• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.139-144
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• 2005

When a Japanese learner in Korea tries to find Japanese dictionary, he must know the pronunciation of the target word. But it's not easy to know the pronunciation of target word from Japanese sentence. Because most of general Japanese sentence shows only HanJa(Chinese character) instead of Kana(Japanese alphabet). If the Japanese learner knows the Korean traditional pronunciation of the target word, he can input the word to electronic Japanese dictionary with the Korean pronunciation. For this solution, the dictionary service provider must convert the Japanese word to Korean pronunciation, in advance. After setting of the conversions as a additional searching process, we can find the target word through Korean pronunciation of the Japanese HanJa, This process is possible for the three reasons below, 1. Korean, Japanese and Chinese are using the nearly same HanJa. The difference is small. 2. Most Japanese learner in Korea, knows the Korean pronunciation of the HanJa. 3. The Korean pronunciation of the HanJa is nearly unique, a HanJa has a Korean pronunciation, generally.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.19-25
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• 2020

This study examined thirty-one Korean students' pronunciation of an English passage using a speech recognition application, Speechnotes, and two Canadian raters' evaluations of their speech according to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) band criteria to assess the possibility of using the application as a teaching aid for pronunciation education. The results showed that the grand average percentage of correctly recognized words was 77.7%. From the moderate recognition rate, the pronunciation level of the participants was construed as intermediate and higher. The recognition rate varied depending on the composition of the content words and the function words in each given sentence. Frequency counts of unrecognized words by group level and word type revealed the typical pronunciation problems of the participants, including fricatives and nasals. The IELTS bands chosen by the two native raters for the rainbow passage had a moderately high correlation with each other. A moderate correlation was reported between the number of correctly recognized content words and the raters' bands, while an almost a negligible correlation was found between the function words and the raters' bands. From these results, the author concludes that the speech recognition application could constitute a partial aid for diagnosing each individual's or the group's pronunciation problems, but further studies are still needed to match human raters.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.339-368
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• 2014

In Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, phoneme-based pronunciation teaching such as tone, consonants, vowels is the most common teaching methods. Based on main character of Chinese grammar: 'lack of morphological change' in a narrow sense, was proposed by Lv Shuxiang and Zhu Dexi, I designed 'Communicative oriented Chinese pronunciation teaching method'. This teaching method is composed of seven elements: one kind is the 'structural elements': phoneme, word, phrase, sentence; another kind is the 'functional elements': listening, speaking and translation. This pronunciation teaching method has four kinds of practice methods: 1) phoneme learning method; 2) word based pronunciation practice; 3) phrase based pronunciation practice; 4) sentence based pronunciation practice. When the teachers use these practice methods, they can use the dialogue and Korean-Chinese translation. In particular, when the teachers use 'phoneme learning method', they must use Korean and Chinese phonetic comparison results. When the teachers try to correct learner's errors, they must first consider the speech communication.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.7-15
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• 2017

The purpose of this study was to investigate the different aspects of word-initial liquid sounds in Korean according to generations. Five women in their 50s and seven in their 20s participated in the experiment. We examined FL (formant of liquids) and voice sustained time by using Praat software. Three English native speakers were asked to judge the Korean speakers' recorded speech samples for marking [l] or [r] using evaluation sheet. The results of the two experiments revealed three important aspects. First, there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in the FL of the words 'racket' and 'ruby.' Second, we found statistically significant differences in 'rhythm', 'ruby' and 'litter' from the measurement of the duration of the acoustic data. Third, there was no difference in pronunciation between the two groups according to the phonemes of the original language. The results of this study showed that it is difficult to say that the duration of word-initial liquids and the phoneme difference of the original language are indicators to distinguish the word-initial liquids between generations. Also, it was seen that the pronunciation of Korean word-initial liquid sounds varied across generations.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.421-430
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• 2021

It is necessary to pay attention to the appearance of word-initial glottalization among social classes. The higher the academic ability, the more formal it is, the more likely it is to avoid word-initial glottalization due to the psychological factors that are close to the English pronunciation. The purpose of this study is to prove and clarify this through experimental research and the Praat voice analysis program. In previous discussions on word-initial glottalization, there have been various discussions such as strengthening expressions, the conclusion of competition of modern society, Korean historical analysis, differences in Korean and English phonetics, and attempts to regularize the pronunciation of loanwords. In this paper, it was revealed that the higher the academic ability, the weaker the pronunciation of loanwords word-initial glottalization appears in formal and formal situations, by using experimental research and voice analysis program Praat. The presence or absence of pronunciation of the initial specification of loanwords acts as a psychological base for expressing one's status and hierarchy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.43-50
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• 2017

