• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.125-134
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• 2011

The current study investigated the effects of experience of deaf speech, severity of speaker's articulation, and linguistic cues on speech intelligibility of congenitally deafened adults with cochlear implants. Speech intelligibility was judged by 28 experienced listeners and 40 inexperienced listeners using a word transcription task. A three-way (2 $\times$ 2 $\times$ 4) mixed design was used with the experience of deaf speech (experienced/inexperienced listener) as a between-subject factor, the severity of speaker's articulation (mild to moderate/moderate to severe), and linguistic cues (no/phonetic/semantic/combined) as within-subject factors. The dependent measure was the number of correctly transcribed words. Results revealed that three main effects were statistically significant. Experienced listeners showed better performance on the transcription than inexperienced listeners, and listeners were better in transcribing speakers who were mild to moderate than moderate to severe. There were significant differences in speech intelligibility among the four different types of cues, showing that the combined cues provided the greatest enhancement of the intelligibility scores (combined > semantic > phonological > no). Three two-way interactions were statistically significant, indicating that the type of cues and severity of speakers differentiated experienced listeners from inexperienced listeners. The current results suggested that the use of a combination of linguistic cues increased the speech intelligibility of congenitally deafened adults with cochlear implants, and the experience of deaf speech was critical especially in evaluating speech intelligibility of severe speakers compared to that of mild speakers.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.20
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• pp.5-27
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• 2010

This paper studies the relation between canonical/variegated babble (CB/VB) and early speech in an infant acquiring Mandarin Chinese from 9 to 17 months. The infant was audio-and video-taped in her home almost every week. The data analyzed here come from 1,621 utterances extracted from 23 sessions ranging from 30 minutes to one hour, from age 00:09;07 to 01:05;27. The data was digitized, and segments from 23 sessions were transcribed in narrow IPA and coded for analysis. Babble was coded from age 00:09;07 to 01:00;00, and words were coded from 01:00;00 to 01:05;27, proto-words appeared at 11 months, and some babble was still present after 01:10;00. 3821 segments were counted in CB/VB utterances, plus the segments found in 899 word tokens. The data transcription was completed and checked by the author and was rechecked by two other researchers who majored in Chinese phonetics in order to ensure the reliability, we reached an agreement of 95.65%. Mandarin Chinese is phonetically very rich in consonants, especially affricates: it has aspirated and unaspirated stops in labial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation; affricates and fricatives in alveolar, retroflex, and palatal places; /f/; labial, alveolar, and velar nasals; a lateral;[h]; and labiovelar and palatal glides. In the child's pre-speech phonetic repertoire, 7 different consonants and 10 vowels were transcribed at 00:09;07. By 00:10;16, the number of phones was more than doubled (17 consonants, 25 vowels), but the rate of increase slowed after 11 months of age. The phones from babbling remained active throughout the child's early and subsequent speech. The rank order of the occurrence of the major class types for both CB and early speech was: stops, approximants, nasals, affricates, fricatives and lateral. As expected, unaspirated stops outnumbered aspirated stops, and front stops and nasals were more frequent than back sounds in both types of utterances. The fact that affricates outnumbered fricatives in the child's late babble indicates the pre-speech influence of the ambient language. The analysis of the data also showed that: 1) the phonetic characteristics of CB/VB and early meaningful speech are extremely similar. The similarities of CB/VB and speech prove that the two are deeply related; 2) The infant has demonstrated similar preferences for certain types of sounds in the two stages; 3) The infant's babbling was patterned at segmental level, and this regularity was similarly evident in the early speech of children. The three types being coronal plus front vowel; labial plus central and dorsal plus back vowel exhibited much overlap in the phonetic forms of CB/ VB and early speech. So the child's CB/ VB at this stage already shared the basic architecture, composition and representation of early speech. The evidence of similarity between CB/VB and early speech leaves no doubt that phones present in CB/VB are indeed precursors to early speech.

