• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.140-148
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of music training on the characteristics of auditory perception of speech and music. The perception of speech and music stimuli was assessed across their respective stimulus continuum and the resultant plots were compared between musicians and non-musicians. Subjects and Methods: Thirty musicians with formal music training and twenty-seven non-musicians participated in the study (age: 20 to 30 years). They were assessed for identification of consonant-vowel syllables (/da/ to /ga/), vowels (/u/ to /a/), vocal music note (/ri/ to /ga/), and instrumental music note (/ri/ to /ga/) across their respective stimulus continuum. The continua contained 15 tokens with equal step size between any adjacent tokens. The resultant identification scores were plotted against each token and were analyzed for presence of categorical boundary. If the categorical boundary was found, the plots were analyzed by six parameters of categorical perception; for the point of 50% crossover, lower edge of categorical boundary, upper edge of categorical boundary, phoneme boundary width, slope, and intercepts. Results: Overall, the results showed that both speech and music are perceived differently in musicians and non-musicians. In musicians, both speech and music are categorically perceived, while in non-musicians, only speech is perceived categorically. Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicate that music is perceived categorically by musicians, even if the stimulus is devoid of vocal tract features. The findings support that the categorical perception is strongly influenced by training and results are discussed in light of notions of motor theory of speech perception.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.140-148
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of music training on the characteristics of auditory perception of speech and music. The perception of speech and music stimuli was assessed across their respective stimulus continuum and the resultant plots were compared between musicians and non-musicians. Subjects and Methods: Thirty musicians with formal music training and twenty-seven non-musicians participated in the study (age: 20 to 30 years). They were assessed for identification of consonant-vowel syllables (/da/ to /ga/), vowels (/u/ to /a/), vocal music note (/ri/ to /ga/), and instrumental music note (/ri/ to /ga/) across their respective stimulus continuum. The continua contained 15 tokens with equal step size between any adjacent tokens. The resultant identification scores were plotted against each token and were analyzed for presence of categorical boundary. If the categorical boundary was found, the plots were analyzed by six parameters of categorical perception; for the point of 50% crossover, lower edge of categorical boundary, upper edge of categorical boundary, phoneme boundary width, slope, and intercepts. Results: Overall, the results showed that both speech and music are perceived differently in musicians and non-musicians. In musicians, both speech and music are categorically perceived, while in non-musicians, only speech is perceived categorically. Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicate that music is perceived categorically by musicians, even if the stimulus is devoid of vocal tract features. The findings support that the categorical perception is strongly influenced by training and results are discussed in light of notions of motor theory of speech perception.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.11-18
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• 2011

This paper examines the categorical labeling of lexical pitch accent contrasts in North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean listeners. It focuses specifically on investigating whether the pitch accent perception of adults and children has a dialect-specific effect. To evaluate the development of perceptual identification, slopes, intercepts, and positions at categorical boundaries were computed using a logistic regression function. The results showed that differences in slopes and intercepts were significant between North Kyungsang child and adult listeners, but the same was not the case for the positions at boundaries. As far as South Cholla child and adult listeners were concerned, there was a significant difference in slopes, but not intercepts and positions at boundaries. In the present study, the comparison of intercepts and slopes at the boundaries indicated developmental differences between North Kyungsang adult and child listeners. This improvement in categorical proportion seems to be a result of developmental changes in categorical perception. For South Cholla adult and child listeners, however, perception of the non-native contrast becomes less categorical.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.325-331
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• 2010

Categorical perception has been noted as characteristic properties of linguistic stimuli. In this study, Korean monosyllabic minimal pairs (consonant-vowel-consonant, CVC) were analyzed to understand perception boundaries between clinically confusing words. An efficient scheme has been developed to systematically synthesize temporal transition waveforms (11 steps) from one word to the target word for the pairs of /gom/-/gong/, /non/-/noon/, and /don/-/non/. The corresponding slopes, widths, and non-dominant factors of perception boundaries were analyzed for the total of 40 young normal subjects (20 males and 20 females). Results showed that there were relative pattern differences among confusing monosyllabic minimal pairs under categorical perception. For instance, the vowel difference within CVC pairs led to the lowest boundary performance in this experiment set. Data also indicated the potential application of the overall procedure for evaluating auditory functions and assisting rehabilitation programs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2019

This study investigated individual variability of L2 learners' categorical judgments of L2 stops by exploring English learners' perceptual processing of two acoustic cues (voice onset time [VOT] and f0) and working memory capacity as sources of variation. As prior research has reported that English speakers' greater use of the redundant cue f0 was responsible for gradient processing of native stops, we examined whether the same processing characteristics would be observed in L2 learners' perception of Korean stops (/t/-/t^h/). 22 English learners of L2 Korean with a range of L2 proficiency participated in a visual analogue scaling task and demonstrated variable manners of judging the L2 Korean stops: Some were more gradient than others in performing the task. Correlation analysis revealed that L2 learners' categorical responses were modestly related to individuals' utilizations of a primary cue for the stop contrast (VOT for L1 English stops and f0 for L2 Korean stops), and were also related to better working memory capacity. Together, the current experimental evidence demonstrates adult L2 learners' top-down processing of stop consonants where linguistic and cognitive resources are devoted to a process of determining abstract phonemic identity.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.86-89
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• 2002

