• Title/Summary/Keyword: Syllable Structure

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Distinct Segmental Implementations in English and Spanish Prosody

  • Lee, Joo-Kyeong
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.11 no.4
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    • pp.199-206
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    • 2004
  • This paper attempts to provide a substantial explanation of different prosodic implementations on segments in English and Spanish, arguing that the phonetic modification invoked by prosody may effectively reflect phonological structure. In English, a high front vowel in accented syllables is acoustically realized as higher F1 and F2 frequencies than in unaccented syllables, due to its more peripheral and sonorous articulation (Harrington et al. 1999). In this paper, an acoustic experiment was conducted to see if such a manner of segmental modification invoked by prosody in English extends to other languages such as Spanish. Results show that relatively more prominent syllables entail higher F1 values as a result of their more sonorous articulation in Spanish, but either front or back vowel does not show a higher F2 or a lower F2 frequency. This is interpreted as an indication that a prosodically prominent syllable entails its vocalic enhancement in both horizontal and vertical dimensions of articulation in English. In Spanish, however, only the vertical dimensional articulation is maximized, resulting in a higher F1. I suggest that this difference may be attributed to the different phonological structures of vowels in English and Spanish, and that sonority expansion alone would be sufficient in the articulation of prosodic prominence as long as the phonological distinction of vowels is well retained.

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Amplification and Howling Suppression of Telephonic Speech for the Hearing-Impaired Person (난청인을 위한 전화기 음성증폭 및 하울링 억제)

  • Lee, Sang-Min
    • Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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    • v.19 no.6
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    • pp.623-629
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    • 1998
  • To provide sufficient sound to the hearing-impaired person(HIP) who have many difficulty in communication with others using general telephone, big amplification is needed. But big amplification can occur howling as a side effect. In this study we developed the new technique of big amplification without howling, manufactured and estimated the new hearing aid telephone. Telephone speech is divided to three frequency band, amplified respectively and fitted to HIP's hearing ability. The telephone speech frequency is monitored by counter in time domain. The counter transfers the sinusoidal sound to rectangular wave using comparator and counts the number of rectangular wave in a certain time period, that is frequency, to monitor the howling. Telephone have microphone and speaker, which are fitted in a rigid structure and frequency band of telephone sound is limited, so howling occurs in the limited frequency band. If the counter notices that howling conditions happen, microprocessor decreases quickly the gain of the related frequency band. The result of test of our new hearing aid telephone showed that we can amplifiy the sound as much as 40dB, which is meaningful level to many HIP, and make HIP increase their perception ability from 20% to 60.8% in 1 syllable test and from 28.9% to 78% in 2 syllable test.

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Analysis of Acoustic Characteristics of Vowel and Consonants Production Study on Speech Proficiency in Esophageal Speech (식도발성의 숙련 정도에 따른 모음의 음향학적 특징과 자음 산출에 대한 연구)

  • Choi, Seong-Hee;Choi, Hong-Shik;Kim, Han-Soo;Lim, Sung-Eun;Lee, Sung-Eun;Pyo, Hwa-Young
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.10 no.3
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    • pp.7-27
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    • 2003
  • Esophageal Speech uses the esophageal air during phonation. Fluent esophageal speakers frequently intake air in oral communication, but unskilled esophageal speakers are difficult with swallowing lots of air. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference of acoustic characteristics of vowel and consonants production according to the speech proficiency level in esophageal speech. 13 normal male speakers and 13 male esophageal speakers (5 unskilled esophageal speakers, 8 skilled esophageal speakers) with age ranging from 50 to 70 years old. The stimuli were sustained /a/ vowel and 36 meaningless two syllable words. Used vowel is /a/ and consonants were 18 : /k, n, t, m, p, s, c, $C^{h},\;k^{h},\;t^{h},\;p^{h}$, h, I, k', t', p', s', c'/. Fundermental frequency (Fx), Jitter, shimmer, HNR, MPT were measured with by electroglottography using Lx speech studio (Laryngograph Ltd, London, UK). 36 meaningless words produced by esophageal speakers were presented to 3 speech-language pathologists who phonetically transcribed their responses. Fx, Jitter, HNR parameters is significant different between skilled esophageal speakers and unskilled esophageal speakers (P<.05). Considering manner of articulation, ANOVA showed that differences in two esophageal speech groups on speech proficiency were significant; Glide had the highest number of confusion with the other phoneme class, affricates are the most intelligible in the unskilled esophageal speech group, whereas in the skilled esophageal speech group fricatives resulted highest number of confusions, nasals are the most intelligible. In the place of articulation, glottal /h/ is the highest confusion consonant in both groups. Bilabials are the most intelligible in the skilled esophageal speech, velars are the most intelligible in the unskilled esophageal speech. In the structure of syllable, 'CV+V' is more confusion in the skilled esophageal group, unskilled esophageal speech group has similar confusion in both structures. In unskilled esophageal speech, significantly different Fx, Jitter, HNR acoustic parameters of vowel and the highest confusions of Liquid, Nasals consonants could be attributed to unstable, improper contact of neoglottis as vibratory source and insufficiency in the phonatory air supply, and higher motoric demand of remaining articulation due to morphological characteristics of vocal tract after laryngectomy.

