• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

Previous research on syntactic processing shows that the interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence is frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another. The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on the production of disambiguating prosody for English ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, 40 speakers gave default readings of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences. Questioning was used to prove intended meanings behind default readings. Intended meanings were treated as interpretation biases when a majority of speakers read a sentence with the same intended meaning. The size of the majority was used to establish bias strength. In Experiment 2, 10 speakers were instructed to use prosody to disambiguate given alternate meanings of the sentences from Experiment 1. The results indicated an effect of bias strength on disambiguating prosody: speakers used temporal juncture cues to reliably disambiguate alternate meanings for sentences with a weak interpretation bias, but not for those with a strong bias. Overall, the results indicated that interpretation biases strongly affect the production of prosody.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.73-89
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• 2007

This study explored the perception of transplanted English prosody by thirty American and Korean, male and female listeners. The English utterances of various sentence types produced by Korean and American male speakers were employed to transplant the American prosody contours to Korean English utterances. Then, the thirty subjects were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the three factors (e.g., rater groups & transplantation types; transplantation types & sentence types; rater groups & transplantation types & sentence types) turned out to be meaningful. Both Americans and Koreans perceived the effectiveness of the combined effect of transplanted duration and pitch or duration and pitch and intensity. However, when perceiving individual prosodic components, Americans and Koreans showed different perceptual ratings. As for the overall prosody change, Americans perceived the change of intensity in a significant way but Koreans did not because intensity is not a crucial semantic factor in Korean. Americans rated the transplantation of duration alone as ineffective while Koreans rated otherwise. This was explained by the difference between English and Korean. The difference of perspective was also significant with different sentence types, especially with the three sentence types that had speech rates slower than other sentence types. A slower speech rate intensified the mismatch between the transplanted duration and the original pitch causing a negative impression on American listeners whereas this did not affect Korean listeners. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.119-124
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• 2017

This study investigates how perception of easy sentences varies with prosody pattern, sound intensity, and signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) in young adults with normal hearing who were in their 20's. The results showed that the presence of proper prosody pattern in the sentences increased correct perception rate of the target sentences, and that the lower the intensity and SNR, the lower the sentence perception scores. The results also showed that SNR had a greater effect on the sentence perception scores than sound intensity. There was a significant decrease of perception scores starting at the level of 15 dB and +3 SNR for the sentences with prosody pattern, while starting at the level of 18 dB and +6 SNR for the sentences without prosody pattern, ending up with a very poor perception score as sound intensity and SNR gets lower. There was a significant difference in the perception score of the sentences with prosody pattern between 20 year-old group and 21 year or older group in several listening conditions of sound intensity and SNR.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.37-40
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• 1999

In this paper, we presented the prosody analysis results of five selected words according to its usage in a sentence, i.e.. the part of sentence (PoS) while changing the type of sentences such as simple, conjugate, and complex sentences. The selected five Korean words were 'U-Ri-Na-Ra' 'Bul-Kuk-Sa', 'Uh-Muh-Ni', 'Han-Ra-San', and 'Cang-A-Ji'. These five words were used as a subjective, an objective, and an adverb in each simple, conjugate, and complex sentence. The pitch, energy, and duration of each word were then analyzed and used for the synthetic speech prosody Improvement. The subjective test on the prosody improvement showed that more than $50\%$ of our listeners are affirmative to the prosody Improvement of the synthetic speech.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.11-13
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• 2006

The present paper focuses on the interaction between lexical-semantic information and affective prosody. More specifically, we explore whether affective prosody influence on evaluation of affective meaning of a word. To this end, we asked participants to listen a word and to evaluate the emotional content of the word which were recoded with affective prosody. Results showed that first, emotional evaluation was slower when the word meaning is negative than when they is positive. Second, when the prosody of words is negative, evaluation time is faster than when it is neutral or positive. And finally, when the affective meaning of word and prosody is congruent, response time is faster than it is incongruent.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.73-85
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• 2009

