• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.71-80
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• 2016

The phonemic awareness tasks (phonemic synthesis, phonemic elision, phonemic segmentation) by auditory presentation and visual presentation were conducted to 40 children who are 5 and 6 years old. The scores and error types in the sub-tasks by two presentations were compared to each other. Also, the correlation between the performances of phonemic awareness sub-tasks in two presentation conditions were examined. As a result, 6-year-old group showed significantly higher phonemic awareness scores than 5-year-old group. Both group showed significantly higher scores in visual presentation than auditory presentation. While the performance under the visual presentation was significantly lower especially in the segmentation than the other two tasks, there was no significant difference among sub-tasks under the auditory presentation. 5-year-old group showed significantly more 'no response' errors than 6-year-old group and 6-year-old group showed significantly more 'phoneme substitution' and 'phoneme omission' errors than 5-year-old group. Significantly more 'phoneme omission' errors were observed in the segmentation than the elision task, and significantly more 'phoneme addition' errors were observed in elision than the synthesis task. Lastly, there are positive correlations in auditory and visual synthesis tasks, auditory and visual elision tasks, and auditory and visual segmentation tasks. Summarizing the results, children tend to depend on orthographic knowledge when acquiring the initial phonemic awareness. Therefore, the result of this research would support the position that the orthographic knowledge affects the improvement of phonemic awareness.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.694-702
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• 2003

The word intelligibility test for dysarthric speakers was designed to examine phonetic contrasts that are likely (1) to be sensitive to intelligibility impairment and (2) to contribute significantly to speech intelligibility. These phonetically contrasting word pairs were tested and proved to be reliable and to be valid, The results showed that in Korean dysarthric patients, the percentage of error in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.59-75
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• 2002

Aerodynamic analysis study was performed on 14 normal subjects (2 males, 12 females) with nonsense syllables composed of Korean bilabial stops (/p, p', $p^{h}$) and their preceding and/or following vowels, /i, a, u/. That is, [pi, p'i, $p^{h}i$, pa, p'a, $p^{h}a$, pu, p'u, $p^{h}u$, ipi, apa, upu, $ip^{h}i$, $ap^{h}a$, $up^{h}u$, ip'i, ap'a, up'u]. All measures were taken and analysed using Aerophone II voice function analyzer and included peak air pressure, mean air pressure, maximum flow rate, volume, mean SPL and phonatory SPL. A t-test and one-way ANOVA were employed for analysis. A post-hoc analysis was performed with Scheffe and Bonferroni. The results were as follows: First, MSPL. and MAP of /p, p', $p^{h}$/ were significantly different in different positions (initial and medial position). In addition, different vowel environment also produced significantly different aerodynamic characteristics those consonants. Especially the lax consonant /p/ was significantly different /i, a, u/ vowel environments. The tense consonant /p'/ was significantly different only /i/ vowel environment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.93-105
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• 2000

The English schwa sound has special characteristics which are distinct from other vowels. It is non-phonemic and occurs only in an unstressed syllable. Compared with the English schwa, the Korean /e/ is a full vowel which has phonemic contrast. This paper had three aims. One was to see whether there is any relationship between English full vowels and their reduced vowel schwas. Second was to see whether there is any possible target in the English schwa sounds which are derived from different full vowels. The third was to compare the English non-phoneme vowel schwa and the Korean full vowel /e/ in terms of articulatory positions and duration. The study results showed that there is no relationship between each of the full vowels and its schwa. The schwa tended to converge into a possible target which was F1 456 and F2 1560. The Korean vowel /e/ seemed to have its distinct position speaker-individual which is different from the neutral tongue position. The evidence that the Korean /e/ is a back vowel was supported by the Seoul dialect speaker. In duration, the English schwa was much shorter than the full vowels, but there was no significant difference in length between the Korean /e/ and other Korean vowels.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.239-244
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• 2009

This paper is to develop the Korean Phonotactic Probability Calculator (KPPC) that anticipates the phonotactic probability in Korean. KPPC calculates the positional segment frequecncy, position-specific biphone frequency and position-specific triphone frequency. And KPPC also calculates the Neighborhood Density that is the number of words that sound similar to a target word. The Phonotactic Calculator that was developed in University of Kansas can be analyzed by the computer-readable phonemic transcription. This can calculate positional frequency and position-specific biphone frequency that were derived from 20,000 dictionary words. But KPPC calculates positional frequency, positional biphone frequency, positional triphone frequency and neighborhood density. KPPC can calculate by korean alphabet or computer-readable phonemic transcription. This KPPC can anticipate high phonotactic probability, low phonotactic probability, high neighborhood density and low neighborhood density.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1E
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• pp.28-33
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• 2005

This study was designed to suggest an assessment tool for analyzing the characteristics of Korean phonetic contrast intelligibility among dysarthric individuals. The intelligibility deficit factors of phonetic contrast in Korean dysarthric patients were analyzed through stepwise regression analysis. The 19 acoustic-phonetic contrasts proposed by Kent et al. (1999) have been claimed to be useful for clinical assessment and research on dysarthria. However, the test cannot be directly applied to Korean patients due to linguistic differences between English and Korean. Thus, it is necessary to devise a Korean word intelligibility test that reflects the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. To identify the speech error characteristics of a Korean dysarthric group, a Korean word list was audio-recorded by 3 spastic, 4 flaccid, and 5 mixed type of dysarthric patients. The word list consisted of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) real word pairs. Stimulus words included 41 phonemic contrast pairs and six triplets. The results showed that the percentage of errors in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.45-53
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• 2011

