• MALSORI
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• no.51
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• pp.39-55
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• 2004

Working memory is the term used to refer to the mental workplace in which information can be temporarily stored and manipulated during complex everyday activities such as understanding language. The studies on language and working memory are based on Baddeley's phonological working memory and Daneman and Carpenter's functional working memory. This article reviews two working memory models and the studies on language and working memory based on each model. These are described in the implication of working memory in language development and specific language impairment-evaluation and treatment.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.107-121
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• 2004

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon to improve the performance of a Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished phonological rules that can be applied to phonemes in within-morpheme and cross-morpheme. The results of 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiments show that an absolute reduction of 1.45% in WER from the baseline performance of 18.42% WER was achieved by modeling proposed pronunciation variations with a possible multiple context-dependent pronunciation lexicon.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.225-234
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• 2001

The Korean Metaphonological Assessment, adapted from the Metaphonological Abilities Battery (MAB; Hesketh, 2000b) was administered to examine the development of metaphonological skills of 60 normally developing Korean pre-school children aged from 3 to 6. The tasks were specifically designed to evaluate their skills to detect rhymes, onsets, and segments. A gradual improvement of total scores was observed in children from 3 to 5, with evidence for developmental refinements of metaphonological abilities in the ages of 5 and 6. Subjects were found to develop segmenting skills at a relatively early age and gradually progressed toward detecting onsets and then rhymes. The differences in the order of development from the previous studies with English-speaking children were discussed. This preliminary study also aimed to provide foundational information for investigating the link between expressive phonological impairments, metaphonolgocial skills, and literacy in Korean-speaking children.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.111-132
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• 2013

Previous research has shown that aging asymmetrically affects various functions in language. It is known that older adults show deficits in language production compared to young adults, while the performance in semantic processing is similar between older and young adults. The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon effectively reflects failure in retrieval of phonological knowledge. Older adults report TOTs more often than young adults and the cause of this phenomenon has been explained by two frameworks: the 'blocking hypothesis' and 'transmission deficit hypothesis'. This study examines the effect of aging on the retrival of phonological knowledge by inducing TOTs in the laboratory. Two variables were manipulated: age and word category. Participants were young and older adults, and stimuli was selected from 5 categories of words. After the participants read a definition about a target word, they reported three conditions: 'know', 'don't know', 'TOT'. The results were as follows: First, the older adults reported TOTs more often than the young adults. Second, TOTs occurred more in proper nouns such as names of persons and places. Third, in the category that TOTs occurred more often, there was a bigger age difference. Fourth, older adults reported fewer alternative words during TOT than young adults. Fifth, participants tended to report the partial information during TOT in characters. These results show the age-related difficulty in the retrieval of phonological knowledge in Korean. It is explained by the transmission deficit hypothesis and the characteristics of Korean orthography and phonology.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.158-162
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• 2007

Anomia, word finding difficulty, is one of the most common feature in aphasia. Previous studies support that the process of picture naming consists of three stages, in the order of the object recognition, semantic, and phonological output stages. Anomic patients have many symptoms and it means that anomia can be sub-divided into several symptom groups. Our anomia assessment battery consists of several parts: (1) picture naming set, (2) picture-word matching task, (3) lexical decision task for mental lexicon damage, (4) naming task for phonological lexicon damage, and (5) semantic decision task. Pictures and words were selected on the basis of usage frequency, semantic category, and word length. We administered this anomia evaluation battery to many anomic aphasics and we subdivided patients into several groups. We hope that our anomia evaluation set is useful and helpful for evaluation anomic aphasics

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.71-87
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• 2004

