• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.71-89
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• 1997

In the framework of linear representation which allows for no internal structure within features, there is no way to represent nonlinear phonological phenomena such as complex segments. This paper shows how we carl solve some problems of the linear feature theory in relation to the hierarchical feature theory. The purpose of this paper is to explain lateral assimilation under hierarchical feature representation. Although arguments for the position of classes of distinctive features have been made the position of (lateral) remains the issue of debate. Sagey(1988) argues that the feature [lateral] is structurally dependent on the root node. In contrast Rice & Avery (1991) put the feature (lated) under the spontaneous voicing. I have discussed previous studies of feature hierarchy and I propose a revised model of feature representation. Within this model I have shown how well feature geometry describes lateralization as feature spreading.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.226-234
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• 2007

In this paper, we develop a speech recognition system using a throat microphone. The use of this kind of microphone minimizes the impact of environmental noise. However, because of the absence of high frequencies and the partially loss of formant frequencies, previous systems developed with those devices have shown a lower recognition rate than systems which use standard microphone signals. This problem has led to researchers using throat microphone signals as supplementary data sources supporting standard microphone signals. In this paper, we present a high performance ASR system which we developed using only a throat microphone by taking advantage of Korean Phonological Feature Theory and a detailed throat signal analysis. Analyzing the spectrum and the result of FFT of the throat microphone signal, we find that the conventional MFCC feature vector that uses a critical pass filter does not characterize the throat microphone signals well. We also describe the conditions of the feature extraction algorithm which make it best suited for throat microphone signal analysis. The conditions involve (1) a sensitive band-pass filter and (2) use of feature vector which is suitable for voice/non-voice classification. We experimentally show that the ZCPA algorithm designed to meet these conditions improves the recognizer's performance by approximately 16%. And we find that an additional noise-canceling algorithm such as RAST A results in 2% more performance improvement.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.31-47
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to explain the cause of obsturents neutralization in syllable final position. Most of the previous phonological studies did not reflect phonetic reality sufficiently because of the limited use of the binary feature system. Using binary distinctive features, we can't explain the cause of neutralization. In order to explain the cause of neutralization, I use the multi-valued phonetic feature -[vocal tract aperture]. By [vocal tract aperture] I mean the distance between articulators in the hold stage. In this study, I claim that the cause of neutralization is assimilation to [vocal tract aperture] 0 degree. The neutralized sounds become aplosives, as a consequence of assimilation to [vocal tract aperture].

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2002

Phonologically, the difference between the English stops /b, d, g/ and /p, t, k/ is carried by the presence or the absence of the vocal fold vibration throughout their oral closure phase. If phonology has its foundation in phonetics, there must be phonetic evidence for the voiced-voiceless distinction. This study is aimed to determine whether or not the voiced-voiceless distinction is acceptable or proper in English. The determination was based mainly on findings in the existing literature and in informal experiments. In conclusion, there is no phonetic evidence for the voiced-voiceless distinction both in production and perception. The [voice] appears to be one of potential phonetic correlates of the phonologically voiced stop. It is improper to use the [voice] as independent phonological marker, regardless of position (word-initial, intervocalic, word-final). A feature other than the voiced-voiceless feature must distinguish /b, d, g/ from /p, t, k/.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.47-66
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• 2006

This study examined the effect of English-language experience on Korean- and Japanese-English late learners' production of English unstressed vowels in terms of four acoustic phonetic features: F0, duration, intensity and vowel reduction. The learners manifested some improvement with experience. The native-like attainment of a phonetic feature, however, was related to the phonological status of that feature in the speakers' native language. The results suggest that the extent to which the non-native speakers' production of English unstressed vowels improved with English-language experience varied as a function of their native language background.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.158-162
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• 2007

Anomia, word finding difficulty, is one of the most common feature in aphasia. Previous studies support that the process of picture naming consists of three stages, in the order of the object recognition, semantic, and phonological output stages. Anomic patients have many symptoms and it means that anomia can be sub-divided into several symptom groups. Our anomia assessment battery consists of several parts: (1) picture naming set, (2) picture-word matching task, (3) lexical decision task for mental lexicon damage, (4) naming task for phonological lexicon damage, and (5) semantic decision task. Pictures and words were selected on the basis of usage frequency, semantic category, and word length. We administered this anomia evaluation battery to many anomic aphasics and we subdivided patients into several groups. We hope that our anomia evaluation set is useful and helpful for evaluation anomic aphasics

