• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.29-41
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.362-371
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate difficulties in using prosodic information to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences in children with high functioning autism (HFA). Fifteen high functioning autistic children and fifteen children who matched their chronological age (CA) participated in this study. We compared the performance of the two groups by conducting syntactically and affectively ambiguous sentence comprehension (SASC and AASC) tasks. The results of this study show that in both tasks, the difference between the two groups was statistically significant at each condition and the performance of high functioning autistic children was significantly lower. In a correlation analysis of major variables, children who matched CA showed a correlation between prosody-only (PO) and AASC, while children with HFA showed a correlation between PO and MO (morpheme-only). Children with HFA used grammatical morpheme information to understand general sentences. We found that the ability to use prosodic information in children with HFA is significantly lower than that of normally developed children. Considering the relevance of prosody to linguistic, non-linguistic and emotional aspects of communication, improving prosodic perception is thought to be a way to mediate deficits in the comprehension of ambiguous sentences in children with HFA.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.112-119
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• 2011

This study presents experiments which examined the role of amplitude and fundamental frequency (f0) in the phonetic perception of short versus long stop length contrasts in Japanese (e.g., [t] vs. [tt]). Stop length contrasts are normally characterized by differences in the duration of stop closures. However, closure duration can be unreliable as a perceptual cue when one considers variability in the rate at which people speak. Acoustically, the amplitude and f0 of the vowel following stop consonants are known to covary with the length distinction of stops in Japanese. Given this fact, the current study examined amplitude and f0 as potential secondary cues to the distinction. The results indicate that even though both amplitude and f0 are robust correlates, Japanese listeners do not use these cues in categorizing short versus long stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

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

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.67-78
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• 2016

This study examined the affective prosodic characteristics observed from the children with cochlear implant (CI, hereafter) and normal hearing (NH, hereafter) along with listener's perception on them. Speech samples were acquired from 15 normal and 15 CI children. 8 SLPs(Speech Language Pathologists) perceptually evaluated affective types using Praat's ExperimentMFC. When it comes to the acoustic results, there were statistically meaningful differences between 2 groups in affective types [joy (discriminated by intensity deviation), anger (by intensity-related variables dominantly and duration-related variables partly), and sadness (by all aspects of prosodic variables)]. CI's data are much more louder when expressing joy, louder and slower when expressing anger, and higher, louder, and slower when it comes to sadness than those of NH. The listeners showed much higher correlation when evaluating normal children than CI group(p<.001). Chi-square results revealed that listeners did not show coherence at CI's utterance, but did at those of NH's (CI(p<.01), normal(p=.48)). When CI utterances were discriminated into 3 emotional types by DA(Discriminant Analysis) using 8 acoustic variables, speed related variables such as articulation rate took primary role.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.3-10
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• 2011

This study investigates the role of suprasegmental features with respect to the intelligibility of Korean-spoken English judged by Korean and English raters as being good or bad. It has been hypothesized that Korean raters would have different evaluations from English native raters and that the effect may vary depending on the types of suprasegmental factors. Four Korean and four English native raters, respectively, took part in the evaluation of 14 Korean subjects' English speaking. The subjects read a given paragraph. The results show that the evaluation for 'intelligibility' is different for the two groups and that the difference comes from their perception of L2 English suprasegmentals.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.29-41
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• 2006

This study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of prosodic phrases in Korean contribute to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP), it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment utilizing an artificial language learning paradigm revealed that cues conforming to the aforementioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also indicated that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Nevertheless, results did show that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.19-24
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• 2022

This study examined which acoustic cue(s) that Korean learners of English give weight to in perceiving English lexical stress. We manipulated segmental and suprasegmental cues in 5 steps in the first and second syllables of an English stress minimal pair "object". A total of 27 subjects (14 native speakers of English and 13 Korean L2 learners) participated in the English stress judgment task. The results revealed that native Korean listeners used the F0 and intensity cues in identifying English stress and weighted vowel quality most strongly, as native English listeners did. These results indicate that Korean learners' experience with these cues in L1 prosody can help them attend to these cues in their L2 perception. However, L2 learners' perceptual attention is not entirely predicted by their linguistic experience with specific acoustic cues in their native language.