Korean has a pair of voiceless fricatives, whose laryngeal manifestation comes in parallel to stops and affricates with a three-way lexical contrast. Prior phonetic studies by Kagaya (1974), Iverson (1983), and Kang (1999, 2000) point out /s/ is associated with multiple characteristics of the larynx shared with not only the lax but also the aspirated series, whereas /s' / carries a laryngeal distinction typical of the tense consonants. The complex dual nature of /s/ is again supported by a psycholinguistic study by Kang (2004), as /s/ was found to interact with /$c^h$/ (17% of the time) as well as /c/ (57%) in speech errors. In addition, a recent work by Cho and Lee (2003) notes an interesting chain shift case in the acquisition of the fricatives. Although they observed a significant phonological pattern between child English and Korean, Cho and Lee's description of acquiring fricatives is far from being precise from the perspective of phonetics. From a longitudinal study of recorded tapes by two children at 1;7-3;8 and 1;7-2;1 respectively, I found that /s' / was usually substituted into tense noncontinuants in young children's early production as predicted, whereas /s/ having both lax and aspirated-like glottal properties revealed a complicated pattern of substitutions into lax, tense, and aspirated noncontinuants with a varying degree of preference relative to the subjects. The current acquisition study supports the previous claims concerning fricatives in other languages, showing that their acquisition comes after stops. Besides, it also notes that Korean fricatives are subject to a series of phonological processes called stopping, affricating, tensifying and palatalizing during the transitional period of phonological development by young children. Moreover, between the two voiceless types, /s/ was acquired earlier than /s'/ as the unmarked segment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.211-214
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• 1995

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in thelexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic Hanmoon and alphabetic/syllabic Hangul, on a task where judgements must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Four experiments are reported using a "homophone decision task" and manipulating the sub-lexical relationship between orthography and phonology in Hanmoon and Hangul, and the lexical status of the stimuli. Hangul words showed a much higher error rate in judging whether there was another word identically pronounced than both Hangul nonwords and Hanmoon words. It is concluded that the relationship between orthography and phonology in the lexicon differs according tn the type of script owing to the availability of sub-lexical information: the process of making a homophone derision is based on a spread of activation exclusively among lexical entries, from orthography to phonology and vice versa (called "Orthography-Phonology-Orthography Rebound" or "OPO Rebound"). The results are explained within the mulitilevel interactive activation model with orthographic units linked to phonological units at each level.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1999.10e
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• pp.351-358
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• 1999

Two experiments were conducted to investigate effects of word-frequency on semantic processing of Hangul. Stimuli were two syllable words, and exemplars and target words were different in the final consonant of the second syllable in the Exp 1 and in the final consonant of the first syllable in the Exp2. Exp 1 shows the results that subjects made more errors on low frequency target words and took longer times on high frequency exemplars than on controls. In Exp 2 subjects took longer times on high frequency examplar-low frequency target word conditions than on controls. These results support the predictions of dual process models and suggest that the use of phonological and visual information depends on word frequency. Phonological activation appears to be an optional rather than obligatory process.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.293-314
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• 2014

This paper aims to contrast phonology of Korean and Thai in terms of language universality. Considering consonants, both languages having 21 typologically most plausible consonants display high universality in the number of consonants. However, Thai shows higher universality in regards to their substance, i.e. it differs from Korean when it comes to the structure of plosives and fricatives. Both Korean and Thai show similarities regarding the plosives due to the fact that both languages possess three contrastive consonants. However, the Thai plosives consist of plain voiced, plain voiceless and aspirated voiceless sounds that have higher universality than the Korean plosives which are plain voiced, plain voiceless and aspirated voiceless. In case of vowels, both Korean with its 10 vowels and Thai with its 9 vowels show lower universality when it comes to the total number of vowels. However, all of those vowels belong to the list of most plausible vowels which makes their universality higher in substance. In respect of syllable structure, Korean with its CVC type shows a moderately complex structure while Thai with its CCVC type has a complex structure. The coda may consist of only one consonant in each language but onset is composed of one consonant in Korean, and two consonants in Thai. The contrastive study of similarities and differences between Korean and Thai in terms of phonology will help not only understand the two languages but also provide useful information for increasing the efficacy of Korean language education for Thai learners of Korean whose number is rapidly increasing.