This paper introduces the technique of synthesizing and evaluating human utterances with exaggerated or atypical prosody. Prosody exaggeration can be implemented by manipulating either the fundamental frequency (F0) contour, the segmental durations, or the intensity contour of an utterance. Of these three prosodic elements, two or more can be exaggerated at the same time. The algorithms of synthesis and evaluation were suggested. Learner utterances exaggerated in each of the three prosodic features were evaluated with respect to their original native versions in terms of the differences in their F0 contours, the segmental durations, and the intensity contours. The measure of differences was the Euclidean distance metric between the matching points in their F0 and intensity contours. The measure was calculated after the exaggerated learner utterances were aligned by the segments and rendered identical to their native version in terms of their segmental durations. For the evaluation of the segmental durations, no prior modifications were made in durations and the same measure was used. The results from the pilot experiment suggest the viability of this measure in the evaluation of learner utterances with atypical prosody with respect to their native versions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.101-107
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• 2010

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of English pronunciation quality between native speakers of English and Korean learners of English. This study employs a novel method of independently evaluating the prosody and segmentals of English sentences. A set of stimuli were made by swapping the prosody and the segmentals of English sentences read by a native speaker of American English and a Korean learner of English. Evaluations of the difference level of stimuli pairs and the goodness of the pronunciation quality showed that both native speakers of English and Korean learners of English give priority to the segmentals but native speakers of English were more sensitive to the difference in prosody in the evaluation of English pronunciation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.753-772
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• 2010

The purpose of this work is to examine the viability of employing the prosody cloning technique in teaching English prosody. Ten native speakers of Korean high school students with similar level of English proficiency participated in the poem self-study experiment. Five of them were grouped into the experimental group and the remaining five into the control group. One popular English poem from a high school textbook was selected and its recording by a professional native speaker of English was used in the experiment. The members of the two groups made a recording of the poem both before and after the experiment. For the study material, the experimental group used their own recorded utterances with their prosody cloned from the professional English speaker, while the control group used the utterances of the professional speaker alone. The acoustic analysis of the recordings by the prosodic foot both before and after the experiment showed that the experimental group performed slightly better than the control group in the realization of the intensity contour of the poem. There were no significant differences in the realization of the intonation contour and segmental durations between the two groups. The recording after the experiment was also subjectively evaluated by a native speaker of English and the scores for the experimental group were slightly higher than the control group. These findings suggest that the use of English poems with the help of the prosody cloning technique is a potentially viable approach to teaching English intonation to high school students. A long-term study with more students is necessary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.13-21
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to examine the prosody characteristics of sentence-level utterances which contain homographs with context cues in patients with neurogenic communication disorders. Homographs which may be affected by prosody, especially tonic length features, were used to investigate this matter. The characteristics of tone, duration, pitch, and pitch peak were analyzed to examine the characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the left or right hemisphere and normal controls. The whole process was recorded using Praat 4.3.14 and for statistical analyses, three-way ANOVA and multiple comparative analyses, Chi-Square tests, and a one-way ANOVA were carried out using SPSS 12.0 for Windows. The conclusions of this study are as follows. First, the length of syllables and vowels in homographs in Korean was different depending on the meaning and was not significant between groups. Second, it was found that patients with lesions in the right hemisphere had significant difference on pitch. Third, it was found that frequency of pitch peak and tone in 'short' tone syllables were different between groups. The conclusion of this study found that the prosody of homographs between groups absolutely was not differentiated. Accordingly, more detailed studies of acoustic parameters and other parameters which the prosody characteristic between groups could be found are needed in the future.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-91
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of prosody of utterance of ambiguous sentences in patients with neurogenic communication disorders. Ambiguous words on which prosody may have an impact were used to investigate this matter. The characteristics of tone duration, pitch and intensity were analyzed to examine the characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the left or right hemisphere and normal controls. The whole process was recorded using a Praat 4.3.14 and for statistical analyses, two-way Anova and multiple comparative analyses were carried out using SPSS10.0 for Windows. The conclusions of this study are as follows: The length of vowel in homograph in Korean was different depending on the meaning and the duration of vowel was the longest in patients with lesions in the left hemisphere. There was agreed that they had problem of timing of prosody(Danly & Shapiro, 1982). On the other hand, there found that patients with lesions in the right hemisphere had deficiency of changeability in pitch. Among various acoustic parameters, this study focused on the duration which are closely related to suprasegmental characteristics of prosody. More acoustic parameters should be taken into account in future studies.