• MALSORI
• /
• no.63
• /
• pp.47-66
• /
• 2007

This study aims at exploring the degree of phonetic similarity between Korean and Japanese vowels in terms of acoustic features by performing the speech production test on Korean speakers and Japanese speakers. For this purpose, the speech of 16 Japanese speakers for Japanese speech data, and the speech of 16 Korean speakers for Korean speech data were utilized. The findings in assessing the degree of the similarity of the 7 nearest equivalents of the Korean and Japanese vowels are as follows: First, Korean /i/ and /e/ turned out to display no significant differences in terms of F1 and F2 with their counterparts, Japanese /i/ and /e/, and the distribution of F1 and F2 of Korean /i/ and /e/ in the distributional map completely overlapped with Japanese /i/ and /e/. Accordingly, Korean /i/ and /e/ were believed to be "identical." Second, Korean /a/, /o/, and /i/ displayed a significant difference in either F1 or F2, but showed a great similarity in distribution of F1 and F2 with Japanese /a/, /o/, and /m/ respectively. Korean /a/ /o/, and /i/, therefore, were categorized as very similar to Japanese vowels. Third, Korean /u/, which has the counterpart /m/ in Japanese, showed a significant difference in both F1 and F2, and only half of the distribution overlapped. Thus, Korean /u/ was analyzed as being a moderately similar vowel to Japanese vowels. Fourth, Korean /${\wedge}$/ did not have a close counterpart in Japanese, and was classified as "the least similar vowel."

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.133-138
• /
• 2015

The purpose of this study is to provide deeper understanding of how it is possible for people to understand PC communication language they have never seen or heard before without any problem. In order to answer this question, we focused on the vowel variation through which new variants are created (for PC communication), and hypothesized that there is a phonetic constraint which requires the vowel of the variant to be phonetically similar (to the maximum) to the vowel of the original word. Through the corpus analysis of the dictionary of PC communication language, we show that our hypothesis is justified by the fact that most of the variants we collected from the dictionary, that is, 90% of them, conformed to the phonetic constraint we postulated.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.26 no.10
• /
• pp.1237-1246
• /
• 1999

최근 모든 분야에서 외국과의 교류가 증대됨에 따라서 한국어 문서에는 점점 더 많은 외국어 음차 표기가 사용되는 경향이 있다. 하지만 같은 외국어에 대한 음차 표기에 개인차가 심하여 이들 음차 표기를 포함한 문서들에 대한 검색을 어렵게 만드는 원인이 되고 있다. 한 가지 해결 방법은 색인 시에 같은 외국어에서 온 음차 표기들을 등가부류로 묶어서 색인해 놓았다가 질의 시에 확장하는 방법이다. 본 논문에서는 외국어 음차 표기들의 등가부류를 만드는데 필요한 음차 표기의 음성적 유사도 비교 알고리즘인 Kodex를 제안한다. Kodex 방법은 기존의 스트링 비교 방법인 비음성적 방법에 비해 음차 표기들을 등가부류로 클러스터링하는데 있어 더 나은 성능을 보이면서도, 계산이 간단하여 훨씬 효율적으로 구현될 수 있는 장점이 있다.Abstract With the advent of digital communication technologies, as Koreans communicate with foreigners more frequently, more foreign word transliterations are being used in Korean documents more than ever before. The transliterations of foreign words are very various among individuals. This makes text retrieval tasks about these documents very difficult. In this paper we propose a new method, called Kodex, of measuring the phonetic similarity among foreign word transliterations. Kodex can be used to generate the equivalence classes of the transliterations while indexing and conflate the equivalent transliterations at the querying stage. We show that Kodex gives higher precision at the similar recall level and is more efficient in computation than non-phonetic methods based on string similarity measure.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
• /
• v.39 no.3
• /
• pp.93-103
• /
• 2005

Users of searching Internet English dictionary sometimes do not know the correct spelling of the word in mind, but remember only its pronunciation. In order to help these users, we propose a method to retrieve English words effectively with a spoken word transliteration that is a Korean transliteration of English word pronunciation. We develop KONIX codes and transform a spoken word transliteration and English words into them. We then calculate the phonetic similarity between KONIX codes using edit distance and 2-gram methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective for retrieving English words with a spoken word transliteration.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.43-56
• /
• 2005

