• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권3호
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• pp.57-65
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• 2017

The current study explored how Korean-speaking children processed the multiple acoustic cues (VOT and f0) for the stop laryngeal contrast (/t'/, /t/, and /$t^h$/) and examined whether individual perceptual strategies could be related to a general cognitive ability performing executive functions (EF). 15 children (aged from 7 to 8) participated in the speech perception task identifying the three Korean laryngeal stops (3AFC) on listening to the auditory stimuli of C-/a/ with synthetically varying VOT and f0. They completed a series of EF tasks to measure working memory, inhibition, and cognitive shifting ability. The findings showed that children used the two cues in a highly correlated manner. While children utilized VOT consistently for the three laryngeal categories, their use of f0 was either reduced or enhanced depending on the phonetic categories. Importantly, the children's processing strategies of a f0 suppression for a tense-aspirated contrast were meaningfully associated with children's better cognitive abilities such as working memory, inhibition, and attentional shifting. As a preliminary experimental investigation, the current research demonstrated that listeners with inefficient processing strategies were poor at the EF skills, suggesting that cognitive skills might be responsible for developmental variations of processing sub-phonemic information for the linguistic contrast.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.45-52
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• 2023

Previous studies have established a role for cognitive differences in explaining variability in speech processing across individuals. In the case of perceptual cue weighting in the context of a sound change, studies have produced conflicting results regarding the relationship between executive function and the use of redundant cues. The current study aimed to explore this relationship in acoustic cue weighting during speech production. Forty-one Korean-speaking children read a list of stop-initial words and completed two tests that assess executive function, i.e., Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) and digit n-back. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) were measured in each word, and analyses were carried out to determine the extent to which children's executive function predicted their use of both informative and less informative cues to the three pairs comprising the Korean three-way stop laryngeal contrast. No evidence was found for a relationship between cognitive ability and acoustic cue weighting in production, which is at odds with previous, albeit conflicting, results for speech perception. While this result may be due to the lack of task demands in the production task used here, it nevertheless expands the empirical ground upon which future work in this area may proceed.

• 음성과학
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• 제8권1호
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• pp.93-111
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• 2001

This study investigates the contribution of vocalic information following the release of an initial stop to the identification of the three-way stop contrast (aspirated, lax, and tense) in Korean. Recent studies showed that there is a strong interaction between consonant types and tone. The findings raise questions concerning Korean listeners' use of tonal (or vocalic F0) variation in differentiation initial tense, lax, and aspirated stops. The above issues are addressed in the present study using a cross-splicing methodology. The overall results show that low vocalic F0 provided the most salient information for lax stops; tense and aspirated stop identification depended on a combination of VOT, F0, and H1-H2 characteristics. The perceptual dominance of F0 over VOT for lax stops is consistent with the size of the F0 difference in utterance-initial position, as well as their prominent role in Korean intonational phonology.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제12권3호
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

This study examines the duration of Korean lax and tense stops in the prosodic word-medial position, their interactions with nearby segments, and the phonological implications of these interactions. It first examines the lengthening of consonants at the function of the short lax stop. Experiment 1 shows that the sonorant C1 is significantly longer before a short lax stop C2 than before a long tense stop. Experiment 2 shows that the short lax stop C1 cancels the contrast between the lax and tense obstruent at C2, making them appear as long tense obstruents (Post-Stop Tensing Rule). We suggest that such lengthening phenomena occur in Korean to robustly preserve the contrastive length difference between C and CC. Second, this study examines the vowel shortening, known as Closed-Syllable Vowel Shortening, before a long tense stop or before the consonant sequence. Experiment 3 suggests that it be interpreted as temporal adjustment to make the interval from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel of near-equal length. Conclusively, we suggest that Korean speech be planned and controlled with two specific intervals. One is the duration of contrastive consonant intervals between vowels, and the other is the duration from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.99-105
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• 2015

The current study investigates whether Korean-speaking adults show differential sensitivities to the sources of auditory stimuli (L1 Korean and L2 English) in utilizing VOT and f0 in the perceptual mode of L2 stops, and how the L2 proficiency interacts with the learners' low-level phonetic sensitivities in L2 perceptual mode. 48 Korean learners of English participated in the perception experiments where they rated the goodness of English /t/ and /d/ using an analogue scale. Two sets of stimuli (English and Korean sources) were prepared by manipulating VOT (6-steps) and f0 (5-steps) values of productions by an English male (L2 source condition) and a Korean male (L1 source condition). Findings showed that, in judging /t/-likeness, the listeners responded differently to the two auditory stimulus conditions by relying on VOT significantly more in English source condition than in Korean source condition. The listeners' English proficiency did not interact with these differential sensitivities to the auditory stimulus source either along the VOT dimension or the f0 dimension. The results of the current study suggest that low-level contextual information of the auditory source can affect the learners in faithfully being in the L2 perceptual mode.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권3호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.43-50
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• 2020