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Comparison of Acoustic Phonetic Characteristics of Korean Fricative Sounds Pronounced by Hearing-impaired Children and Normal Children (청각장애 아동과 일반 아동의 마찰음에 나타난 음향음성학적 특성 비교)

  • Kim, YunHa;Kim, Eunyeon;Jang, Seoung-Jin;Choi, Yaelin
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.6 no.2
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    • pp.73-79
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    • 2014
  • Alveolar fricative sounds /s/ and /s'/ are learned last for normal children in the speech development process for Koreans. These are especially difficult to articulate for hearing-impaired children often causing articulation errors. The acoustic phonetic evaluation uses testing tools to provide indirect and object information. These objective resources can be compared with standardized resources on speech when interpreting the results of a test. However, most previous studies in Korea did not consider acoustic studies that used the spectrum moment values of hearing-impaired children. Therefore, this study was conducted to compare the characteristics of hearing-impaired children's pronunciation of fricative sounds using spectrum moment values. For this purpose, the study selected a total of 10 hearing-impaired children (5 boys and 5 girls) currently in 3rd or 5th grade and attending one of the elementary schools in Seoul or Gyeonggi-do. For the selection process, their age, type of hearing aid, implantation of hearing aid (CI) before two years of age, hearing capacity (dB) before and after wearing the hearing aid, duration of speech rehabilitation, and time of learning alveolar fricative sounds were all considered. Also, 10 normal children (5 boys and 5 girls) were selected among 3rd or 5th grade students attending one of the elementary schools in Seoul or Gyeonggi-do. The subjects were asked to read the carrier sentence, "I say _______," including a list of 12 meaningless syllables composed of CV and VCV syllables, including alveolar fricative sounds /s/ and /s'/ and vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. The recorded resources were processed through the Time-frequency Analysis Software Program to measure M1 (mean), M2 (variance), M3 (skewness), and M4 (kurtosis) of the fricative noise. No significant differences were found when comparing spectrum threshold values in the acoustic phonetic characteristics of hearing-impaired children and normal children in alveolar fricative sound pronunciation according to vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/, alveolar fricative sounds /s/ and /s'/, and syllable structure (CV, VCV) other than, for M3 in the comparison of groups according to disability. In the comparison of syllable structures, there were statistically significant differences in M1, M2, M3, and M4 with clinical significance. However, there was no significant difference in results when comparing the alveolar fricative sounds according to the vowels.

A Comparative study on the Effectiveness of Segmentation Strategies for Korean Word and Sentence Classification tasks (한국어 단어 및 문장 분류 태스크를 위한 분절 전략의 효과성 연구)

  • Kim, Jin-Sung;Kim, Gyeong-min;Son, Jun-young;Park, Jeongbae;Lim, Heui-seok
    • Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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    • v.12 no.12
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    • pp.39-47
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    • 2021
  • The construction of high-quality input features through effective segmentation is essential for increasing the sentence comprehension of a language model. Improving the quality of them directly affects the performance of the downstream task. This paper comparatively studies the segmentation that effectively reflects the linguistic characteristics of Korean regarding word and sentence classification. The segmentation types are defined in four categories: eojeol, morpheme, syllable and subchar, and pre-training is carried out using the RoBERTa model structure. By dividing tasks into a sentence group and a word group, we analyze the tendency within a group and the difference between the groups. By the model with subchar-level segmentation showing higher performance than other strategies by maximal NSMC: +0.62%, KorNLI: +2.38%, KorSTS: +2.41% in sentence classification, and the model with syllable-level showing higher performance at maximum NER: +0.7%, SRL: +0.61% in word classification, the experimental results confirm the effectiveness of those schemes.

