• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.86-89
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• 2002

According to Pierrehumbert (1980), two level tones - H and L - are enough in representing intonation of intonational languages. But in Korean, high fall and low fall boundary tones, both of which must be represented as HL％ in intonational phonology as in Jun (1993, 1999), are distinct not only acoustically but also functionally. The same is true in the case of high level and mid level boundary tones, which must be represented as H％ in intonational phonology. In this paper, I conducted two identification tests to provide crucial evidence that H and L are not enough in intonational phonology. The results of the identification tests show that categorical perception occur between high level and low level as well as between high fall and low fall. Based on this fact and the results of the acoustic analyses in Lee (1999, 2000), I strongly propose to adopt one more level tone - M - to represent Korean boundary tones.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2007

Old Korean regulated poems have a typical prosodic structure characterized by a pitch contour. This work applies Jun's finding in Seoul Korean(Jun 1993, 2000, 2005) to old Korean regulated poems, and reports some other significant phonetic characteristics, arguing that old Korean regulated poems have a regular rhythm based on the pitch contour implementing the typically hierarchical prosodic structure. The major prosodic units defined are a foot, a phrase, and a line. Next, this work proposes pitch contour characterizing prominence in a unit, boundary tones, and pauses at the boundary position, as the basic and significant cues of rhythm of a Korean poem. Specifically, some significant characteristics are discussed as follows: first, the tonal pattern of a foot is HL, starting high and ending low; second, the lowering boundary tones of HL% and L% are perceived at the end of a phrase and a line; and finally, a gradient degree of pause is observed at each unit-final position.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.123-130
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• 2013

Previous researches on Korean intonation have been mainly focused on $F_0$ target frequencies, $F_0$ slope, and the duration of intonation patterns. This study investigated Korean intonation patterns, both boundary and phrasal tones, in relation to the $F_0$ percentage change between pitch targets. We measured the percentage change between the pitch targets of both boundary and phrasal tones. Additionally, the $F_0$ change between the preceding pitch target and the first pitch target of the boundary tone and the $F_0$ targets of the sequence of two LH phrasal tones ('LH + LH') were also measured. Two phrasal tones, LHLH and HLH, were compared with 'LH + LH' and the 'HLH' in the LHLH pattern respectively. We found that the percentage change between pitch targets in the phrasal tone is fixed to some extent. This helped explain why the slope of the phrasal tone is closely related to the number of syllables and the duration of the phrasal tone as discussed in previous studies. Since we analyzed the intonation patterns with the utterances from a large speech corpus, the results of this paper are expected to be used in building a larger annotated corpus of Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.89-101
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• 2003

This paper investigates edge effects on the relationship between the underlying tonal sequence and its surface realization in the IP-final Accentual Phrase within the Optimality Theoretic framework. I will examine the way in which AP tones are aligned with their associated syllables in IP-final position. In Korean. Jun's (1996) 'see-saw effect' does not allow any two identical tones if they are marking a boundary of a prosodic group. A phonetic experiment conducted in this paper suggests that the 'see-saw effect' only apply to H boundary tones. Furthermore, it will be shown that the timing of tonal peaks is determined through the ranking of a set of violable constraints. The AP tonal realization is achieved through the access to the global intonation in a complicated way. In the course of discussion, pitch patterns in IP-medial Accentual Phrase will also be discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.113-133
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• 1998

The system proposed in this paper prosodically transcribes the intonation patterns, prosodic structures, phrasings, and other prosodic aspects of Korean utterances, on four parallel tiers: a tone tier, an orthographic tier, a break index tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs two phrase accents (L* and H *), three accentual phrase boundary tones (L-, H-, LH-), and four intonational phrase boundary tones (L%,H%,LH%,LHL%) in order to provide a phonological transcription of pitch events associated with accented syllables and phrase boundaries. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, which mark a prosodic grouping of words and its prosodic structure in an utterance. Among the five indices, the break index 3 and the break index 4 align with an accentual phrase boundary tone and an intonational phrase boundary tone, respectively, in the tone tier.

• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.203-217
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• 2000

In spoken language, the characteristics of prosodic realization are related to the meaning of utterance. The pitch pattern of an interrogative sentence which differs from that of declarative sentences can be considered in this respect.. If we consider the question-answer pair, we can find that the most important variation comes from the intended meaning of asking. In this paper, we experiment with four kinds of interrogative sentences and show that the difference in pitch patterns of interrogative sentences can be explained in relation to the focus phenomena that is, the differences of the boundary tones in interrogative sentences are due to the differences in the prosodic domain of focus. For a relevant explanation with the focus phenomena, we divided focus into the categories: emphatic focus, which plays a role in delivering the speaker's intended meaning for the sentence interpretation, and informational focus, delivers the central intended meaning of the utterance. The results can be summarized in three points. First, High boundary tone delivers the meaning of asking. Second, the realization of different boundary tones that are found in wh-question and alternative question are just phonetic variations caused by focusing. Third, the high rise boundary tone in echo questions is related to the meaning of surprise or incredulity, and this relation is a consensus of existing opinion, that is, the speaker's attitude of surprise can raise the pitch range. From these results we can distinguish between boundary type and phonetic variation, and we can also give appropriate meaning to the different boundary tones in interrogative sentences that have been regarded as merely a part of sentence type.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.3-11
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• 2011

This experimental study has a goal to explore the perceptual sensitivity to phonetic evidence such as duration, phrase accent, or pause in disambiguation. We argue that the realization of the intonational phrasal boundary at the meaningful grammatical boundary in structurally ambiguous sentences facilitates English native listeners to distinguish the meanings of the ambiguous sentences. Moreover, the duration of the phrase-final syllable, pitch range reset, or phrasal tones also provides listeners with important phonetic evidence in disambiguation. In our perception experiment, however, Korean English learners largely depend on the realization of pause. In the results from the perception experiment, all of the groups showed an increase in the response time from the perception of no pause to pause realization. This means that pause at the phonological phrasal boundary plays a role of facilitator to English native speakers with other prosodic cues such as duration, pitch accent, or phrasal tones, while an absolutely important cue to Korean English learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.85-94
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• 2009

This paper investigates the intonation patterns of Korean spontaneous speech through an analysis of four dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The speech corpus, which is a subset of spontaneous speech database recorded and distributed by ETRI, is labeled in APs and IPs based on K-ToBI system using Momel, an intonation stylization algorithm. It was found that unlike in English, a significant number of APs and IPs include hesitation lengthening, which is known to be a disfluency phenomenon due to speech planning. This paper also claims that the hesitation lengthening is different from the IP-final lengthening and that it should be categorized as a new category, as it greatly affects the intonation patterns of the language. Except for the fact that 19.09% of APs show hesitation lengthening, the spontaneous speech shows the same AP patterns as in read speech with higher frequency of falling patterns such as LHL in comparison with read speech which show more LH and LHLH patterns. The IP boundary tones of spontaneous speech, showing the same five patterns such as L%, HL%, LHL%, H%, LH% as in read speech, show higher frequency of rising patterns (H% and LH%) and contour tones (HL%, LH%, LHL%) while read speech on the contrary shows higher frequency of falling patterns and simple tones at the end of IPs.