This study investigated whether listeners' perceptual patterns varied according to base token selected for stimuli manipulation. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) values were orthogonally manipulated, each in seven steps, using naturally produced words that contained a lenis (/kan/) and an aspirated (/k^han/) stop in Seoul Korean. Both native and non-native groups showed significantly higher numbers of aspirated responses for the stimuli constructed with /k^han/, evidencing the use of minor cues left in the stimuli after manipulation. For the native group the use of the VOT and F0 cues in the stop categorization did not differ depending on whether the base token included the lenis or aspirated stop, indicating that the results of previous studies remain tenable that investigated the relative importance of the acoustic cues in the native listener perception of the Korean stop contrasts by using one base token for manipulating perceptual stimuli. For the non-native group, the use patterns of the F0 cue differed as a function of base token selected. Some findings indicated that listeners used alternative cues to identify the stop contrast when major cues sound ambiguous. The use of the manipulated VOT and F0 cues by the non-native group was not native-like, suggesting that non-native listeners may have perceived the minor cues as stable in the context of the manipulated cue combinations.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.81-90
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• 2013

This study explored how Korean L2 learners of English utilize multiple acoustic cues (VOT and F0) in perceiving and producing the English alveolar stop with a voicing contrast. Thirty-four 18-year-old high-school students participated in the study. Their English proficiency level was classified as either 'high' (HEP) or 'low' (LEP) according to high-school English level standardization. Thirty different synthesized syllables were presented in audio stimuli by combining a 6-step VOTs and a 5-step F0s. The listeners judged how close the audio stimulus was to /t/ or /d/ in L2 using a visual analogue scale. The L2 /d/ and /t/ productions collected from the 22 learners (12 HEP, 10 LEP) were acoustically analyzed by measuring VOT and F0 at the vowel onset. Results showed that LEP listeners attended to the F0 in the stimuli more sensitively than HEP listeners, suggesting that HEP listeners could inhibit less important acoustic dimensions better than LEP listeners in their L2 perception. The L2 production patterns also exhibited a group-difference between HEP and LEP in that HEP speakers utilized their VOT dimension (primary cue in L2) more effectively than LEP speakers. Taken together, the study showed that the relative cue-weighting strategies in L2 perception and production are closely related to the learner's L2 proficiency level in that more proficient learners had a better control of inhibiting and enhancing the relevant acoustic parameters.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권3호
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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=${\mu}+{\lambda}CPV+{\lambda}TCP$.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.27-33
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• 2011

This paper explores two articulatory characteristics of inter-consonantal coordination observed in lingual-lingual (/kt/, /ks/) and labial-lingual (/pt/) sequences. Using electromagnetic articulometry (EMMA), temporal aspects of the lip movement and lingual movement (of the tongue tip and the tongue dorsum) were examined. Three sequences (/ks/, /kt/, /pt/) were investigated in two respects: gestural overlap in C1C2 and formation duration of coronals in C2 (/t/ or /s/). Results are summarized as follows. First, in a sequence of two stop consonants gestural overlap did not vary with order contrast or a low-level motor constraint on lingual articulators. Gestural overlap between two stop consonants was similar in both /kt/ (lingual-lingual; back-to-front) and /pt/ (labial-lingual; front-to-back). Second, gestural overlap was not simply constrained by place of articulation. Two coronals (/s/ and /t/) shared the same articulator, the tongue tip, but they showed a distinctive gestural overlap pattern with respect to /k/ in C1 (/ks/ (less overlap) < /kt/ (more overlap)). Third, temporal duration of the tongue tip gesture varied as a function of manner of articulation of the target segment in C2 (/ks/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)) as well as a function of place of articulation of the segmental context in C1 (/pt/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)). There are several implications associated with the results from Korean non-assimilating contexts. First, Korean can be better explained in the way of its language-specific gestural pattern; gestural overlap in Korean is not simply attributed to order contrast (front-to-back vs. back-to-front) or a physiological motor constraint on lingual articulators (lingual-lingual vs. nonlingual-lingual). Taking all factors into consideration, inter-gestural coordination is influenced not only by C1 (place of articulation) but also C2 (manner of articulation). Second, the jaw articulator could have been a factor behind a distinctive gestural overlap pattern in different C1C2 sequences (/ks/ (less overlap) vs. /kt/ and /pt/ (more overlap)). A language-specific gestural pattern occurred with reference to a physiological motor constraint on the jaw articulator.