• Title/Summary/Keyword: accents

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An Acoustic Study of the Pronunciation of English Pitch. Accents Uttered by Korean Speakers (한국인의 영어피치악센트 발음에 관한 연구)

  • Koo, Hee-San
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.223-236
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    • 2003
  • The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate characteristics of English pitch accents uttered by Korean speakers. Six English sentences were uttered five times by fifteen male undergraduate and graduate students from three groups, Seoul, Yongnam and Honam dialect speakers. We compared the subjects' data with the data of a native speaker of English as model pronunciation of English pitch accents. Acoustic features(Fo, duration, amplitude) were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Works. Results showed that (1) acoustic features of English pitch accents are Fo and duration for the native speaker and Korean speakers altogether, (2) Seoul dialect speakers uttered English pitch accents more similarly to the English native speaker than the other dialect speakers and (3) Korean speakers generally have difficulties in pronouncing L* accents. It appears that Korean speakers have more problems in pronouncing L* accents than H* accents.

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The English Intonation of Native Speakers and Korean Learners: A Comparative Study

  • Um, Hye-Young
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.11 no.1
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    • pp.117-130
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    • 2004
  • This paper investigates the English intonation of Korean speakers of English as a second language and compares it to that of English native speakers. The speech data of ten Korean speakers and three native speaker controls were tape recorded in an oral reading task in which the subjects were asked to read aloud the given text which was used in the study of Wennerstrom (1994). Following Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) who distinguishes the discrete units of meaning in intonation, pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones were measured. It was found that Korean speakers' use of phrase accents and boundary tones were relatively good compared to their use of pitch accents. That is, Korean speakers conform to native speakers' use of phrase or boundary tones for the purpose of marking the relationship between intermediate or intonational phrases. In contrast, the main difference of Korean speakers' use of intonation from that of native speakers was the use of pitch accents. That is, Korean speakers tend to have difficulty in assigning an appropriate pitch accent to signal relationships between new or contrastive information and that which is assumed to be understood or contributes little to the meaning of the utterance.

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The Analysis of Intonational Meaning Based on the English Intonational Phonology (영어 억양음운론에 의한 영어 억양 의미 분석)

  • Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.7 no.3
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    • pp.109-125
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    • 2000
  • The purpose of this paper is to analyse the intonational meaning of various sentences based on the English Intonational Phonology, and to show the superiority of Intonational Phonology in explaining the intonational meanings in comparison with the other existing intonational theories. The American structuralists and British schools which attempt to describe the intonation in terms of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively, analyze intonational meaning from a holistic perspective in which an utterance cannot be divided into smaller parts. On the other hand, Intonational Phonology considers English intonation as composed of a series of High and Low tones, and as a result, intonational meaning is interpreted compositionally as sets of H and L. In this paper, the phonological relations between intonation and its meaning from the compositions of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones which consist of an intonational tune are discussed.

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A Rhythmic Effect of Tone in English (영어 억양의 리듬효과)

  • Lee, Joo-Kyeong;Kang, Sun-Mi
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.303-318
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    • 2003
  • This paper attempts to investigate the tonal implementations of English stress clash, arguing that a preceding stress shifts leftward when two lexical stresses conflict across word boundaries or that H* and L* pitch accents are alternatively manifested on the stressed syllables, establishing intonational peak and valley contours. We claim that the H*/L* alternation might be a tonal strategy to avoid stress clash, and that pitch could be solely manipulated to display a rhythmic effect with maintaining lexical stress. In the experiment, we examined two-word combinations whose boundaries involve stress clash, and divided them into two categories. One has the preceding words involving a heavy syllable ahead of stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress and the other, a light syllable, in which case stress shift is completely prevented. We analyzed the distribution of pitch accents in the word combinations, focusing on the pitch configurations in the cases where stress should not be shifted. Results show that approximately 50% of the stimuli show stress shift in the heavy syllable combinations of the preceding words; the preceding stress is moved leftward within the word. The other 50% and the light syllable combinations show various pitch accents patterns; H* and L* alternation, deaccentuation of either stressed syllable, or L-insertion between two H* pitch accents, etc. We interpret this as a rhythmic effect of tone to avoid stress clash and suggest that a true stress clash would be confined into cases without H*/L* contours.

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Role and Properties of Rhythm in French Intonation

  • Yuh, Hea-Ok;Lee, Eun-Yung
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.12 no.1
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    • pp.107-119
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    • 2005
  • The current study considers that the distinctive acoustic properties and variations in the closed plateau are realized by four different pitch accents(/Hi*_ H*/ or /Hi*_$h*_f$ for an emphatic phrase and /hi*_ H*/ for a neutral phrase) in an intermediate phrase in the French intonational structure. Thus, an attempt is made to define the acoustic property of the CP in the ip according to the duration time and pitch range, while different combinations of the four pitch accents of the CP are used to explain the way a speaker will highlight. The duration time of the CP was measured at about 0.67 sec. for males and 0.75 sec. for females. The duration properties of the plateau in the CP were found to control the pitch range based on two different prominent pitch accents, which appeared in more than two APs. Therefore, the ip was identified as having a hierarchical level in the French intonational structure, along with the AP and IP. In addition, the CP in the ip was used as a specific location to explain the pragmatic meaning of the rhythm using the two acoustic factors and different combinations of the four pitch accents.

