• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.131-136
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• 2016

An appropriate evaluation on learner's pronunciation has been an important part of foreign language education. The learners should be evaluated and receive proper feedback for pronunciation improvement. Due to the cost and consistency problem of human evaluation, automatic pronunciation evaluation system has been studied. The most of the current automatic evaluation systems utilizes underlying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. We suggest in this work to evaluate learner's pronunciation accuracy and fluency in word-level using the ASR and non-native teacher's speech model. Through the performance evaluation on our system, we confirm the overall evaluation result of pronunciation accuracy and fluency actually represents the learner's English skill level quite accurately.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.112-128
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• 2019

The history of modern Korean 'kimchi' can be traced through the history of the wordforms 'dihi' (디히), 'dimchʌi' (딤?), and 'thimchʌi' (팀?) in ancient Korean texts. As native Korean words, the 'dihi' word line ('dihi', 'dii', 'jihi', and 'ji') constitutes an old substratum. This word line coexisted with the 'dimchʌi' word line (dimchʌi, jimchʌi, and kim∫chi) from the Hanja '沈菜'. 'Ji', which is the last word variation of 'dihi', and is still used today as the unique form in several Korean dialects. In standard Korean, however, it only serves as a suffix to form the derivative names of various kimchi types. 'Dimchʌi' is believed to have appeared around the $6^{th}-7^{th}$ centuries, when Silla began to master Chinese characters. Hence,'dimchʌi' reflects either the Archaic Chinese (上古音) or the Old Chinese (中古音) pronunciation of the Hanja, '沈菜'. With the palatalization of the plosive alveolar [t], 'dimchʌi' changed to 'jimchʌi'. The Yangban intellectuals' rejection of the palatalization of the plosive velar [k] led to the hypercorrection of 'jimchʌi' into 'kimchʌi'. It is precisely the hypercorrect 'kimchʌe' that gave the wordform 'kim∫chi', which has eventually become the standard and predominant form in today's Korean language. Regarding 'thimchʌe', it reflects the Middle Chinese (Yuan Dynasty) pronunciation of the Hanja '沈菜' and was used mainly in writing by Yangban intellectuals.

• The korean journal of orthodontics
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• v.21 no.2 s.34
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• pp.287-307
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• 1991

This study aimed at examining speech defects of openbite patients, which were analized in terms of formant frequency for vowels and word pronunciation length for consonants. In addition, the upper and lower lip (perioral m.) activity was tested by the EMG. The tongue force was measured by the strain gauge, and the speech discrimination test was carried out. One experimental group and one control group were used for this study and they were respectively composed of six female openbite patients and six normal-occlusion females. Eight monophthongs, two fricatives and two affricatives were chosen for speech analysis. Speeches of the above-mentioned groups were recorded and then analized by the ILS/PC-1 software. Four hundred most frequently used monosyllables were also chosen for discrimination score. Openbite patients showed the following characteristics: 1. Abnormality in case of /a/, $/\varepsilon/$, /e/, /i/ $F_2$ and /e/, /a/ $F_1$. 2. Significantly elongated length in their pronunciation of /h/ and $/C^h/$ and somewhat elongated length also in their pronunciation of /s/ and /c/. 3. Significant upper lip activity according to the EMG test during pronunciation of the bilabial consonants. 4. Relatively weak tongue force according to the strain gauge measurement. 5. According to the speech discrimination test, high rate of misarticulation in case of (a) initial /p/ /s'/ and /ts'/, (b) /a/,$/\varepsilon/$,/e/,/je/,/o/, $/\phi/$,/jo/,/u/,/we/, and /i/ (c) final (equation omitted).

