and affricates with the subjects of children with the cleft palate and normal children. The subjects of this study are total 12 children residing in Seoul and Gyeonggi area. Six are the children diagnosed to have the cleft palate and whose chronological age are more than six, and another six are the normal children who are also more than six and whose chronological age and sex correspond to those of the former. Each subject was presented with nonsyllable environment and sentence environment(50 environment) of fricatives and affricates. Regarding meaningless syllable environment and sentence environment of fricatives and affricates, children with the cleft palate had lower cut-off frequencies than normal children. As a result of comparative study on correlations between cut-off frequencies and nasalance score of children with the cleft palate and normal children, it doesn't show statistically significant correlations in both meaningless syllable environment and sentence environment of normal children, but it has statistically significant correlations in sentence environment of children with the cleft palate.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.20
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• pp.5-27
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• 2010

This paper studies the relation between canonical/variegated babble (CB/VB) and early speech in an infant acquiring Mandarin Chinese from 9 to 17 months. The infant was audio-and video-taped in her home almost every week. The data analyzed here come from 1,621 utterances extracted from 23 sessions ranging from 30 minutes to one hour, from age 00:09;07 to 01:05;27. The data was digitized, and segments from 23 sessions were transcribed in narrow IPA and coded for analysis. Babble was coded from age 00:09;07 to 01:00;00, and words were coded from 01:00;00 to 01:05;27, proto-words appeared at 11 months, and some babble was still present after 01:10;00. 3821 segments were counted in CB/VB utterances, plus the segments found in 899 word tokens. The data transcription was completed and checked by the author and was rechecked by two other researchers who majored in Chinese phonetics in order to ensure the reliability, we reached an agreement of 95.65%. Mandarin Chinese is phonetically very rich in consonants, especially affricates: it has aspirated and unaspirated stops in labial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation; affricates and fricatives in alveolar, retroflex, and palatal places; /f/; labial, alveolar, and velar nasals; a lateral;[h]; and labiovelar and palatal glides. In the child's pre-speech phonetic repertoire, 7 different consonants and 10 vowels were transcribed at 00:09;07. By 00:10;16, the number of phones was more than doubled (17 consonants, 25 vowels), but the rate of increase slowed after 11 months of age. The phones from babbling remained active throughout the child's early and subsequent speech. The rank order of the occurrence of the major class types for both CB and early speech was: stops, approximants, nasals, affricates, fricatives and lateral. As expected, unaspirated stops outnumbered aspirated stops, and front stops and nasals were more frequent than back sounds in both types of utterances. The fact that affricates outnumbered fricatives in the child's late babble indicates the pre-speech influence of the ambient language. The analysis of the data also showed that: 1) the phonetic characteristics of CB/VB and early meaningful speech are extremely similar. The similarities of CB/VB and speech prove that the two are deeply related; 2) The infant has demonstrated similar preferences for certain types of sounds in the two stages; 3) The infant's babbling was patterned at segmental level, and this regularity was similarly evident in the early speech of children. The three types being coronal plus front vowel; labial plus central and dorsal plus back vowel exhibited much overlap in the phonetic forms of CB/ VB and early speech. So the child's CB/ VB at this stage already shared the basic architecture, composition and representation of early speech. The evidence of similarity between CB/VB and early speech leaves no doubt that phones present in CB/VB are indeed precursors to early speech.

