• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.30-37
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• 1987

Twelve Korean monophthongs were studied by formant analysis, fundamental frequencies and their harmonics were considered as the parameters of analysis. The analyzed data were twelve Korean monophthongs which were pronounced with the five fundamental frequencies by the five male vocal musicians. The study shows that the first and the second formants are characterized by the resonance of the cavities of pharymx and mouth, respectively. The lip rounding effect detreases the second formant frequency. The phonemes of $[a]/[\alpha ], [e]/[\varepsilon] and [\partial]/[\Lambda]$were not distinguished well in this formant analysis.

• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.1-17
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate and quantitatively describe the acoustic characteristics of current Korean monophthongs. Recordings were made of 33 men and 27 women producing the vowels /i, e, ${\epsilon}$, a, ${\partial}$, o, u, i/ in a carrier phrase "This character is ___." A listening test was conducted in which 19 participants judged each vowel. F1, F2, and F3 were measured from the vowels judged as intended vowels by more than 17 people from the listening test. Analysis of formant data shows some interesting results including the undeniable confirmation of the 7-vowel system in modern Korean. It turns out that quite different sounding Korean vowels and English vowels happen to have very similar formant measurements. Also the difference between "citation-form reading" vs. "natural utterance reading" is discussed.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.3-26
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• 1993

The goals of the present study were (3) to collect and analyze sets of fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequency (F1, F2, F3) data of Korean diphthongs from ten linguistically homogeneous speakers of Korean males, and (2) to make a comparative study of Korean monophthongs and diphthongs. Various definitions, kinds, and previous studies of diphthongs were examined in the introduction. Procedures for screening subjects to form a linguistically homogeneous group, time point selection and formant determination were explained in the following section. The principal findings were as follows: 1. Much variation was observed in the ongliding part of diphthongs. 2. F2 values of (j) group descended while those of [w] group ascended, 3. The average duration of diphthongs were about 110 msec, and there was not much variation between speakers and diphthongs. 4. In a comparative study of monophthongs and diphthongs, Fl and F2 values of the same offgliding part at the third time point almost converged. 5. The gliding of diphthongs was very short beginning from the h-noise. Perceptual studies using speech synthesis are desirable to find major parameters for diphthongs. The results of the present study wi11 be useful in the area of automated speech recognition and computer synthesis of speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.23-29
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• 2017

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in pronounced phrasal words of the Seoul Corpus by gender and age groups in order to provide linguists and phoneticians with a clearer understanding of the spoken Korean. Both orthographic and pronounced phrasal words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Corpus using Praat. Then, phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs were tabulated using an R script after syllabifying the phrasal words into separate components. Results revealed that 97% of the number of syllables in the orthographic and pronounced phrasal words were the same while 65.8% showed difference in the syllable structure. 90.5% of the vowels in the orthographic phrasal words were realized in the pronounced phrasal words. A Chi-square test of independence was performed to obtain a significant dependence in the distribution of phonological process types of male and female groups along with a very strong correlation. Female group changed the diphthong yo into yv at the end of the pronounced phrasal words more often than the male group did. Age groups also showed a significant dependence in the distribution of phonological process types along with a very strong correlation. Females in the 40s produced the diphthong yv and made the vowel raising at the end of the pronounced phrasal words most often among the gender and age groups. From the results, this paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in light of syllable structure can contribute greatly to the understanding of the spoken Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.25-31
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• 2018

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the pronounced words present in the Buckeye Corpus and compared the frequency distribution of these processes by sex and age groups to provide a clearer understanding of spoken English to linguists and phoneticians. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus using R. Next, the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated using R scripts, and a frequency distribution by vowel process types, as well as sex and age groups, was created. The results revealed that 95% of the orthographic words contained the same number of syllables, whereas 5% had different numbers of vowels, thereby proving that speakers tend to preserve vowels in spontaneous speech. In addition, deletion processes were preferred in natural speech. Most vowel deletions occurred with an unstressed syllable. Chi-square tests were performed to calculate dependence in the distribution of phonological process types for male and female groups and young and old groups. The results showed a very strong correlation. This finding indicates that vowel processes occurred in approximately the same pattern in natural and spontaneous speech data regardless of sex and age, as well as whether or not the vowel processes were identical. Based on these results, the author concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can greatly enhance practical understanding of spoken English.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.1123-1126
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• 2004

Recognizing emotion in speech is required lots of spoken language corpus not only at the different emotional statues, but also in individual languages. In this paper, we focused on the changes speech signals in different emotions. We compared the features of speech information like formant and pitch according to the 4 emotions (normal, happiness, sadness, anger). In Korean, pitch data on monophthongs changed in each emotion. Therefore we suggested the suitable analysis techniques using these features to recognize emotions in Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.71-79
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• 2013

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of the Korean vowels. Specifically the author examined whether Korean monophthongs are acquired rapidly in early stages of learning (Flege, Munro and Skelton, 1992; Munro and Derwing, 2008) or they develop rather gradually in proportion to the learners' experience (Byee, 2001; Ellis, 2006). This study collected the Korean vowel production by 23 Chinese learners for a year, and then analysed F1 and F2 of each Korean vowel. The results showed that 1) Most of the second language (L2) vowels were rapidly improved during the first six or nine months of Korean learning before reaching the constant stage; and 2) The exact acquisition trajectories varied across the seven vowels. Specifically the vowels which were acquired in the early stage of learning were /i, e, ɨ/ for F1 and /ʌ, e, o, u/ for F2. Thus this study supports the hypothesis of Flege et al. (1992) and Munro and Derwing (2008) except the fact that each vowel showed the different learning route.

• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.13-36
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• 2008

This paper attempts to analyze the characteristics of Korean vowel production by 12 Korean native speakers and 36 adult learners. The analyses have been performed with investigations of F1and F2 values. Results showed that there's no significant difference between /ㅔ/ and /H/ and between /ㅗ/ and /ㅜ/ in Korean native speakers' pronunciations. The distinguishing tendencies found in the analyses of foreign learners' pronunciations are fronting and lowering of /ㅗ/ by English speakers, backing and heightening of /ㅓ/ by Japanese speakers and backing and lowering of /ㅏ/ by Chinese speakers. For the limitations of this paper, it has a meaning of a preliminary study and could be developed into further research to show the order of acquisition and L1 transference.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2015

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.7-27
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• 2006

This study explored the discrimination of synthesized English vowel pairs by twenty-seven American and Korean, male and female listeners. The average formant values of nine monophthongs produced by ten American English male speakers were employed to synthesize the vowels. Then, subjects were instructed explicitly to respond to AX discrimination tasks in which the standard vowel was followed by another one with the increment or decrement of the original formant values. The highest and lowest formant values of the same vowel quality were collected and compared to examine patterns of vowel discrimination. Results showed that the American and Korean groups discriminated the vowel pairs almost identically and their center formant frequency values of the high and low boundary fell almost exactly on those of the standards. In addition, the acceptable range of the same vowel quality was similar among the language and gender groups. The acceptable thresholds of each vowel formed oval to maintain perceptual contrast from adjacent vowels. The results suggested that nonnative speakers with high English proficiency could match native speakers' performance in discriminating vowel pairs with a shorter inter-stimulus interval. Pedagogical implications of those findings are discussed.