• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.6527-6533
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• 2015

It is generally accepted that there are differences between men and women in linguistic communication style. Genderlect is a socio-linguistic term to refer to the linguistic differences spoken by specific gender. Some linguistic features are provided as evidence to show the genderlects: pitch, lexicon, intonation, grammar and styles. The purpose of this paper is to compare the characteristics of genderlect in English and Korean. To do so, I analyzed the scripts of an English movie, 'Mrs. Doubtfire' and Korean tv drama, 'Oohlala couple'. In "Mrs. Doubtfire, tension and laughter arose out of discrepancy from the way he looked (as a woman) and the way he spoke (like a man). The same is true with "Oohlala couple." In the language of Mrs. Doubtfire, male speech characteristics with nouns were salient while in "Oohlala couple" with verb forms, especially with honorific style, which shows a difference between Korean and English genderlect. Korean language has special genderlect characteristics with honorific speech style realized in verb endings. In Korean the highest honorific speech style, 'Habsho-che' is used in official situation and men are more accustomed to it than women. When women have to use polite expressions they have to choose between the highest honorific style, 'Habsho-che' losing the female characteristics or the second highest honorific style 'Haeyo-che' keeping the female characteristics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.33-44
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• 2019

This paper dealt with how realization of pauses in utterance is affected by speech style, gender, and generation. For this purpose, we analyzed the frequency and duration of pauses. Pauses were categorized into four types: pause with breath, pause with no breath, utterance medial pause, and utterance final pause. Forty-eight subjects living in Seoul were chosen from the Korean Standard Speech Database. All subjects engaged in reading and spontaneous speech, through which we could also compare the realization between the two speech styles. The results showed that utterance final pauses had longer durations than utterance medial pauses. It means that utterance final pause has a function that signals the end of an utterance to the audience. For difference between tasks, spontaneous speech had longer and more frequent pauses because of cognitive reasons. With regard to gender variables, women produced shorter and less frequent pauses. For male speakers, the duration of pauses with breath was significantly longer. Finally, for generation variable, older speakers produced more frequent pauses. In addition, the results showed several interaction effects. Male speakers produced longer pauses, but this gender effect was more prominent at the utterance final position.

• MALSORI
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• no.43
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• pp.11-23
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• 2002

In this paper, speech style is divided into two - read speech and dialogue. In the experiment, read speech and dialogue use the same sentence to control discrepancy from different sentence. While the number of AP in read speech is less than in dialogue, the number of IP in read speech is more than in dialogue. The number of syllables which consist of AP is more various in dialogue. Intonational patterns of the first AP in IP make a difference. In dialogue, there is a pattern which has many high tones - LHH. The FO range in dialogue is wider than in read speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.33-37
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• 2018

Korean students with much exposure to the relatively slow and clear speech used in most English classes in Korea can be expected to have difficulty understanding the casual style that is common in the everyday speech of English speakers. This research attempted to investigate an effective way to utilize casual speech in English education, by exploring the way different speech styles (clear vs. casual) affect Korean learners' comprehension of spoken English. Twenty Korean university students and two native speakers of English participated in a listening session. The English utterances were produced in different speech styles (clear slow, casual slow, clear fast, and casual fast). The Korean students were divided into two groups by English proficiency level. The results showed that the Korean students achieved 69.4% comprehension accuracy, while the native speakers of English demonstrated almost perfect results. The Korean students (especially the low-proficiency group) had more problems perceiving function words than they did perceiving content words. Responding to the different speech styles, the high-proficiency group had more difficulty listening to utterances with phonological variation than they did listening to utterances produced at a faster speed. The low-proficiency group, however, struggled with utterances produced at a faster speed more than they did with utterances with phonological variation. The pedagogical implications of the results are discussed in the concluding section.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.21-24
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• 2005

This paper presents durational characteristics of Korean Lombard speech using data, which consist of 500 Lombard utterances and 500 normal utterances of 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females). Each file was segmented and labeled manually and the duration of each segment and each word was extracted. The durational change of Lombard effect in comparison with normal speech was analyzed using a statistical method. The results show that the duration of words with Lombard effect is increased in comparison with normal style, and that the average unvoiced consonantal duration is reduced while the average vocalic duration is increased. Female speakers show a stronger tendency towards lengthening the duration in Lombard speech, but without statistical significance. Finally, this study also shows that the speakers of Lombard speech could be classified according to their different duration rate.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.77-91
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• 2001

This paper investigates the timing of Korean spoken in a news-reading speech style in order to improve the naturalness of durations used in Korean speech synthesis. Each segment in a corpus of 671 read sentences was annotated with 69 segmental and prosodic features so that the measured duration could be correlated with the context in which it occurred. A CART model based on the features showed a correlation coefficient of 0.79 with an RMSE (root mean squared prediction error) of 23 ms between actual and predicted durations in reserved test data. These results are comparable with recent published results in Korean and similar to results found in other languages. An analysis of the classification tree shows that phrasal structure has the greatest effect on the segment duration, followed by syllable structure and the manner features of surrounding segments. The place features of surrounding segments only have small effects. The model has application in Korean speech synthesis systems.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2010

The current study exploresacoustic variation induced by prosodic contexts in different speech styles,with a focus on motherese or child-directed speech (CDS). The patterns of variation in the acoustic expression of voicing contrast in English stops, and the role of prosodic factors in governing such variation are investigated in CDS. Prosody-induced acoustic strengthening reported from adult-directed speech (ADS)is examined in the speech data directed to infants at the one-word stage. The target consonants are collected from Utterance-initial and -medial positions, with or without focal accent. Overall, CDS shows that the prosodic prominence of constituents under focal accent conditions variesin the acoustic correlates of the stop laryngeal contrasts. The initial position is not found with enhanced acoustic values in the current study, which is similar to the finding from ADS (Choi, 2006 Cole et al, 2007). Individualized statistical results, however, indicate that the effect of accent on acoustic measures is not very robust, compared to the effect of accent in ADS. Enhanced distinctiveness under focal accent is observed from the limited subjects' acoustic measures in CDS. The results indicate dissimilar strategies to mark prosodic structures in different speech styles as well as the consistent prosodic effect across speech styles. The stylistic variation is discussed in relation to the listener under linguistic development in CDS.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.107-110
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• 1994

In this paper, we describe the features of the fundamental frequency contour of Korean read speech, and propose a new stylization method to characterize the Fø pattern of segments. Our algorithm consists of three stylization processes : the segment level, the syllable level, and the sord level. For stylization of Fø contour in the segment level , we applied least square error minimization method to determine Fø values at initial, medial, and final position in a segment. In the syllable level, we determine the stylized Fø pattern of a syllable using the mean Fø value of each word and style information for each word, syllable and segment, we reconstruct Fø contour of sentences. The simulation results show that the error is less than 10% of the actual Fø contour for each sentence. In perception test, there is little difference between the synthesized speech with the original difference between the synthesized speech with the original Fø contour and the synthesized speech with the stylized Fø contour.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.