• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.17-28
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• 2005

This paper argues that news speech entails a distinct intonational pattern from natural speech, effectively reflecting that it primarily focuses on providing new information. We conducted a phonetic experiment to compare the tonal contours between news speech and natural speech, examining the distributions of pitch accents and the overall pitch ranges. We utilized 70 American Press (AP) radio news utterances and 70 natural utterances extracted from TV dramas. Results show that news speech involves 3.38 H*'s (including L+H* and !H*) within an intonational phrase (IP) or intermediate phrase (ip) whereas natural speech, 1.8 in average. The number of IP/ip's per sentence is 3 in news speech, which is shown in the highest rate of 32.07% of the news speech, but it is merely 1, taking up the highest 41.42% in natural speech. Next, declination tends to be prevented in news speech, and the pitch range is much greater in news speech than in natural speech. Finally, a secondary stress syllable is comparatively frequently given a pitch accent in news speech, explicitly distinct from natural speech. These results can be interpreted as stating that news has the particular purpose of providing new information; every content word tends to be given a H* or its related pitch accent like L+H* or !H* because news speech assumes that every word conveys new information. This definitely brings about more IP/ip's per sentence due to a human physiological constraint; that is, more H*'s will cause more respiratory breaks. Also, greater pitch ranges and pitch accents imposed on secondary stress may be attributed to exaggerating new information.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.3-11
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• 2011

This experimental study has a goal to explore the perceptual sensitivity to phonetic evidence such as duration, phrase accent, or pause in disambiguation. We argue that the realization of the intonational phrasal boundary at the meaningful grammatical boundary in structurally ambiguous sentences facilitates English native listeners to distinguish the meanings of the ambiguous sentences. Moreover, the duration of the phrase-final syllable, pitch range reset, or phrasal tones also provides listeners with important phonetic evidence in disambiguation. In our perception experiment, however, Korean English learners largely depend on the realization of pause. In the results from the perception experiment, all of the groups showed an increase in the response time from the perception of no pause to pause realization. This means that pause at the phonological phrasal boundary plays a role of facilitator to English native speakers with other prosodic cues such as duration, pitch accent, or phrasal tones, while an absolutely important cue to Korean English learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.23-29
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• 2016

The present study tested if individual speakers showing great sound change in segments (i.e., vowels and fricatives) also had innovative changing patterns in suprasegmental properties (i.e., lexical pitch accents) in Kyungsang Korean. The acoustic analysis at a group level first confirmed the presence of group level differences in distinguishing /ɨ-ʌ/ and /s-s'/ both of which had different phonemic distinction from Seoul Korean. Younger speakers had more innovative segmental change than older speakers, and even within the younger generation, female speakers produced more innovative phonetic variants than male speakers. Regarding the individual observation within the younger group, the younger speakers with large acoustic distinction in vowels and fricatives also showed acoustically less distinct accent patterns, indicating the innovative sound change pattern consistent across segment and suprasegmental properties. The group and individual observations suggested that linguistic innovators introduced new phonetic variants with consistent degree of changing pattern between segment and suprasegmental properties.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06a
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• pp.949-956
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• 1994

In this paper, we introduce a new speech synthesis method for Japanese and Korean arbitrary sentences using the natural speech data-base. Also, application of this method to a CAI system is discussed. In our synthesis method, a basic sentence and basic accent-phrases are selected from the data-base against a target sentence. Factors for those selections are phrase dependency structure (separation degree), number of morae, type of accent and phonemic labels. The target pitch pattern and phonemic parameter series are generated using those selected basic units. As the pitch pattern is generated using patterns which are directly extracted form real speech, it is expected to be more natural than any other pattern which is estimated by any model. Until now, we have examined this method on Japanese sentence speech and affirmed that the synthetic sound preserves human-like features fairly well. Now we extend this method to Korean sentence speech synthesis. Further more, we are trying to apply this synthesis unit to a CAI system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2011

Recent studies on English $L^*$ (low pitch accent) have revealed the difference of changes in acoustic manifestation between utterances produced by Koreans and those produced by native speakers of English. However, not much effort has been made to compare $L^*$ focused constituents and non-focused constituents. At the same time, most previous works on focus realization are lacking in terms of normalization of acoustic measurement. Therefore, this research is dedicated to comparing the $L^*$ focused items and non-focused items realized by Koreans and Americans and to examining the realization of English $L^*$ produced by the two language groups with improved normalization of the acoustic features (F0, intensity and duration). Within-group analysis comparing focused words and non-focused words showed both Americans and Koreans prolonged the $L^*$ focused syllables but the effect size of syllable lengthening made by Koreans was far less than that made by Americans. Furthermore, significant F0 lowering was found in Americans but not in Koreans. However, the effect of intensity change caused by $L^*$ focus was not significant within each group. The effect of focused words was tested between the two groups revealing that Koreans implemented English $L^*$ focus with higher F0, lower intensity and shorter duration than Americans. In the instances in which a significant Group x Focus Location (initial, middle and final of a sentence) interaction was found, further analysis testing the effect of Group on each Focus Location was conducted. The testing showed that the Koreans produced shorter syllables at initial and middle of a sentence and higher F0 at initial of a sentence than Americans. Implications for the intonation training were also discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.223-236
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• 2003