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An Introduction to English Intonational Phonology (영어 억양음운론의 소개)

  • Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.6
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    • pp.119-143
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    • 1999
  • In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

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A Study on the Color Coordination of Eye-shadow Makeup - Focused on Works of Kendra Stanton in Makeup of 'Daytime to Night', 'Special Occasion', 'Holiday Accents', 'Seasonal Looks' and 'Animated Characters' - (아이섀도우 메이크업(Eye-shadow Makeup)의 컬러 배색에 관한 연구 - 켄드라 스탠튼(Kendra Stanton)의 "내추럴(Daytime to Night)", "스페셜(Special Occasion)", "할러데이(Holiday Accents)", "시즌(Seasonal Looks)", "캐릭터(Animated Characters)" 메이크업 경우를 중심으로 -)

  • Ji, Hyun Suk;Kim, Eun Sil
    • Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.509-519
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    • 2016
  • The purpose of this study is to present important guidelines for effective eye-shadow color coordination according to T.P.O. such as 'Day time to Night', 'Special Occasions', 'Holiday Accents', 'Seasonal Looks' and 'Animated Characters'. The method is as follows; This study examined the 100 works of her published in the?500 EYE MAKEUP DESIGNS?. For this research analysis, three specialists selected a total of 100 photo-works through 3 rounds of evaluation. This study analysis was conducted based on the colors and tones of eye-shadows identified under Munsell's basic color chart. The study findings are as follows; First, 'Day time to Night' was found to have similarity coloration most frequently, presenting a more stable look in the Natural makeup. Second, 'Special Occasions' showed similarity, accent, and complex colorations mainly. Third, 'Holiday Accents' showed diverse types of colorations such as accent, complex, similarity and contrast. Forth, 'Seasonal Looks' was found to use a variety of colorations including similarity, contrast, accent, gradation and complex. Fifth, 'Animated Characters' showed contrast coloration the most for dramatic effect along with accent and complex colorations to give a unique and symbolic look. The color scheme database(DB) obtained in this study will be present important guidelines for future in eye-shadow makeup design.

Break Predicting Methods Using Phonetic Symbols Combined with Accents Information in a Japanese Speech Synthesizer (일본어 합성기에서 악센트 정보가 결합된 발음기호를 이용한 Break 예측 방법)

  • Na, Deok-Su;Lee, Jong-Seok;Kim, Jong-Kuk;Bae, Myung-Jin
    • MALSORI
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    • no.62
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    • pp.69-84
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    • 2007
  • Japanese is a language having intonations, which are indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the accentual phrases (APs) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI, which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method which can enhance the quality of synthesized speech by reducing the errors in predicting break indices (BI), are proposed. The method is to use a new definition for the phonetic symbols, which combine the phonetic values of Japanese words with the accents information. Since a stream of defined phonetic symbols includes the information on the changes in intonations, the BI can be easily predicted by dividing the intonation phrase (IP) into several APs. As a result of an experiment, the accuracy of break generations was 98 % and the proposed method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

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Automatic Recognition of Pitch Accents Using Time-Delay Recurrent Neural Network (시간지연 회귀 신경회로망을 이용한 피치 악센트 인식)

  • Kim, Sung-Suk;Kim, Chul;Lee, Wan-Joo
    • The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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    • v.23 no.4E
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    • pp.112-119
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    • 2004
  • This paper presents a method for the automatic recognition of pitch accents with no prior knowledge about the phonetic content of the signal (no knowledge of word or phoneme boundaries or of phoneme labels). The recognition algorithm used in this paper is a time-delay recurrent neural network (TDRNN). A TDRNN is a neural network classier with two different representations of dynamic context: delayed input nodes allow the representation of an explicit trajectory F0(t), while recurrent nodes provide long-term context information that can be used to normalize the input F0 trajectory. Performance of the TDRNN is compared to the performance of a MLP (multi-layer perceptron) and an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) on the same task. The TDRNN shows the correct recognition of $91.9{\%}\;of\;pitch\;events\;and\;91.0{\%}$ of pitch non-events, for an average accuracy of $91.5{\%}$ over both pitch events and non-events. The MLP with contextual input exhibits $85.8{\%},\;85.5{\%},\;and\;85.6{\%}$ recognition accuracy respectively, while the HMM shows the correct recognition of $36.8{\%}\;of\;pitch\;events\;and\;87.3{\%}$ of pitch non-events, for an average accuracy of $62.2{\%}$ over both pitch events and non-events. These results suggest that the TDRNN architecture is useful for the automatic recognition of pitch accents.

Korean Speakers' Realization of Focus and Information Structure on English Intonation in Comparison with English Native Speakers (초점과 정보 구조에 따른 한국어 화자의 영어 억양 실현 양상)

  • Um, Hye-Young;Lee, Hye-Suk;Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.8 no.2
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    • pp.133-148
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    • 2001
  • Focus and information structure are closely related with the distribution of pitch accents. A focused word conveys new information and bears a pitch accent. A content word can usually get a pitch accent, but it can be deaccented if it is mentioned earlier in the discourse. In this paper, we test how English native speakers and Korean learners of English realize pitch accents according to focus and information structure of a sentence. The production experiment shows that English native speakers give a pitch accent to narrow-focused items, deaccenting all the other items of the sentence. For VP broad focus, native speakers give a pitch accent either to both the verb and its complement or to the complement only. On the other hand, it is found that Koreans give pitch accents to most content words regardless of focus and information structure. Moreover, the perception experiment confirms that Koreans' intonation patterns, which are not appropriate in terms of focus and information structure, may jeopardize listeners' comprehension. This paper shows that Korean speakers have little knowledge about focus and information structure for intonational realization, and that such notions should be applied to teaching of English intonation.

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