• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.27-34
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• 2017

The purpose of this work is to examine the English and Korean voiceless plosives from the Buckeye[15] and Seoul[16] corpus in terms of their static spectral characteristics. The plosives were automatically extracted by a Praat script. In order to estimate the percent correctness in the classification of the plosives, discriminant analyses were performed whose trainings were based on four spectral moments, i.e. the center of gravity, variance, skewness and kurtosis as suggested in [6]. Another set of discriminant analyses were performed based on the spectral tilts. In the last set of analyeses, the spectral moments and tilts were both used in the training. Results showed that the correct classification rate did not exceed around 65% in the best case, which suggested that phonetic cues other than the release burst would be necessary including the dynamic spectral aspects and vowel-onset cues.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.75-83
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• 2012

The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.53-58
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to compare the first two vowel formants of the stressed and unstressed English vowels produced by ten young males (in their twenties and thirties) and ten old males (in their forties or fifties) from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. The results indicate that the stressed and unstressed vowels, /i/ and $/{\ae}/$ in particular, from the two groups are different in their formant frequencies. In addition, the vowel space of the unstressed vowels is somewhat smaller than that of the stressed vowels. Specifically, the range of the second formant of the unstressed vowels and that of the first formant of the unstressed front vowels were compressed. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation training for the Korean learners of English vowels. We propose that teachers of English pay attention to the stress patterns of English vowels as well as their formant frequencies.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.95-102
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten adult male speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [4], also known as the Seoul corpus, and to analyze them by comparing to earlier works on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] in terms of the various linguistic factors that are expected to affect the formant distribution. The vowels extracted from the Korean corpus were also compared to those of the read Korean. The results showed that the distribution of the vowel formants from the Korean corpus was very different from that of read Korean speech. The comparison with English corpus and read English speech showed similar patterns. The factors affecting the Korean vowel formants were the interviewer sex, the location of the target vowel or the syllable containing it with respect to the phrasal word or utterance and the speech rate of the surrounding words.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.19-25
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• 2021

설측음의 변이음에는 어두운 [l]과 밝은 [l]이 있다고 알려져 왔으나 최근 설측음의 변이음의 종류가 언어마다 다르다는 주장이 제기되고 있다. 본 연구에서는 영어 설측음 /l/이 음절 내 출현 위치에 따라 연구개음화의 실현 정도가 유의미하게 다른 변이음이 있는지 확인하기 위해 자연발화 음성 데이터베이스인 벅아이 코퍼스를 이용하였다. 먼저, 설측음의 음절 내 출현 위치에 따라 측정한 포만트 주파수를 비교한 결과 음절 내 모든 위치에서 유의미한 차이를 보이는 F2 주파수를 근거로 연구개음화 정도가 유의미하게 다른 변이음이 어두운 [l]과 밝은 [l] 이외에도 존재한다고 판단할 수 있었다. 또한 인접 모음의 후설성이 설측음의 연구개음화에 미치는 영향으로 인해 표준적인 어두운 [l]과 표준적인 밝은 [l] 이외의 변이음이 존재하는지 확인하기 위해 포만트 주파수를 측정하고 이에 대해 분산분석을 한 결과 음절 말 위치에서 연구개음화될 때에도 인접 모음이 후설모음인 경우 인접 모음이 전설모음인 경우와 비교했을 때 유의미하게 차이나는 F2 주파수를 보여 연구개음화되는 정도에 차이가 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. 이는 음절 초 위치에서 설측음이 실현될 경우에도 마찬가지로 인접 모음의 종류에 무관하게 모든 설측음이 음절 초 위치에서는 표준적인 밝은 [l]로 발음될 것이라고 예측했지만 실제 F2 주파수는 음절 말 위치에서 선행모음이 전설모음일 경우의 설측음과 유사한 결과를 나타냈다. 이를 통해 음절 내의 위치뿐만 아니라 인접 모음의 후설성이 설측음의 연구개음화 정도에 미치는 영향이 매우 크다는 점을 확인할 수 있고, 이러한 논문의 결과는 설측음의 변이음의 종류가 언어마다 다르고 미국 영어의 경우 다양하게 나타난다는 주장에 대한 하나의 음성학적 근거로 사용될 수 있을 것이다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권1호
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• pp.99-108
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• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권2호
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• pp.11-16
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• 2016

This study explores the phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary to provide phoneticians and linguists with fundamental phonetic data on English word components. Entry words in the dictionary file were syllabified using an R script and examined to obtain the following results: First, English words preferred consonants to vowels in their word components. In addition, monophthongs occurred much more frequently than diphthongs. When all consonants were categorized by manner and place, the distribution indicated the frequency order of stops, fricatives, and nasals according to manner and that of alveolars, bilabials and velars according to place. These results were comparable to the results obtained from the Buckeye Corpus (Yang, 2012). Second, from the analysis of syllable structure, two-syllable words were most favored, followed by three- and one-syllable words. Of the words in the dictionary, 92.7% consisted of one, two or three syllables. This result may be related to human memory or decoding time. Third, the English words tended to exhibit discord between onset and coda consonants and between adjacent vowels. Dissimilarity between the last onset and the first coda was found in 93.3% of the syllables, while 91.6% of the adjacent vowels were different. From the results above, the author concludes that an analysis of the phonetic symbols in a dictionary may lead to a deeper understanding of English word structures and components.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제11권4호
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• pp.45-53
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• 2019

본 논문의 목적은 자연발화 음성 코퍼스를 대상으로 영어 무성 파열음 [p, t, k]과 한국어 격음 파열음 [p^h, t^h, k^h]의 조음위치 결정에 영향을 미치는 요인들을 살펴보는 것이다. 프랏 스크립트를 이용하여 요인들은 자동 추출하였고, 판별분석을 통해 요인의 수를 점차 증가시켜가면서 무성 파열음의 예측 정확도를 계산하였다. 분석에 사용된 요인들은 개방파열, 파열 후 기식음과 모음 시작 부분의 운동량과 스펙트럼 기울기, 폐쇄구간과 VOT, 단어와 발화 내 위치, 마지막으로 직후 모음의 종류 등이었다. 분석 결과에 따르면, 요인의 수가 다섯 개까지 증가하는 경우 예측정확도가 최대로 증가하여 영어는 74.6%, 한국어는 66.4%를 나타내었다. 그러나 사실상의 최대값에 도달하는 데는 네 개의 요인으로도 충분하였고, 이들은 개방파열과 직후 모음의 운동량과 스펙트럼 기울기, 폐쇄구간과 VOT였다. 이는 무성파열음의 조음위치가 자신의 내부 요인들과 직후 모음의 영향을 동시에 받는다는 것을 의미한다고 볼 수 있다.