• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.31-38
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• 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.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 10월 학술대회지
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• pp.168-168
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• 1996

In this paper I will examine some concrete examples of the obstacles faced by non-native speakers of Japanese when learning the language. I will go on to suggest ways in which these obstacles may be overcome. Nowadays there are numerous Japanese language books available for non-native speakers. However, most of these introductory Japanese language books focus on topics such as pronunciation, accent and intonation. Notable, these introductory textbooks provide insufficient emphasis on prosodic features of the Japanese language. The Japanese language has been considered by many teachers as relatively easy compared to other languages, due to its simple phonetic structure. This may be a partial explanation of the reason why the teaching of prosodic features has generally been given insufficient emphasis. To teach Japanese efficiently at a university level I have combined an emphasis on the teaching of prosodic features together with my experience of television announcing. This has entailed using television news programmes and contemporary reading materials in my class. Using taped material I intend to describe a case-study of teaching of Japanese articulation.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2006년도 춘계 학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.77-81
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• 2006

This paper presents a technique of imposing the prosodic features of a native speaker's utterance onto the same sentence uttered by a non-native speaker. Three acoustic aspects of the prosodic features were considered: the fundamental frequency (F0) contour, segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The fundamental frequency contour and the segmental durations of the native speaker's utterance were imposed on the non-native speaker's utterance by using the PSOLA (pitch-synchronous overlap and add) algorithm [1] implemented in Praat[2]. The intensity contour transfer was also done in Praat. The technique of transferring one or more of these prosodic features was elaborated and its implications in the area of language education were discussed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.25-31
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• 2009

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of synthesizing Masan dialect with Seoul dialect and to examine the role of prosody in the authentication of the synthesized Masan dialect. The synthesis was performed by transferring one or more of the prosodic features of the Masan utterance onto the Seoul utterance. The hypothesis is that, given an utterance composed of the phonemes shared by both dialects, as more prosodic features of the Masan utterance are transferred onto the Seoul utterance, the Seoul utterance will be identified as more authentic Masan utterance. The prosodic features involved were the fundamental frequency contour, the segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The synthesized Masan utterances were evaluated by thirteen native speakers of Masan dialect. The result showed that the fundamental frequency contour and the segmental durations had main effects on the perceptual shift from Seoul to Masan dialect.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제45권4호
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• pp.678-689
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• 2023

This paper describes a novel end-to-end deep generative model-based speaker recognition system using prosodic features. The usefulness of variational autoencoders (VAE) in learning the speaker-specific prosody representations for the speaker recognition task is examined herein for the first time. The speech signal is first automatically segmented into syllable-like units using vowel onset points (VOP) and energy valleys. Prosodic features, such as the dynamics of duration, energy, and fundamental frequency (F₀), are then extracted at the syllable level and used to train/adapt a speaker-dependent VAE from a universal VAE. The initial comparative studies on VAEs and traditional autoencoders (AE) suggest that the former can efficiently learn speaker representations. Investigations on the impact of gender information in speaker recognition also point out that gender-dependent impostor banks lead to higher accuracies. Finally, the evaluation on the NIST SRE 2010 dataset demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach for speaker recognition.

• 인지과학
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• 제19권1호
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• pp.89-105
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• 2008

본 논문에서는 자연스러운 한국어 운율구 경계를 예측하기 위해 (1) 문장 성분을 하위범주화하고, (2) 세분화된 문장 성분 간 의존관계를 이용하여 통사구를 추출하며 (3) 추출한 통사구의 유형에 따른 운율구 경계 예측 규칙을 설정하였다. 또한, (4) 통사적 정보 외에도 통사구와 문장의 길이, 통사구의 문장 내 위치, 문맥의 의미 정보 등에 따라 가변적인 운율구 경계를 판단하여 보다 자연스러운 한국어 운율구 경계 예측 시스템을 개발하였다. 그 결과 통사구 경계와 상관관계가 높은 강한 운율구 경계 예측과 운율구 내부 비경계 예측에 있어 90% 이상의 높은 재현율과 정확도를 보였으며, 전체 운율구 경계 예측에 있어서도 87% 이상의 성능을 보였다.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 2월 학술대회지
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.121-128
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• 2013

In Korean, wh-question and indefinite yes-no questions have the same morphemic and syntactic structure. In speech, however, these two types of questions are distinguished by a prosodic difference. In this study, we examined if Chinese Korean leaners can distinguish between these two types of questions in production and if they can correctly perceive the different meaning of a question based on the prosodic information. For this purpose, we analysed two types of interrogative sentences produced by 5 native speakers and 15 Chinese Korean language leaners. The results show that the 5 Korean native speakers produce two types of questions by a salient prosodic difference, i.e., difference of prosodic structure, different pitch range of wh-phrase and indefinite phrase, and different boundary tone. However, for the 15 Chinese speakers, the two types of questions were not distinguished by the same prosodic features but in the perception analysis they were able to distinguish between the two types of questions easily.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

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. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.