Linguistic Characteristics of Domestic Men's Formal Wear Brand Names

  • Kwon, Hae-Sook
    • Journal of Fashion Business
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    • v.14 no.6
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    • pp.11-22
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    • 2010
  • The main purpose of this research was to examine the linguistic characteristics of domestic men's formal wear brand name. Four linguistic characteristics of language type, combined structure type of language, word class, length of brand name were investigated in this research and also examined the difference between brand type. For sample selection, the 209 men's fashion brands were selected from '2009 Korea Fashion Yearbook' and then, 25 brands which could not collect proper informations about the brand name or naming were excluded. Among total 184 men's brand names, 66 men's formal wear brands were selected and studied. For data analysis, quantitative evaluation of the frequency and qualitative evaluation have been used. The result as follows.; (1) Seven language types were found in domestic men's formal wear brand names. English has been used the most, then followed by Italian and French. (2) For combined structure type of brand name language, the single word used the most, followed by separately combined word type, artificially combined word, and unified word type. (3) The most frequently used the type of word class was noun, and followed by phrase, adjective, and verb. In the noun type, 6 different types which expressed a person, concrete & abstract entity, place, acronym, and neologic were found. For phrase, only noun type was appeared, however, 6 out of 20 phrases were abbreviated type. All eight adjective brand names implied an attributive character of the brand such as 'Dainty' or 'Solus(Solo)'. (4) The long name used most and then followed by normal and short length of brand name. Looking by the number of syllable, 4 syllables appeared the most and then followed by 3, 5, 6, 2 & 7 showed the same rate, and 8 syllables. (5) The result which compared the difference according to each brand type showed a difference in its language type, language combined style, word class, but length of brand name.

Place Assimilation in OT

  • Lee, Sechang
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 1996.10a
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    • pp.109-116
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    • 1996
  • In this paper, I would like to explore the possibility that the nature of place assimilation can be captured in terms of the OCP within the Optimality Theory (Mccarthy & Prince 1999. 1995; Prince & Smolensky 1993). In derivational models, each assimilatory process would be expressed through a different autosegmental rule. However, what any such model misses is a clear generalization that all of those processes have the effect of avoiding a configuration in which two consonantal place nodes are adjacent across a syllable boundary, as illustrated in (1):(equation omitted) In a derivational model, it is a coincidence that across languages there are changes that have the result of modifying a structure of the form (1a) into the other structure that does not have adjacent consonantal place nodes (1b). OT allows us to express this effect through a constraint given in (2) that forbids adjacent place nodes: (2) OCP(PL): Adjacent place nodes are prohibited. At this point, then, a question arises as to how consonantal and vocalic place nodes are formally distinguished in the output for the purpose of applying the OCP(PL). Besides, the OCP(PL) would affect equally complex onsets and codas as well as coda-onset clusters in languages that have them such as English. To remedy this problem, following Mccarthy (1994), I assume that the canonical markedness constraint is a prohibition defined over no more than two segments, $\alpha$ and $\beta$: that is, $^{*}\{{\alpha, {\;}{\beta{\}$ with appropriate conditions imposed on $\alpha$ and $\beta$. I propose the OCP(PL) again in the following format (3) OCP(PL) (table omitted) $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are the target and the trigger of place assimilation, respectively. The '*' is a reminder that, in this format, constraints specify negative targets or prohibited configurations. Any structure matching the specifications is in violation of this constraint. Now, in correspondence terms, the meaning of the OCP(PL) is this: the constraint is violated if a consonantal place $\alpha$ is immediately followed by a consonantal place $\bebt$ in surface. One advantage of this format is that the OCP(PL) would also be invoked in dealing with place assimilation within complex coda (e.g., sink [si(equation omitted)k]): we can make the constraint scan the consonantal clusters only, excluding any intervening vowels. Finally, the onset clusters typically do not undergo place assimilation. I propose that the onsets be protected by certain constraint which ensures that the coda, not the onset loses the place feature.

