• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

We explored Dutch listeners' perception of Korean three-way contrast of fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. The three Korean stops are all voiceless word-initially, whereas Dutch distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, so Korean voiceless stops were expected to be difficult for the Dutch listeners. Among the three Korean stops, fortis stops are phonetically most similar to Dutch voiceless stops, thus they were expected to be the easiest to distinguish for the Dutch listeners. Dutch and Korean listeners carried out a discrimination task using three crucial comparisons, i.e., fortis-lenis, fortis-aspirated, and lenis-aspirated stops. Results showed that discrimination between lenis and aspirated stops was the most difficult among the three comparisons for both Dutch and Korean listeners. As expected, Dutch listeners discriminated fortis from the other stops relatively accurately. It seems likely that Dutch listeners relied heavily on VOT but less on F0 when discriminating between the three Korean stops.

• 음성과학
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• 제3권
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• pp.71-82
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• 1998

Five sets of nonsense acoustical stimuli {$[sp{\varepsilon},st{\varepsilon},sk{\varepsilon}],\;[p{\varepsilon},t{\varepsilon},k{\varepsilon}],\;[sb{\varepsilon},sd{\varepsilon},sg{\varepsilon}],\;[b{\varepsilon},d{\varepsilon},g{\varepsilon}],\;['{\varepsilon}b{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}d{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}g{\varepsilon}]$} were presented for identification of English stops to native speakers of English, Chinese, and Korean. The English speakers perceived stops after /s/ as /p, t, k/; in other contexts as /b, d, g/. In the languages where other distinctions exist, however, the evaluation was different. The results suggest that in English the cue for stops after /s/ was syllable structure constraint: After initial /s/ always /p, t, k/ follow; the cue for the initial stops was aspiration. On the basis of the results, it was concluded that in English we should classify the unaspirated voiceless stops in initial /s/-stop clusters into the phoneme where [$p^{h},t^{h},k^{h}$] are in, and that perception is not only language specific but also context specific.

• 중국학논총
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• 제66호
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• pp.85-103
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• 2020

We use prototypes (also known as referent in semiotics) when we understand the outside world. Different language users use different prototypes to decode the same sound. When we learn Chinese language as a foreign language, during it's sound perceptual process, Korean learners' target language prototypes are different from Chinese native speakers'. The purpose of the paper is to examine the theory of speech perception and the theory of constructivism teaching, and to suggest to the Chinese language teachers to have Cunstructivist approach while they design there teaching course. For this, we concerned three things: First is to review speech perception theory and constructivism teaching theory. Second based on the preceding study, we review that learner's prototypes are different from Chinese native speaker and this cause the error of listening and pronunciation. Finally, we introduced two simple speech visualization programs developed to help us learn pronunciation.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.95-101
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• 2014

This paper investigated the effects of frequency band limitation on perceptual characteristics of Korean consonants. Monosyllabic speech (144 syllables of CV type, 56 syllables of VC type, 8 syllables of V type) produced by two announcers were low- and high-pass filtered with cutoff frequencies ranging from 300 to 5000 Hz. Six listeners with normal hearing performed perception test by types of filter and cutoff frequencies. We reported phoneme recognition rates and types of perception error of band-limited Korean consonants to examine how frequency distortion in the process of speech transmission affect listener's perception. The results showed that recognition rates varied with the following factors: position in a syllable, manner of articulation, place of articulation, and phonation types. Consonants in the final position were stronger to the frequency band limitation than those in the initial position. Fricatives and Affricates are stronger than stops. Fortis consonants were less stronger than their lenis or aspirated counterparts. Types of perception error also varied depending on such factors as consonant's place of articulation: In case of bilabial stops, they were perceived as alveolar stops with while in cases of alveolar and velar stops, there were changes in phonation types without any change in the place of articulation.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.59-67
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to scientifically examine Kuhl's (2011), originally Johnson and Newport's (1989) critical period graph, from a perspective of auditory perception and linguistic discrimination. This study utilizes two types of experiments (auditory perception and linguistic phoneme discrimination) with five different age groups (5 years, 6-8 years, 9-13 years, 15-17 years, and 20-26 years) of Korean English learners. Auditory perception is examined via ultrasonic sounds that are commonly used in the medical field. In addition, each group is measured in terms of their ability to discriminate minimal pairs in Chinese. Since almost all Korean students already have some amount of English exposure, the researchers selected phonemes in Chinese, an unexposed foreign language for all of the subject groups. The results are almost completely in accordance with Kuhl's critical period graph for auditory perception and linguistic discrimination; a sensitive age is found at 8. The results show that the auditory capability of kindergarten children is significantly better than that of other students, measured by their ability to perceive ultrasonic sounds and to distinguish ten minimal pairs in Chinese. This finding strongly implies that human auditory ability is a key factor for the sensitive period of language acquisition.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제31권5호
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• pp.298-308
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• 2012