• 중국학논총
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• no.67
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• pp.61-80
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• 2020

This paper analyzes the formation of Tianjin dialect by investigating the immigration situation in Tianjin in history, analyzing the rhyme phenomenon of Tianjin dialect and comparing Tianjin dialect with surrounding dialects. First of all, with the need of transferring grain from the south to the north after the Ming Dynasty, the canal-centered grain transportation industry developed, and the immigrants in Tianjin naturally began to increase. In the Qing Dynasty, a large number of commercial immigrants flowed into various areas of Tianjin with the expansion of Tianjin's urban scale. This way of immigration makes Tianjin dialect preserve some dialectal features of other regions. By comparing with other Mandarin dialects, it is found that this is not only a feature of Tianjin dialect, but also a common feature in other Mandarin dialects. Therefore, we can draw a conclusion that the opinion of considering the dialect of one region is the mother dialect of Tianjin dialect because a certain phonological feature of Tianjin dialect is the same as that of other specific area is not appropriate. On the other hand, these immigrant dialects, which well reflects the characteristics of Tianjin, just show that these dialects have formed the present Tianjin dialect in the form of integration after the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

• MALSORI
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• no.21_24
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• pp.43-89
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• 1992

In this thesis, the prominent aspect of word accent in standard Korean is studied by auditory test and acoustic analysis experiment. The definition of 'accent' is, following Hoyoung Lee's discussion(1990), to be described as 'the means whereby a focused part of an utterance is made to stand out in order to concentrate the hearer's attention on it.' That is to say, the ten of 'accent' may be described in terms of phonological phenomenon and the accented syllable can be phonetically prominent as the result of those phonological process. Prosodic features may have different characteristics in different languages whether they contain linguistically important functions or not. Thus the characteristics of word accent in standard Korean will be determined as the content and trait of prosodic features. Following this viewpoint, present study looked over prosodic features which may effect the characteristics of word accent in standard Korean, through systematic experimental procedure. And the result of this experiment has been verified by statistical method, the T-test, for the purpose of identifying the relatedness among prosodic features(parameters). This thesis, therefore, aimed to investigate the intrinsic acoustic and physical qualities of the word accent in standard Korean. Nonsense words composed by 'mal' and 'ma' which can be divided into 'heavy syllable' and 'light syllable' quoted from Hyman(1975) have been classified into 28 types with respect to syllable numbers(2 syl., 3 sy1., 4 syl.) and these words have become the target of auditory test and acoustic experiment. As the result of those experimental Procedures, the word accent in standard Korean may be said that it has a tendency of fixing first two syllables regardless of syllable numbers. The syllable types of HH, HL, LL in the first two syllables may be prominent at first syllable and the type of H may be at second syllable. Various prosodic features(parameters) including duration, intensity, and Fo(purely phonetic terms) were also strengthened in those positions. The result of this experiment can be cleared up like these : 1. The most important feature is proved as 'duration', the feature of intensity resulted in more subsidiary one than the feature of duration. 2. Fo( fundamental frequency) could be observed as having some coherent contour through almost all syllable types(99 ％), that is, in 2 syllable types, it had rising contour, in 2 syllable types, rising-falling contour, and in 4 syllable types, it contained rising-falling-rising contour. The result of auditory test was different with those contour forms of all Fo surveyed. With respect to these results, the discuss for Fo is determined' to be excluded comparing other features. 3. Finally, this thesis resulted in a decision that the word accent in standard Korean may has fixed(somewhat weaker) accent, especially fixed at first two syllables in almost all words. 4. Various kinds of syllable types related with 2,3,4 syllables, therefore, can be reclassified into 4 types of HH, HL, LH, LL following the concept of accent fixing placement(i.e. first two syllables). In these 4 types, the types of HH, HL, LL were prominent at the position of the first syllable , and the type of LH was prominent at the second syllable otherwise.