• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.19-24
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• 2016

The Korean high back vowels /o/ and /u/ have been reported to be in a state of near-merger especially among young female speakers. Along with cross-generational changes, the vowel position within a word has been reported to render different phonetic realization. The current study examines native English speakers' ability to attend to the phonetic cues that distinguish the two merging vowels and the positional effects (word-initial vs. word-final) on the identification accuracy. 28 two-syllable words containing /o/ or /u/ in either initial or final position were produced by native female Korean speakers. The CV part of each target word were excised and presented to six native English speakers. The results showed that although the identification accuracy was the lowest for /o/ in word- final position (41%), it increased up to 80% in word-initial position. The acoustic analyses of the target vowels showed that /o/ and /u/ were differentiated on the height dimension only in word-initial position, suggesting that English speakers may have perceived the distinctive F1 difference retained in the prominent position.

• The Journal of Korean Academy of Prosthodontics
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-81
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• 1985

The purpose of the this article was to determine the ideal Korean phonemes for the mandibular rest position. The subjects were 30 dentists and dental students who had normal occlusion and speech patterns. To determine the amount of mandibular opening, MKG was used for this study. The results were as follows: 1. The average mandibular rest position of Korean were -0.75(0.55)mm in horizontal plot (X), and -1.21(0.54) mm in vertical plot (Y). 2. The ideal medial sounds for the mandibular rest position were '으', '우' and '이'. 3. The ideal Korean consonants for the mandibular rest position were affricatives (ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ) and fricatives (ㅅ, ㅆ), vowels were back closed vowels (ㅡ, ㅜ). 4. The last consonants were affected by the proceeding vowels. 5. In Korean, the vowels were the most important factors that determine the rest position of mandible.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.8
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• pp.313-329
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• 2006

In some American English dialects, the vowels /a:/ or /c:/ have been replaced with /a:/, as in caught /ka:t/ dog /da:g/ that were pronounced in /kc:t/, and /dc:g/ previously. General American does not have /a:/ in its vowel system. But in East American and Western Pensylvania, cot and caught are homophones, /ka:t/, and similarly with other pairs such as collar vs. caller, stock vs. stalk, don vs. down, knotty vs. naughty. The use of /a/ or /c/ is quite unstable, and is a well-known diagnostic for distinguishing the northern speech area of the United States from the midland and southern area. For an increasing number of Americans, however, entirely lack the opposition between /a/ and /c/, merging to /a/, referring to 'both' of the vowels of lot. This paper investigates the use of /b:/ in American dialects and its relationship with /a:/, /c:/ in AE, and with short /a/ in RP. Examining the isoglosses of the use of /a:/ in various databases of the phonological atlas of North America, this paper discusses the use, position, and trend of merger to /a:/ from the vowels of /a:/ and /c:/ in Current American English.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.30
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• pp.97-124
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• 2013

For a long period, vowel reduction has been accepted as one of the most common pronunciation rules in Russian phonology. However, since the rules have been modified in many ways after the influx of loanwords, [a, e, i, o, u, ${\star}$]-including [e, o]-can now be pronounced in unstressed position, obeying the rule of vowel reduction. Especially in Modern Russian, along with the destruction of the consonant pronunciation norm due to some relatively complex changes it underwent palatalization, consonant pronunciation has been simplified, and as a response to such a phenomenon, the specialization of vowel pronunciation rule is now occurring. In other words, in the interrelation between consonants and vowels, as the pronunciation rules for consonants are simplified and thus the contrast between consonants is weakened, the degree of dependence on pronunciation of segment in the vowel pronunciation rule has been elevated. Therefore, the analysis says that the degree of vowel reduction depends on a vowel's distance from a stressed syllable is not enough; the influence of surrounding phonemes-including consonants-or the formative characteristics of words themselves should also be considered. The introduction of Max-noncorner/UnderLex, a/an Licence constraint that is related to non-declension nouns, and that of IdentC[back] and ShareCV[back], which are faithfulness constraint and share constraint respectively that are related to the nature of consonants stresses that vowel pronunciation rules should not be simply viewed as rules for vowels; The rules should be analyzed with emphasis on their correlation with surrounding phonemes.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• MALSORI
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• no.58
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• pp.19-34
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• 2006