This study was designed to examine the phoneme recognition errors of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners on a consonant-by-consonant basis, to show (1) how each HI ear perceives individual consonants differently and (2) how standard clinical measurements (i.e., using a tone and word) fail to predict these differences. Sixteen English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables of six signal-to-noise ratios in speech-weighted noise were presented at the most comfortable level for ears with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The findings were as follows: (1) individual HI listeners with a symmetrical pure-tone threshold showed different consonant-loss profiles (CLPs) (i.e., over a set of the 16 English consonants, the likelihood of misperceiving each consonant) in right and left ears. (2) A similar result was found across subjects. Paired ears of different HI individuals with identical pure-tone threshold presented different CLPs in one ear to the other. (3) Paired HI ears having the same averaged consonant score demonstrated completely different CLPs. We conclude that the standard clinical measurements are limited in their ability to predict the extent to which speech perception is degraded in HI ears, and thus they are a necessary, but not a sufficient measurement for HI speech perception. This suggests that the CV measurement would be a useful clinical tool.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• 한국정보컨버전스학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정보컨버전스학회 2008년도 International conference on information convergence
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• pp.53-56
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• 2008

This paper reports on the ACQA(Animated agent for Conversational Question Answering) project conducted at LIMSI. The aim is to design an expressive animated conversational agent(ACA) for conducting research along two main lines: 1/ perceptual experiments(eg perception of expressivity and 3D movements in both audio and visual channels): 2/ design of human-computer interfaces requiring head models at different resolutions and the integration of the talking head in virtual scenes. The target application of this expressive ACA is a real-time question and answer speech based system developed at LIMSI(RITEL). The architecture of the system is based on distributed modules exchanging messages through a network protocol. The main components of the system are: RITEL a question and answer system searching raw text, which is able to produce a text(the answer) and attitudinal information; this attitudinal information is then processed for delivering expressive tags; the text is converted into phoneme, viseme, and prosodic descriptions. Audio speech is generated by the LIMSI selection-concatenation text-to-speech engine. Visual speech is using MPEG4 keypoint-based animation, and is rendered in real-time by Virtual Choreographer (VirChor), a GPU-based 3D engine. Finally, visual and audio speech is played in a 3D audio and visual scene. The project also puts a lot of effort for realistic visual and audio 3D rendering. A new model of phoneme-dependant human radiation patterns is included in the speech synthesis system, so that the ACA can move in the virtual scene with realistic 3D visual and audio rendering.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.13-23
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• 2012

The sound /w/ has been traditionally regarded as an independent segment in Korean regardless of the phonological contexts in which it occurs. There have been, however, some questions regarding whether it is an independent phoneme in /CwV/ context (cf. Kang 2006). The present pilot study examined how Korean /w/ is realized in $/S^*wV/$ context by performing some perception tests. Our assumption was that if Korean /w/ is a part of the preceding complex consonant like $/C^w/$, it should be more or less uniformly articulated and perceived as such. If /w/ is an independent segment, it will be realized with speaker variability. Experiments I and II examined the identification rates as "labialized" of the spliced original stimuli of $/S^*-V/$ and $/S^{w*}-^wV/$, and the cross-spliced stimuli $/S^{w*}-V/$ and $/S^*-^wV/$. The results showed that round qualities of /w/ are perceived at significantly different temporal point with speaker and context variability. We therefore conclude that /w/ in $/S^*wV/$ context is an independent segment, not a part of the preceding segment. Full-scale examination of the production test in the future should be performed to verify the conclusion we suggested in this paper.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제8권5호
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• pp.78-85
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• 1989

본 논문에서는 한국어의 규칙합성에 관한 연구중 파열음의 함성 파라미터를 추정하기 위하여 사용한 통계적 방법과 인지실험에 의한 방법에 관하여 기술하고 있다. 합성기로는 직렬 포만트 합성기를 구성하여 사용하였고 통제적 분석에 사용된 음성시료는 9개의 초성 파열음과 8개의 모음으로 구성되는 72개의 독립 CV형태를 갖는 단음절을 만일 화자를 통하여 수집하였다. 음성의 분석은 시간 및 주파수 평면에서 파라미터의 변화를 중심으로 행하였으며, 인지실험을 통한 파라미터 추정방법을 통하여 독립적으로 포만트 파라미터의 변화에 관하여 조사하였다.