• 음성과학
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• 제14권4호
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• pp.25-39
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• 2007

The present study investigated some perceptual phonetic attributes of two Korean stop types, aspirated and lax, in medial position of an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables (Jun, 1993) is argued to depend on the type of stop (aspirated vs. lax) only in the initial position of an accentual phrase. In Kang & Dilley (2007), we showed that significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in medial position of an accentual phrase exist in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. In the present perception experiment, we investigated whether these phonetic attributes contribute to the perception of these two types of stops: The closure durations and/or F0's of post-stop vowels on accentual-phrase medial words were altered and twenty native Korean speakers then judged these words as beginning with an aspirated or lax stop. Both closure duration and F0 significantly affected judgments of stop identity. These results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues that distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops in production also plays a role in perception. To account for these results we suggest some phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권4호
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• pp.3-11
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• 2011

This experimental study has a goal to explore the perceptual sensitivity to phonetic evidence such as duration, phrase accent, or pause in disambiguation. We argue that the realization of the intonational phrasal boundary at the meaningful grammatical boundary in structurally ambiguous sentences facilitates English native listeners to distinguish the meanings of the ambiguous sentences. Moreover, the duration of the phrase-final syllable, pitch range reset, or phrasal tones also provides listeners with important phonetic evidence in disambiguation. In our perception experiment, however, Korean English learners largely depend on the realization of pause. In the results from the perception experiment, all of the groups showed an increase in the response time from the perception of no pause to pause realization. This means that pause at the phonological phrasal boundary plays a role of facilitator to English native speakers with other prosodic cues such as duration, pitch accent, or phrasal tones, while an absolutely important cue to Korean English learners.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2007년도 한국음성과학회 공동학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.114-118
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• 2007

The current study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of a prosodic phrase in Korean (Accentual Phrase) contributed to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one AP, it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment revealed that the cues that conform to the above-mentioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also showed that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Further, the results showed that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제40호
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• pp.13-27
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• 2000

It is generally accepted that there appears the rising tone at the end of the intermediate phrase in standard Korean. There have been discussions about whether the syllable with the rising tone, even if it is a particle or an ending, might be accented or not. The accented syllable is the most prominent one in the given phonological strings. It is determined by the nondistinctive stress which is located on the first or second syllable of lexical word according to vowel length and syllable weight. So pitch does not have any close relationship with accent. The intermediate phrase-final rising tone, therefore, is not associated with accent, but used to convey other pragmatic meanings, that is, i) speech style is more friendly, ii) the speaker tries to send the information for the hearer to hear more clearly, and iii) the speaker wants the hearer to keep on listening to him or her because the speaker's utterance is not complete.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제18권1E호
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• pp.27-31
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• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.9-17
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• 2017

The aim of this study is to examine whether Chinese Korean learners (CKL) can correctly produce the aspiration in 'a lenis obstruents /k/, /t/, /p/, /ʧ/+/h/ sound' sequence at the lexical and post-lexical level. For this purpose 4 Korean native speakers (KNS), 10 advanced and 10 intermediate CKL participated in a production test. The material analyzed consisted of 10 Korean sentences in which aspiration can be applied at different prosodic boundaries (syllable, word, accentual phrase). The results showed that for KNS and CKL, the rate of application of aspiration was different according to prosodic boundaries. Aspiration was more frequently applied at the lexical level than at the post-lexical level and it was more frequent at the word boundary than at the accentual phrase boundary. For CKL, pronunciation errors were either non-application of aspiration or coda obstruent omission. In the case of non-application of aspiration, CKL produced the target syllable as an underling form and they did not transform it as a surface form. In the case of coda obstruent ommision, most of the errors were caused by the inherent complexity of phonological process.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권3호
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• pp.29-37
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• 2009

This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권3호
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• pp.37-54
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• 2004

The main goal of this study is to examine the current issue of the deletion of high tone vs. the downstep or upstep of high tone in North Kyungsang Korean (NKK). In this phonetic experiment, five native speakers of North Kyungsang Korean participated and two categories, such as compounds and two-word phrases were included as a test material. This experiment shows that when the first word belongs to the nonfinal class, the high tone of the second word is overwhelmingly deleted. When the first word belongs to the final class, the high tone of it is also overwhelmingly deleted. It is thus concluded that when two words are combined into a phrase, the peak of one word retains, whereas the peak of the other is deleted. It is confirmed that a single high tone prominence in a phonological phrase in NKK is not due to the processes of down step or upstep but the deletion process.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.29-41
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• 2006

This study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of prosodic phrases in Korean contribute to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP), it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment utilizing an artificial language learning paradigm revealed that cues conforming to the aforementioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also indicated that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Nevertheless, results did show that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.109-125
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• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the intonational meaning of various sentences based on the English Intonational Phonology, and to show the superiority of Intonational Phonology in explaining the intonational meanings in comparison with the other existing intonational theories. The American structuralists and British schools which attempt to describe the intonation in terms of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively, analyze intonational meaning from a holistic perspective in which an utterance cannot be divided into smaller parts. On the other hand, Intonational Phonology considers English intonation as composed of a series of High and Low tones, and as a result, intonational meaning is interpreted compositionally as sets of H and L. In this paper, the phonological relations between intonation and its meaning from the compositions of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones which consist of an intonational tune are discussed.