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Notes on Descriptions of the Prosodic System in French Grammars in the Age of Enlightenment & the Departure of the International Phonetic Alphabet (계몽주의 시대 프랑스 문법서에서 기술한 운율 현상과 국제음성기호의 출발에 대한 고찰)

  • Park, Moon-Kyou
    • The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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    • v.21 no.4
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    • pp.658-667
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    • 2021
  • Our study aimed to analyze and reinterpret, by an acoustic approach, the descriptions of the 18th century prosody and introduce the figurative pronunciation system, which is the International Phonetic Alphabet pioneer. Our methodology compares and analyzes grammars and documents on the transcription system and restructures the prosodic structure. It is certain that the 18th century grammarians widely accepted the prosody theories made by Arnauld & Lancelot of the seventeenth century. In particular, grammar scholars accepted the dichotomous classification of the accent structures as prosodic and oratorical accents. The prosodic accent has a relation to intonation, and the oratorical accent has as its key elements intonation and intensity. Regarding the temporal structure, the lengthening of the final syllable was observed systematically by grammarians of the 18th century. This time structure is similar to that of today. Therefore, we can conclude that the final elongation, an essential characteristic of the modern French accent, has already played an imbued role in 18th century prosody. Despite this, the 18th century grammarians did not assign it the status of accent, as it was a stereotype that matches accent with intonation.

A Symphony of Language

  • Kim, Chin W.
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.5-50
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    • 2002
  • This paper aims to illustrate and illuminate the relationship between language and its neighbor disciplines, in particular between language and literature, language and religion, and language and music. 1. Language and literature. Literature is an art of language. Therefore, linguistics, the science of language, should be able to explain how the grammar of literature elevates and ordinary language into a literary language. I illustrate poetic syntax with examples from Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. 2. Language and religion. I show how a linguistic analysis of a religious text can illuminate the background, authorship, chronology, etc., of a religious text with an example from the Book of Daniel. I also illustrate how a misanalysis of a poetic meter led to a mistranslation with an example from the Book of Psalms. 3. Language and music. First I trace an epochal event in the history of the Western music, i.e., the change of the musical style from the liturgical music of Latin in which the rhythm was created by the alternation of syllable duration into the liberated music of German in which the rhythm was generated by the alternation of lexical stress. I then illustrate a parallelism between linguistic and musical structures with several musical pieces including Gregorian chant, the 16th century music of Palestrina, the 17th century music of Schutz, the 18th century music of Mozart, and the 19th century Viennese music. Finally, the importance of text-tune (verse-melody) association is discussed with examples of mismatches in translated Korean hymns and contemporary Korean lyrical songs. In the concluding part, I speculate on some factors that are responsible for the same organizational devices in three different modes of human communication. An answer may be that all are under the same laws of mind that govern the way man perceives and organizes nature, i.e., the same cognitive abilities of man, in particular, the capacity to organize and impose structure on their respective inputs.

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Geographic variation in the acoustic signals of black-billed magpies (Pica pica) in South Korea and Japan

  • Lee, Sang-Im;Lee, Sun-Hee;Nam, Hyun-Young;Choe, Jae-Chun
    • Journal of Ecology and Environment
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    • v.34 no.2
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    • pp.167-174
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    • 2011
  • Black-billed magpies (Pica pica) are a highly sedentary species due to their short and round wings, which are not adequate for long distance flights. We investigated geographic variation in the vocal signals of magpies residing in South Korea and Japan (subspecies sericea). Based on the magpie's limited dispersal ability, we predicted that the variation in vocal signals of black-billed magpies could be explained by geographic barriers such as mountain ranges and straits. We analyzed four-syllable chatter calls of magpies from five localities in South Korea, which are separated by mountain ranges (Seoul, Daejeon, Daegu, Gwangju, and Busan), and two island localities separated from the mainland by straits (Jeju in Korea and Saga in Japan). We found significant differences in the characteristics of magpie chatter calls recorded in the seven localities, and the variation pattern was independent among the variables. Mainland-island differentiation and north-south differentiation were observed. In general, magpies on Saga were the most distinctive. North-south differentiation was observed among the Korean mainland localities. However, the pattern was not related to the presence of putative geographic barriers. We hypothesize that the patterns of geographic variation in the structure of magpie chatter calls residing in South Korea might have been shaped by a sudden expansion of magpies followed by low level of local isolation, which may have led to vocal differentiation. Along with elucidating the vocal environment of Korean magpie populations, more extensive sampling is needed to clarify the functional aspects of geographic variation in the vocal signals of Korean magpies.