• 음성과학
• /
• 제10권3호
• /
• pp.175-185
• /
• 2003

Japanese and Turkish are syntactically similar to each other, and there are syntactic structures that become ambiguous in terms of NP's and VP's modified by adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers of Sendai dialect of Japanese and Turkish use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurements were made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese and Turkish to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese and Turkish creates the same ambiguities. In this paper, I look at duration, F0, and pause as observed in their speech and see how each language uses three prosodic elements in disambiguation. The results show that both speakers of Sendai dialect in Japan and those of Ankara dialect in Turky use lengthening of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제4권4호
• /
• pp.117-127
• /
• 2012

This research reports the prosodic characteristics (including articulation speech rate, pause characteristics, duration) of children with cochlear implants with reference to those of children with normal hearing. Subjects are 8-to 10-year-old children, balancing each number of gender as 24. Dialogue speech data are comprised of four types of sentence patterns. Results show that 1) there's a statistically meaningful difference on articulation speech rate between the two groups. 2) On pauses, they are not observed in exclamatory and declarative sentences in normal children. While imperative sentences show no statistical difference on the number of pauses between the two groups, interrogative sentences do. 3) Declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences reveal statistical difference between the two groups in terms of the sentence's final two-syllable word duration, showing no difference on imperative sentences. 4) When it comes to the RFP (duration ratio of sentence final syllable to penultimate syllable), we no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups in all types of sentences exists. 5) Lastly, RWS (the ratio of sentence final two syllable word duration to that of whole sentence duration) shows statistical difference between two groups in imperative sentences, but not in all the rest types.

• 한국언어정보학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국언어정보학회 2007년도 정기학술대회
• /
• pp.522-530
• /
• 2007

This article investigates the use of distal demonstrative Hitlo in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) from a discourse-pragmatic perspective. The analysis is based on a 5-hour corpus of spoken data, including daily conversations, radio interviews, TV drama series, and some random examples. A total of 172 tokens of Hitlos are identified in the data. They can be divided into six categories according to their functions: firstly, exophoric usage, those Hitlos which refer to an object non-linguistically which can be identified in the immediate situation; secondly, endophoric usage, those which refer to an element textually; thirdly, referent introducing function, those which can be used to introduce a new but identifiable referent into the conversation (the referent usually has topical importance); fourthly, hedging expression, those which serve as a marker of imprecision; fifthly, a condition introducing marker, those which function as an indicator of the coming of a conditional sentence; finally, pause fillers, those which help speakers to manage speech turn or indicate the mental states In addition, an interactive function which Hitlo is found to serve will be discussed. Moreover, a grammaticalizational process involving semantic bleaching which Hitlo is probably undergoing is revealed in general. Finally, a filled demonstrative principle, stating that it may be a universal phenomenon to use demonstratives as filled pause will be proposed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권2호
• /
• pp.141-151
• /
• 2014

This study reports anti-hierarchical initial-syllable lengthening of an utterance-internal phrase in Korean. That is, the phrase-initial syllable (e.g., /a/ of "apa-do" or /ma/ of "mapa-do") starting with a voiced phoneme (i.e., vowels or voiced consonants) manifests itself as significantly longer when it is preceded by another phrase without a pause than when it leads an utterance or follows a pause utterance-internally. The phenomenon was examined with regard to two other factors: (1) tempo and (2) tenseness of the consonant (/p, $p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/) following the target syllable /a/. First, the effect of tempo on initial lengthening was not significant. Apart from the statistical significance, however, a tendency was observed, i.e., the slower the tempo is, the greater the lengthening. By contrast, the faster the tempo is, the higher the ratio (%) of lengthening. Second, contrary to our expectations, initial-syllable lengthening was even greater before tense stops /$p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/ than before lax stop /p/ regardless of tempo, and it was remarkable when it comes to the ratio (%), which means that initial lengthening is free of the pre-consonantal vowel shortening effect. Final-syllable lengthening is a pre-boundary marker, while the initial-syllable lengthening is regarded as a post-boundary marker of a phrase.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제12권3호
• /
• pp.95-103
• /
• 2020

