• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.121-132
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• 2006

In Hangeul, the graphemes of syllables are organized in horizontal, vertical and mixed (both horizontal & vertical) orientations, and the graphemic position of consonant(s) and vowel(s) within a each syllable needs to be maintained within a square pattern. We investigated the characteristics of writing errors of 9 stroke patients with right hemisphere (RH) lesions and compared it to the performances of 15 normal subjects. The subjects were asked to write to dictation of 90 Korean syllables. One of the interesting findings was that our patients manifested visuospatial errors which are not commonly observed in other language-speaking (e.g., English) patients due to the unique syllabic organizations of Korean writing system. The prominent errors in the RH group could be explained by the impaired RH which normally controls the visuospatial functions.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.45-48
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• 2000

In the case of making large vocabulary speech recognition system, it is better to use the segment than the syllable or the word as the recognition unit. In this paper, we study on the basis of making mono-phone for Korean speech recognition. For experiments, we use the speech toolkit of OGI in U.S.A. The result shows that the recognition rate of :he case in which the diphthong is established as a single unit is superior to that of the case in which the diphthong is established as two units, i.e. a glide plus a vowel. And also, the recognition rate by the number of consonants is a little different.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.325-353
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• 2016

The visual span refers to the number of letters that can be accurately recognized without moving one's eyes. The size of the visual span is affected by sensory factors such as perimetric complexity, crowding, and mislocation of letters. Korean Hangul utilizes rather unique alphabetic-syllabary writing system, quite different from English and Chinese writing systems. Due to this combinatorial nature of the script, the visual span for Hangul characters can also be affected by the letter type (e.g., CV vs CVCC). The present study examined the effect of syllable complexity on the visual span for Hangul by comparing letter recognition accuracy across four letter type conditions (C only, CV, CVC, and CVCC). We also aimed to determine the meaningful letter type(s) that is associated with differences in reading abilities in Korean. Using a trigram presentation method, we found that overall recognition accuracy declined as syllable complexity increased. However, the visual span for CVC type was greater than that for CV type, suggesting that the effect is not necessarily linear, and that there might be other factors affecting the visual span for these types of letters. C and CV type showed fairly strong positive correlations with reading comprehension, suggesting that these might be the meaningful units for measuring visual span in relating to reading abilities.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.77-91
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• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phonetic characteristics of the 'focus' phrases associated with the particle '-man' in Korean. The particle '-man' is a bound morpheme which, like other postpositions such as the subject marker '-ka' and the object marker '-lil', the so-called 'case markers' in Korean, typically attaches to a noun (phrase). The semantics of '-man' roughly corresponds to that of only, its counterpart in English, and is thus classified as a 'delimiter' (Yang 1973). It is assumed in this paper that '-man', like only in English, should have a 'focus' associated with it (von Stechow 1991, Rooth 1992). In general, '-man' attached phrases get the focus, but sometimes the association is not clear-cut, especially in the cases of emphatic use of '-man' or when the context strongly favors other phrase as the focus (Choe 1996). In this paper, we compare the phonetic characteristics of the '-man' marked phrases with those to which '-ka'/'-lil' is attached, and conclude that the focused '-man' phrases show higher fundamental frequencies than their equally focused 'case' -marked counterparts. However, when the context clearly forces the focus to fall on phrases other than the '-man' or '-ka'/'-lil' attached ones, there is no meaningful difference in fundamental frequency between the '-man' and '-ka'/'-lil' attached phrases. We also compare the phonetic characteristics of the regular use of '-man' with those of the emphatic '-man'. According to our experiments, the emphatic '-man' does not bring forth its phonetic effects, namely, higher fundamental frequencies, on the' -man' attached words or phrases but rather in various other ways such as higher fundamental frequencies in '-man', lengthening of the following word-initial syllable, or the inclusion of the following word in the same accentual phrase. Finally, it is claimed that '-man' associated focus phenomena, especially the emphatic use of '-man', show some typical acoustic characteristics of the other well-known focus phenomena, namely, wh-interrogatives.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.1-7
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• 2021

Recently, since most of the research on correcting speech recognition errors is based on English, there is not enough research on Korean speech recognition. Compared to English speech recognition, however, Korean speech recognition has many errors due to the linguistic characteristics of Korean language, such as Korean Fortis and Korean Liaison, thus research on Korean speech recognition is needed. Furthermore, earlier works primarily focused on editorial distance algorithms and syllable restoration rules, making it difficult to correct the error types of Korean Fortis and Korean Liaison. In this paper, we propose a context-sensitive post-processing model of speech recognition using a LSTM-based sequence-to-sequence model and Bahdanau attention mechanism to correct Korean speech recognition errors caused by the pronunciation. Experiments showed that by using the model, the speech recognition performance was improved from 64% to 77% for Fortis, 74% to 90% for Liaison, and from 69% to 84% for average recognition than before. Based on the results, it seems possible to apply the proposed model to real-world applications based on speech recognition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.67-76
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• 2001

