• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2002

Phonologically, the difference between the English stops /b, d, g/ and /p, t, k/ is carried by the presence or the absence of the vocal fold vibration throughout their oral closure phase. If phonology has its foundation in phonetics, there must be phonetic evidence for the voiced-voiceless distinction. This study is aimed to determine whether or not the voiced-voiceless distinction is acceptable or proper in English. The determination was based mainly on findings in the existing literature and in informal experiments. In conclusion, there is no phonetic evidence for the voiced-voiceless distinction both in production and perception. The [voice] appears to be one of potential phonetic correlates of the phonologically voiced stop. It is improper to use the [voice] as independent phonological marker, regardless of position (word-initial, intervocalic, word-final). A feature other than the voiced-voiceless feature must distinguish /b, d, g/ from /p, t, k/.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.111-117
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Chinese learners of Korean produce Korean plain plosives differently in a reading passage and isolated sentences. There are several studies on Korean plosives produced by Chinese speakers, but the study comparing the production of reading passage and isolated sentences are rare. For these purposes, ten Chinese speakers' VOT values of Korean plain plosives were measured using Speech Analyzer. The results show that there is no significant difference between the plain plosive production of a reading passage and that of isolated sentences. In the further studies, the measurement of pitch with VOT is needed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten adult male speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [4], also known as the Seoul corpus, and to analyze them by comparing to earlier works on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] in terms of the various linguistic factors that are expected to affect the formant distribution. The vowels extracted from the Korean corpus were also compared to those of the read Korean. The results showed that the distribution of the vowel formants from the Korean corpus was very different from that of read Korean speech. The comparison with English corpus and read English speech showed similar patterns. The factors affecting the Korean vowel formants were the interviewer sex, the location of the target vowel or the syllable containing it with respect to the phrasal word or utterance and the speech rate of the surrounding words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.77-83
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• 2015

The aim of this paper is to investigate Japanese speakers' perception of Korean tense consonants. In a range of perceptual experiments Japanese participants were directed to label Korean stimuli using Japanese katakana characters. The analysis of the results showed a strong influence of Japanese phonology in the responses. Japanese perception of sokuon was increased, (1) when the tense consonants were in word medial position, (2) when tense consonants were other than /s/, (3) when the tense consonant followed voiceless consonants, (4) when the consonants were part of a cluster sharing their point of articulation, (5) when preceding vowel were other than /u/, (6) when following vowel were /u/. This result, showing preference for phonology, is in harmony with previous research on the Japanese sokuon perception using Japanese (Takeyasu 2009, Matsui 2011), and Italian (Tanaka & Kubozono 2008) stimuli.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.39-45
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• 2015

This research was conducted to investigate the voice related needs of occupational voice users. The data collected from teachers(379), tele-marketers(156), therapists(50) was classified according to its content, by colaizzi's inductive categorical analysis. The voice related needs are classified into 3 big categories, 1) how to use, 2) how to care, 3) how to be healthy. Again the category 'how to use' my voice was into 6 sub-categories: (1) efficiently, (2) as I desired, (3) without pain(discomfort), (4) expressively, (5) phonation (methods) and (6) clear articulation. The result showed that the needs from 3 groups of occupational voice users reflect their own environment which they have to use their voice as well as the voice characteristics wanted from their specific listeners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.157-162
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• 2015

This study reports on the effective way of displaying dynamic formant information on F1-F2 space. Conventional ways of F1-F2 space (different name of vowel triangle or vowel rectangle) have been used for investigating vowel characteristics of a speaker or a language based on statistics of the F1 and F2 values, which were computed by spectral envelope search method. Those methods were dealing mainly with the static information of the formants, not the changes of the formant values (i.e. dynamic information). So a better way of investigating dynamic informations from the formant values of speech signal is suggested so that more convenient and detailed investigation of the dynamic changes can be achieved on F1-F2 space. Suggested method used visualization of static and dynamic information in overlapped way to be able to observe the change of the formant information easily. Finally some examples of the implemented display on some cases of the continuous vowels are shown to prove the usefulness of suggested method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.139-145
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• 2015

Researchers have claimed that Korean younger speakers tend to less clearly differentiate aspirated and lax stops with VOT values while older speakers clearly differentiate these two stops with VOT values. To explain this phenomena, the current study consider both an aging effect and a general sound shift. For this study, VOT values and F0 of Korean stops produced by eight male speakers(years of birth were 1942 ~ 1952) analyzed using Praat. Their productions were compared with the values of participants whose year of birth were 1943 ~ 1952) in Silva(2006)'s research. Silva's research was conducted in 2004 using the same methods. The result shows that 2014's VOT gap between aspirated and lax stops and less F0 gap between aspirated and lax stops than those of 2004. When the F0 values related to physical conditions of the larynx is considered, it could be analyzed as the following: to distinguish the three-way phonation type clearly, older speakers depend on the VOT value more instead of F0 which they have difficulty to control.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-6
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• 2018

The current study aimed to investigate the transfer of English word stress rules to the production of Korean trisyllabic words by L1 English learners of Korean. It compared English and Korean speakers' productions of seven Korean words from the corpus L2KSC (Rhee et al., 2005). To this end, it analyzed the syllable duration, intensity, and pitch. The results showed that English and Korean speakers' pronunciations differed markedly in duration and intensity. English learners produced word-initial syllables of greater intensity than Korean speakers, while Korean speakers produced word-final syllables of longer duration than English learners. However, these differences between the two speaker groups were not related to the expected L1 transfer. The tonal patterns produced by English and Korean speakers were similar, reflecting L1 English speakers' learning of the L2 Korean prosodic system.