• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.529-533
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• 1996

There are some similar phonological properties shared by different languages. The phenomenon of vowel length is just one of them which shows distinctive futures. In some languages long vowels serve to differentiate meanings. In that case the phonological context it creates is important and so it has to be incorporated into the phonemic inventory of the language, otherwise there will be misunderstanding. In this paper I will try to explain the Turkish vowel system as well as the Korean, and then to show how long vowels take their forms in Turkish and Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.39-46
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• 2013

This study examined the perception of two Korean vowels using F1/F2 manipulated synthetic vowels. Previous studies indicated that there is an overlap between the acoustic spaces of Korean /o/ and /u/ in terms of the first two formants. A continuum of eleven synthetic vowels were used as stimuli. The experiment consisted of three tasks: an /o/ identification task (Yes-no), an /u/ identification task (Yes-no), and a forced choice identification task (/o/-/u/). ROC(Receiver Operating Characteristic) analysis and logistic regression were performed to calculate the boundary criterion of the two vowels along the stimulus continuum, and to predict the perceptual judgment on F1 and F2. The result indicated that the location between stimulus no.5 (F1 = 342Hz, F2 = 691Hz) and no.6 (F1 = 336Hz, F2 = 700Hz) was estimated as a perceptual boundary region between /o/ and /u/, while stimulus no.0 (F1=405Hz, F2=666Hz) and no.10 (F1=321Hz, F2=743Hz) were at opposite ends of the continuum. The influence of F2 was predominant over F1 on the perception of the vowel categories.

• The Journal of Korean Academy of Prosthodontics
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-81
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• 1985

The purpose of the this article was to determine the ideal Korean phonemes for the mandibular rest position. The subjects were 30 dentists and dental students who had normal occlusion and speech patterns. To determine the amount of mandibular opening, MKG was used for this study. The results were as follows: 1. The average mandibular rest position of Korean were -0.75(0.55)mm in horizontal plot (X), and -1.21(0.54) mm in vertical plot (Y). 2. The ideal medial sounds for the mandibular rest position were '으', '우' and '이'. 3. The ideal Korean consonants for the mandibular rest position were affricatives (ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ) and fricatives (ㅅ, ㅆ), vowels were back closed vowels (ㅡ, ㅜ). 4. The last consonants were affected by the proceeding vowels. 5. In Korean, the vowels were the most important factors that determine the rest position of mandible.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.55-68
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• 2004

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the relationship between English pronunciation and listening comprehension of English diphthongs and low vowels of Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Of 22 test sentences for listening comprehension, 15 sentences were recorded by native speakers and seven sentences were edited from Springboard by Oxford University Press. For the listening comprehension test, 90 subjects from two groups, Chungnam dialect speakers and Gyungnam dialect speakers, were selected. They listened to 22 sentences produced by audio cassette tape and completed a cloze exercise. By the results of this experiment, we observed that Korean collegians of Gyungnam province showed a better listening comprehension of words including front low vowels when they preceded voiced sounds than those of Chungnam province. When the back low vowel came in an open syllable, we also recognized the same result; Gyungnam province collegians showed better listening comprehension of words including back low vowels than those of Chungnam province. As the results of Hee-Suk Park & Jung-Soak Kim(2003) showed that Gyungnam province collegians pronounced the English low vowels longer than Chungnam province collegians, we discovered that there was a positive relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension, especially in Gyungnam province collegians. However regarding words including English diphthongs we discovered almost no relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.240-242
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• 2007

The goal of this paper is to investigate effects of three prosodic factors, such as phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented), prosodic boundary (IP-initial vs. IP-medial) and coda voicing (e.g., bed vs. bet), on acoustic realization of English vowels (/i, $_I/$, $/{\varepsilon}$, ${\ae}/$) as produced by native (Canadian) and nonnative (Korean) speakers. The speech corpus included 16 minimal pairs (e.g., bet-bat, bet-bed) embedded in a sentence. Results show that phonological contrast between vowels are maximized when they were accented, though the contrast maximization pattern was not the same between the English and Korean speakers. However, domain-initial position do not affect the phonetic manifestation of vowels. Results also show that phonological contrast due to coda voicing is maximized only when the vowels are accented. These results propose that the phonetic realization of vowels is affected by phrasal accent only, and not by the location within prosodic position.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.107-115
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• 2015

