• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.91-99
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• 2010

This paper reports on an identification test where KFL learners identified the Korean three-way laryngeal contrast in the phrase-initial position, when the phrase-initial tone was systematically manipulated. It turns out that heritage learners have some sensitivity to phrase-initial tone and show a plain-aspirated alternation in their identification according to the phrase-initial tone, as native speakers do, whereas non-heritage students do not show such tone sensitivity. However, after a weekly prosody training, second-year non-heritage students have shown a significant improvement in their performance. This paper clearly shows that the phrase-initial tone plays a critical role in distinguishing laryngeal features of Korean obstruents, and also suggests that prosody including the tone-segment correlation should be incorporated in the KFL curriculum.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제35_36호
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• pp.13-24
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• 1998

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.141-151
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• 2014

This study reports anti-hierarchical initial-syllable lengthening of an utterance-internal phrase in Korean. That is, the phrase-initial syllable (e.g., /a/ of "apa-do" or /ma/ of "mapa-do") starting with a voiced phoneme (i.e., vowels or voiced consonants) manifests itself as significantly longer when it is preceded by another phrase without a pause than when it leads an utterance or follows a pause utterance-internally. The phenomenon was examined with regard to two other factors: (1) tempo and (2) tenseness of the consonant (/p, $p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/) following the target syllable /a/. First, the effect of tempo on initial lengthening was not significant. Apart from the statistical significance, however, a tendency was observed, i.e., the slower the tempo is, the greater the lengthening. By contrast, the faster the tempo is, the higher the ratio (%) of lengthening. Second, contrary to our expectations, initial-syllable lengthening was even greater before tense stops /$p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/ than before lax stop /p/ regardless of tempo, and it was remarkable when it comes to the ratio (%), which means that initial lengthening is free of the pre-consonantal vowel shortening effect. Final-syllable lengthening is a pre-boundary marker, while the initial-syllable lengthening is regarded as a post-boundary marker of a phrase.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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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.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제18권7호
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• pp.85-91
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• 1999

본 연구는 한국어 유음 /l/의 두 변이음 중 [r]의 음성적 실현에 대해 실험음성학적으로 고찰해보았다. 분절음들의 음성학적 실현은 인접해 있는 분절음으로부터 영향을 받을 뿐만 아니라 분절음의 운율적 위치 또한 영향을 미친다. 본 연구는 이런 운율적 위치가 변이음 [r]의 음성적 실현에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 살펴보았다. 운율적 위치는 발화문장 초, 억양구 초, 악센트구 초, 그리고 악센트구 말로 분류하였으며 그리고 단어 내 위치에 따른 영향 또한 살펴보기 위하여 단어 초, 단어 중간, 단어 말로 분류하였다. 네 명의 피험자를 대상으로 음성 실험과 그에 따른 통계 분석 결과, [r]의 음성적 실현은 다양한 것으로 나타났다. 가장 약화 정도가 심한 공명음에서부터, 마찰음, 그리고 [r]의 전형적인 음성적 실현인 짧은 파열음으로까지 다양하게 실현되었다. 짧은 파열음 내에서도 폐쇄구간과 VOT의 길이 또한 다양하게 나타났다. 이들의 다양한 음성적 실현에 미치는 요인 중의 하나는 단어 내 [r]이 나타나는 위치로서 단어 초(때에 따라서는 단어 말에서도)에서가 단어 중간에서보다 약화 현상이 덜한 것으로 나타났다. 이는 음성, 운율 단위초 강화 현상과 단위말 장음화 현상에 기인하는 것으로 판단된다. 그리고 운율적 위치에 따라서도 다양하게 실현되었는데 일반적으로 운율적으로 약한 자리에서가 강한 자리에서보다 약화된 형태인 공명음 또는 마찰음으로 실현되는 경향이 큰 것으로 나타났다. 폐쇄구간이 약화되지 않고 짧은 폐쇄음으로 실현될 경우 폐쇄구간 지속시간은 운율위치와 뚜렷한 상관관계를 보이지 않는 반면 VOT 지속시간은 단어 초 위치에서 높은 상관관계를 보였다. 즉, 발화문장 초와 억양구 초에서가 악센트구 초와 악센트구 중간에서보다 강하게, 즉 길게 실현되는 것으로 나타났다. 이는 [r]의 음성적 실현이 운율적 계층성에 따라 달라지며 운율적으로 강한 자리에서가 약한 자리에서 보다. 또는, 계층적으로 높은 위치에서가 낮은 위치에서보다 분절음 자신의 음성적 특성의 변형(약화)을 덜 입는 것으로 해석할 수 있겠다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권4호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권3호
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• pp.17-23
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• 2017

The present study investigates the effect of Accentual Phrase on F0 using a subset of large-scale corpus of Seoul Korean. Four syllable words which were neither preceded nor followed by silent pauses were presumed to be canonical exemplars of Accentual Phrases in Korean. These four syllable words were extracted from female speakers' speech samples. Growth curve analyses, combination of regression and polynomial curve fitting, were applied to the four syllable words. Four syllable words were divided into four groups depending on the categorical status of the initial segment: voiceless obstruents, voiced obstruents, sonorants, and vowels. Results of growth curve analyses indicate that initial segment types have an effect on the F0 (in semitone) in the nucleus of the initial syllable, and the cubic polynomial term revealed that some of the medial low tones in the 4 syllable words may be guided by the principle of contrast maximization, while others may be governed by the principle of ease of articulation.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제31_32호
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• pp.195-205
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• 1996

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic structure of Korean related to the syllable duration varying with its positional difference. An attempt is made in this study to analyze and describe the concrete correlation between the syllable lengthening and its position in the utterance at the initial and final positions. Using the syllable [na] at the final and initial position of a prosodic phrase in the Korean version of 'the North Wind and the Sun', it has found that the ratio of phrase final versus phrase initial syllable lengthening was approximately 1.8:1 for 4 subjects taking part in the test. In the case of nonsense data, we found that the ratio was approximately 1.6:1 for 2 out of 3 subjects. The results of this study might indicate that Korean tends to have a high rate of final lengthening. We can tentatively classify it, therefore, as a stress-timed language. Still, there is no denying that further studies should be done before we can be absolutely certain about the classification of languages along the dichotomy scale.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권1호
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• pp.89-105
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• 2005

This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.7-19
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• 2007

The present study investigated some phonetic attributes which distinguish two Korean stop types $^-aspirated$ and $lax^-$ in a prosodic position which has previously received little attention, namely medial in an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables which are initial in an accentual phrase (Jun, 1993) is said to depend on the type of stop (aspirated or lax), while that of syllables which are medial in an accentual phrase are not. In Experiment 1, nine native Korean speakers read sentences with a controlled prosodic pattern in which aspirated or lax stops occurred in accentual phrase-medial position. Acoustic analysis revealed significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. The results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops than previously demonstrated. Phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean will need to be revised to account for these results.