• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.1-9
• /
• 2024

This study investigated the variation in the intonation of Seoul Korean interjection ani across different meanings ("no" and "really?") and speech levels (Intimate and Polite) using data from Korean Intonation Corpus (KICo). The investigation was conducted in two stages. First, IP-final tones in the dataset were categorized according to the K-ToBI convention (Jun, 2000). While significant relationships were observed between the meaning of ani and its IP-final tones, substantial overlap between groups was notable. Second, the F0 characteristics of the final syllable of ani were analyzed to elucidate the apparent many-to-many relationships between intonation and meaning/speech level. Results indicated that these seemingly overlapping relationships could be significantly distinguished. Overall, this study advocates for a deeper analysis of phonetic intonation beyond ToBI-based categorical labels. By examining the F0 characteristics of the IP-final syllable, previously unclear connections between meaning/speech level and intonation become more comprehensible. Although ToBI remains a valuable tool and framework for studying intonation, it is imperative to explore beyond these categories to grasp the "distinctiveness" of intonation, thereby enriching our understanding of prosody.

• Journal of Korean language education
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.37-60
• /
• 2017

This research has its basis with focus on the way Korean native speakers recognize Chinese Korean-learners' pronunciation. The objective of the study is to lay the cornerstone for establishing effective teaching-learning strategies for the education of the Korean phonetic system. In this study, the results of the experiment are presented which shows how native speakers of Korean identify Chinese Korean-learners' pronunciation of consonants. In the first place, stimulation tones were created from the original utterances of Chinese Korean-learners and seven scripts were made through the Pratt program. In addition, the subjects were asked to choose what the phonetic materials sounded like. The results of the research are represented as the ratio of frequency of Korean native speakers' response to each utterance to the total frequency. In addition, the paired t-test was taken in order to explore any relatedness to the changes in the level of proficiency of the Korean phonetic system, ranging from beginners to advanced learners. The outcome shows that the mistakes which Chinese Korean-learners make in pronouncing the consonants of Korean are relatively well-reflected in Korean native speakers' auditory cognitive reactions. To put it concretely, there is some difficulty in differentiating lax consonants from aspirates in the cases of plosives and affricates, but relatively little trouble with fortes. However, it is revealed that there is also a slight difference in relation to articulatory positions in detailed aspects. To provide an effective teaching method for the Korean phonetic system, it is essential to comprehend learners' phonetic mistakes through the precise analysis of data in terms of 'production.' Also, a more meticulous observation of 'phenomena' must be made through verification from the view of 'reception,' as attempted in this study. A more thorough diagnosis by applying methodology makes it possible to lay the foundation for developing effective teaching-learning strategies for the instruction of the Korean phonetic system. This study has its significance in making such attempts.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2002.11a
• /
• pp.47-50
• /
• 2002

This paper is to introduce 'Dr. Speaking', which was recently developed by Eonon Inc.. 'Dr. Speaking' is an English pronunciation tutoring system. This has three distinguishing features. First, it teaches how to organize a speaker's vocal organs to pronounce accurately. Second, after it compares a speaker's pronunciation with that of a native speaker's, it grades that speaker's pronunciation level according to phonetic standards. Third, it provides proper information necessary for correcting a speaker's incorrect pronunciation. It is not always easy for a tutoring system to execute the above three almost simutaneously. However, 'Dr. Speaking' proved itself that it is possible by adding speech technology (e.g. speech recognition) to phonetic knowledge.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.399-403
• /
• 1996

This paper addresses issues of perceptual constancy in speech perception through the use of a spatial metaphor for speech sound identity as opposed to a more conventional characterisation with multiple interacting acoustic cues. This spatial representation leads to a correlation between phonetic, acoustic and auditory analyses of speech sounds which can serve as the basis for a model of speech perception based on the general auditory characteristics of sounds. The correlations between the phonetic, perceptual and auditory spaces of the set of English voiceless fricatives /f $\theta$ s $\int$ h / are investigated. The results show that the perception of fricative segments may be explained in terms of 2-dimensional auditory space in which each segment occupies a region. The dimensions of the space were found to be the frequency of the main spectral peak and the 'peakiness' of spectra. These results support the view that perception of a segment is based on its occupancy of a multi-dimensional parameter space. In this way, final perceptual decisions on segments can be postponed until higher level constraints can also be met.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.165-165
• /
• 2000

