• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.95-109
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• 2004

Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.119-143
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• 1999

In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.215-234
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• 2002

This study is designed for two purposes. The first one is to compare the realization and perception of English contrastive focus between Korean learners of English and native speakers of English. The second purpose is to study the phonological and phonetical features of contrastive focus by examining the results of production and perception experiments. English native speakers' results show that the English contrastive accents are generally accompanied by higher peak heights. The findings agree with the results of Bartels & Kingston (1994). Unlike native speakers of English, Korean speakers seem to be poor at relating the phonetical features of contrastive focus to their actual speech. Korean speakers' results are especially unsuccessful when the contrast is not distinctly grasped through syntactic structure, or when the function words are contrasted. Furthermore, Korean speakers' utterances tend to have pitch accents on every content word, whether the word is contrasted or not.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study focuses on providing the pedagogical implications of stress in English pronunciation teaching since stress is one the most important characteristic factors in English pronunciation (Bolinger, 1976; Brown, 1994; Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin, 1996; Kreidler, 1989). The author investigated stress production regarding in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity by a group of native speakers of English and a group of low-proficiency South Kyungsang Korean college students for their pre-test. For both of the pre- and post-test, the same stimuli, which consisted of a one-syllable word, two two-syllable words, three three-syllable words, and three four-syllable words, were used along with the various sentence positions: isolation, initial, medial, and final. Soft ware programs, ALVIN and Praat, were used to record and analyze the data. Since Celce-Murcia et al. (1996), Klatt (1975), and Ladefoged (2001) treat duration of the stressed syllable more significantly than other factors, pitch and intensity, with respect to the listener's point of view, the author developed a special method of teaching English stress using a traditional Korean drum to emphasize duration. In addition, the results from the native speakers' production showed that their main strategy to realize stress was through lengthening stressed syllables. After six weeks of stress instruction using the drum, the production of the native speakers and the SK Korean participants from the pre- and post-test were compared. The results from the post-test indicated that the participants showed great improvement not only in duration but also in pitch after the stress instruction. Pitch improvement was unexpected but well-explained by the statement that long vowels receive accent in loan word adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. The results also showed that the Korean participants' pitch values became more even in their duration values for each syllable as the structure of the word or the sentence became more complex, due to their dependency upon their L1.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.89-108
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• 2002

Deaccentuation' means the phenomenon that the accent on the particular element which deserves to be accented, disappears and loses the property of intonational prominence. Based on some theoretical background, we divided the cases where deaccentuation can be placed into six categories : the first, the case that the words already mentioned are repeated in the context; the second, the case that the element can be recovered anaphorically or situationally; the third, the case that the elements are semantically weightless; the fourth, the case that the meaning of the word is empty; the fifth, the case that the elements are less informative, so that they are easy to predict; the sixth, the case that the elements are located after the focused words. Then we organized the context and the experimental sentences corresponding to each category. The utterances of Korean and English native speakers were recorded and analysed based on the ToBI system and compared to each other, in order to find out that Korean speakers can distinguish the difference within each sentence pair, and produce them with appropriate intonation similar to that of native speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.319-338
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• 2003

The aim of this paper is to examine the sentence final tonal patterns of English wh-questions through phonetic experiments, based on Intonational Phonology, and to explain the meaning of the final phrase tones of English wh-questions. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) suggested that it is pitch accents rather than boundary tones which play a crucial role in the meaning of a sentence, and that most of the general questions have H-H% tonal patterns in the sentence final. However, they could not explain why wh-questions had final falling tonal patterns (L-L%). While Bartels (1999) suggested that L phrase tone has the meaning of 'ASSERTION' and it could be applied to the explanation of the meaning of wh-questions' final tonal patterns. However, her suggestions are only theoretical explanation without any experimental support. In this paper, based on Bartels (1999), the data was classified into the following three classes: 1) echo wh-questions, 2) reference questions, and 3) common wh-questions. Using this data, a production test by three English native speakers was conducted. The results show that reference questions and common wh-questions have L phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate, and echo wh-questions have H phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.15-22
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• 2009

Prominence of speech, which is often called 'accent,' affects the fluency of speaking American English greatly. In this paper, we present an accurate prominence detection method that can be utilized in computer-aided language learning (CALL) systems. We employed pitch movement, overall syllable energy, 300-2200 Hz band energy, syllable duration, and spectral and temporal correlation as features to model the prominence of speech. After the features for vowel syllables of speech were extracted, prominent syllables were classified by SVM (Support Vector Machine). To further improve accuracy, the differences in characteristics of neighboring syllables were added as additional features. We also applied a speech recognizer to extract more precise syllable boundaries. The performance of our prominence detector was measured based on the Intonational Variation in English (IViE) speech corpus. We obtained 84.9% accuracy which is about 10% higher than previous research.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.113-133
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• 1998

The system proposed in this paper prosodically transcribes the intonation patterns, prosodic structures, phrasings, and other prosodic aspects of Korean utterances, on four parallel tiers: a tone tier, an orthographic tier, a break index tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs two phrase accents (L* and H *), three accentual phrase boundary tones (L-, H-, LH-), and four intonational phrase boundary tones (L%,H%,LH%,LHL%) in order to provide a phonological transcription of pitch events associated with accented syllables and phrase boundaries. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, which mark a prosodic grouping of words and its prosodic structure in an utterance. Among the five indices, the break index 3 and the break index 4 align with an accentual phrase boundary tone and an intonational phrase boundary tone, respectively, in the tone tier.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.49-56
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• 2017

Much research attention has been directed to identify how native speakers perceive non-native speakers' oral proficiency. To investigate the generalizability of previous findings, this study examined segmental, phonological, accentual, and temporal correlates of native speakers' evaluation of L2 Korean proficiency produced by learners with various levels and nationalities. Our experiment results show that proficiency ratings by native speakers significantly correlate not only with rate of speech, but also with the segmental accuracies. The influence of segmental errors has the highest correlation with the proficiency of L2 Korean speech. We further verified this finding within substitution, deletion, insertion error rates. Although phonological accuracy was expected to be highly correlated with the proficiency score, it was the least influential measure. Another new finding in this study is that the role of pitch and accent has been underemphasized so far in the non-native Korean speech perception studies. This work will serve as the groundwork for the development of automatic assessment module in Korean CAPT system.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.149-163
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• 2002

Focal parts of utterance can be determined by new/contrastive information, a focus particle, a contrastive topic marker, or a nominative case marker in Busan Korean. Among these factors, new or contrastive information is the most important element in determining the intonational nucleus of an utterance. However, unlike Seoul Korean, when a focus particle, a topic marker, or a case marker contributes to the placement of the most prominent peak of an utterance, the peak is on the noun to which they are attached. Moreover, the case marker-ga shows more prominent pitch on the preceding noun than the noun followed by the topic marker-nun when-ga is used as emphatic or contrastive. This is one of the major problems for Busan Korean users in commanding natural and fluent Seoul Korean intonation even if they use standard written form of Seoul Korean in their speech.