• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten adult male speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [4], also known as the Seoul corpus, and to analyze them by comparing to earlier works on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] in terms of the various linguistic factors that are expected to affect the formant distribution. The vowels extracted from the Korean corpus were also compared to those of the read Korean. The results showed that the distribution of the vowel formants from the Korean corpus was very different from that of read Korean speech. The comparison with English corpus and read English speech showed similar patterns. The factors affecting the Korean vowel formants were the interviewer sex, the location of the target vowel or the syllable containing it with respect to the phrasal word or utterance and the speech rate of the surrounding words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.103-109
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of the Korean corpus of spontaneous speech, also called the Seoul corpus. The corpus contains the audio recording of the interview-style spontaneous speech from the 40 native speakers of Seoul Korean. The talkers are divided into four age groups; talkers in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties. Each age group has ten talkers, five males and five females. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described. The corpus containing around 220,000 phrasal words was phonemically labeled along with information on the boundaries for Korean phrasal words and utterances, which were additionally romanized. According to the test result of labeling consistency, the inter-labeler agreement on phoneme identification was 98.1% and the mean deviation on boundary placement was 9.04 msec. The corpus will be made available for free to the research community in March, 2015.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.257-262
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• 2015

It is well known that cigarette smoke can cause erectile dysfunction by affecting the penile vascular system. However, the exact effects of nicotine on the corpus cavernosum remains poorly understood. Nicotine has been reported to cause relaxation of the corpus cavernosum; it has also been reported to cause both contraction and relaxation. Therefore, high concentrations of nicotine were studied in strips from the rabbit corpus cavernosum to better understand its effects. The proximal penile corpus cavernosal strips from male rabbits weighing approximately 4 kg were used in organ bath studies. Nicotine in high concentrations ($10^{-5}{\sim}10^{-4}M$) produced dose-dependent contractions of the corpus cavernosal strips. The incubation with $10^{-5}M$ hexamethonium (nicotinic receptor antagonist) significantly inhibited the magnitude of the nicotine associated contractions. The nicotine-induced contractions were not only significantly inhibited by pretreatment with $10^{-5}M$ indomethacin (nonspecific cyclooxygenase inhibitor) and with $10^{-6}M$ NS-398 (selective cyclooxygenase inhibitor), but also with $10^{-6}M$ Y-27632 (Rho kinase inhibitor). Ozagrel (thromboxane $A_2$ synthase inhibitor) and SQ-29548 (highly selective TP receptor antagonist) pretreatments significantly reduced the nicotine-induced contractile amplitude of the strips. High concentrations of nicotine caused contraction of isolated rabbit corpus cavernosal strips. This contraction appeared to be mediated by activation of nicotinic receptors. Rho-kinase and cyclooxygenase pathways, especially cyclooxygenase-2 and thromboxane $A_2$, might play a pivotal role in the mechanism associated with nicotine-induced contraction of the rabbit corpus cavernosum.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2020

This study identified the substitution of /u/ for /o/ (e.g., pyəllo [pyəllu]) in Korean based on the speech corpus as a function of grammar items. Korean /o/ and /u/ share the vowel feature [+rounded], but are distinguished in terms of tongue height. However, researchers have reported that the merger of Korean /o/ and /u/ is in progress, making them indistinguishable. Thus, in this study, the frequency of the phonetic manifestation /u/ of the underlying form of /o/ for each grammar item was calculated in The Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Seoul Corpus 2015) which is a large corpus from a total of 40 speakers from Seoul or Gyeonggi-do. It was then confirmed that linking endings, particles, and adverbs ending with /o/ in the word-final position were substituted for /u/ approximately 50% of the stimuli, whereas, in nominal items, they were replaced at a frequency of less than 5%. The high rates of substitution were the special particle "-do[du]" (59.6%) and the linking ending "-go[gu]" (43.5%) among high-frequency items. Observing Korean pronunciation in real life provides deep insight into its theoretical implications in terms of speech recognition.

• Language and Information
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.19-36
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• 2015

The aim of this paper is to investigate the usage of Korean markers -(n)un and -i/ka in editorial texts focusing on information structure. Noun phrases ending with the markers -(n)un and -i/ka were annotated semi-automatically using a corpus obtained from an online newspaper. Two important factors to determine the choice of markers were examined with the annotated data: referential givenness/newness and position in a sentence. Referential givenness and newness were adopted as indicators of information structure, topic and focus respectively. In addition to quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis was conducted on the selected data. The results suggest that both the marker -(n)un and -i/ka could carry a topic and a focus reading. Sentence position also played a crucial role in determining the marker, and the marker -i/ka was used more frequently in a later position of a sentence than the marker -(n)un.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2015

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.114-116
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• 2015

A 21-month-old girl with cri-du-chat syndrome in conjunction with developmental delay underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The MRI showed hypoplasia of the brain stem, a normal cerebellum, thinning of the corpus callosum, and a lack of myelination in both anterior limbs of the internal capsule. She also had neonatal bilateral subependymal cysts. We believe that the symmetrical lack of myelination in both anterior limbs of the internal capsule could be a diagnostic clue of cri-du-chat syndrome.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2015

All kinds of objects on the ground have inherent spectral reflectance curves, which can be used to classify the ground objects and to detect the target. Remotely sensed data have to be transferred to spectral reflectance for accurate analysis. There are formula methods provided by the institution, mathematical model method and ground-data-based method. In this study, RapidEye satellite image was converted to reflectance data using spectral reflectance of a CASI hyperspectral image by using vicarious radiometric calibration. The results were compared with those of the other calibration methods and ground data. The proposed method was closer to the ground data than ATCOR and New Kurucz 2005 method and equal with ELM method.