• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.512-520
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• 2019

It is quite useful to represent speeches visually for learners who study foreign languages as well as the hearing impaired who cannot directly hear speeches, and a number of researches have been presented in the literature. They remain, however, at the level of representing the characteristics of speeches using colors or showing the changing shape of lips and mouth using the animation-based representation. As a result of such approaches, those methods cannot tell the users how far their pronunciations are away from the standard ones, and moreover they make it technically difficult to develop such a system in which users can correct their pronunciation in an interactive manner. In order to address these kind of drawbacks, this paper proposes a speech visualization model based on the relative distance between the user's speech and the standard one, furthermore suggests actual implementation directions by applying the proposed model to the visualization of Korean vowels. The method extract three formants F1, F2, and F3 from speech signals and feed them into the Kohonen's SOM to map the results into 2-D screen and represent each speech as a pint on the screen. We have presented a real system implemented using the open source formant analysis software on the speech of a Korean instructor and several foreign students studying Korean language, in which the user interface was built using the Javascript for the screen display.

• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.29-47
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• 2005

Investigating and comparing English vowels $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$, and their-supposedly- corresponding vowels in Korean /ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/, this study addresses the following questions: Do Koreans pronounce/ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/ differently? Do they pronounce English $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$ differently? And what is the relationship between the Korean vowels and the English vowels? Is the conventional correspondence (/ㅔ:${\varepsilon}/$, and /ㅐ/:${\ae)/$ appropriate? The results showed that 24 Korean male college students distinguish neither Korean /ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/ nor English $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$, thus suggesting that their inability to distinguish the two vowels in their native tongue has an effect on their production of the English vowels. While not distinguishable within a language, Korean /ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/ still form a separate group from English $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$. But Korean-Produced $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$ are significantly different from American-produced $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/:$ Korean-produced $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$ have much lower F1 and F2 than American-produced counterparts. Accordingly it is advised that, in learning English pronunciation, Korean students should be instructed to take the English vowel system as a separate system from Korean one, and thus, not to substitute Korean vowels for English vowels. And students should be provided with specific instructions on the articulatory differences between English vowels and Korean vowels. For example, Cey should be instructed to lower their jaws more for English $/{\varepsilon}/\;and\;/{\ae}/$ than for Korean /ㅔ/ and /ㅐ/.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.207-207
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• 1996

The neutral tone is one of the most important distinguishing features in Beijing Mandarin, but there are two completely different views on its linguistic function: a special tone(Xu, 1980) versus weak stress(Chao, 1968). In this paper, the acoustic manifestation of the neutral tone will be explored to show that it is closely related to weak stress. 122 disyllabic words in which the second syllable carries the neutral tone, including 22 stress pairs, were uttered by a native male speaker of Beijing dialect and analysed by Kay Digital Sonagraph 5500-1. The results of the acoustic analysis are presented as follows: 1) The first two formants of the medial and the syllabic vowel moves towards that of central vowel with a greater magnitude in the syllable with the neutral tone than in the syllable with any of the four normal tones. Also the vowel ending, and nasal coda /n/ and / / in the syllable with the neutral tone tends to be deleted. 2) In the syllables with the neutral tone, there are strong carryover coarticulations between the medial and syllabic vowel and the preceding unvoiced consonant. In general, the vowel is affected to move towards the position of the central vowel with more greater magnitude by coronal consonant than by labial or velar consonant. 3) In the syllable with the neutral tone, when and only when it precedes a syllable with tone-4, the high vowel following [f], [ts'], [s], [ts'], [s], [tc'] or [c] tends to be voiceless. 4) It can be seen from the acoustical results of 22 stress pairs that the duration of the syllable with the neutral tone is on the average reduced to 55% of that of the syllable with the four normal tones, and the duration of the final in the syllable with neutral tone is on the average reduced to 45% of that of the final in the syllable with the four normal tones(Lin & Yan 1980). 5) The FO contour of the neutral tone is highly dependent on the preceding normal tone(Lin & Yan 1993). For a number of languages it has been found that the vowel space is reduced as the level of stress placed upon the vowel is reduced(Nord 1986). Therefore we reach the conclusion that the syllable with neutral tone is related to weak stress(Lin & Yan 1990). The neutral tone is not a special tone because the preceding normal tone.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.246-246
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• 1996

Purpose: Some of the properties of the prosodic phrasing and some acoustic and phonological effects of contrastive focus on the tonal pattern of Seoul Korean is explored based on a brief experiment of analyzing the fundamental frequency(=FO) contour of the speech of the author. Data Base and Analysis Procedures: The examples were chosen to contain mostly nasal and liquid consonants, since it is difficult to track down the formants in stops and fricatives during their corresponding consonantal intervals and stops may yield an effect of unwanted increase in the FO value due to their burst into the following vowel. All examples were recorded three times and the spectrum of the most stable repetition was generated, from which the FO contour of each sentence was obtained, the peaks with a value higher than 250Hz being interpreted as a high tone (=H). The result is then discussed within the prosodic hierarchy framework of Selkirk (1986) and compared with the tonal pattern of the Northern Kyungsang dialect of Korean reported in Kenstowicz & Sohn (1996). Prosodic Phrasing: In N.K. Korean, H never appears both on the object and on the verb in a neutral sentence, which indicates the object and the verb form a single Phonological Phrase ($={\phi}$), given that there is only one pitch peak for each $={\phi}$. However, Seoul Korean shows that both the object and the verb have H of their own, indicating that they are not contained in one $={\phi}$. This violates the Optimality constraint of Wrap-XP (=Enclose a lexical head and its arguments in one $={\phi}$), while N.K. Korean obeys the constraint by grouping a VP in a single $={\phi}$. This asymmetry can be resolved through a constraint that favors the separate grouping of each lexical category and is ranked higher than Wrap-XP in Seoul Korean but vice versa in N.K. Korean; $Align-x^{lex}$ (=Align the left edge of a lexical category with that of a $={\phi}$). (1) nuna-ka manll-ll mEk-nIn-ta ('sister-NOM garlic-ACC eat-PRES-DECL') a. (LLH) (LLH) (HLL) ----Seoul Korean b. (LLH) (LLL LHL) ----N.K. Korean Focus and Phrasing: Two major effects of contrastive focus on phonological phrasing are found in Seoul Korean: (a) the peak of an Intonatioanl Phrase (=IP) falls on the focused element; and (b) focus has the effect of deleting all the following prosodic structures. A focused element always attracts the peak of IP, showing an increase of approximately 30Hz compared with the peak of a non-focused IP. When a subject is focused, no H appears either on the object or on the verb and a focused object is never followed by a verb with H. The post-focus deletion of prosodic boundaries is forced through the interaction of StressFocus (=If F is a focus and DF is its semantic domain, the highest prominence in DF will be within F) and Rightmost-IP (=The peak of an IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$). First Stress-F requires the peak of IP to fall on the focused element. Then to avoid violating Rightmost-IP, all the boundaries after the focused element should delete, minimizing the number of $={\phi}$'s intervening from the right edge of IP. (2) (omitted) Conclusion: In general, there seems to be no direct alignment constraints between the syntactically focused element and the edge of $={\phi}$ determined in phonology; all the alignment effects come from a single requirement that the peak of IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$ as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995).