• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.1E
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• pp.10-15
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• 2004

In performing speech conversion from a source speaker to a target speaker, it is important that the pitch contour of the source speakers utterance be converted into that of the target speaker, because pitch contour of a speech utterance plays an important role in expressing speaker's individuality and meaning of the utterance. This paper describes statistical algorithms of pitch contour conversion for Korean language. Pitch contour conversions are investigated at two 1 evels of prosodic phrases: intonational phrase and accentual phrase. The basic algorithm is a Gaussian normalization [7] in intonational phrase. The first presented algorithm is combined with a declination-line of pitch contour in an intonational phrase. The second one is Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases to compensate for local pitch variations. Experimental results show that the algorithm of Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases is significantly more accurate than the other two algorithms in intonational phrase.

• 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.219-234
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• 2000

The study of boundary tones in connected speech or dialogues is one of the most underdeveloped areas of Korean prosody. This. paper concerns the boundary tones of intonational phrase-final morphemes which are shown in the speech corpus of dialogues. Results of phonetic analysis show that different kinds of boundary tones are realized, depending on the positions of the intonational phrase-final morphemes in the sentences.. This study has also shown that boundary tone patterning is somewhat related to the sentence structure, and for better speech recognition and speech synthesis, it presents a simple model of boundary tones based on the fundamental frequency contour. The results of this study will contribute to our understanding of the prosodic pattern of Korean connected speech or dialogues.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.209-224
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• 2000

This paper proposes an automatic detection method of intonational and accentual phrases in Korean standard continuous speech. We use the pause over 150 msec for detecting intonational phrases, and extract accentual phrases from the intonational phrases by analyzing syllables and pitch contours. The speech data for the experiment are composed of seven male voices and two female voices which read the texts of the fable 'the ant and the grasshopper' and a newspaper article 'manmulsang' in normal speed and in Korean standard variation. The results of the experiment shows that the detection rate of intonational phrases is 95% on the average and that of accentual phrases is 73%. This detection rate implies that we can segment the continuous speech into smaller units(i.e. prosodic phrases) by using the prosodic information and so the objects of speech recognition can narrow down to words or phrases in continuous speech.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.75-84
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• 2009

The aim of this paper is to find an adequate method to study declination in Korean. In previous studies of declination in Korean, maximum and minimum pitch values in an accentual phrase were measured. But this method is inadequate when an accentual phrase is located at the intonational phrase. So in order to exclude the final tone of an intonational phrase, we propose to measure pitch values of the first and second tone in an accentual phrase when the tonal pattern of the accentual phrase is 'LHLH'. In this case, the line that connects every first tone of an accentual phrase is the baseline, and the line that connects every second tone of an accentual phrase is the topline. By a comparison of declination between focused and neutral utterances, we will show that the topline of declination is more direct to the speaker's plan than the baseline.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.235-252
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to characterize the intonational realizations of vocatives in comparison with those of appositives in English statements and questions, and to compare the realizations produced by English native speakers with those of Korean students. Unlike Pierrehumbert(1980), in which the tag expressions do not have pitch accents, Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) proposed that the vocatives have a special status in tonal alignment and duration and that they form an independent phrase with pitch accent. Our results reinforce Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986): both English native speakers and Korean students realize the vocatives in terms of rising tone, and the appositives in terms of both falling tone in statements and rising tone in questions. Moreover, they pronounced the nouns before vocatives longer than those before appositives. However, native speakers impose the low phrase tone before vocatives in statements and the high tone in questions; whereas, Korean students either put the low phrase tone on pitch contours of both statements and questions, or tend to pause before vocatives, thereby constituting an intonational phrase.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

Intonation as suprasegmental phonetic features conveys meanings on the postlexical or utterance level in a linguistically structured way. It includes three aspects: tunes, relative prominence, and intonational phrasing. In this article, I will treat how prosodic phrasing is functionally related to the listening comprehension of English by analysing the students' errors of listening comprehension. When utterance meaning is conveyed, it is realized to be divided into intonational phrases. The small intonational phrase is regarded as an intermediate phrase which has a primary accent and a phrase tone or audible break. Most students' errors of listening occurred with linking pronunciation in the intermediate phrases of the fast speech. Thus through the smallest unit with tune we can help students improve their pronunciation and listening ability of English.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.64
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• pp.195-223
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• 2014

The aim of this paper is to study the morphemization of {Geuraegajigo} based on a spontaneous speech corpus. For this purpose, the distributions, the semantic functions, and the intonational phrase pattterns of the connective {Geuraegajigo} have been analyzed based on the corpus. The results are as follow; at first, coalescence that comes with a morphemization process was found, resulting in many variations. Secondly, there are three functions of it: [Direct/Indirect interrelationship], [Enumerate conjunction], and [Discourse marker]. And this semantic/functional diversity has many similarities with conjunctive adverbs. Lastly, intonational phrase patterns of {Geuraegajigo} accord with those of conjunctive adverbs. Especially, the discourse strategic IP pattern is connected with the short variation type. In conclusion, {Geuraegajigo} has finished turning into a conjunctive adverb through morphemization.