• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.4
• /
• pp.39-49
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean intonation phrase (IP) boundary tones in the reading of a Korean text. Korean IP boundary tones play various roles in speech communication. They indicate prosodic constituents' boundaries while simultaneously performing pragmatic and grammatical functions. In order to express and understand Korean utterances correctly, it is necessary to understand the Korean IP boundary tone system. To investigate the IP boundary tone produced by Chinese speakers, we have specifically examined the type of boundary tones, the degree of internal pitch modulation of boundary tones, and the pitch difference between penultimate syllables and boundary tones. The results of each analysis were compared to the IP boundary tones produced by Korean native speakers. The results show that IP boundary tones were realized higher than penultimate syllables.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.69-75
• /
• 2010

We propose an automatic pronunciation diagnosis system to evaluate the pronunciation of a foreign language without the uttered text. We recorded English utterances spoken by native and Korean speakers, and utterances spoken by Koreans are evaluated by native speakers based on three criteria: fluency, accuracy of phones and intonation. The system evaluates the utterances of test Korean speakers based on the differences of log-likelihood given two models: one is trained by English speech uttered by native speakers, and the other is trained by English speech uttered by Korean speakers. We also applied purification algorithm to increase class differentiability. The purification can detect and eliminate the non-speech frames such as short pauses, occlusive silences that do not help to discriminate between utterances. As the results, our proposed system has higher correlation with the human scores than the baseline system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.4
• /
• pp.29-37
• /
• 2010

Previous studies have investigated a between-category relationship of multiple acoustic cues for a laryngeal contrast by examining the distributions of VOT, f0 and H1-H2. The current study examined within-category correlations between cues comprising stops by Korean- and English-speaking adults and children to understand how children master the internal structure of stop phonation types in two languages. Word-initial stops were collected from about 70 children and 15 adults speaking English and Korean, and were analyzed in terms of VOT, f0 and H1-H2 to compute correlation coefficients. Findings in adults' productions included a gender-differentiated cue-correlation pattern associated with H1-H2 in Korean tense stops and a trading relationship between f0 and VOT in Korean lax and aspirated stops and English voiced and voiceless stops. Children did not necessarily have adult-like cue-correlation patterns even in early-acquired categories, suggesting that the mastery of intra-category structure of phonation type might occur later than inter-category structure.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.79-83
• /
• 2010

As bolus enters the pharynx during the swallow, laryngeal closure takes place by approximating the epiglottis to the arytenoid Laryngeal Closure Duration(LCD) is the duration of contact between the arytenoids and the epiglottis from the first contact to the last(Logemann et al, 2000). Epiglottic inversion continues pharyngeal swallow stage is completed in order to protect the airway. The purpose of this study is to measure layrngeal closure duration (LCD) in three groups of subjects: a) 10 stroke patients who aspirate before and during the swallow(aspirators), b) 10 stroke patients who do not aspirate during the swallow c)10 normal control subjects. Means and standard deviation of LCD was analyzed in both 5ml and 10 ml thin liquids using 100msec timer in videoflouroscopic swallowing examination. The mean for each group was 0.15 seconds shorter from aspirators to control group. There was a significant difference between aspirators and normal subjects for laryngeal closure duration during the swallow. Laryngeal closure duration after a stroke lead to aspiration. However, only one of this temporal problem may not be enough to aspiration.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.39-51
• /
• 2017

The current study aims to investigate the effect of sociolinguistic factors such as region, generation and gender on the acoustic properties of Korean high and mid back vowels. We analyzed the vowel productions of one hundred twenty-eight subjects from the Korean Standard Speech Database, chosen to represent the different possible combinations of region, generation, and gender. The results reveal a chain-like shift in the back vowels. Unlike previous studies that have reported /o/-/u/ becoming closer as a result of a decreasing F1 in /o/, we found that the distance between the two vowels is decided more by the changing F2 in /u/. Also, the F2 of /u/ and /ɯ/, and the F2 of /ʌ/ and F1 of /o/ appear to move in tandem. Lastly, this study suggests that the reason the vowel changes differ across gender and regional dialects could be because they are all converging on to the standard Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.53-59
• /
• 2017

The present study examined if individual listeners' perceptual variations were associated with their cognitive characteristics indexed by the Autistic Spectrum Quotient (AQ). This study first investigated the perception of the lexical pitch accent contrast in the Kyungsang Korean currently undergoing a sound change, and then tested if listeners' perceptual variations were correlated with their AQ scores. Eighteen Kyungsang listeners in their 20s participated in the perception experiment where they identified two contrastive accent words for auditory stimuli systematically varying F0 scaling and timing properties; the participants then completed the AQ questionnaire. In the results, the acoustic parameters reporting reduced phonetic differences across accent contrasts for younger Kyungsang generation played a reliable role in perceiving the HH word from HL, suggesting the discrepancy between the perception and the production in the context of sound change. This study also observed that individuals' perceptual variations were negatively correlated with their AQ sub scores. The present findings suggested that the sound change might appear differently between production and perception with a different time course, and deviant percepts could be explained by individuals' cognitive measure.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.111-118
• /
• 2017

This study compares speech rate, articulatory rate, and pause between the children with mild and moderate Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) who performed Sentence Repetition Tasks and the Typically Developing children (TD) of the same chronological age. The results showed that three groups are categorized in terms of speaking rate and articulatory rate. There is no difference between the two groups with SSD children, namely between the mild and moderate groups. However, there is a significant difference in their rate of speech and the articulatory rate between the two groups, such that the two groups with SSD are significantly slower than the TD group. The results also showed that there are no significant difference in the length and frequency of pause between the moderate group and the mild group. However, there is a substantial difference between them and the TD group. This study, provided the basic data for evaluating the speech rate of the children and implies that there are limitations in speech rate among the children with SSD.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations between phonetic differences among Korean learners' production of English front vowels, pronunciation intelligibility and speaking proficiency test score. To do so, thirty Korean university students were asked (1) to read English text book paragraphs and (2) describe a picture. Two English native raters and one Korean rater evaluated Korean subjects' English pronunciation intelligibility and speaking. In addition, subjects' English vowel productions were acoustically analyzed(F0, F1, F2, vowel duration, intensity). The results of the study show that the vowel quality and pitch of the unstressed vowels and lax vowel are related to the pronunciation intelligibility. In addition, the scores of pronunciation intelligibility and speaking are highly related.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.61-68
• /
• 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Chinese Korean Learners (L1: Chinese, L2: Korean). In Korean, sentence ambiguity can be caused by homonym or syntactically ambiguous structure. In spoken language however all ambiguity can be resolved by different prosodic features according to the meaning that they transmit. In this study we examined whether Chinese Korean Leaners also distinguish, in production, ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic characteristics. For this study 4 Korean natives speakers and 10 advanced Chinese Korean learners participated in the production test. The material analysed constituted 10 Korean sentences in which 6 sentences are lexically ambiguous and 4 sentences contain structural ambiguity. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure. Chinese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for different ambiguous sentences in most cases. But in the phonetic realization, the internal pitch range was greater for Korean native speakers than Chinese learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.77-83
• /
• 2017

We propose a new method to reduce emotion recognition errors caused by variation in speaker characteristics and speech rate. Firstly, for reducing variation in speaker characteristics, we adjust features from a test speaker to fit the distribution of all training data by using the histogram equalization (HE) algorithm. Secondly, for dealing with variation in speech rate, we augment the training data with speech generated in various speech rates. In computer experiments using EMO-DB, KRN-DB and eNTERFACE-DB, the proposed method is shown to improve weighted accuracy relatively by 34.7%, 23.7% and 28.1%, respectively.