• 음성과학
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.167-180
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• 2005

The present study examines the phonetic realizations of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ in English words produced by native and Korean ESL speakers. Traditionally, the stressed elements in utterance are considered to be prominent. In this sense, the unstressed weak vowel /e/ is predicted to be shorter in length, lower in pitch and intensity than the stressed vowels. The experiment shows that native English speakers correlate the unstressed weak vowel /e/ with both shorter duration and lower pitch; Korean ESL speakers correlate it with lower pitch only. We cannot find any significant statistical difference in intensity between /e/ and the stressed vowels in both cases. This study suggests it is important to acquire and produce the correct prosodic correlates of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ for Korean ESL speakers to command more natural English intonation, since /e/ is the most common vowel in English speech and consists of the English foot rhythm along with stressed vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.103-110
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to assess the vowel property by examining the vowel duration of the American English vowles found in the Buckeye corpus[6]. The vowel durations were analyzed in terms of various linguistic factors including the number of syllables of the word containing the vowel, the location of the vowel in a word, types of stress, function versus content word, the word frequency in the corpus and the speech rate calculated from the three consecutive words. The findings from this work agreed mostly with those from earlier studies, but with some exceptions. The relationship between the speech rate and the vowel duration proved non-linear.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.37-44
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• 2021

Preliminary findings are reported from five experiments testing the perceived naturalness of word tokens whose vowel durations are altered. The stimuli were minimal pairs of English words ending in a voiced/voiceless plosive. Results show an asymmetric effect of shortening and lengthening of the vowel on the perceived naturalness of the word. Incremental shortening of vowel duration initially shows a stable degree of perceived naturalness but rapidly deteriorates beyond a certain point. On the contrary, only a small degree of lengthening of the vowel made the perceived naturalness of the word quickly decay, but there was a floor effect such that the perceived degree of naturalness does not lower beyond a certain level. Further, the tokens with the original vowel duration were not always scored higher than the stimuli with a small degree of shortening. Future studies should address the issue of speaking rate and the ratio between the vowel and the stop closure duration to better understand the phenomenon. The issue investigated here has implications on the role of prototypical exemplars in the perception of phonotactic naturalness.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제38호
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• pp.71-97
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• 1999

In this paper I have surveyed vowel phonemes in a variety of English accents and have proposed the vowel systems of English. The English accents covered in this paper include General American English, Northeastern American English, Western American English, Southern British English, Northern British English, Scottish English, Southern Irish English, Northern Irish English, Australian English, and New Zealand English. The vowel systems proposed here reflect the acoustic information of vowels and phonological aspects of English. This paper offers an Optimality Theory-based analysis of the English vowel systems by appealing to independently motivated constraints. This paper, following Flemming(1995), makes an assumption that the vowel system in question is selected in output as an optimal candidate by a given constraint ranking, the assumption which is different from the view that the vowel system is fixed in input. The analysis proposed here gives an answer to why a specific vowel system is selected and why dialectal variations come about. It is shown in this paper that the vowel system selected in a specific dialect comes from an optimal satisfaction of a given constraint ranking and that dialectal differences result from dynamic permutations of the same constraints. The constraint-based analysis proffered here accounts well for the similarities and differences among dialects in regard to the vowel system.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.111-116
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• 2016

The Nasometer is most commonly used to assess the presence and degree of resonance problems in clinical settings and it provides nasalance scores to identify the acoustic correlates of nasality. Nasalance scores are influenced by factors related to speakers and speech stimuli. This study aims to examine the effect of vowel context and length of stimuli and age on nasalance scores. The participants were 20 adults and 45 children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years. The stimuli consisted of 12 sentences containing no nasal consonants. The stimuli in the three vowel contexts (low, high, and mixed) consisted of 4, 8, 16, and 31-syllable long sentences. Speakers were asked to repeat each stimulus after examiner. The results indicated significant effects of vowel contexts and stimulus length on nasalance scores. The nasalance scores for the high vowel contexts were significantly higher than those for the mixed and low vowel contexts. The nasalance scores for the mixed vowel contexts were significantly higher than those for the low vowel contexts. Speakers had higher nasalance scores for 4-syllable long sentences and 31-syllable long sentences than for 16-syllable long sentences. The effect of age on nasalance scores was not significant. The results of the study suggest that the vowel context and length of speech stimuli should be carefully considered when interpreting the nasalance scores.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.69-87
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• 2006