These days voice models of speech recognition software are sophisticated enough to process the natural speech of people without any previous training. However, not much research has reported on the use of speech recognition tools in the field of pronunciation education. This paper examined Google speech recognition of a short English paragraph produced by Korean college students in clear and casual speech styles in order to diagnose and resolve students' pronunciation problems. Thirty three Korean college students participated in the recording of the English paragraph. The Google soundwriter was employed to collect data on the word recognition rates of the paragraph. Results showed that the total word recognition rate was 73% with a standard deviation of 11.5%. The word recognition rate of clear speech was around 77.3% while that of casual speech amounted to 68.7%. The reasons for the low recognition rate of casual speech were attributed to both individual pronunciation errors and the software itself as shown in its fricative recognition. Various distributions of unrecognized words were observed depending on each participant and proficiency groups. From the results, the author concludes that the speech recognition software is useful to diagnose each individual or group's pronunciation problems. Further studies on progressive improvements of learners' erroneous pronunciations would be desirable.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.267-278
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• 2017

As the same letter can be pronounced differently depending on word contexts, one should refer to a lexicon in order to pronounce a word correctly. Phonetic alphabets that lexicons adopt as well as pronunciations that lexicons describe for the same word can be different from lexicon to lexicon. In this paper, we use a sequence-to-sequence model that is widely used in deep learning research area in order to convert automatically from one pronunciation to another. The 12 seq2seq models are implemented based on pronunciation training data collected from 4 different lexicons. The exact accuracy of the models ranges from 74.5% to 89.6%. The aim of this study is the following two things. One is to comprehend a property of phonetic alphabets and pronunciations used in various lexicons. The other is to understand characteristics of seq2seq models by analyzing an error.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.79-84
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• 1996

The two existing romanization systems in Korea, namely the recently promulgated Ministry of Education version sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences incorporating for the most part the McCune-Reischauer system and the Hangeul Haghoe or the Korean Language Society's version, must be judged as failures: He fennel for its disregard of Korean orthography and pronunciation, use of Latin-oriented pronunciation despite its assertion that English is the standard used, and the greatest weakness of all, its use of phonetic symbols neither found in regular typewriters, teleprinters, word processors and telex machines nor understood by laymen, sometimes not even by specialists. And the latter suffers from its undue emphasis on Korean orthography, Latin-oriented pronunciation being only partly capable of representing Korean pronunciation, among other shortcomings. Since the two existing romanization systems of Korean in South Korea, and romanization system of Japanese with Latin-oriented pronunciation are woefully inadequate, in today's world where English is used as if it were the international language almost all over the world, the present writer has invented a completely new system of romanizing Korean and Japanese by the so-called pseudo-phonetic method. This method employs the roman letters only and uses thorn in place of phonetic symbols as long as the letters thus applied are believed to have constant sound value. The English pronunciation is the standard used for this system.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.11-18
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• 2005

In this paper, English pronunciation system and the methods of its notations which is used in the internet web sites or in electronic English dictionaries are analyzed and new font table and its key layout are presented to input it efficiently. By using this method, English pronunciation can be inputted to the spreadsheets, databases and presentations as well as word-processors, and each application program's data can have compatibility. Furthermore, it can have compatibility within another type of computers and increase inputting speed. In the result of experiments, every data can have the compatibility in all of application programs and inputting speed is increased highly compare with using the pre-existing functions of word-processors.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3257-3269
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• 2020

Articulation disorders are characterized by an inability to achieve clear pronunciation due to misuse of the articulators. In this paper, a method of detecting such disorders by comparing to the standard pronunciations is proposed. This method defines the standard pronunciations from the speeches of normal children by clustering them with three features which are the Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC), the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), and the Relative Spectral Analysis Perceptual Linear Prediction (RASTA-PLP). By calculating the distance between the centroid of the standard pronunciation and the inputted pronunciation, disordered speech whose features locates outside the cluster is detected. 89 children (58 of normal children and 31 of children with disorders) were recruited. 35 U-TAP test words were selected and each word's standard pronunciation is made from normal children and compared to each pronunciation of children with disorders. In the experiments, the pronunciations with disorders were successfully distinguished from the standard pronunciations.