• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• 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.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.4E
• /
• 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.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• spring
• /
• pp.7-10
• /
• 2000

Studies of prosody and sentence processing have demonstrated that prosodic phrasing can exhibit strong effects on processing decisions in English. In this paper, we tested Korean sentence fragments containing syntactically ambiguous Adj-N1-N2 strings in a cross-modal naming task. Four accentual phrasing patterns were tested: (a) the default phrasing pattern, in which each word forms an accentual phrase; (b) a phrasing biased toward N1 modification; (c) a phrasing biased toward complex-NP modification; and (d) a phrasing used with adjective focus. Patterns (b) and (c) are disambiguating phrasings; the other two are commonly found with both interpretations and are thus ambiguous. The results showed that the naming time of items produced in the prosody contradicting the semantic grouping is significantly longer than that produced in either default or supporting prosody, We claim that, as in English, prosodic information in Korean is parsed into a well-formed prosodic representation during the early stages of processing. The partially constructed prosodic representation produces incremental effects on syntactic and semantic processing decisions and is retained in memory to influence reanalysis decisions.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.21-31
• /
• 2001

The effects of focus on prosodic phrasing, F0, and duration are investigated paying attention not only to the target of focus but also to the constituents that are outside the domain of focus in Korean. We find that the constituents preceding and following the focused word tend to be dephrased. Dephrasing does not always cover up to the Intonation Phrase boundary contrary to Jun's (1993) claim. Dephrasing caused by focus determines F0 and durational difference between focused and neutral sentences. Syntactic constituency is also shown to playa role in prosodic phrasing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.33-39
• /
• 2010

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners' processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean listeners' comprehension patterns for syntactically ambiguous speech strings varying in 1) the relative height of F0 peaks across prosodic units, and 2) the types of prosodic phrasing, to see whether pitch range reset informs the recovery of syntactic structure even though it is not reflected in the intonational hierarchy in Korean. The results show that the hierarchical level of prosodic phrasing affects the parsing pattern of syntactic ambiguity. The pitch range reset also cued the location of syntactic boundaries, but this effect was confined to phrases across AP.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.323-332
• /
• 1996

The current speech technology has been aiming to acquire much clearer and more natural synthetic speech sound. The naturalness can be developed by an adequate phrasing of target sentence, of course, which seems to be strongly related to both syntactic and phonetic aspect simultaneously. The present study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relatedness between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing through dialogue speech, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern with respect to the purpose of acquiring more natural synthetic sound. The prosodic phrase, here, means a prosodic unit which can be clearly identified as having an evident break boundary at its final position in a sentence in the sense of both perceptual and acoustical viewpoint. The end of each prosodic phrase is, accordingly, marked as the point of major boundary in a sentence.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.02a
• /
• pp.157-172
• /
• 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
• /
• 2006.11a
• /
• pp.19-23
• /
• 2006

This paper is for the comparison of prosodic phrasing in Korean spontaneous speech and read speech. For this comparison, The subjects read the transcriptions from their own spontaneous speech. The number of IP in spontaneous speech is more than in read speech, while The number of AP has no difference between them. A accentual phrase in spontaneous speech has less syllable than read speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.89-97
• /
• 2015

The aim of this study is to investigate the prosodic aspects of structural ambiguous sentences in Korean produced by Japanese Korean learners and the influence of their first language prosody. Previous studies reported that structural ambiguous sentences in Korean are different especially in prosodic phrasing. So we examined whether Japanese Korean leaners can also distinguish, in production, between two types of structural ambiguous sentences on the basis of prosodic features. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers and 8 Japanese Korean learners participated in the production test. Analysis materials are 6 sentences where a relative clause modify either NP1 or NP1+NP2. The results show that Korean native speakers produced ambiguous sentences by different prosodic structure depending on their semantic and syntactic structure (left branching or right branching sentence). Japanese speakers also show distinct prosodic structure for two types of ambiguous sentences in most cases, but they have more errors in producing left branching sentences than right branching sentences. In addition to that, interference of Japanese pitch accent in the production of Korean ambiguous sentences was observed.