According to Pierrehumbert (1980), two level tones - H and L - are enough in representing intonation of intonational languages. But in Korean, high fall and low fall boundary tones, both of which must be represented as HL％ in intonational phonology as in Jun (1993, 1999), are distinct not only acoustically but also functionally. The same is true in the case of high level and mid level boundary tones, which must be represented as H％ in intonational phonology. In this paper, I conducted two identification tests to provide crucial evidence that H and L are not enough in intonational phonology. The results of the identification tests show that categorical perception occur between high level and low level as well as between high fall and low fall. Based on this fact and the results of the acoustic analyses in Lee (1999, 2000), I strongly propose to adopt one more level tone - M - to represent Korean boundary tones.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.9-22
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• 2009

This paper first presents the author's personal view on the importance of modeling in scientific research in general, and then describes two of his works toward modeling certain aspects of human speech communication. The first work is concerned with the physiological and physical mechanisms of controlling the voice fundamental frequency of speech, which is an important parameter for expressing information on tone, accent, and intonation. The second work is concerned with the cognitive processes involved in a discrimination test of speech stimuli, which gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called categorical perception. They are meant to illustrate the power of models based on deep understanding and precise formulation of the functions of the mechanisms/processes that underlie observed phenomena. Finally, it also presents the author's view on some models that are yet to be developed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2023

This study investigated the response time and patterns of categorical perception of the wh-scope of an embedded clause with the non-bridge verb, "gung-geum hada 'wonder'," in the matrix verb phrase in Gyeongsang Korean. Using the same procedure as Yun (2022), 72 responses and response times for each stimulus were collected from 24 participants over the course of three trials. The stimuli were recorded readings of 40 speakers (20 male, 20 female). Context was provided to induce a matrix scope interpretation of the embedded wh-phrase in the target sentence. We sorted the 40 stimuli according to the number of matrix scope responses each received, and charted the response times for each stimulus. Although there was considerable overlap for the different types of wh-scope interpretations, there was a clear difference in categorical perception between the matrix and embedded scopes. The 24 participants also differed in their categorical perceptions. The results suggested that response time and wh-scope interpretation were not directly related and that two main weighted factors affected wh-scope interpretation: morpho-syntactic constraints and prosodic structural integrity. The weighting of each of these factors was inversely correlated and varied among subjects.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.19-28
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• 2009

This paper reports experimental findings about the duration feature of the acoustic components of English stops in Korean speakers' voicing perception. In our experiment, 35 participants discriminated between recorded stimuli and digitally transformed stimuli with different duration features from the original stimuli. 72 sets of paired stimuli are generated to test the effects of the duration feature in various phonetic contexts. The result of our experiment is a complicated cross-tabulation with 540 cells defined by five categorical independent variables plus one response variable. To find a meaningful generalization out of this complex frequency table, we ran logit log-linear regression analyses. Surprisingly, we have found that there is no single effect of the duration feature in all phonetic contexts on Korean speakers' perception of the voicing contrasts of English stops. Instead, the logit log-linear analyses reveal that there are interaction effects among phonetic contexts (=C), the places of articulation of stops (=P), and the voicing contrast (=V), and among duration (=T), phonetic contexts, and the places of articulation. To put it in mathematical terms, the distribution of the data can be explained by a simple log-linear equation, logF=${\mu}+{\lambda}CPV+{\lambda}TCP$.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.53-65
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• 2014

The current research examines whether pitch contour shapes in North Kyungsang pitch accent contrasts provide a phonetic dimension for phonological discreteness in a mimicry task. Two pitch accent continua resynthesized were created for HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. To confirm a phonetic dimension for accounting for pitch accent categories in North Kyungsang Korean, the mimicries of speakers of two dialects (i.e., North Kyungsang & South Cholla) were compared. One of the findings showed that, for North Kyungsang speakers, the range of mean f0 peak times was a phonetic dimension undergoing a continuous shift within a stimulus continuum for both HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. On the other hand, for South Cholla speakers, there were no apparent shifts around categorical boundaries for either HH vs. HL or HH vs. LH. Regarding individual mimicries on f0 peak timing, there are many variations. For HH vs. LH, three North Kyungsang speakers showed a discrete pattern reflecting a shift in phonological categories, but for HH vs. HL, there was no such distinction showing a categorical shift, though there were statistically significant differences for two speakers. Interestingly, one of the North Kyungsang speakers showed a continuous phonetic dimension for both HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. Lastly, the f0 valley timing did not exhibit a discrete or gradient phonetic dimension for speakers of either dialect. On the basis of these results, what is interesting is that the tonal target such as high tone in North Kyungsang pitch accent categories within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory may be realized within individual cognitive systems for representing the interaction of perception and production.