• MALSORI
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• no.37
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• pp.49-71
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• 1999

The Purpose of this paper is to gather pairs of heteronyms in modern Korean and transcribe them in the IPA and the Roman alphabet in order to propose that all of them should be differentiated in Hanngul orthography. More than a quarter of the whole Korean vocabulary consists of words with a long vowel and the number of minimal pairs distinguished only by the chroneme reaches nearly ten thousand (i.e. twenty thousand words). The letter h syllable-finally is used here to represent the long vowel in Romanization except the vowel '으‘[?:] which is transcribed by doubling the letter u (i.e. uu). Another factor bringing forth lots of heteronyms in Korean is the lack of full indication as to the non-automatic reinforcement in the initial consonant of a word (or a morpheme) when preceded by another within a phrase (or a word). These reinforced word-initial consonants are written with the letter c and an apostrophe (like c'g- , c'd- , c'b-, c's-, c'j-) in Romanization here. The reinforced morpheme-initial consonant within a word is written with the letters k t, p, ss and cz for ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ and ㅉ sounds respectively. The contrasted pronunciations of pairs of heteronyms beginning with ㅅ /s/sup h// and ㅆ /s/ sounds are transcribed here for exemplification.

• MALSORI
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• no.43
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• pp.1-9
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• 2002

This study aims to model Korean prosodic phrasing using CART(classification and regression tree) method. Our data are limited to Korean read speech. We used 400 sentences made up of editorials, essays, novels and news scripts. Professional radio actress read 400sentences for about two hours. We used K-ToBI transcription system. For technical reason, original break indices 1,2 are merged into AP. Differ from original K-ToBI, we have three break index Zero, AP and IP. Linguistic information selected for this study is as follows: the number of syllables in ‘Eojeol’, the location of ‘Eojeol’ in sentence and part-of-speech(POS) of adjacent ‘Eojeol’s. We trained CART tree using above information as variables. Average accuracy of predicting NonIP(Zero and AP) and IP was 90.4% in training data and 88.5% in test data. Average prediction accuracy of Zero and AP was 79.7% in training data and 78.7% in test data.

• MALSORI
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• no.50
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• pp.51-69
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• 2004

In this paper, we present a one-pass semi-dynamic network decoding framework that inherits both advantages of fast decoding speed from static network decoders and memory efficiency from dynamic network decoders. Our method is based on the novel language model network representation that is essentially of finite state machine (FSM). The static network derived from the language model network [1][2] is partitioned into smaller subnetworks which are static by nature or self-structured. The whole network is dynamically managed so that those subnetworks required for decoding are cached in memory. The network is near-minimized by applying the tail-sharing algorithm. Our decoder is evaluated on the 25k-word Korean broadcast news transcription task. In case of the search network itself, the network is reduced by 73.4% from the tail-sharing algorithm. Compared with the equivalent static network decoder, the semi-dynamic network decoder has increased at most 6% in decoding time while it can be flexibly adapted to the various memory configurations, giving the minimal usage of 37.6% of the complete network size.

• MALSORI
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• no.31_32
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• pp.51-82
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• 1996

The purpose of this paper is to gather pairs of heteronyms in Modem Korean and to propose that all of them should be differentiated in both the Hanngul orthography and Romanization as well as in the IPA transcription. More than a quarter of the whole Korean vocabulary consists of words with a long vowel and the number of minimal pairs distinguished only by the chroneme reaches nearly ten thousand (ie. twenty thousand words). It is suggested here that the letter s in Hanngul and the letter 'h' in the Roman alphabet be used to represent the long vowel. Another factor which brings forth lots of heteronyms in Korean is the lacking of enough indication as to non-automatic reinforcement in the initial consonant o( a word (or a morpheme) when following another within a phrase (or a word). It is proposed here that the non-automatincally rienforced word-initial consonant should be written with the letter h (like ㅺ, ㅼ, ㅽ, ㅾ) and an apostrophe (like 물'새 or 밭'이랑, 물'약) in Hanngul, and with the letter c and an apostrophe (like c'g-, c'd-, c'b-, c'j- ) in the Roman alphabet The morpheme-initial reinforced consonant within a word is written with the letters k, 1, p and cz for ㅺ, ㅼ, ㅽ, and ㅾ respectively. The contrasted pronunciations of pairs of heteronyms beginning with ㅁ/m sound are transcribed here for exemplification in the IPA, Roman alphabet and Hanngul.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.658-667
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• 2021