This study is targeted at introducing the three aspects of speech timing (articulatory, acoustic and auditory) and discussing their strong and weak points in describing speech timing. Traditional (extrinsic) articulatory timing theories exclude timing representation in the speaker's articulatory plan for his utterance, while the (intrinsic) articulatory timing theories headed by Fowler incorporate time into the plan for an utterance. As compared with articulatory timing studies with crucial constraints in data collection, acoustic timing studies can deal with even several hours of speech relatively easily. This enables us to perform suprasegmental timing studies as well as segmental timing studies. On the other hand, perception of speech timing is related to psychology rather than physiology and physics. Therefore, auditory timing studies contribute to enhancing our understanding of speech timing from the psychological point of view. Traditionally, some theories of speech timing (e.g. typology of speech rhythm: stress-timing; syllable-timing or mora-timing) have been based on our perception. However, it is problematic that auditory timing can be subjective despite some validity. Many questions as to speech timing are expected to be answered more objectively. Acoustic and articulatory description of timing will be the method of solving such problems of auditory timing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.228-229
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• 1997

1 Intonation is important. It cannot be ignored. To convince students of the importance of intonation, we can use sentences with two very different interpretations according to intonation. Example: "I thought it would rain" with a fallon "rain" means it did not rain, but with a fall on "thought" and a rise on "rain" it means that it did rain. 2 Although complex, intonation is structured. For both teacher and student, the big job of tackling intonation is made simpler by remembering that intonation can be analysed into systems and units. There are three main systems in English intonation: Tonality (division into phrases) Tonicity (selection of accented syllables) Tone (the choice of pitch movements) Examples: Tonality: My brother who lives in London is a doctor. Tonicity: Hello. How ARE you. Hello. How are YOU. Tone: Ways to say "Thank you" 3 In deciding what to teach, we must distinguish what is universal from what is specifically English. This is where contrastive studies of intonation are very valuable. Usually, for instance, division into phrases (tonality) works in broadly similar ways across languages. Some uses of pitch are also similar across languages - for example, very high pitch may signal excitement or urgency. 4 Although most people think that intonation is mainly about pitch (the tone system), actually accent placement (tonicity) is probably the single most important aspect of English intonation. This is because it is connected with information focus, and the effects on interpretation are very clear-cut. Example: They asked for coffee, so I made them coffee. (The second occurrence of "coffee" must not be accented). 5 Ear-training is the beginning of intonation training in the VeL approach. First, students learn to identify fall vs rise vs fall-rise. To begin with, single words are used, then phrases and sentences. When learning tones, the fIrst words used should have unstressed syllables after the stressed syllable (Saturday) to make the pitch movement clearer. 6 In production drills, the fIrst thing is to establish simple neutral patterns. There should be no drama or really special meanings. Simple drills can be used to teach important patterns: Example: A: Peter likes football B: Yes JOHN likes football TOO A: Mary rides a bike B: Yes JENny rides a bike TOO 7 The teacher must be systematic and let learners KNOW what they are learning. It is no good using new patterns and hoping that students will "pick them up" without noticing. 8 Visual feedback of fundamental frequency with a computer display can help students learn correct patterns. The teacher can use the display to demonstrate patterns, or students can practise by themselves, imitating recorded models.

• Journal of Korean Ophthalmic Optics Society
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.425-435
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• 2015

Purpose: This study analyzed the names of optical shops currently used in Korea and is to investigate the optical shop names that customers prefer. Methods: We used the 351 names of optical shop all over the country as a sample, and surveyed 296 people aged between 20s~30s in Seoul and Gyeonggi provinces to collect the data. Results: The most used names are currently English names (54.4%) and names of with 2 syllables (30.5%) and 3 syllables (32.5%). For more than 4 syllables, the names included Eye (26.0%) and Glasses (24.3%) are being used a lot. For the name awareness, Korean names (63.0%) was the highest and followed by 1syllable (34.5%) and 5 syllables (20.9%). Conclusions: For the improvement of optical shop awareness, Korean name with 1 to 3 syllables and words related glasses are recommended.