In this paper English word-final /s/ and /z/ produced by English and Korean speakers were investigated. The durations and maximum intensities of these fricatives with those of their preceding vowels were compared. In the English speakers' productions, they relied on the ratio of the durations of them as well as the ratio of the maximum intensities of them. In their productions, the /s/ was long in duration and high in maximum intensity and its preceding vowel was short in duration whereas the /z/ was short in duration and low in maximum intensity and its preceding vowel was long in duration. However, the maximum intensities of the preceding vowels were not different in their productions. But in the Korean speakers' productions, they relied on neither the ratio of the durations of them nor the ratio of the maximum intensities of them. In their productions, the /s/ and the /z/ were not different in durations, but the duration of the preceding vowel of the /s/ was shorter than that of /z/, and the maximum intensities of the /s/ and /z/ as well as their preceding vowels were not different. Based on these results we can conclude that in distinguishing /CVs/ and /CVz/ words, English speakers used durations and intensities of the word-final fricatives in addition to durations of the vowels whereas Koreans used only durations of the vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

English vowels play an important role in the daily communication between Korean students and international visitors. However, many Korean students still have difficulty producing them distinctively. Vowels vary according to shapes of oral and pharyngeal cavities, which are mainly determined by the degree of jaw opening and tongue position. Yang (2008a) proposed a simplified chart of English and Korean vowels for an educational purpose. He also suggested to use wooden chopsticks to secure distinguishable jaw openings. The purpose of this study is to tap whether wooden chopsticks can be applicable to a method for correcting English vowel pronunciation. Twelve male and female students participated in the recordings of eight /hVd/ words followed by additional recordings with wooden chopsticks between upper and lower teeth. The first and second formant trajectories of both natural and controlled vowel productions were obtained and compared at six equidistant measurement points using Praat. Results showed that the formant values of natural vowel productions were comparable to those of controlled productions. Vowels with similar formant trajectories of male students were separated with the aid of chopsticks. The width of each chopstick could be controlled similarly in the experiment. The author concludes that wooden chopsticks can be useful to correct vowel pronunciation. Further studies are desirable for native speakers to make perceptual evaluations of controlled vowel productions by nonnative speakers.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 1982

Many researches on the parametric representation of speech ,signals using the adaptive linear prediction method have been studied for the past few years. In this paper, we used the LPC(Linear Predictive Coding)method to analyae the parameters of Korean vowels and by using those parameters we studied the affinity between every pair of Korean vowels. As a result of our study, it is found that each pair of Korean vowels that has a greater phonetic affinity also has a greater affinity of vocal tract parameters than other pairs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.19-24
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• 2016

The Korean high back vowels /o/ and /u/ have been reported to be in a state of near-merger especially among young female speakers. Along with cross-generational changes, the vowel position within a word has been reported to render different phonetic realization. The current study examines native English speakers' ability to attend to the phonetic cues that distinguish the two merging vowels and the positional effects (word-initial vs. word-final) on the identification accuracy. 28 two-syllable words containing /o/ or /u/ in either initial or final position were produced by native female Korean speakers. The CV part of each target word were excised and presented to six native English speakers. The results showed that although the identification accuracy was the lowest for /o/ in word- final position (41%), it increased up to 80% in word-initial position. The acoustic analyses of the target vowels showed that /o/ and /u/ were differentiated on the height dimension only in word-initial position, suggesting that English speakers may have perceived the distinctive F1 difference retained in the prominent position.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.139-146
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• 2007

This study attempted to obtain differences as a function of Korean and Chinese in vowels. The $NasalView^{(R}}$ (Tiger Electronics Inc., Seattle, USA) was used to obtain nasalance values. Ninety eight subjects participated in this study (48 females from Korea and 48 females from China). The stimuli used in this experiment included vowel /i, a, u/. The stimuli were presented in a random order. The entire session was recorded and the average nasalance score was measured via the $NasalView^{(R)}$. The procedure took approximately 10 minutes. The results of this study showed that the difference between Korean and Chinese was significant in vowel /i, a, u/. The average nasalance scores were /i, a, u/ from highest to lowest in order in vowels. The average nasalance was higher in China than Korean in vowels.