• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.31-41
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• 2001

This paper aims to provide preliminary evidence that (at least part of) phonetic phenomena are not simply automatic or arbitrary, but are explained by the functional guidelines, ease of articulation and maintenance of contrasts. The first study shows that languages with more high vowels (e.g., French) allow larger consonantal deviation from its target than languages with less high vowels (e.g., English). This is interpreted as achieving the economy of articulation to a certain extent in order to avoid otherwise extreme articulatory movement to be made in CV syllables due to strict demand on maintaining vocalic contrasts. The second study shows that Russian plain bilabial consonant allows less amount of undershoot due to the neighboring vowels than does English bilabial consonant. This is probably due to the stricter demand on maintaining the consonantal contrasts, plain vs. palatalized, existing only in Russian.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.421-425
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• 1996

A multimedia Version of ${\ulcorner}Lee-Kim test of Korean Articulation{\lrcorner}$ "Lee-Kim Test of Korean Articulation" consisting of picture test, Sentence test, user's manual and notation, analysis sheets was published in 1990 to serve as a standard tool for testing and analysing the articulation errors of normal and abnormal speakers. It has been found, however that, the picture and sentences test using the printed version of Lee-Kim test of Korean Articulation revealed several limitations, in i, e, a) inefficiency in inducing desirable response from the informants b) lack of concentration and interest on the part of informants c) no consistent way of providing the informant with a clue in case the informant is unfamiliar with the word represented by the picture or the sentence. d) no reliable means for the speech-language pathologist to analyze and evaluate the informant's speech in relation to the standard pronunciation A multimedia version of Lee-Kim Korean articulation Test which features picture and word as well as recorded voice has been developed with a view to eliminating the limitation mentioned above and facilitating the articulation test-with ease and accuracy.

• MALSORI
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• no.53
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• pp.1-16
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• 2005

This experimental study aims to test the hypothesis that the occurrence of English sentence-final stop release is, at least, partly predictable by examining its phonetic context. 10 native(5 male and 5 female) speakers of American English recorded, in a sound-proof booth, sentences excerpted from novels and the natural documents on the World Wide Web. Based on the waveforms and spectrograms of the recorded sentences, judgements of the release of a sentence-final stop were made. If the aperiodic energy of a given final stop lasted more than .015 second, it was considered to be "released." The result reveals that English sentence-final stops tend to be released when they are 1) velar consonants, 2) preceeded by tense vowels, and 3) coda consonants of content words. The phonetic environment in which final stops are often released can be characterized by the articulatory comfortableness and the need for release burst noise, without which the final stops may not be correctly perceived. By examining the release of English final stops, it is concluded that the phonological events, which had been considered to occur rather "randomly," in fact, reflect the universal tendency of human speech: to minimize the speakers' and hearers' effort.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.17-23
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• 2017

The present study investigates the effect of Accentual Phrase on F0 using a subset of large-scale corpus of Seoul Korean. Four syllable words which were neither preceded nor followed by silent pauses were presumed to be canonical exemplars of Accentual Phrases in Korean. These four syllable words were extracted from female speakers' speech samples. Growth curve analyses, combination of regression and polynomial curve fitting, were applied to the four syllable words. Four syllable words were divided into four groups depending on the categorical status of the initial segment: voiceless obstruents, voiced obstruents, sonorants, and vowels. Results of growth curve analyses indicate that initial segment types have an effect on the F0 (in semitone) in the nucleus of the initial syllable, and the cubic polynomial term revealed that some of the medial low tones in the 4 syllable words may be guided by the principle of contrast maximization, while others may be governed by the principle of ease of articulation.