• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.113-133
• /
• 1998

The system proposed in this paper prosodically transcribes the intonation patterns, prosodic structures, phrasings, and other prosodic aspects of Korean utterances, on four parallel tiers: a tone tier, an orthographic tier, a break index tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs two phrase accents (L* and H *), three accentual phrase boundary tones (L-, H-, LH-), and four intonational phrase boundary tones (L%,H%,LH%,LHL%) in order to provide a phonological transcription of pitch events associated with accented syllables and phrase boundaries. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, which mark a prosodic grouping of words and its prosodic structure in an utterance. Among the five indices, the break index 3 and the break index 4 align with an accentual phrase boundary tone and an intonational phrase boundary tone, respectively, in the tone tier.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.15 no.6
• /
• pp.26-32
• /
• 1996

In this paper we make a rule of pitch variation for a natural synthetic female voice. Intonation phrase, which is the basic unit the rule is applied to, mostly consists of a syllable or syllables. The pitch values of the first, second, and final syllables make up the pitch contour of the intonation phrase. Those of the first and second syllable are determined by the initial consonants of the respective syllables, and that of the final syllable by the type of the function word. There are two kinds of boundaries between intonation phrases. One is a boundary with pause, and the other is a boundary without pause. The pitch contour of the intonation phrase with the boundary phenomena determines the pitch pattern of a sentence.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.31 no.7
• /
• pp.461-471
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic data for development of Korean teaching programs for immigrant women from multicultural families through the acoustic analysis of their prosodic phrasing and intonation pattern. The results showed that immigrant women showed some differences in most of the prosodic characteristics from a Korean women's group: Immigrant women realized the first word of a sentence in an intonational phrase while Korean women did in an accentual phrase. They also haven't yet correctly learned the tone type of the first of an accentual phrase which differs depending on the type of its first segment yet. As a result, they showed many diverse intonation patterns compared to Korean women. Furthermore, the immigrant women's groups showed some differences between them in a few prosodic characteristics. Philippine women, whose residence duration in Korea is relatively longer than that of Vietnamese women, were more similar to Korean women: Vietnamese women read a sentence with a larger number of intonational phrases than Philippine women did. And they realized sentence-final boundary tone of a yes-no question not only in 'H%' but also in 'HL%' while, like Korean women, Philippine women did only in 'H%'.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6
• /
• pp.119-143
• /
• 1999

In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

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

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.4
• /
• pp.85-94
• /
• 2009

This paper investigates the intonation patterns of Korean spontaneous speech through an analysis of four dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The speech corpus, which is a subset of spontaneous speech database recorded and distributed by ETRI, is labeled in APs and IPs based on K-ToBI system using Momel, an intonation stylization algorithm. It was found that unlike in English, a significant number of APs and IPs include hesitation lengthening, which is known to be a disfluency phenomenon due to speech planning. This paper also claims that the hesitation lengthening is different from the IP-final lengthening and that it should be categorized as a new category, as it greatly affects the intonation patterns of the language. Except for the fact that 19.09% of APs show hesitation lengthening, the spontaneous speech shows the same AP patterns as in read speech with higher frequency of falling patterns such as LHL in comparison with read speech which show more LH and LHLH patterns. The IP boundary tones of spontaneous speech, showing the same five patterns such as L%, HL%, LHL%, H%, LH% as in read speech, show higher frequency of rising patterns (H% and LH%) and contour tones (HL%, LH%, LHL%) while read speech on the contrary shows higher frequency of falling patterns and simple tones at the end of IPs.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.7-19
• /
• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.59-69
• /
• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the variation of pitch contour observed in the reading of Korean sentences produced by Chinese Korean-learners. In the reading context, Korean sentence intonation can be described by considering accentual phrases' pitch pattern and intonational phrases' boundary tone. But when APs and IPs connect to each other to form sentences, another aspect of speech production must be considered, that is declination of pitch contour. So, in order to examine how Chinese speakers produce Korean sentence intonation, we have analysed the sentences' pitch contours produced by fourteen Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to decline the pitch contour in shorter sentences, but for longer sentences, the declination was not observed. Moreover, even though Chinese speakers produced sentences with declination, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.109-125
• /
• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the intonational meaning of various sentences based on the English Intonational Phonology, and to show the superiority of Intonational Phonology in explaining the intonational meanings in comparison with the other existing intonational theories. The American structuralists and British schools which attempt to describe the intonation in terms of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively, analyze intonational meaning from a holistic perspective in which an utterance cannot be divided into smaller parts. On the other hand, Intonational Phonology considers English intonation as composed of a series of High and Low tones, and as a result, intonational meaning is interpreted compositionally as sets of H and L. In this paper, the phonological relations between intonation and its meaning from the compositions of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones which consist of an intonational tune are discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2003.05a
• /
• pp.163-167
• /
• 2003

Intonation as suprasegmental phonetic features conveys meanings on the postlexical or utterance level in a linguistically structured way. It includes three aspects: tunes, relative prominence, and intonational phrasing. In this article, I will treat how prosodic phrasing is functionally related to the listening comprehension of English by analysing the students' errors of listening comprehension. When utterance meaning is conveyed, it is realized to be divided into intonational phrases. The small intonational phrase is regarded as an intermediate phrase which has a primary accent and a phrase tone or audible break. Most students' errors of listening occurred with linking pronunciation in the intermediate phrases of the fast speech. Thus through the smallest unit with tune we can help students improve their pronunciation and listening ability of English.