• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2020

The perceptual assimilation of a nonnative phonological contrast can change with linguistic experience, resulting in naïve listeners and novice second language (L2) learners potentially assimilating the members of a nonnative contrast to different native (L1) categories. While it has been shown that this sort of change can affect the discrimination of the nonnative contrast, it has not been tested whether such a change could have consequences for the production of the contrast. In this study, L1 speakers of Mandarin Chinese who were (1) naïve to Korean, (2) novice L2 learners, or (3) advanced L2 learners participated in a Korean non-word repetition task using word-initial sibilants. The initial CVs of their repetitions were then played to L1 Korean listeners who categorized the initial consonant. The naïve talkers were more likely to repeat an initial /s^ha/ as an affricate, whereas the L2 learners repeated it as a fricative, in line with how these listeners have been shown to assimilate Korean sibilants to Mandarin categories. This result suggests that errors in the production of new words presented auditorily to nonnative listeners may be driven by how they perceptually assimilate the nonnative sounds, emphasizing the need to better understand what drives changes in perceptual assimilation that accompany increased linguistic experience.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.73-79
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• 2003

There are more than five systems for transcribing English vowels. Because of this diversity, teachers of English and students are confronted with not a little problems with the English vowel symbols used in the English-Korean dictionaries, English text books, books for Phonetics and Phonology. This study was designed to suggest criterions for the phonemic transcription of English vowels on the basis of phonetic properties of the vowels and a system of English vowel transcription based on the criterions in order to minimize the problems with inter-system differences. A speaker (phonetician) of RP English uttered a series of isolated minimal pairs containing the vowels in question. The suggested vowel symbols are as follows: (1) Simple vowels: /i:/ in beat, /I/ bit, /$\varepsilon$/ bet, /${\ae}$ bat, /a:/ father, /Dlla/ bod, /c:/ bawd, /$\upsilon$ put, /u:/ boot /$\Lambda$/ but, and /e/ about /$\varepsilon:ll3:r$/ bird. (2) Diphthongs: /aI/ in bite, /a$\upsilon$/ bout, /cI/ boy, /3$\upsilon$llo$\upsilon$/ boat, /eI/ bait, /eelleer/ air, /uelluer/ poor, /iellier/ beer. Where two symbols are shown corresponding to the vowel in a single word, the first is appropriate for most speakers of British English and the second for most speakers of American English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.93-98
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• 2009

The aim of this study was to investigate voice characteristics of adductive spasmodic dysphonia(ADSD) by measuring electroglottal and acoustic examination at the sentence level. The clinical records of 86 ADSD female patients (age group of $20{\sim}50$ years) and the control records of 86 normal females (age group of $20{\sim}40$ years) were recorded by speech studio(Laryngograph Ltd., UK). An independent t-test was used to compare ADSD and normal group. Results were as follows. (1) Fundamental frequency($F_0$) was significantly decreased in ADSD compared with normal group. (2) Irregularity of frequency and closed quotient(CQ) was significantly increased in ADSD compared with normal group. (3) Voiceless duration increased and voiced duration was significantly decreased in ADSD compared with normal group. (4) Fricative duration was increased in ADSD compared with normal group but it wasn't significant. In conclusion, strained, tight and choked voice shows an increase of CQ, tremor voice shows an increase of irregularity of frequency and less feminine voice shows decrease of $F_0$. Increase of voiceless duration and fricative duration and decrease of voiced duration related with diminution speech intelligibility.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.99-107
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• 2009

