• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.119-124
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• 2017

This study investigates how perception of easy sentences varies with prosody pattern, sound intensity, and signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) in young adults with normal hearing who were in their 20's. The results showed that the presence of proper prosody pattern in the sentences increased correct perception rate of the target sentences, and that the lower the intensity and SNR, the lower the sentence perception scores. The results also showed that SNR had a greater effect on the sentence perception scores than sound intensity. There was a significant decrease of perception scores starting at the level of 15 dB and +3 SNR for the sentences with prosody pattern, while starting at the level of 18 dB and +6 SNR for the sentences without prosody pattern, ending up with a very poor perception score as sound intensity and SNR gets lower. There was a significant difference in the perception score of the sentences with prosody pattern between 20 year-old group and 21 year or older group in several listening conditions of sound intensity and SNR.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제65호
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• pp.1-11
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• 2008

This study explored the perception of transplanted Korean prosody by NE (Native speakers of English) and NK (Native speakers of Korean) listeners. The Korean utterances of various sentence types produced by NE and NK were employed to transplant the original Korean prosody contours to the Korean utterances read by NE. Then, other NE and NK were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the two rater groups with the three factors (e.g., transplantation types & rater groups, sentence types & rater groups, sentence length & rater groups) turned out to be meaningful. Both rater groups preferred the combined effect of transplanted prosodic components (e.g. DP, DPI) to that of individual transplantation (e.g. I, D, P). Compared to NK, NE were more sensitive to duration change than pitch change whereas NK showed equal preference to the both. In sentence types such as De, Ex, Im, and Ta, NE perceived higher similarity than NK.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제62호
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• pp.19-32
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• 2007

This study investigated the perception of emotional voices by transplanting some or all of the prosodic aspects, i.e. pitch, duration, and intensity, of the utterances produced with emotional voices onto those with normal voices and vice versa. Listening evaluation by 24 raters revealed that prosodic effect was greater than segmental & vocal quality effect on the preception of the emotion. The degree of influence of prosody and that of segments & vocal quality varied according to the type of emotion. As for fear, prosodic elements had far greater influence than segmental & vocal quality elements whereas segmental and vocal elements had as much effect as prosody on the perception of happy voices. Different amount of contribution to the perception of emotion was found among prosodic features with the descending order of pitch, duration and intensity. As for the length of the utterances, the perception of emotion was more effective with long utterances than with short utterances.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.73-89
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• 2007

This study explored the perception of transplanted English prosody by thirty American and Korean, male and female listeners. The English utterances of various sentence types produced by Korean and American male speakers were employed to transplant the American prosody contours to Korean English utterances. Then, the thirty subjects were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the three factors (e.g., rater groups & transplantation types; transplantation types & sentence types; rater groups & transplantation types & sentence types) turned out to be meaningful. Both Americans and Koreans perceived the effectiveness of the combined effect of transplanted duration and pitch or duration and pitch and intensity. However, when perceiving individual prosodic components, Americans and Koreans showed different perceptual ratings. As for the overall prosody change, Americans perceived the change of intensity in a significant way but Koreans did not because intensity is not a crucial semantic factor in Korean. Americans rated the transplantation of duration alone as ineffective while Koreans rated otherwise. This was explained by the difference between English and Korean. The difference of perspective was also significant with different sentence types, especially with the three sentence types that had speech rates slower than other sentence types. A slower speech rate intensified the mismatch between the transplanted duration and the original pitch causing a negative impression on American listeners whereas this did not affect Korean listeners. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

• 인간행동과 음악연구
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• 제14권2호
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• pp.1-18
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• 2017

본 연구에서는 인공와우이식 난청인(N = 15)을 대상으로 말소리 운율변화에 따른 구어 이해와 음도 변별, 선율윤곽 확인(Melodic contour identification: MCI) 간 관련성을 살펴보았다. 말소리 운율 변화에 따른 구어이해를 살펴보기 위해 말소리 운율지각 검사를 시행하였고, 긍정적인 운율과 부정적인 운율 조건에 따른 의미 변화를 피검자에게 판단하게 하였다. 검사 시 긍정적인 의미(Positive meaning: PW)와 중립적인 의미(Neutral meaning: NW)를 갖는 낱말 및 낱말 조합 형태를 제시하고, 긍정적인 운율과 부정적인 운율 조건에 따른 의미 변화를 피검자에게 판단하게 하였다. 음도 변별 검사를 위해서는 단음도 변화 변별 과제와 3개 음으로 구성된 패턴에서의 음도 변별 과제가 실시되었다. MCI 검사는 기대 확률을 달리한 세부 검사 1, 2로 구성하여 시행하였다. 실시한 검사 간 관련성을 살펴본 결과, 말소리 운율지각 검사 결과는 보청기 착용으로도 청지각적 이득을 기대할 수 없었던 기간과 유의한 관련성을 보였다. PW와 NW 검사에서 운율 조건에 따라 유의한 수행 차를 보였지만, 단어조합 형태에 따른 통계적 유의성은 발견하지 못하였다. 말소리 운율지각 검사 결과는 MCI 1과 유의한 상관을 보인 반면(p < .01), 말지각 검사 수행력과는 유의한 관련성을 보이지 않았다. 이는 인공와우이식 후 시각적 단서 없이 말소리, 음소 지각이 가능해졌다 하더라도 미묘한 운율 변화에 따른 의미 지각의 제한은 계속될 수 있음을 시사한다. 또한 인공와우이식 후 선율윤곽 변화 확인은 음도 변별에 비해 제한을 보이며, 운율지각과 관련 있음을 확인할 수 있었다.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제61호
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• pp.49-62
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• 2007

This study focused on the improvement of prosody transplantation technology to be used for effective prosody education. Issues making the technology a less acceptable tool for prosody education were addressed. Instead of merely copying the target pitch onto a learner's utterances, the target pitch was resealed in semitone before the transplantation. In so doing, distortion of a signal was minimized and the transplanted utterance could have the quality of sound not different from the learner's utterances. Instead of manual transplantation, an automatic procedure was proposed to increase the reliability and the consistency of the outcome and enable real time processing. The perceptual performance of the automatic transplantation was evaluated by the perception experiment showing the automatic ransplantation was as good as the manual process.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2007년도 한국음성과학회 공동학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.234-239
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect with the speech segments from Seoul dialect. The dialect simulation was performed by transplanting the prosodic features of Masan utterances unto the same utterances produced by a Seoul speaker. Thus, the simulated Masan utterances were composed of Seoul speech segments but their prosody came from the original Masan utterances. The prosodic features involved were the fundamental frequency contour, the segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The simulated Masan utterances were evaluated by four native Masan speakers and the role of prosody in dialect authentication and speech synthesis was discussed.

• 음성과학
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• 제2권
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• pp.95-108
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• 1997

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.81-88
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• 2014

The normal aging process on speech production and these changes are perceived by listeners. This study examined whether age perception changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations in normal listeners, comparing the prosodic changes according to age and sex in adulthood. The older and younger voices were resynthesized by manipulation of the speaking rate and pitch to shift the perceived age of the groups toward each other. Two-way repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant shift in perceived age of young and old voices. The manipulation of the speaking rate resulted in a significant shift in perceived age for the older and younger groups. A significant shift in age estimates was not observed for the younger male group when pitch was manipulated. There were significant gender-by-age group interactions for prosodic manipulation type. Age-related changes in the prosodic properties of speech may ultimately influence speech perception.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.