• Korean Linguistics
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• v.65
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• pp.211-236
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• 2014

The aim of this study is to investigate categorical characteristics of 'mak' and their discourse functions through analyzed the prosodic features of 'mak'. The previous studies of 'mak' focused on grammatical or semantic characteristics, but this study focuses on the prosodic features of 'mak' based on speech data. As a result, adverb 'mak' and discourse marker 'mak' are distinguished from prosodic boundary, duration, pause and sort of number tonal patterns. Functions of discourse marker 'mak' is as follows: Maintenance of utterance, Attention, Delay, Expression negative manner. These functions have salient prosodic features related to their functions. Consequently prosodic features are important to analyze categorical characteristics and to establish functions of 'mak'.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.47-63
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• 2010

This study provides a description of the glottal characteristics of the word-initial low vowels /a, $\ae$/ in terms of a set of acoustic parameters and discusses glottal configuration as their acoustic correlates. Furthermore, it examines the effect of prosodic boundary on the glottal properties of the vowels, seeking an account of the possible role of prosodic structure based on prosodic theory. Acoustic parameters reported to indicate glottal characteristics were obtained from the measurements made directly from the speech spectrum on recordings of Korean and English collected from 45 speakers. They consist of two separate groups of native Korean and native English speakers, each including both male and female speakers. Based on the three acoustic parameters of open quotient (OQ), first-formant bandwidth (B1), and spectral tilt (ST), comparisons were made between the speech of males and females, between the speech of native Korean and native English speakers, and between Korean and English produced by native Korean speakers. Acoustic analysis of the experimental data indicates that some or all glottal parameters play a crucial role in differentiating the speech groups, despite substantial interspeaker variations. Statistical analysis of the Korean data indicates prosodic strengthening with respect to the acoustic parameters B1 and OQ, suggesting acoustic enhancement in terms of the degree of glottal abduction and the glottal closure during a vibratory cycle.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.165-180
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• 2001

In this paper prosodic characteristics of French language are analysed with a corpus of radio interview. Intonation patterns are interpreted in terms of raising pattern, focal raising pattern and falling pattern. Accentual prominence is classified in two types, rhythmic accent and focal accent. Focal accent permit to explain the cohesion in a utterance or between two utterances. As a prosodic variable of discourse pauses are described by their form of realization (filled pause, silent pause, hesitation etc), their distribution and their function in utterance.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.29-41
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• 2006

This study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of prosodic phrases in Korean contribute to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP), it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment utilizing an artificial language learning paradigm revealed that cues conforming to the aforementioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also indicated that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Nevertheless, results did show that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.114-118
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• 2007

The current study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of a prosodic phrase in Korean (Accentual Phrase) contributed to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one AP, it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment revealed that the cues that conform to the above-mentioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also showed that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Further, the results showed that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2007

Old Korean regulated poems have a typical prosodic structure characterized by a pitch contour. This work applies Jun's finding in Seoul Korean(Jun 1993, 2000, 2005) to old Korean regulated poems, and reports some other significant phonetic characteristics, arguing that old Korean regulated poems have a regular rhythm based on the pitch contour implementing the typically hierarchical prosodic structure. The major prosodic units defined are a foot, a phrase, and a line. Next, this work proposes pitch contour characterizing prominence in a unit, boundary tones, and pauses at the boundary position, as the basic and significant cues of rhythm of a Korean poem. Specifically, some significant characteristics are discussed as follows: first, the tonal pattern of a foot is HL, starting high and ending low; second, the lowering boundary tones of HL% and L% are perceived at the end of a phrase and a line; and finally, a gradient degree of pause is observed at each unit-final position.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.61-68
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• 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
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.23-32
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• 2014

This study presents the prosodic characteristics of 'Motherese' and 'Teacherese (child care teacher and kindergarten teacher)'. 21 mothers and 24 teachers spoke to children in the child care center or kindergarten. Children are in their 4;00-6;11. Speech and articulation rate, number of accentual phrases (APs), number of intonational phrases (IPs), pitch-related factors (f0, pitch range, f0 standard deviation), and intonation slope (mean Absolute, f0, q-tone slope) were measured. 2 groups spoke 2 sentential types (interrogative_ alternative question, declarative_ coordinated sentence) in 2 situations (one accompanied with the children, the other done without children, but pretending as if they were in front of the children). The results indicate that teachers show more noticeable prosodic characteristics than mothers do.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.157-172
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• 1996

This study aims to suggest some theoretical methodology for analysis of the prosodic patterns in Korean Read Speech. The engineering effort relevant to the phonetic study has focused to the importance of prosodic phrasing which may play a major role in analyzing the phonetic DB. Before establishing the prosodic phrase as the prosodic unit, we should describe the features of the boundary signal in a target sentence. With this in mind, the general characteristics of Read Speech and the ToBI(tones and Break Indices), which has been currently in vogue with respect to the prosodic labelling system were presented as the first step. The concrete analysis was carried out with the fable 'North Wind and the Sun' Korean version, where about 25 prosodic units were discriminated by perceptual approach for 5 subjects. Establishing various informations which can be used for deciding a boundary position systematically, we can proceed to the next, viz. acoustic analysis of prosodic unit. The most important which we primarily study for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech may be, at first, detecting the boundary signals in the speech file and accordingly reestablishment it within the raw text.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.197-200
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to analyze the prosodic characteristics of Korean news utterances. In this paper, prosodic phrases were described in terms of the K-ToBI labeling system. In addition, the change of intonation contour that occurs throughout the sentences was discussed in terms of types of media and gender. According to analyzing the tendency of resets, 331 out of 729 resets were observed at the boundary of the intonation phrases. This means that resets are of the speaker's own volition regardless of prosodic units of intonation phrases. The declination of the intonation contour of radio news showed a gentler slope than that of TV news, because when the sentence is getting longer, the declination of the intonation contour becomes slower.