• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2017

This study examined how early bilingual children produce sounds in their two languages articulated with the same manner of articulation but at different places of articulation. English affricates are palato-alveolar and Korean affricates are alveolar. This study analyzed the frequencies of center of gravity (COG), spectral peak (SP), and the second formant (F2) of word-initial affricates in English and Korean produced by twenty-four early Korean-English bilingual children (aged 4 to 7), and compared them with those of monolingual counterparts in the two languages. If early Korean-English bilingual children produce palato-alveolar affricates in English and alveolar affricates in Korean, they may produce Korean affricates with higher COGs, SPs, and F2s than English affricates. The early Korean-English bilingual children at the age of 4 produced English and Korean affricates with similar COGs, SPs, and F2s, and the COGs, SPs, and F2s of their Korean affricates were similar to those of the Korean monolingual counterparts. However, the early bilingual children at the age of 5 to 7 had lower COGs and SPs for English affricates with higher F2s compared to Korean affricates, and the COGs, SPs, and F2s of their English affricates were similar to those of the English monolingual counterparts.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.57-62
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• 2003

Using EPG, the stop and fricative portions of the Korean and English afficates were examined to find out whether the stop and fricative portions of Korean affricates are the same as those of English ones in articulation, as generally assumed in the literature. The English affricate in the word 'choose' is classified as alveopalatal just like the Korean affricate in the word 'cam'. The results of the EPG data showed that Korean affricates were not articulated the same as those in English, especially in the stop portion. In English, the stop portion of 'choose' was quite similar to /t/ as 'tooth', but in Korean, the stop portion of 'cam' was somewhat different from /t/ in 'tam'. More specifically, the stop portion of /t/ in 'tam' was articulated with the contact at the upper teeth and the alveolar ridge, but the stop portion of /t/ in 'cam' was articulated with the contact in the alveopalatal region. This shifting in the place of articulation of the stop portions of the Korean affricate (from dental and alveolar to alveopalatal) can be explained. Unlike English affricates, the stop portions of Korean affricates and the fricative portions of Korean affricates are co-articulated at the same place of articulation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.137-148
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• 2002

This study investigates phonation modes of vowels following the affricate consonants in Korean and English- -tense affricate /c'/, lenis affricate /c/, and aspirated affricate /$c^{h}$/ for Korean; voiced affricate /$\check{J}$/ and aspirated affricate /c/ for English. The investigation makes significant use of the H1*-H2* measure (a normalized amplitude difference between the first and second harmonics) to provide acoustic correlates of the phonation types. The major findings for English are that the H1*-H2* measure at the vowel onset was significantly larger in post-aspirated position than in post-voiced position. The Korean data showed the H1*-H2* measure at the vowel onset to be significantly higher in the post-aspirated class than in the post-tense class. On the other hand, the Fo values for the post-lenis vowels were significantly lower than those of the other two classes during the first half of the vowel. Based on the phonetic results, this study argues for the need to incorporate the [stiff vocal folds] and [slack vocal folds] features into the phonological treatments of Korean affricates, while maintaining the two features [constricted glottis] and [spread glottis].

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.93-108
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• 1998

This paper attempts to acoustically examine the place of articulation of Korean affricates. In order to pursue an acoustic analysis of where Korean affricates are articulated, we resort to LPC spectra of the Korean plain affricate /c/ in intervocalic position, based on theoretical assumptions (e.g., Stevens 1993a), and compare the data to that of the Korean alveolar consonants /t, s/ in the same context. Our phonetic results show that in intervocalic position, the Korean plain affricate is alveolar just like the Korean alveolar consonants /t, s/, supporting the articulatory studies of $Skali{\check{c}}kov{\acute{a}}$ (1960) and Kim (1997).

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.91-95
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of postvocalic voicing(Contrasting voiceless fricative and affricate with voiced fricative and affricate) on vowel duration. In particular we focused on the durational differences between vowels followed by voiceless and voiced consonants across three groups of speakers: English speakers, English bilinguals and Korean learners of English. the result of experimental I showed that durations of vowels preceding voiced fricative and affricates as well as voiced stops are significantly longer than those preceding voiceless counterparts. Experiment Ⅱ indicated that as the subjects exposed themselves longer to English speaking society, their pronunciation was increasingly similar to those of English native speakers.

• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.139-151
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• 2005

Previous studies have shown that Korean students have difficulty identifying some English consonants which are not in the Korean sound inventory. The aim of this study was to examine the accuracy rate of English consonants correctly identified by 130 college students in order to find out which English consonants were difficult for the students to perceive. The subject's task was to identify one of the minimal pairs played in a quiet laboratory classroom. 100 minimal pairs consisted of syllables with various onsets or codas: stops, fricatives, affricates, liquids and nasals. Results were as follows: First, the average score of the English major group was significantly higher than that of the non-English major group. Second, there was a similar distribution in the rank order of minimal pairs sorted by the accuracy rate between the two groups. Third, the accuracy rate systematically decreased as each score range decreased. Fourth, the students showed higher accuracy in the perception of liquids than that of the stop-fricative contrast. Fifth, the accuracy score in onset position was higher than in coda position. Finally, the students still had problem telling voiced consonants from voiceless ones, especially in coda position. It would be desirable to extend the present research to middle or high school students to fundamentally resolve those listening problems.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.364-364
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• 2000

It has been widely discussed in phonology that syllable structure of mother tongue influences one's acquisition of foreign language. However, the topic was hardly examined experimentally. So, we investigated effects of Korean syllable structure when Korean speakers pronounce English words, especially focusing on consonant strings that are not allowed in Korean. In the experiment, all the subjects are divided into 3 groups, that is, native, experienced, and inexperienced speakers. Native group consists of 1 male English native speaker. Experienced and inexperienced are each composed of 3 male Korean speakers. These 2 groups are divided by the length of residence in the country using English as a native language. 41 mono-syllable words are prepared considering the position (onset vs. coda), characteristic (stops, affricates, fricatives), and number of consonant. Then, the length of the consonant cluster is measured. To eliminate tempo effect, the measured length is normalized using the length of the word 'say' in the carrier sentence. Measurement of consonant cluster is the relative time period between the initiation of energy (onset I coda) which is acoustically representative of noise (consonant portion) and voicing. bar (vowel portion) in a syllable. Statistical method is used to estimate the differences among 3 groups. For each word, analysis of variance (ANDY A) and Post Hoc tests are carried out.

• 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%.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.71-87
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• 2004

Korean has a pair of voiceless fricatives, whose laryngeal manifestation comes in parallel to stops and affricates with a three-way lexical contrast. Prior phonetic studies by Kagaya (1974), Iverson (1983), and Kang (1999, 2000) point out /s/ is associated with multiple characteristics of the larynx shared with not only the lax but also the aspirated series, whereas /s' / carries a laryngeal distinction typical of the tense consonants. The complex dual nature of /s/ is again supported by a psycholinguistic study by Kang (2004), as /s/ was found to interact with /$c^h$/ (17% of the time) as well as /c/ (57%) in speech errors. In addition, a recent work by Cho and Lee (2003) notes an interesting chain shift case in the acquisition of the fricatives. Although they observed a significant phonological pattern between child English and Korean, Cho and Lee's description of acquiring fricatives is far from being precise from the perspective of phonetics. From a longitudinal study of recorded tapes by two children at 1;7-3;8 and 1;7-2;1 respectively, I found that /s' / was usually substituted into tense noncontinuants in young children's early production as predicted, whereas /s/ having both lax and aspirated-like glottal properties revealed a complicated pattern of substitutions into lax, tense, and aspirated noncontinuants with a varying degree of preference relative to the subjects. The current acquisition study supports the previous claims concerning fricatives in other languages, showing that their acquisition comes after stops. Besides, it also notes that Korean fricatives are subject to a series of phonological processes called stopping, affricating, tensifying and palatalizing during the transitional period of phonological development by young children. Moreover, between the two voiceless types, /s/ was acquired earlier than /s'/ as the unmarked segment.