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate characteristics of English pitch accents uttered by Korean speakers. Six English sentences were uttered five times by fifteen male undergraduate and graduate students from three groups, Seoul, Yongnam and Honam dialect speakers. We compared the subjects' data with the data of a native speaker of English as model pronunciation of English pitch accents. Acoustic features(Fo, duration, amplitude) were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Works. Results showed that (1) acoustic features of English pitch accents are Fo and duration for the native speaker and Korean speakers altogether, (2) Seoul dialect speakers uttered English pitch accents more similarly to the English native speaker than the other dialect speakers and (3) Korean speakers generally have difficulties in pronouncing L* accents. It appears that Korean speakers have more problems in pronouncing L* accents than H* accents.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.69-75
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• 2011

This paper investigates phrase positional effects on the timing of F0 (pitch) peaks in Tokyo Japanese disyllabic words with varying accent type (HL or LH) and phrase position (final or non final). The F0 peak timing was normalized by the total word duration ('normalized H timing'). The normalized H timing was significantly affected by accent type and phrase position. The H timing was later in the LH accent type than in the HL accent type, and in non final positions than in final positions. In addition, to examine the validity of the quantitative results, different models of phrase position effects were compared by measuring H timing in two approaches: normalization versus relative distance measures. For the normalization measures, the H timing was measured as the time of the F0 peak divided by the total word duration or by the duration of the tone bearing syllable. For the relative distance measures, the H timing was measured as the distance in milliseconds from the end of the word or from the end of the associated syllable. The best model was the normalization by the total word duration, rather than by the duration of the tone bearing syllable. This means that phrase positional effects on the timing of F0 peaks in Japanese disyllabic words are best modeled in terms of proportion of the total word duration.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.4E
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• pp.112-119
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• 2004

This paper presents a method for the automatic recognition of pitch accents with no prior knowledge about the phonetic content of the signal (no knowledge of word or phoneme boundaries or of phoneme labels). The recognition algorithm used in this paper is a time-delay recurrent neural network (TDRNN). A TDRNN is a neural network classier with two different representations of dynamic context: delayed input nodes allow the representation of an explicit trajectory F0(t), while recurrent nodes provide long-term context information that can be used to normalize the input F0 trajectory. Performance of the TDRNN is compared to the performance of a MLP (multi-layer perceptron) and an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) on the same task. The TDRNN shows the correct recognition of $91.9{\%}\;of\;pitch\;events\;and\;91.0{\%}$ of pitch non-events, for an average accuracy of $91.5{\%}$ over both pitch events and non-events. The MLP with contextual input exhibits $85.8{\%},\;85.5{\%},\;and\;85.6{\%}$ recognition accuracy respectively, while the HMM shows the correct recognition of $36.8{\%}\;of\;pitch\;events\;and\;87.3{\%}$ of pitch non-events, for an average accuracy of $62.2{\%}$ over both pitch events and non-events. These results suggest that the TDRNN architecture is useful for the automatic recognition of pitch accents.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.23-31
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• 2019

The present study examines whether pitch range variation in North Kyunsang Korean shows a categorical or continuous function. Specifically, the study is focused on the data imitated by adults and children in the North Kyungsang region. To investigate pitch range variation, the log-produced f0 intervals were measured and statistically analyzed. The results of the study are as follows. First, both the adults' and children's imitations were more categorical than continuous, especially for the HL-LH patterns. For the other pitch accent patterns, such as HH-HL and HH-LH, the curves were continuous or flat for most of the speakers. Second, the children's imitations were poorer than those of the adults. That is, the children's imitative responses were shown as more continuous or flat curves than categorical. For the children, the HL-LH pattern showed a categorical function at the midpoint of the curves, though the shifts were not as distinctive as the adults' data. This implies that the imitative responses of children follow the perceptual and productive trace of adults' speech behavior.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This paper investigated Korean prosody as it relates to graded internal structure in an identification function. Within Korean prosody, variants regarded as dialectal variations can appear as different prosodic scales, which contain the range of within-category variations. The current experiment was intended to show how the prosodic scale corresponding to the range of within-category differences relates to f0 contours for speakers of two Korean dialects, North Kyungsang and South Cholla. In an identification task, participants responded by selecting an item from two answer choices. The probability of choosing the correct response from the two choices was computed by a logistic regression analysis using intercepts and slopes. That is, the correct response between two choices was used to show a linear line with an s-shape presentation. In this paper, to investigate the graded internal structure of labeling, 25%, 50%, and 75% of predicted probability were assessed. Listeners from North Kyungsang showed progressive variations, whereas listeners from South Cholla revealed random patterns in the internal structure of the identification function. In this paper, the results were plotted using scatterplot graphs, applying the range of within-category variation and predicted probability obtained from the logistic regression analyses. The scatterplot graphs showed the different degree of the responses for f0 scales (i.e., variations within categories). The results demonstrate that the gradient structures of native pitch accent users become more progressive in response to f0 scales.