Flemming and Johnson (2007) claim that there is a fundamental distinction between the mid central vowel [ə] and the high central vowel [?] in that [ə] occurs in an unstressed word-final position while [?] appears elsewhere. Compared to English counterparts, Korean [ə] and [?] are full vowels and they have phonemic contrast. The purpose of this paper is to explore the acoustic quality of two English reduced vowels produced by Korean learners and native speakers of English in terms of their two formant frequencies. Sixteen Korean learners of English and six native speakers of English produced four types of English words and two types of Korean words with different phonological and morphological patterns. The results show that Korean learners of English produced the two reduced vowels of English and their Korean counterparts differently in Korean and English words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.25-30
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• 2012

This study investigated whether native Korean listeners could use visual cues for the identification of the English consonants /b/ and /v/. Both auditory and audiovisual tokens of word minimal pairs in which the target phonemes were located in word-initial or word-medial position were used. Participants were instructed to decide which consonant they heard in $2{\times}2$ conditions: cue (audio-only, audiovisual) and location (word-initial, word-medial). Mean identification scores were significantly higher for audiovisual than audio-only condition and for word-initial than word-medial condition. Also, according to signal detection theory, sensitivity, d', and response bias, c were calculated based on both hit rates and false alarm rates. The measures showed that the higher identification rate in the audiovisual condition was related with an increase in sensitivity. There were no significant differences in response bias measures across conditions. This result suggests that native Korean speakers can use visual cues while identifying confusing non-native phonemic contrasts. Visual cues can enhance non-native speech perception.

• MALSORI
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• no.29_30
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• pp.61-94
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• 1995

The aim of this paper is to describe the linguistic differences of two Koreas with a special emphasis on the phonetic aspect of Seoul and Pyongyang speech. The sources of the North Korean speech material used in the study are 1) the Pyongyang radio and TV broadcasts, 2) interviews of north Korean defectors and 3) speech material of north Korean scholars collected by the writer in london, Warsaw, France and China between 1989 and 1994. The most noticeable phonetic differences of Seoul and Pyongyang speech are abstracted as follows: 1) The vowels /이/, /에/ and /애/ are higher and fronter in Pyongyang speech than in Seoul speech. 2) The vowels /우/ and /으/ of Pyongyang speech are somewhat fronter than the corresponding vowels of Seoul speech. 3) The Pyongyang vowels /으/ and if are produced with rounded lips compared to the corresponding Seoul vowels. 4) The Pyongyang vowel /h) is much lower in tongue position and at the same time somewhat fronter than the corresponding Seoul vowel. 5) The consonants /r ,i ,n / are pronounced in Pyongyang as alveolar affricates or something close to them whereas they are pronounced in Seoul as post-alveolar affricates. 6) Unlike in Seoul speech there is a very strong tendency in Pyongyang speech to reduce aspiration feature in consonant seouences such as /ㅂ+ㅎ/, /ㄷ+ㅎ/, /ㄱ+ㅎ/. 7) /ㄴ/ and /ㄹ/(flap) freely occur word-initially in Pyongyang speech whereas they are restricted in Seoul speech. 8) Unlike in Seoul speech the phonemic contrast of long and short vowels are generally not functional in Pyongyang speech. Thus the vowels pronounced long in Seoul speech are usually pronounced short in Pyongyang speech.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.142-143
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• 1997

The purpose of this paper is to assess the psychological status of the phoneme, syllable, and various postulated subsyllabic units in Korean by applying the Sound Similarity Judgment (SSJ) task, to compare the results with those in English, and to discuss the advantage and disadvantage of the SSJ task as a tool for linguistic research. In Experiment 1, 30 subjects listened to pairs of 56 eve words which were systematically varied from 'totally different' (e.g., pan-met) to 'identical' (e.g., pan-pan). Subjects were then asked to rate sound similarity of each pair on a 10-point scale. Not very surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between the number of phonemic segments matched and the similarity score provided by the subjects. This result was in accord with the previous results from English (e.g., Vitz & Winkler, 1973; Derwing & Nearey, 1986) and supported the assumption that the phoneme is the basic phonological unit in Korean and English. However, there were sharply contrasting results between the two languages. When the pairs shared two phonemes (e.g., pan-pat; pan-pen; pan-man), the pairs sharing the fIrst two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Quite to the contrary, in the comparable English experiments, the pairs sharing the last two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Experiment 2 was designed to conflrm the results of Experiment 1 by controlling the 'degree' of similarity between phonemes. For example, the pair pan-pam can be judged more similar than the pair pan-nan, although both pairs share the same number of phonemes. This could be interpreted either as confirming the result of Experiment 1 or as the fact that /n/ is more similar to /m/ than /p/ is to /n/ in terms of shared number of distinctive features. The results of Experiment 2 supported the former interpretation. Thus, the results of both experiments clearly showed that, although the 'number' of matched phonemes is the important predictor in judging sound similarity of monosyllabic pairs of both languages, the 'position' of the matched phonemes exerts a different influence in judging sound similarity in the two languages. This contrasting set of results may provide interesting implications for the internal structure of the syllable in the two languages.