• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.4
• /
• 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.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.37
• /
• pp.73-85
• /
• 1999

The prosodic characteristics of Korean particles in read speech were examined in this paper based on K-ToBI labeling system in order to see whether they are prosodically weak form like functions words in English. Acoustic measurements and statistical analysis were done focusing on the distribution of particles over a variety of prosodic positions, prosodic positional effects on the phonetic realization of particles, and acoustic strength of particles compared to those of their surrounding syllables. The panicles were distributed rather equally over all 4 prosodic positions with the highest frequency at IP-medial/AP-final position and the lowest at IP-medial/AP-medial position except that topic marker 'Un/nUn' showed preference for IP-final/AP-final position. There was a significant prosodic positional effect on the duration and F0 of the particles. Duration was the longest at IP-final/AP-final position and interestingly, at IP-medial/AP-medial position while F0 was the highest at IP-final/AP-medial Position as expected. The comparison of the acoustic properties of the particles with those of neighbor syllables showed that duration was generally significantly longer and energy also showed larger values, if not significant, in particles suggesting that the particles in Korean are not prosodically weaker like function words in English.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.20 no.3E
• /
• pp.3-9
• /
• 2001

This study aims to describe a prosodic pattern on the Korean subjective particles with respect to their discourse function. 4 kinds of Korean subjective particles were mainly investigated with reference to sentential location, grammatical relations that precede or follow the word including subjective particles, and prosodic phrasing. F0 and energy were gradually diminished as the particles moved down to the sentential final position. 'Ga'particle, which has been potentially regarded as having a grammatical focusing function, looks like to show relatively higher F0 in sentential medial in discourse. At sentential medial position, when the words including 'ga, eun, and neun'particles were preceded by adverbials, the acoustic variables of particles tended to be diminished by some ratio in comparison with the mean value. The duration of particles might vary with respect to style variation and especially that it tended to diminish from 150 basic, 50 separate, and finally 50 discourse successively. And there's some specific phenomenon that prosodic phrasing itself was relatively easily taken place after 'eun' and 'neun' particles. Finally, I tried to catch the prosodic characteristics (which would be established as acoustic features) of inter-word position at which specific subjective particles were intervened. These acoustic features can be made up of the duration and F0 fluctuation activated in the successive 3 syllables in which word (or prosodic) boundary was located.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.7-24
• /
• 2007

This paper discusses some current issues regarding how prosodic structure is manifested in fine-grained phonetic details, how prosodically-conditioned articulatory variation is explained in terms of speech dynamics, and how such phonetic manifestation of prosodic structure may be exploited in spoken word recognition. Prosodic structure is phonetically manifested in prosodically important landmark locations such as prosodic domain-final position, domain-initial position and stressed/accented syllables. It will be discussed how each of the prosodic landmarks engenders particular phonetic patterns, ow articulatory variation in such locations are dynamically accounted for, and how prosodically-driven fine-grained phonetic detail is exploited by listeners in speech comprehension.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.455-464
• /
• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.35_36
• /
• pp.13-24
• /
• 1998

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

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

• MALSORI
• /
• no.33_34
• /
• pp.23-42
• /
• 1997

This study has two main purposes. One is to explore the relationship between syntactic aspects and prosodic aspects in Standard Korean. The other is to provide speech synthesis with the information about such relationship. This study will focus on the prosodic behavior of subjective particles'-i/-ga', '-eun/-neun'. The prosodic features of subjective particles are described respectively. How do the elements such as the position of particles in a sentence, the sentence constituents, the length of the sentence and the rhythmic boundaries influence on the prosodic behavior are also investigated.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.65
• /
• pp.51-65
• /
• 2008

The aim of this study is to compare ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) children with normal children in terms of the prosodic features. Materials are collected by the reading of Korean read sentences. They are composed of 10 declarative sentences, each of which was consisted of 5-6 words. Subjects are consisted of 10 ASD and 10 normal male children with a receptive vocabulary age of 5;0-6;5 years. We found out that both groups showed the differences not only in the tonal patterns at the end of the prosodic phrases, but also in both the degree of rising and falling slope related to pitch contour. While HL% and HLH% were highly emerged in sentence final position in normal group, HL% and HLH% were prominent in ASD group in the same position. LH% and LHL% IP types were observed only in ASD group in sentence medial position. The slope showing the variation in the fundamental frequency at the end of the prosodic phrase was twice as steep in the group of ASD children as in the group of normal children.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.4
• /
• pp.13-21
• /
• 2011

The present study investigated the effects of two different sources of prosodic strengthening, i.e., boundary and accent, in the articulation of English high front vowels, /i/ and /I/. The vowels were investigated in vowel-initial ('eat' vs. 'it'), /h/-initial ('heat' vs. 'hit') and /p/-initial words ('Pete' vs. 'pit'), which were placed in varying prosodic conditions. Using Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA), the tongue dorsum positions in the x and y dimensions, the lip opening and the jaw opening (lowering) were measured. With respect to the boundary-induced strengthening, results showed that /i/ and /I/ in vowel-initial words ('eat' - 'it') are produced with a higher tongue position in the domain-intial than domain-medial positions. The fact that the vowels only in the vowel-initial condition showed the domain-intial strengthening (DIS) effect suggests that the DIS effect is localized mainly to the initial position (the locality account). As for the accent-induced strengthening, vowels were produced with a more fronted tongue position and larger lip opening in accented than unaccented positions. This suggests that the presence of accent increases overall sonority of the vowels in various prosodic contexts, and enhances primarily the frontedness of the front high vowels. Taken together, the results indicate that the two types of prosodic strengthening are articulatorily realized differently, supporting the view that they are encoded separately in the speech planning process. The present study also showed the distinction between the two high front vowels in the tongue position (in both the frontedness and the height dimensions), while the jaw did not seem to contribute to the distinction robustly, suggesting that the tongue contributes more in distinguishing the two vowels than the jaw does.