• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.31-38
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• 2013

This study investigated the influence of English vowel pronunciation training to English word-initial stop pronunciation. For that purpose, VOT values of English stops produced by twenty Korean English learners(five Youngnam dialect male speakers, five Youngnam dialect female speakers, five Kangwon dialect male speakers, and five Kangwon dialect female speakers) were measured using the Speech Analyzer and their post-training production was compared with their pre-training production. The result shows that post-training VOT values of voiced stops became closer to those of native English speakers in all four groups. Hence, it can be inferred that vowel pronunciation training is effective for correcting pronunciation of voiced vowels by analyzing the change of the quality of following vowels(especially low vowels) and the degree of giving stress.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.111-117
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Chinese learners of Korean produce Korean plain plosives differently in a reading passage and isolated sentences. There are several studies on Korean plosives produced by Chinese speakers, but the study comparing the production of reading passage and isolated sentences are rare. For these purposes, ten Chinese speakers' VOT values of Korean plain plosives were measured using Speech Analyzer. The results show that there is no significant difference between the plain plosive production of a reading passage and that of isolated sentences. In the further studies, the measurement of pitch with VOT is needed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.227-236
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• 1997

How do aphasics deal with the inflectional marking occurring in agglutinative languages like Korean? Korean speech repetition, comprehension and production were studied in 3 Broca's aphasic speakers of Korean. As experimental materials, 100 easy sentences were chosen in 1st grade Korean elementary school textbooks about reading writing and listening, and two pictures were made from each sentence. This study examines the use of three kinds of inflectional markings--past tense, nominative case, and accusative case. The analysis focuses on whether each inflectional marking was performed well or not in tasks such as repetition, comprehension and production. In addition, morphological errors concerned with each inflectional marking were analyzed in view of markedness. In general, the aphasic subjects showed a clear preservation of the morphological aspects of their native language. So the view of Broca's aphasics as agrammatical could not be strongly supported. It can be suggested that nominative case and accusative case are marked elements in Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2011

The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate the correlation between English word-final stop and the duration of vowels before word-final stop and (2) to suggest a way to detect pronunciation errors and teach the pronunciation of English word-final stops. For these purposes, 18 Korean speakers' production was recorded and analysed using Speech Analyzer and their production was compared with that of native English speakers. In addition, two native English speakers evaluated the subjects' pronunciation. The major findings are the voicing dependent effect of the English vowels produced by native Korean speakers is lower than that of native English speakers; Korean speakers release English word-final stops less than native English speakers; and the pronunciation of English word-final stops and the duration of adjacent vowels are closely related in that the pronunciation score of final stops and the ratio of vowels between the vowels before voiced stops and voiceless stops are correlated. In addition, this study concludes with pedagogical suggestions that may be useful for English pronunciation teaching.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2005

This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.249-253
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• 2005

This paper summarizes some recent findings with respect to how prosodic structure is manifested in fine-grained phonetic details and how such phonetic manifestation of prosodic structure may be exploited in spoken word recognition.

• Therapeutic Science for Rehabilitation
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.67-78
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• 2019

Objective : The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of hand tapping on the accuracy and the fluency of speech production in children with speech sound disorder(SSD) and their typically developing peers(TD). Methods : The study subjects were 15 SSD children and 15 TD children aged 4, 5, and 6 years of age. Subjects were asked to give a picture name without hand tapping in the first experimental condition, and with hand tapping in the second experiment condition. Results : The results showed that hand tapping significantly increased disfluency in TD, whereas in SSD. it did not affect the accuracy or fluency of speech production. In addition, TD demonstrated a significant positive correlation with the changes of accuracy and disfluency due to hand tapping, whereas SSD had no correlation. Conclusion : We discussed the possibility that hand tapping could serve as an obstacle distracting attention from SSD and TD, acting as a motor gesture to facilitate phonological processing when facing the difficulty in lexical retrieval for SSD.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.109-119
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• 2014

This article represents a first step in a large study aimed at elucidating the relationship between production and perception involved in sound change of /o/ in (Seoul) Korean. In this paper we present the results of a production study and a perception experiment. For the production study we examined vowel production data of 20 young adult speakers, measuring the first and second formants, then conducted a discriminant analysis based on those values. In terms of their F1-F2 values, the distribution of /o/ and /u/ were close, and even overlapping in some circumstances, which is consistent with the literature. This tendency was more apparent among the female speakers than the males. Moreover, with the females' distributions, /o/ was frequently categorized as /u/, suggesting that the direction of the sound change is indeed increasing from /o/ to /u/. Next, to investigate the effects of this proximity on perception, we used the production data of five randomly selected speakers from the production study as stimuli for a perception experiment in which 21 young adult native speakers of (Seoul) Korean performed a vowel identification task and provided a Goodness rating on a 5-point scale. We found that while rates of correctness were high, when these correctness scores were weighted by the Goodness rating, these "weighted correctness" scores were lower in some cases, indicating a degree of confusion in distinguishing between the two vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.3-12
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• 2012

The primary goal of the current study was to examine category solidity of Korean alveolar fricatives in the Busan and Seoul dialects of Korean. Considering the common belief of $/s^h/-/s^*/$ neutralization in Kyungsang speech, plain $/s^h/$ and fortis $/s^*/$ fricatives of Busan speakers were examined against the same fricatives of Seoul speakers. Perceptual distance between Korean $/s^h/$ and $/s^*/$ on the one hand and English /s/ on the other was investigated by use of across-linguistic mapping method. Two experiments of a perceptual mapping task of English /s/ to Korean $/s^h/$ and $/s^*/$ and a $/s^*/$-production task were conducted on users of the Busan and Seoul dialects of Korean. The results from the perception and production experiments suggested that at a micro-level, younger Busan speakers have less solid category stability for Korean $/s^*/$ compared with Seoul speakers, although their production of $/s^h/$ and $/s^*/$ was as highly distinctive from each other as that of Seoul speakers.