This study was analyzed the syllable structure of Korean and Chinese using subjective sound similarity judgement tasks with both Korean-chinese and Chinese students in Shenyang, China. 86 college students were administered with the tasks which lasted about 20 min. in a small group setting. Both Korean-chinese and Chinese students showed the sensitivity for the CV sub-syllabic unit and the CV+C was the building block for phonetic representation for both languages. This syllabic similarity of Korean and Chinese may be a help for Korean-chinese to become horizontal bilinguals. Further studies are needed to specify the mechanism that will explain the syllabic perception of CV+C in both Korean and Chinese which was different from that of C+VC structure dominance in English.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.41
• /
• pp.73-81
• /
• 2001

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study of intonation contrasts perception by speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian. Six series of re-synthesized two-syllable rise-fall contours with manipulated parameters of the rise in the first and the fall in the second syllable were employed in the experiment. Modifications of pitch height were executed in 2 st steps, and of duration in 30ms steps. The subjects, who were native speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian, identified the sentence type of presented re-synthesized stimuli. The results of the experiments demonstrate overall similarity of the perception strategies across the three groups of subjects, especially regarding the thresholds of declarative' sentence type judgement. Non-declarative judgements are more language-specific. The results can be employed for the teaching of English, Japanese and Russian as foreign languages as well as for speech synthesis and recognition.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.139-148
• /
• 2000

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study of intonation contrasts perception by speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian. Six series of re-synthesized two-syllable rise-fall contours with manipulated parameters of the rise in the first and the fall in the second syllable were employed in the experiment. Modifications of pitch height were executed in 2 st steps, and of duration - in 30ms steps. The subjects, who were native speakers of British English, Japanese and Russian, identified the sentence type of presented re-synthesized stimuli. The results of the experiments demonstrate overall similarity of the perception strategies across the three groups of subjects, especially regarding the thresholds of 'declarative' sentence type judgement. Non-declarative judgements are more language-specific. The results can be employed for the teaching of English, Japanese and Russian as foreign languages as well as for speech synthesis and recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.119-129
• /
• 2015

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1997.07a
• /
• pp.142-143
• /
• 1997

The purpose of this paper is to assess the psychological status of the phoneme, syllable, and various postulated subsyllabic units in Korean by applying the Sound Similarity Judgment (SSJ) task, to compare the results with those in English, and to discuss the advantage and disadvantage of the SSJ task as a tool for linguistic research. In Experiment 1, 30 subjects listened to pairs of 56 eve words which were systematically varied from 'totally different' (e.g., pan-met) to 'identical' (e.g., pan-pan). Subjects were then asked to rate sound similarity of each pair on a 10-point scale. Not very surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between the number of phonemic segments matched and the similarity score provided by the subjects. This result was in accord with the previous results from English (e.g., Vitz & Winkler, 1973; Derwing & Nearey, 1986) and supported the assumption that the phoneme is the basic phonological unit in Korean and English. However, there were sharply contrasting results between the two languages. When the pairs shared two phonemes (e.g., pan-pat; pan-pen; pan-man), the pairs sharing the fIrst two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Quite to the contrary, in the comparable English experiments, the pairs sharing the last two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Experiment 2 was designed to conflrm the results of Experiment 1 by controlling the 'degree' of similarity between phonemes. For example, the pair pan-pam can be judged more similar than the pair pan-nan, although both pairs share the same number of phonemes. This could be interpreted either as confirming the result of Experiment 1 or as the fact that /n/ is more similar to /m/ than /p/ is to /n/ in terms of shared number of distinctive features. The results of Experiment 2 supported the former interpretation. Thus, the results of both experiments clearly showed that, although the 'number' of matched phonemes is the important predictor in judging sound similarity of monosyllabic pairs of both languages, the 'position' of the matched phonemes exerts a different influence in judging sound similarity in the two languages. This contrasting set of results may provide interesting implications for the internal structure of the syllable in the two languages.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.46
• /
• pp.117-126
• /
• 2003

This paper presents our language model adaptation for Korean spontaneous speech recognition. Korean spontaneous speech is observed various characteristics of content and style such as filled pauses, word omission, and contraction as compared with the written text corpus. Our approaches focus on improving the estimation of domain-dependent n-gram models by relevance weighting out-of-domain text data, where style is represented by n-gram based tf/sup */idf similarity. In addition to relevance weighting, we use disfluencies as Predictor to the neighboring words. The best result reduces 9.7% word error rate relatively and shows that n-gram based relevance weighting reflects style difference greatly and disfluencies are good predictor also.