본 연구의 목적은 경직형 뇌성마비 아동의 하위그룹별로 말속도와 쉼에서 차이가 있는지 살펴보고, 말명료도와의 관련성에 대해서 알아보고자 하였다. 연구대상은 경직형 뇌성마비 아동 26명이 참여하였다. 말문제와 언어문제가 없는 NSMI-LCT 4명, 말문제는 없지만 언어문제가 있는 NSMI-LCI 그룹 6명, 말문제가 있지만 언어문제는 없는 SMI-LCT 6명, 말과 언어문제를 모두 동반하는 SMI-LCI 그룹 10명이 참여하였다. 연구과제는 문장 따라말하기였고, Praat을 통해 말속도, 조음속도, 쉼 시간의 비율, 평균 쉼 횟수, 평균 쉼 시간을 측정하였다. 연구결과, 첫째, 말속도와 조음속도는 언어문제의 유무와 관계없이 NSMI와 SMI 그룹 간에 유의한 차이가 나타났다. 둘째, NSMI에 비해 SMI 그룹에서에서 쉼 시간의 비율은 더 높고, 쉼 횟수는 더 빈번하였으며 쉼 시간은 더 길게 나타났다. 셋째, 말속도와 조음속도는 말명료도와 유의한 상관을 나타내었다. 본 연구의 결과는 느린 말속도가 SMI 그룹의 말산출 과정에서 나타나는 주요한 특성이고, 말명료도에 있어서 조음속도와 말속도가 중요한 역할을 함을 시사한다.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제9권3호
• /
• pp.211-221
• /
• 2002

The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers in Tokyo and Sendai dialects of Japanese use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurement was made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese create the same ambiguities. After defining the depth of a syntactic boundary, F0 of the phrase before and after the boundary, and duration of the syllable and pause before the boundary were measured. The results show that Tokyo dialects speakers use F0 after syntactic boundary, and Sendai dialects speakers use of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제56호
• /
• pp.195-206
• /
• 2005

Discrimination between speech and music is important in many multimedia applications. In this paper, focusing on the spectral change characteristics of speech and music, we propose a new method of speech/music discrimination based on cepstral distance. Instead of using cepstral distance between the frames with fixed interval, the minimum of cepstral distances among neighbor frames is employed to increase discriminability between fast changing music and speech. And, to prevent misclassification of speech segments including short pause into music, short pause segments are excluded from computing cepstral distance. The experimental results show that proposed method yields the error rate reduction of$68\%$, in comparison with the conventional approach using cepstral distance.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제14권4호
• /
• pp.65-80
• /
• 2007

This experimental study is designed to investigate the acoustic cues produced by English native speakers in order to disambiguate the ambiguous sentences. This study also investigates whether Korean learners of English and English native speakers can perceive the appropriate meanings from the sentences produced with those acoustic cues. In the perception test, English native speakers successfully found out the proper meaning, utilizing the intonational cues, while Korean learners had difficulties in distinguishing the differences in meaning. The break interval was manipulated in order to see whether the pause duration facilitates or interferes with disambiguation. Though phrasing played an important role in disambiguation, the break interval itself did not have influence on it. The result, therefore, suggests that the tonal realization of phrasal accents and boundary tones seem to be more significant than the break interval in the perception of phrasing.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제13권2호
• /
• pp.47-58
• /
• 2006

People tend to control their speech rate to help those with listening problems such as hearing impaired people. The aim of this study was to investigate effects of speech rate on the sentence perception by 10 adults with cochlear implantation. The sample speech included 42 sentences at normal, slow, and very slow speed focusing on the overall duration, vowel or pause duration. The subjects listened to the speech and wrote down what they heard. Each correct syllable of the content words in the sentence was counted to obtain the score. Partial points were given to the incomplete syllables. Results of this study were as follows: 1. The changes of speech rate had some influence on the sentence perception score by the cochlear implanted people. 2. In slow pause condition, the controlled speech rate had a positive effect on the perception score.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국음향학회 1994년도 FIFTH WESTERN PACIFIC REGIONAL ACOUSTICS CONFERENCE SEOUL KOREA
• /
• pp.937-942
• /
• 1994

Text-to-Speech(TTS) conversion system can convert any words or sentences into speech. To synthesize the speech like human beings do, careful prosody control including intonation, duration, accent, and pause is required. It helps listeners to understand the speech clearly and makes the speech sound more natural. In this paper, a prosody control scheme which makes use of the information of the function word is proposed. Among many factors of prosody, intonation, duration, and pause are closely related to syntactic structure, and their relations have been formalized and embodied in TTS. To evaluate the synthesized speech with the proposed prosody control, one of the subjective evaluation methods-MOS(Mean Opinion Score) method has been used. Synthesized speech has been tested on 10 listeners and each listener scored the speech between 1 and 5. Through the evaluation experiments, it is observed that the proposed prosody control helps TTS system synthesize the more natural speech.