• Journal of Korean Medical classics
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.75-80
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• 2016

Objectives : The paper raises an objection to the word '涕' being used to refer to nasal discharge, and proposes a word for nasal discharge upon studying a set of medical books. Methods : The author finds and confirms the dictionary definition of '涕' and studies how they are used differently in medical books. Through this study, the author shows how the word '涕' is used incorrectly and makes deductions for its reason. The author takes a look at the old form of the word '涕', its etymological origin, takes a guess as to the real word that should have been used to refer to nasal discharge, and find examples of instances where this correct word for nasal discharge are more appropriate. Results & Conclusions : In medical books such as Huangdineijing Suwen, '涕' is used to mean nasal discharge, but the word's dictionary definition does not validate such usage. Yugunryeombu (劉君廉夫), in its commentary for Somun, used '?' and '鼻夷' for '涕', and '?' means nasal discharge and used as same as '涕' when its used to mean tear. This is a phenomenon that originated from '弟' and '夷' being used interchangeably which led to the incorrect usage of '?'. If someone were to refer to nasal discharge, he needs to use '?'. '鼻夷' is believed to be the same word as '弟鼻', which is the old form of '?', and it means both tear(pronounced 'Che') and nasal discharge(pronounced 'Je'). However, the pronunciation different between 'Che' and 'Je', and its definition as tear, is divided in later periods into '涕' following the shape of '弟'. Following the shape of '夷', the meaning of nasal discharge remains in '?' while retaining the pronunciation of 'yi'. Therefore, the word '涕' used to mean nasal discharge is an incorrect form of '?', and should all be re-written to '?'.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.4 s.310
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• pp.31-38
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• 2006

In this paper, the inputting method of english pronunciation for a computer by the combining diacritical mark is studied. English pronunciation system and the methods of its notations are investigated and conditions to input english pronunciations easily are analysed. Therefore, the inputting method which can input 3, 4-level stress as well as 2-level stress is presented. 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. 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 individual vowel method which has high speed than using the pre-existing functions of word processors.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.87-102
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• 2003

In this paper, we present an English pronunciation correction system for Korean speakers and show some of experimental results on it. The aim of the system is to detect mispronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give appropriate correction comments to users. There are several English pronunciation correction systems adopting speech recognition technology, however, most of them use conventional speech recognition engines. From this reason, they could not give phoneme based correction comments to users. In our system, we build two kinds of phoneme models: standard native speaker models and Korean's error models. We also design recognition network based on phonemes to detect Koreans' common mispronunciations. We get 90% detection rate in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we cannot get high detection rate in diphthong split and accents.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.1397-1406
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• 2019

In everyday mobile phone calls between the disabled and non-disabled people due to neurological impairment, the communication accuracy is often hindered by combining the accuracy of pronunciation due to the neurological impairment and the pronunciation features of the disabled. In order to improve this problem, the limiting method is MEMS (micro electro mechanical systems), which includes an induction line that artificially corrects difficult vocalization according to the oral characteristics of the language impaired by improving the word of out of vocabulary. mechanical System) Microphone device improvement. S/W improvement is decision tree with invert function, and improved matrix-vector rnn method is proposed considering continuous word characteristics. Considering the characteristics of H/W and S/W, a similar dictionary was created, contributing to the improvement of speech intelligibility for smooth communication.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.421-425
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• 1996

A multimedia Version of ${\ulcorner}Lee-Kim test of Korean Articulation{\lrcorner}$ "Lee-Kim Test of Korean Articulation" consisting of picture test, Sentence test, user's manual and notation, analysis sheets was published in 1990 to serve as a standard tool for testing and analysing the articulation errors of normal and abnormal speakers. It has been found, however that, the picture and sentences test using the printed version of Lee-Kim test of Korean Articulation revealed several limitations, in i, e, a) inefficiency in inducing desirable response from the informants b) lack of concentration and interest on the part of informants c) no consistent way of providing the informant with a clue in case the informant is unfamiliar with the word represented by the picture or the sentence. d) no reliable means for the speech-language pathologist to analyze and evaluate the informant's speech in relation to the standard pronunciation A multimedia version of Lee-Kim Korean articulation Test which features picture and word as well as recorded voice has been developed with a view to eliminating the limitation mentioned above and facilitating the articulation test-with ease and accuracy.