This study aims to describe the vowel system of present-day American English and to discuss some of its phonetic variations due to regional differences. Fifteen speakers of American English from various regions of the United States produced the monophthongs of English. The vowel duration and the frequencies of the first and the second formant were measured. The results indicate that the distinction between the vowels [c] and [a] has been merged in most parts of the U.S. except in some speakers from eastern and southeastern parts of the U.S., resulting in the general loss of phonemic distinction between the vowels. The phonemic merger of the two vowels can be interpreted as the result of the relatively small functional load of the [c]-[a] contrast, and the smaller back vowel space in comparison to the front vowel space. The study also shows that the F2 frequencies of the high back vowel [u] were extremely high in most of the speakers from the eastern region of the U.S., resulting in the overall reduction of their acoustic space for high vowels. From the viewpoint of the Adaptive Dispersion Theory proposed by Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) and Lindblom (1986), the high back vowel [u] appeared to have been fronted in order to satisfy the economy of articulatory gesture to some extent without blurring any contrast between [i] and [u] in the high vowel region.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제27_28호
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• pp.27-56
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• 1994

Processes involving the change of vowel height are natural enough to be found in many languages. It is essential to have a better feature specification for vowel height to grasp these processes properly, Standard Phonology adopts the binary feature system, and vowel height is represented by the two features, i.e., [\pm high] and [\pm low]. This has its own merits. But it is defective because it is misleading when we count the number of features used in a rule to compare the naturalness of rules. This feature system also cannot represent more than three degrees of height, We wi31 discard the binary features for vowel height. We consider to adopt the multivalued feature [n high] for the property of height. However, this feature cannot avoid the arbitrariness resulting from the number values denoting vowel height. It is not easy to expect whether the number in question is the largest or not It also is impossible to decide whether a larger number denotes a higher vowel or a lower vowel. Furthermore this feature specification requires an ad hoc condition such as n > 3 or n \geq 2, whenever we want to refer to a natural class including more than one degree of height The altelnative might be Particle Phonology, or Dependency Phonology. These might be apt for multivalued vowel height systems, as their supporters argue. However, the feature specification of Particle Phonology will be discarded because it does not observe strictly the assumption that the number of the particle a is decisive in representing the height. One a in a representation can denote variant degrees of height such as [e], [I], [a], [a ] and [e ]. This also means that we cannot represent natural classes in terms of the number of the particle a, Dependency Phonology also has problems in specifying a degree of vowel height by the dependency relations between the elements. There is no unique element to represent vowel height since every property has to be defined in terms of the dependency relations between two or more elements, As a result it is difficult to formulate a rule for vowel height change, especially when the phenomenon involves a chain of vowel shifts. Therefore, we suggest a new feature specification for vowel height (see Chapter 3). This specification resorts to a single feature H and a few >'s which refer exclusively to the degree of the tongue height when a vowel is pronounced. It can cope with more than three degrees of height because it is fundamentally a multivalued scalar feature. This feature also obviates the ad hoc condition for a natural class while the [n high] type of multivalued feature suffers from it. Also this feature specification conforms to our expection that the notation should become simpler as the generality of the class increases, in that the fewer angled brackets are used, the more vowels are included, Incidentally, it has also to be noted that, by adopting a single feature for vowel height, it is possible to formulate a simpler version of rules involving the changes of vowel height especially when they involve vowel shifts found in many languages.

• 음성과학
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• 제6권
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• pp.33-44
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• 1999

This paper aims to analyze whether the phenomenon of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ is a hypercorrection or not in the North Korean dialects. Most North Koreans pronounce /i/(gold) as /kum/ because the vowel /i/ merges into the peripheral vowel space of /u/ in their dialects. The merger of back vowel is one of most distinctive characters in North Korean dialects. But some speakers pronounce /chubann/(exile) as /chiban/. This time /u/ in peripheral space moves to /i/ in central vowel space. It seems that the vowels /i/ and /u/ exchange places with each other when they uttered in North Korean. Though it was observed that the vowel movement of /i/$\rightarrow$/u/ was caused by the merger of back vowels, the reason why vowel /u/ moves in the opposite direction, that is, the central space of vowel /i/ has not been analyzed yet. This experiment starts with hypothesis that the movement of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ might be caused by hypercorrection. The first step of this research is to analyze /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ pronunciation of North Koreans. The second step is to compare the results of North Korean pronunciation with those of South Korean pronunciation and observe whether tendency of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/pronunciation can also be found in the standard Seoul dialect and other South Korean dialects.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제25권
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• pp.723-741
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• 2011

The principle of vowel dispersion claims that vowels are dispersed in the available phonetic space. However, SPAP and UPSID show that deviations from the patterns predicted by this principle are relatively infrequent of, for the most part, confined to matters of small scale, falling into a few definable classes. In this paper, we will discuss the vowel systems of 4 languages, Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, and will argue that vowels tend toward a balanced and wide dispersion in the available phonetic space by the complementary vowels.