In the phoneme level, English stop sounds are classified with the feature of 'voicing': voiceless and voiced (p/b, t/d, k/g). But when realized, a voiceless stop is not alwats the same sound. For example, the two 'p' sounds in 'people' are different. The former is pronounced with much aspiration, while the latter without it. This allophonic differnece between [$P^h$] and [p] out of an English phoneme /p/ can be well explained to Koreans because in Korean these two sounds exist as two different phonemes {/ㅍ/ and /ㅃ/ respectively). But difficulties lie in teaching the English voiced stop sounds (/b, d, g/) to Koreans because in Korean voiced stops do not exist as phonemes but as allophones of lenis sounds (/ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ/). For example, the narrow transcription of '바보' (a fool) is [baboo]. In the word initial position, Korean lenis stops are pronounced voiceless and even with a slight aspiration while in the inrervocalic environments they become voiced, That is in Korean voiced stops do not occur independently and neither they have their own letters. To explain all these more effectively to Koreans, it is very helpful to use Korean Phenetic Alphabet (KPA) which is devised by Dr. LEE Hyunbok (a professor of phonetics at Seoul National Univ. and chairman of Phonetic Society of Koera.)(omitted)

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.1-25
• /
• 2011

Brand names are often considered as a part of product and important extrinsic cues of product evaluation, when consumers make purchasing decisions. For a company, brand names are also important assets. Building a strong brand name in the Chinese commonwealth is a main challenge for many global companies. One of the first problem global company has to face is how to translate English brand name into Chinese brand name. It is very difficult decision because of cultural and linguistic differences. Western languages are based on an alphabet phonetic system, whereas Chinese are based on ideogram. Chinese speakers are more likely to recall stimuli presented as brand names in visual rather than spoken recall, whereas English speakers are more likely to recall the names in spoken rather than in visual recall. We interpret these findings in terms of the fact that mental representations of verbal information in Chinese are coded primarily in a visual manner, whereas verbal information in English is coded by primarily in a phonological manner. A key linguistic differences that would affect the decision to standardize or localize when transferring English brand name to Chinese brand name is the writing system. Prior Chinese brand naming research suggests that popular Chinese naming translations foreign companies adopt are phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic translation. The phonetic translation refers to the speech sound that is produced, such as the pronunciation of the brand name. The semantic translation involves the actual meaning of and association made with the brand name. The phonosemantic translation preserves the sound of the brand name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner. name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.60
• /
• pp.165-180
• /
• 2006

In this paper, we present several confidence measures (CM) for speech recognition systems to evaluate the reliability of recognition results. We propose heuristic CMs such as mean log-likelihood score, N-best word log-likelihood ratio, likelihood sequence fluctuation and likelihood ratio testing(LRT)-based CMs using several types of anti-models. Furthermore, we propose new algorithms to add weighting terms on phone-level log-likelihood ratio to merge word-level log-likelihood ratios. These weighting terms are computed from the distance between acoustic models and knowledge-based phoneme classifications. LRT-based CMs show better performance than heuristic CMs excessively, and LRT-based CMs using phonetic information show that the relative reduction in equal error rate ranges between $8{\sim}13%$ compared to the baseline LRT-based CMs. We use the support vector machine to fuse several CMs and improve the performance of utterance verification. From our experiments, we know that selection of CMs with low correlation is more effective than CMs with high correlation.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 1999.11c
• /
• pp.727-729
• /
• 1999

We have developed a realtime phonetic typewriter implemented on IBM PC with sound card based on Windows 95. In this system, analyzing of speech signal, learning of neural network, labeling of output neurons and visualizing of recognition results are performed on realtime. The developing environment for speech processing is established by adding various functions, such as editing, saving, loading of speech data and 3-D or gray level displaying of spectrogram. Recognition experimental using Korean phone had a 71.42% for 13 basic consonant and 90.01% for 7 basic vowel accuracy.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.168-168
• /
• 1996

In this paper I will examine some concrete examples of the obstacles faced by non-native speakers of Japanese when learning the language. I will go on to suggest ways in which these obstacles may be overcome. Nowadays there are numerous Japanese language books available for non-native speakers. However, most of these introductory Japanese language books focus on topics such as pronunciation, accent and intonation. Notable, these introductory textbooks provide insufficient emphasis on prosodic features of the Japanese language. The Japanese language has been considered by many teachers as relatively easy compared to other languages, due to its simple phonetic structure. This may be a partial explanation of the reason why the teaching of prosodic features has generally been given insufficient emphasis. To teach Japanese efficiently at a university level I have combined an emphasis on the teaching of prosodic features together with my experience of television announcing. This has entailed using television news programmes and contemporary reading materials in my class. Using taped material I intend to describe a case-study of teaching of Japanese articulation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.220-234
• /
• 2000

This paper focuses on how and where to set learner goals in English phonetic education in Japan, especially at the threshold level, and on what components are necessary to achieve them both from practical and theoretical perspectives. It first describes some issues mainly through the speaker's own teaching plan and a literature review of various researchers such as Morley (1991), Kajima (1989), Porcaro (1999), Matsul (1996), Lambacher (1995, 1996), Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994), and Murphy (1991). By comparing and analyzing these and other researchers, the speaker tries to set and elucidate reasonable and achievable goals for students to attain intelligibility for comprehensible communicative output. The paper then suggests detailed components that form an essential part of desirable pronunciation teaching plan in order to realize a well-balanced curriculum between segmental and suprasegmental aspects.