• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• 제5권1호
• /
• pp.99-108
• /
• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• 제15권4호
• /
• pp.29-41
• /
• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• 제3권4호
• /
• pp.71-81
• /
• 2011

This paper investigated how prosodic position and word type affect the phonetic structure of Korean coronal stops. Initial segments of prosodic domains were known to be more strongly articulated and longer relative to prosodic domain-medial segments. However, there are few studies examining whether the properties of prosodic domain-initial segments are affected by the information content of words (real vs. nonsense words). In addition, since the scope of domain-initial effect was known to be local to the initial consonant and the effects on the following vowel have been found to be limited, it is thus worth examining whether the prosodic domain-initial effect extends into the vowel after the initial consonant in a systematic way across different prosodic domains. The acoustic properties of Korean coronal stops (lenis /t/, aspirated /$t^h$/, and tense /t'/) were compared across Intonational Phrase, Phonological Phrase and Word-initial positions both in real and nonsense words. The durational intervals such as VOT and CV duration were cumulatively lengthened for /t/ and /$t^h$/ in the higher prosodic domain-initial positions. However, tense stop /t'/ did not show any variation as a function of prosodic position and word type. The domain-initial lenis stop showed significantly longer duration in nonsense words than in real words. But the prosodic domain-initial effect was not found in the properties of F0 and [H1-H2] of the vowel after initial stops. The present study provided evidence that speakers tend to enhance speech clarity when there is less contextual information as in prosodic domain-initial position and in nonsense words.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제28권2E호
• /
• pp.43-50
• /
• 2009

To get more natural synthetic speech generated by a Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) system, we have to know all the possible prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. We should find out these rules from linguistic, phonetic information or from real speech. In general, all of these rules should be integrated into a prosody-generation algorithm in a TTS system. But this algorithm cannot cover up all the possible prosodic rules in a language and it is not perfect, so the naturalness of synthesized speech cannot be as good as we expect. ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) can be trained to learn the prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. To train and test ANNs, we need to prepare the prosodic patterns of all the phonemic segments in a prosodic corpus. A prosodic corpus will include meaningful sentences to represent all the possible prosodic rules. Sentences in the corpus were made by picking up a series of words from the list of PB (phonetically Balanced) isolated words. These sentences in the corpus were read by speakers, recorded, and collected as a speech database. By analyzing recorded real speech, we can extract prosodic pattern about each phoneme, and assign them as target and test patterns for ANNs. ANNs can learn the prosody from natural speech and generate prosodic patterns of the central phonemic segment in phoneme strings as output response of ANNs when phoneme strings of a sentence are given to ANNs as input stimuli.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 대한음성학회 1996년도 10월 학술대회지
• /
• pp.473-475
• /
• 1996

The prosodic features of Spoken Chinese play the important roll of the naturalness, a list of prosodic labeling symbols represents all the prosodic features is given in this paper, and a paragraph of ' Prosodic Labeling Text '(PLT) is also attached for example.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• 제8권4호
• /
• pp.31-38
• /
• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• 제7권4호
• /
• pp.123-148
• /
• 2000

This paper investigates prosodic conditions for the epenthetic /n/ in Korean. It has been claimed that an epenthetic /n/ appears across prosodic words (Han 1994, Lee 1996). However, using acoustic data as well as aerodynamic data, I argue that the epenthetic /n/ does not always surface across all prosodic words, but that its appearance is prosodically restricted. I further demonstrate that it appears only across prosodic words within an accentual phrase. This finding provides empirical support for the intonation-based model of Korean prosodic structure studies.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제18권4E호
• /
• pp.26-30
• /
• 1999

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in text-to-speech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language processing procedure, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and parsing, since syntactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with other factors. In this paper, the prosodic phrasing procedure is treated from two perspectives: dependency parsing and prosodic phrasing using dependency relations. This is appropriate for Ural-Altaic, since a prosodic boundary in speech usually concurs with a governor of dependency relation. From experimental results, using the proposed method achieved 12% improvement in prosody boundary prediction accuracy with a speech corpus consisting 300 sentences uttered by 3 speakers.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• 제8권4호
• /
• pp.207-214
• /
• 2001

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• 제9권2호
• /
• 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.