• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.11-22
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• 2010

The present study attempts to investigate declination in Korean and its relevant aspects to the length of utterance, the clause boundary, and focus. More specifically, I examine the relation of declination with the length of utterance, the declination reset at the clause boundary, and the effect of focus on declination. Results showed that the length of utterance had no relation with the first and last pitch values of the utterance but that they were consistent regardless of the length of utterance. However, the declination slope changed to be relatively gentle from the fourth accentual phrase to the end of the whole intonational phrase. There was a reset of declination in such a way that the first pitch in the second phrase was always lower than that of the first phrase, but the first pitch in the third phrase was not always lower than that of the second phrase when the whole utterance was composed of three phrases. Finally, the pitch values of the focusing words decreased as their position went back in a sentence. One declination line was formed in the case of focused utterance, but in the case of an utterance that contained a clause boundary, a new declination line was formed at the start of each new clause. These findings can be applied to developing a Korean speech synthesizer that contains natural prosody; they can be also utilized for teaching Korean prosody.

• MALSORI
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• no.39
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• pp.15-24
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• 2000

This study aims to reexamine Korean Lenis Stop Voicing (henceforth, LSV) and to specify its phonetic conditions in phonetic terms. LSV optionally occurs within certain prosodic domains. They are called 'Malthomak'(Lee, 1996),'phonological phrase'(Kang, 1992), or 'accentual phrase'(Jun, 1993). On the basis of Jun's phrasing, this study focuses on the more specific phonetic conditions of LSV in the accentual phrase medial position, sub-classifying voicing as complete and partial. The results shows that whether the stops become completely voiced or partially voiced was determined by the various phonetic environments, such as adjacent segments and following intonational phrase boundaries. It is shown that the conditions of LSV should be described in terms of more detailed phonetic environments and that they could be used in predicting the class of voicing.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2008

In this paper, we suggest a rule-based system for the prediction of natural prosodic phrase breaks from Korean texts. For the implementation of the rule-based system, (1) sentence constituents are sub-categorized according to their syntactic functions, (2) syntactic phrases are recognized using the dependency relations among sub-categorized constituents, (3) rules for predicting prosodic phrase breaks are created. In addition, (4) the length of syntactic phrases and sentences, the position of syntactic phrases in a sentence, sense information of contextual words have been considered as to determine the variable prosodic phrase breaks. Based on these rules and features, we obtained the accuracy over 90% in predicting the position of major break and no break which have high correlation with the syntactic structure of the sentence. As for the overall accuracy in predicting the whole prosodic phrase breaks, the suggested system shows Break_Correct of 87.18% and Juncture Correct of 89.27% which is higher than that of other models.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.71-81
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• 2011

This paper investigated how prosodic position and word type affect the phonetic structure of Korean coronal stops. Initial segments of prosodic domains were known to be more strongly articulated and longer relative to prosodic domain-medial segments. However, there are few studies examining whether the properties of prosodic domain-initial segments are affected by the information content of words (real vs. nonsense words). In addition, since the scope of domain-initial effect was known to be local to the initial consonant and the effects on the following vowel have been found to be limited, it is thus worth examining whether the prosodic domain-initial effect extends into the vowel after the initial consonant in a systematic way across different prosodic domains. The acoustic properties of Korean coronal stops (lenis /t/, aspirated /$t^h$/, and tense /t'/) were compared across Intonational Phrase, Phonological Phrase and Word-initial positions both in real and nonsense words. The durational intervals such as VOT and CV duration were cumulatively lengthened for /t/ and /$t^h$/ in the higher prosodic domain-initial positions. However, tense stop /t'/ did not show any variation as a function of prosodic position and word type. The domain-initial lenis stop showed significantly longer duration in nonsense words than in real words. But the prosodic domain-initial effect was not found in the properties of F0 and [H1-H2] of the vowel after initial stops. The present study provided evidence that speakers tend to enhance speech clarity when there is less contextual information as in prosodic domain-initial position and in nonsense words.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2007

Old Korean regulated poems have a typical prosodic structure characterized by a pitch contour. This work applies Jun's finding in Seoul Korean(Jun 1993, 2000, 2005) to old Korean regulated poems, and reports some other significant phonetic characteristics, arguing that old Korean regulated poems have a regular rhythm based on the pitch contour implementing the typically hierarchical prosodic structure. The major prosodic units defined are a foot, a phrase, and a line. Next, this work proposes pitch contour characterizing prominence in a unit, boundary tones, and pauses at the boundary position, as the basic and significant cues of rhythm of a Korean poem. Specifically, some significant characteristics are discussed as follows: first, the tonal pattern of a foot is HL, starting high and ending low; second, the lowering boundary tones of HL% and L% are perceived at the end of a phrase and a line; and finally, a gradient degree of pause is observed at each unit-final position.

• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.51-65
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• 2008

The aim of this study is to compare ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) children with normal children in terms of the prosodic features. Materials are collected by the reading of Korean read sentences. They are composed of 10 declarative sentences, each of which was consisted of 5-6 words. Subjects are consisted of 10 ASD and 10 normal male children with a receptive vocabulary age of 5;0-6;5 years. We found out that both groups showed the differences not only in the tonal patterns at the end of the prosodic phrases, but also in both the degree of rising and falling slope related to pitch contour. While HL% and HLH% were highly emerged in sentence final position in normal group, HL% and HLH% were prominent in ASD group in the same position. LH% and LHL% IP types were observed only in ASD group in sentence medial position. The slope showing the variation in the fundamental frequency at the end of the prosodic phrase was twice as steep in the group of ASD children as in the group of normal children.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.21-30
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• 2008

The current study investigated distributional properties of the Korean Accentual Phrase and their implication to word segmentation. The properties examined were the frequency of various AP tonal patterns, the types of tonal patterns that are imposed upon content words, and the average number and temporal location of content words within the AP. A total of 414 sentences from the Read speech corpus and the Radio corpus were used for the data analysis. The results showed that the 84% of the APs contained one content word, and that almost 90% of the content words are located in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was not an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were LH, LHH, and LHLH (78%), and 88% of the multisyllabic content words start with a rising tone in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were HH, HHLH, and HHL (72%), and 74% of the multisyllabic content words start with a level H tone in AP-initial position. The data further showed that 84.1% of APs end with the final H tone. The findings provide valuable information about the prosodic pattern and structure of Korean APs, and account for the results of a previous study which showed that Korean listeners are sensitive to AP-initial rising and AP-final high tones (Kim, 2007). This is in line with other cross-linguistic research which has revealed the correlation between prosodic probability and speech processing strategy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.3-15
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• 2014

An articulatory study (using an Electromagnetic Articulography, EMA) was conducted to explore effects of prosodic boundary strength (Intonational Phrase/IP versus Word/Wd), and focus (Focused/accented, Neutral, Unfocused/unaccented) on the kinematic realization of /m/ in the coda (${\ldots}$am#i${\ldots}$) and the onset (${\ldots}$a#mi${\ldots}$) conditions in Korean. (Here # refers to a prosodic boundary such as an IP or a Wd boundary). Several important points have emerged. First, the boundary effect on /m/s was most robustly observed in the temporal dimension in both the coda (IP-final) and the onset (IP-initial) conditions, generally in line with cross-linguistically observable boundary-related lengthening patterns. Crucially, however, in contrast with boundary-related slowing-down effects that have been observed in English, both the IP-final and IP-initial temporal expansions of Korean /m/s were not accompanied by an articulatory slowing down. They were, if anything, associated with a faster movement in the lip opening (release) phase (into the vowel). This suggests that the mechanisms underlying boundary-related temporal expansions may differ between languages. Second, observed boundary-induced strengthening effects (both spatial and temporal expansions, especially on the IP-initial /m/s) were remarkably similar to prominence (focus)-induced strengthening effects, which is again counter to phrase-initial strengthening patterns observed in English in which boundary effects are dissociated from prominent effects. This suggests that initial syllables in Korean may be a common focus for both boundary and prominence marking. These results, taken together, imply that the boundary-induced strengthening in Korean is different in nature from that in English, each being modulated by the individual language's prosodic system. Third, the coda and the onset /m/s were found to be produced in a subtly but significantly different way even in a Wd boundary condition, a potentially neutralizing (resyllabification) context. This suggests that although the coda may be phonologically 'resyllabified' into the following syllable in a phrase-medial position, its underlying syllable affiliation is kinematically distinguished from the onset.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.323-332
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• 1996

The current speech technology has been aiming to acquire much clearer and more natural synthetic speech sound. The naturalness can be developed by an adequate phrasing of target sentence, of course, which seems to be strongly related to both syntactic and phonetic aspect simultaneously. The present study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relatedness between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing through dialogue speech, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern with respect to the purpose of acquiring more natural synthetic sound. The prosodic phrase, here, means a prosodic unit which can be clearly identified as having an evident break boundary at its final position in a sentence in the sense of both perceptual and acoustical viewpoint. The end of each prosodic phrase is, accordingly, marked as the point of major boundary in a sentence.