Our study aimed to analyze and reinterpret, by an acoustic approach, the descriptions of the 18th century prosody and introduce the figurative pronunciation system, which is the International Phonetic Alphabet pioneer. Our methodology compares and analyzes grammars and documents on the transcription system and restructures the prosodic structure. It is certain that the 18th century grammarians widely accepted the prosody theories made by Arnauld & Lancelot of the seventeenth century. In particular, grammar scholars accepted the dichotomous classification of the accent structures as prosodic and oratorical accents. The prosodic accent has a relation to intonation, and the oratorical accent has as its key elements intonation and intensity. Regarding the temporal structure, the lengthening of the final syllable was observed systematically by grammarians of the 18th century. This time structure is similar to that of today. Therefore, we can conclude that the final elongation, an essential characteristic of the modern French accent, has already played an imbued role in 18th century prosody. Despite this, the 18th century grammarians did not assign it the status of accent, as it was a stereotype that matches accent with intonation.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.109-117
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• 2021

Recently, the use of speech-based interfaces is increasing as a means for human-computer interaction (HCI). Accordingly, interest in post-processors for correcting errors in speech recognition results is also increasing. However, a lot of human-labor is required for data construction. in order to manufacture a sequence to sequence (S2S) based speech recognition post-processor. To this end, to alleviate the limitations of the existing construction methodology, a new data construction method called Back TranScription (BTS) was proposed. BTS refers to a technology that combines TTS and STT technology to create a pseudo parallel corpus. This methodology eliminates the role of a phonetic transcriptor and can automatically generate vast amounts of training data, saving the cost. This paper verified through experiments that data should be constructed in consideration of text style and domain rather than constructing data without any criteria by extending the existing BTS research.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.50-59
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• 1997

In this paper, we implement an automatic speech segmentation and labeling system which marks phone boundaries automatically for constructing the Korean speech database. We specify and implement the system based on conventional speech segmentation and labeling techniques, and also develop the graphic user interface(GUI) on Hangul $Motif^{TM}$ environment for the users to examine the automatic alignment boundaries and to refine them easily. The developed system is applied to 16kHz sampled speech, and the labeling unit is composed of 46 phoneme-like units(PLUs) and silence. The system uses both of the phonetic and orthographic transcription as input methods of linguistic information. For pattern-matching method, hidden Markov models(HMM) is employed. Each phoneme model is trained using the manually segmented 445 phonetically balanced word (PBW) database. In order to evaluate the performance of the system, we test it using another database consisting of sentence-type speech. According to our experiment, 74.7% of phoneme boundaries are within 20ms of the true boundary and 92.8% are within 40ms.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.456-463
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• 1996

In this paper, we discussed three cases to see the effects of the characteristics of Hangul writing system. In applications such as computer Hangul shorthands for ordinary people and pushbuttons with Hangul characters engraved, we found that there is much advantage in using Hangul. In case of Hangul Transliteration, we discussed some problems which are related with the characteristics of Hangul writing system. Shorthands use 3-set keyboards in England, America, and Korea. We saw how ordinary people can do computer Hangul shorthands, whereas only experts can do computer shorthands in other countries. Specifically, the facts that 1) Hangul characters are grouped into syllables (syllabic blocks) and that 2) there is already a 3-set Hangul keyboard for ordinary people allow ordinary people to do computer Hangul shorthands without taking special training as with English shorthands. This study was done by the author under the codename of 'Sejong 89'. In contrast like QWERTY or DVORAK, a 2-set Hangul keyboard cannot be used for shorthands. In case of English pushbuttons, one digit is associated with only one character. However, by engraving only syllable-initial characters on the phone pushbuttons, we can associate one Hangul "syllable" with one digit. Therefore, for a given number of digits, we can associate longer words or more meaningful words in Hangul than in English. We discussed the problems of the Hangul Transliteration system proposed by South Korea and suggested their solutions, if available. 1) We are incorrectly using the framework of transcription for transliteration. To solve the problem, the author suggests that a) we include all complex characters in the transliteration table, and that b) we specify syllable-initial and -final characters separately in the table. 2) The proposed system cannot represent independent characters and incomplete syllables. 3) The proposed system cannot distinguish between syllable-initial and -final characters.