• MALSORI
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• no.29_30
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• pp.61-94
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• 1995

The aim of this paper is to describe the linguistic differences of two Koreas with a special emphasis on the phonetic aspect of Seoul and Pyongyang speech. The sources of the North Korean speech material used in the study are 1) the Pyongyang radio and TV broadcasts, 2) interviews of north Korean defectors and 3) speech material of north Korean scholars collected by the writer in london, Warsaw, France and China between 1989 and 1994. The most noticeable phonetic differences of Seoul and Pyongyang speech are abstracted as follows: 1) The vowels /이/, /에/ and /애/ are higher and fronter in Pyongyang speech than in Seoul speech. 2) The vowels /우/ and /으/ of Pyongyang speech are somewhat fronter than the corresponding vowels of Seoul speech. 3) The Pyongyang vowels /으/ and if are produced with rounded lips compared to the corresponding Seoul vowels. 4) The Pyongyang vowel /h) is much lower in tongue position and at the same time somewhat fronter than the corresponding Seoul vowel. 5) The consonants /r ,i ,n / are pronounced in Pyongyang as alveolar affricates or something close to them whereas they are pronounced in Seoul as post-alveolar affricates. 6) Unlike in Seoul speech there is a very strong tendency in Pyongyang speech to reduce aspiration feature in consonant seouences such as /ㅂ+ㅎ/, /ㄷ+ㅎ/, /ㄱ+ㅎ/. 7) /ㄴ/ and /ㄹ/(flap) freely occur word-initially in Pyongyang speech whereas they are restricted in Seoul speech. 8) Unlike in Seoul speech the phonemic contrast of long and short vowels are generally not functional in Pyongyang speech. Thus the vowels pronounced long in Seoul speech are usually pronounced short in Pyongyang speech.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.85-102
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• 2018

This study aims to contrast phonological characteristics of Korean and Turkish in terms of language universality. Considering consonants, both languages have the same number of consonants (21), which is the most typologically plausible structure of consonants. Thus, it can be said that they display high universality in the number of consonants. However, Turkish shows higher universality in regards to their substance, i.e., it differs from Korean when it comes to the structure of plosives and affricates. Turkish has two contrastive consonants, i.e., voiced and voiceless. However, the Korean plosives and affricates consist of neutral, tense and aspirate voiceless. In the case of vowels, both Korean with 10 vowels and Turkish with 8 vowels show lower universality. Yet, all of those vowels belong to the list of the most plausible vowels which makes their universality higher in substance. In respect of the syllable structure, Korean with its (C)V(C) type shows a moderately complex structure while Turkish with its (C)V(C)(C) type has a complex structure. The coda may consist of two consonants in Turkish while only one consonant is possible in Korean. However, onset is composed of one consonant in both languages. The contrastive study of similarities and differences between Korean and Turkish in terms of phonological characteristics will help not only understand the two languages but also provide useful information to increase the efficacy of Korean language education for Turkish learners of Korean, whose number is rapidly increasing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2021

While recent acoustic studies have reported associations of fronted sibilants (fricatives /s s⁎/ and affricates /tɕ tɕ⁎/) with gender in Seoul Korean, there have not been any studies examining the relationship of the variants with adult speakers' ages. The current study analyzes sibilant productions from 39 adult speakers born between 1942 and 2008 (19 females) in terms of spectral peak frequencies (SPFs) in frication, an acoustic index of place of articulation (POA). The results indicate some phonetic contexts where higher sibilant SPFs, i.e., fronter POAs, are associated with younger adults and those fronted variants are realized in a gender-differentiated manner -- tense affricates and word-initial tense fricatives before /i/ in the females' productions, and word-medial tense fricatives before /a/ in the males' productions. The findings confirm that the distributions of the fronted sibilants are accounted for not only by the speakers' gender but also by their ages, indicating that the fronted variants are innovative forms of realizing sibilants in Seoul Korean. In addition, the current results convincingly show that the fronted sibilant variants are not mere reflections of individuals' physiological differences since they are not observed across all of the examined phonetic contexts.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.06c
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• pp.375-378
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• 1998