The present study investigates the vowels of Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia in terms of the first two formant frequencies and provides a three-dimensional formant chart of vowels by plotting F1, F2, and the frequency of datapoints on 4 different scales: Hz, mel, bark, and the number of ERB. For this study, we recruited 30 male native speakers of Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia (15 each) which include 6 vowels (i, e, a, o, u, e) in various contexts. The three-dimensional formant chart showed geophysics of vowel space, such that mountain peaks stand in particular locations with a higher frequency of occurrence of datapoints. The geophysics of vowel space may shed lights on the perceptual structure of vowel space. The results also showed that vowels in utterance-final positions have a significantly higher F1 and a significantly lower F2 than those in utterance-medial or utterance-initial positions, which means that vowels in utterance-final positions are more back and lower in vowel space than those in utterance-medial or utterance-initial positions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.81-98
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• 2007

This study aims to investigate whether shortened vowel duration conditioned by a following voiceless stop induces phonetic reduction of vowel space in English, and whether the reduction appears more in the height dimension than in the backness dimension (Lindblom, 1963; Flemming, 2005). Fifteen native speakers of American English read minimal pairs containing ten American English vowels in [bVd] and [bVt] syllables in a carrier phrase. All the subjects produced shorter vowels in the voiceless than in the voiced context. However, a reduction in vowel space and a raising of low vowels due to the shortened vowel duration were generally not found. To the contrary, the speakers tended to exhibit even more lowering of low vowels in the voiceless context, and vowel space was more commonly compressed in the backness dimension than in the height dimension. Many speakers, in particular, demonstrated fronting of the high back vowel [u] in the voiceless context. It was interpreted that due to a relatively large number of English vowels in the narrower low vowel space, the raising of low vowels may give rise to confusion in vowel contrasts, and therefore the degree of phonetic vowel reduction is restricted in that region. On the other hand, the high vowel region, being relatively spacious in English, allows a certain degree of phonetic vowel reduction in the F2 dimension. It is possible that heavy requirements for maintaining vowel contrasts may cause speakers to overachieve vowel target values, especially when faced with vowels which are difficult to distinguish due to shortened vowel duration, leading to an over-lowering of the low vowels.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.30B no.8
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• pp.71-75
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• 1993

This paper presents a neural network IC for Korean vowels recognition. The neural network is composed with three levels and which is learned by Back Propagation algorithm. In the neural network IC, the neuron bodys and synapses are implemented with CMOS inverters and ion-implanted polysilicon resistors.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2004

The aim of this study is to reveal the order and the age of mastery of phonemic contrast in vowel sounds of Korean. For this purpose, we made an observation of the correspondences between the sounds produced by children of 12-35 months and the target sounds produced by adults. The provisional order and the age of contrast acquisition shown from the results of this study are as follows. First, the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the body of the tongue precedes the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the lip rounding. Second, as for the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the body of the tongue, the contrast between the low vowels and the others is accomplished first, and the contrast between the high and low vowels and the contrast between the front and the back vowels are established around the age of 24 months. Third, as for the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the lip rounding, the contrast between the rounded and the unrounded vowel is not accomplished until 36 months. Finally, we observed, prior to the completion of the differential production of phonemes, children use a specific phoneme excessively. This passing phrase could be interpreted as a result of over-application of a distinctive feature in the course of acquisition of it.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2009

The purpose of the study was to investigate the characteristics of the pronunciation of Korean vowels in patients with class III malocclusion. 11 adult male patients with class III malocclusion(mean ages 22.3 years) and four adult males with normal occlusion(mean ages 26.5 years) were selected for the analysis of eight Korean monophthongs /ㅣ, ㅔ, ㅐ, ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅡ, ㅜ/. The values and relationships of F1, F2 and F3 were derived from the stable section of target vowel in each sentence, and the analysis using formant plots and vowel triangles' distance and area was conducted to find the features of two groups' vowel distributions. Consequently, it was identified that the pronunciation of males patients with class III malocclusion showed high values of F1 in the low vowels, high values of F2 in the back vowels, and remarkably low position of /ㅏ/. The vowel triangle suggested that the triangle areas of male patients with class III malocclusion were shown wider vertically and narrower horizontally than those of males with normal occlusion. These characteristics could reflect the structural features of class III malocclusion such as the prognathic mandible, low tongue position, and advancement of back position of the tongue.