• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.37-52
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• 2011

This study investigates patterns of the alignment of the accentual peaks in bisyllabic words of the CVNCV, CVNV, and CVNNV structures in North Kyungsang Korean. Based on the tonal alignment, patterns of the F0 pitch excursion are discussed relative to one another. Issues are addressed concerning how the tonal targets are aligned, and how the tonal specifications of nasals in postvocalic, intervocalic, and prevocalic environments are supplied in the LH, HL, and HH classes. Tonal specification of nasals in various environments is accounted for by extension of the L target, displacement of the pitch peak, and interpolation between two tonal targets, depending on the tonal class. The results in this study provide preliminary evidence that the categorical alignment of the tonal targets is implemented by simply checking the presence or absence of a nasal before or after the nucleus vowel on the segmental string, without reference to the constituency of the nasal in the syllable structure. However, the prosodic structure has a key role to play in explaining speaker-dependent variations in the tonal alignment. Sensitivity to tautosyllabicity has an effect on the shape of the F0 contour, and disparity in the patterns of the pitch excursion is represented as a function of syllable structure correlated with segmental composition of the nasal.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2012

Recent studies on acoustic correlates of stress in English compounds and English phrases have revealed the difference of changes in acoustic manifestation between English compounds and English phrases with different intonation patterns. However, little effort has been made to compare Korean compounds and Korean phrases in different intonational environments. Therefore, this study focuses on the analysis of acoustic characteristics of Korean compounds and Korean phrases produced in different intonational sentence patterns (Subject, Question, Clause-Final, and Statement-Final). Measurements of vowel duration, intensity (dB) and pitch (in semitones) were compared. The results of the experiment in which 30 native speakers of Korean pronounced Korean compounds and Korean phrases (obtained from $8{\times}30$ sentences) in controlled prosodic and intonational environments reveal clear patterns that distinguish Korean compounds from Korean phrases and support the evidence of acoustic salience for phrases. Duration differences turned out to be a significant cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases in all but the Clause Final position. According to the size effect, duration ratio is the most reliable cue to distinguish Korean compounds and Korean phrases followed by the pitch differences between the first syllable and the second syllable and the intensity ratio. Implications for Korean and English intonation training were also discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.7-21
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• 2003

Sums-of-Products models were built for segment duration prediction of spoken Korean. An experiment for the modelling was carried out to apply the results to Korean text-to-speech synthesis systems. 670 read sentences were analyzed. trained and tested for the construction of the duration models. Traditional sequential rule systems were extended to simple additive, multiplicative and additive-multiplicative models based on Sums-of-Products modelling. The parameters used in the modelling include the properties of the target segment and its neighbors and the target segment's position in the prosodic structure. Two optimisation strategies were used: the downhill simplex method and the simulated annealing method. The performance of the models was measured by the correlation coefficient and the root mean squared prediction error (RMSE) between actual and predicted duration in the test data. The best performance was obtained when the data was trained and tested by ' additive-multiplicative models. ' The correlation for the vowel duration prediction was 0.69 and the RMSE. 31.80 ms. while the correlation for the consonant duration prediction was 0.54 and the RMSE. 29.02 ms. The results were not good enough to be applied to the real-time text-to-speech systems. Further investigation of feature interactions is required for the better performance of the Sums-of-Products models.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

This study examines the duration of Korean lax and tense stops in the prosodic word-medial position, their interactions with nearby segments, and the phonological implications of these interactions. It first examines the lengthening of consonants at the function of the short lax stop. Experiment 1 shows that the sonorant C1 is significantly longer before a short lax stop C2 than before a long tense stop. Experiment 2 shows that the short lax stop C1 cancels the contrast between the lax and tense obstruent at C2, making them appear as long tense obstruents (Post-Stop Tensing Rule). We suggest that such lengthening phenomena occur in Korean to robustly preserve the contrastive length difference between C and CC. Second, this study examines the vowel shortening, known as Closed-Syllable Vowel Shortening, before a long tense stop or before the consonant sequence. Experiment 3 suggests that it be interpreted as temporal adjustment to make the interval from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel of near-equal length. Conclusively, we suggest that Korean speech be planned and controlled with two specific intervals. One is the duration of contrastive consonant intervals between vowels, and the other is the duration from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.80-84
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• 2006

Motivated by the fact that cluster reduction strategies such as inserting a vowel or deleting a consonant in resolving English complex clusters differ depending on studies, this paper investigates the repair strategies employed by Korean EFL students. A total of 60 college students participated in the present study and the participants' production of English voiceless word-initial and word-final clusters was measured using the materials designed for this study. It has been shown that prosodic positions such as onset and coda and the number of cluster sequences influenced cluster reduction strategies. The error rates of both insertion and deletion were noticeably higher in the coda position than in the onset position and both insertion and deletion error rates were higher in triconsonatal cluster than in biconsonantal cluster sequences. Overall, the insertion rate was higher than the deletion rate. However, the deletion rate was significantly higher than the insertion rate in triconsonantal coda cluster sequences. Because of this, the deletion rate was higher than the insertion rate for triconsonantal cluster sequences across onset and coda. Also, the high deletion rate of triconsonantal coda clusters contributed to the high deletion rate for the coda clusters in general.