본 연구의 목적은 한국에 존재하는 세 종류 파찰음/ㅈ,ㅊ, ㅉ/의 시간적.공간적 조음 특성을 전자구개도와 스펙트로그램 분석을 통하여 면밀히 검토해 보려는 것이다. 이를 위하여 두 실험이 행해 졌는데, 조음 음성학적인 실험(전자구개도를 이용한 실험)에는 한 명의 피험자가, 그리고 음향 음성학적인 실험(음향 자료의 스펙트로그램 분석)에는 세 명의 피험자가 발화한 자료가 이용되었다. 대상이 되는 세 자음들은 /ㅏ_ㅏ/, /ㅡ_ㅡ/, /ㅣ_ㅣ/ 등 세 모음 사이에서 발화되었으나, 모음이 자음의 조음에 미치는 영향, 즉 모음_자음 동시조음은 본 연구의 범위에서 제외되었다.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1992.06a
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• pp.71-75
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• 1992

This paper proposes algorithm in order to classify Korean consonant phonemes same as polosives, fricatives affricates into la sounds, glottalized sounds, aspirated sounds. This three kinds of sounds are one of distinctive characters of the Korean language which don't eist in language same as English. This is thesis on classfication of 14 Korean consonants(k, t, p, s, c, k', t', p', s', c', kh, ph, ch) as a previous stage for Korean phone recognition. As feature sets for classification, LPC cepstral analysis. The eperiments are two stages. First, using short-time speech signal analysis and Mahalanobis distance, consonant segments are detected from original speech signal, then the consonants are classified by fuzzy inference. As the results of computer simulations, the classification rate of the speech data was come to 93.75%.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.409-414
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• 1996

The aim of this paper is to research on the actual condition of Koreans' Spanish consonants pronunciation with an emphasis on describing the phonetic different of Korean speakers and Spanish speakers. 40 Spanish words were chosen for the speech sampling, and 10 Spanish majoring Korean students from Seoul or Kyunggi Province and 3 Spanish speakers form Castile, Spain participated in the interview. The most noticeable phonetic differences of Korean speakers' pronunciation comparing with Spanish speakers are abstracted as follows: 1) The voiced stops are pronounced voiceless or weak voiced. 2) The voiced stops are slightly aspirated. 3) The length of voiceless consonants is quite longer than the length of proceeding vowel. 4) Fricatives and affricates are somewhat fronter, and weaker in the degree of friction. 5) There is a strong tendency to geminate dental lateral /l/ such as 'pelo' and to vocalize palatal lateral /$\rightthreetimes$/ such as 'calle' 6) Unlike in Spanish speech flap $\mid$r$\mid$ and trill [r] are pronounced similarly in Korean speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.27-35
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• 1991

음소를 인식의 기본 단위로 하는 소규모 음성 인식 시스템을 구현하기 위한 기초 연구로서 마 찰음(/ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅎ/) 과 파찰음(/ㅈ, ㅉ, ㅊ/) 에 대하여 지속시간, 평균패턴, 분산비를 이용하여 각 음소 의 특징을 분석하고 각 음소군 내에서의 식별에 유효한 parameter들을 추출하여 인식 실험을 실시하 였다. 지속시간의 분포, 평균패턴의 분포, 분산비의 분포를 이용하여 분석한 결과 6차원 정도의 cepstrum 계수만으로 마찰음 및 파찰음의 식별이 가능하고, 시간 방향의 정보는 음성의 시단으로부터 14 frame 정도의 특징을 인식 파라미터로 할 경우가 최적임을 알 수 있었다. 이를 이용한 인식실험 결과에서는 조음방법별로 분류된 음소군내의 각 음소에 대한 인식실험의 인식률 보다는 발음방법별 인식실험시의 인식률이 높게 나타나 동일 음소군 내에서의 각 음소에 대한 식별이 더 어려움을 알 수 있었고, 특징 파라미터의 길이를 음성의 시단으로부터 14 frame 정도로 했을 때 조음방법별 인식률은 평균 81.1%, 발음방법별 인식률은 평균 97.9%로 최고의 인식률을 나타내었다. 특징 파라미터의 길이 를 14 frame 이상으로 증가시켜도 인식률은 큰 변화가 없어 분석 결과를 잘 설명하고 있음을 알 수 있었다.