In view of the hypothesis that the effects of Parkinson disease on voice production can be detected before pharmacological intervention, the voice differences of patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease and a healthy aging group were diagnostically analyzed with the long term object of establishing, for clinical purposes, early disease-progression biomarkers. Fifteen patients with Idopathic Parkinson's disease (prior to pharmacological intervention) and a healthy control group of 15 were selected and every voice was recorded three times using praat (ver. 5022) with a headset mic. Relevant parameters - acoustic measure of /a/ phonation, F0 related parameters, MPT related parameters, articulatory ratio, VOT - were then analyzed by MANOVA. Significant differences were found in the F0 related (low F0, high F0, F0 range) and MPT related parameters. There were also significant differences in acoustic measurements (intensity, shimmer, HNR, jitter), AMR (/$t{\Lambda}$/,/$k{\Lambda}$/) and VOT (/ta/), The findings indicated that the voice production of patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease have normal pitch but bad quality. In particular, with slow articulatory ratios and VOT values, the tongue tip functioning of patients was lower than for the healthy group.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-91
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of prosody of utterance of ambiguous sentences in patients with neurogenic communication disorders. Ambiguous words on which prosody may have an impact were used to investigate this matter. The characteristics of tone duration, pitch and intensity were analyzed to examine the characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the left or right hemisphere and normal controls. The whole process was recorded using a Praat 4.3.14 and for statistical analyses, two-way Anova and multiple comparative analyses were carried out using SPSS10.0 for Windows. The conclusions of this study are as follows: The length of vowel in homograph in Korean was different depending on the meaning and the duration of vowel was the longest in patients with lesions in the left hemisphere. There was agreed that they had problem of timing of prosody(Danly & Shapiro, 1982). On the other hand, there found that patients with lesions in the right hemisphere had deficiency of changeability in pitch. Among various acoustic parameters, this study focused on the duration which are closely related to suprasegmental characteristics of prosody. More acoustic parameters should be taken into account in future studies.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.63-67
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• 2009

In this paper, in order to protect music copyrights, we propose a music identification system which is scalable to the number of pieces of registered music and robust to signal-level variations of registered music. For its implementation, we define the new concepts of 'music word' and 'music phoneme' as recognition units to construct 'music acoustic models'. Then, with these concepts, we apply the HMM-based framework used in continuous speech recognition to identify the music. Each music file is transformed to a sequence of 39-dimensional vectors. This sequence of vectors is represented as ordered states with Gaussian mixtures. These ordered states are trained using Baum-Welch re-estimation method. Music files with a suspicious copyright are also transformed to a sequence of vectors. Then, the most probable music file is identified using Viterbi algorithm through the music identification network. We implemented a music identification system for 1,000 MP3 music files and tested this system with variations in terms of MP3 bit rate and music speed rate. Our proposed music identification system demonstrates robust performance to signal variations. In addition, scalability of this system is independent of the number of registered music files, since our system is based on HMM method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2009

This study examines how young speakers of Seoul Korean produce tri-consonantal clusters /1kt/ and /1pt/ as in palk-ta ('to be bright') and palp-ta ('to step on'). Production data were collected from 20 speakers of Seoul Korean. The results of narrow transcription of the data showed that simplification is not obligatory as some speakers often preserve all three consonants. When simplified, there was a clear asymmetry between /1kt/ and /1pt/. Speakers showed no clear preference for either C1 preservation (C1=/1/) or C2 preservation (C2=/k/ in /1kt/ and /p/ in /1pt/) in production of /1kt/, but in production of /1pt/, strong preference was found for C1-preserved to C2-preserved variant. When compared with production data in Cho (1999), simplification patterns appear to have changed over the past 10 years, in a direction to preserve the first member of the cluster (/1/) more often, especially with /1kt/. There was no substantial between-item variation, indicating that simplification patterns are not lexically specified. Finally, the results suggest that the process of tri-consonantal simplification has not been fully phonologized in the grammar of the language as evident in substantial inter- and intra-speaker variation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.141-151
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• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.123-131
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the comprehension and production of various tense markings in Korean-speaking children with and without language delay. Thirty children with language delay(LD) and 30 typically developing(TD) children participated in the study. In each group, half were at the age of 4-years and the other half at 7-years. In both the comprehension and production task, 28 verbs containing four types of tense markings were used: past tense '-et ta', two present progressives '-ko itta', '-enta', and future tense '-elyeko hanta'. In the comprehension task, the children were presented with three printed still-scenes of video recording of a verb action, each representing future, present progressive, and past tense of the verb, respectively. Then they listened to the action verb with one of the 4 tense markings and had to pick the scene that matched the verb tense. In the production task, the children were given one of the three scenes and asked to produce the verb with appropriate tense marking. In both tasks, the LD children performed significantly worse than the TD children, and the older children performed significantly better than the younger children. Interestingly, the pattern of performances across different types of tense markings at the two language-age levels were closely similar in LD children and TD children. This similarity of groups seemed stronger in the comprehension task than the production task.