• MALSORI
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• no.21_24
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• pp.3-24
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• 1992

This study was designed to investigate the changes of phonological processes in normal Korean children aged from 2- to 6-years. Forty eight children who lived in Seoul or Kyung-Ki do were tested with a picture articulation test and their articulation errors including omissions, additions and substitutions were coded into phonological processes. Those phonological processes were discussed in several ways: syllable structure, place, manner, assimilation, tenseness, and aspiration of sounds. Data were analyzed by two ways: (1) number of subjects who showed each process and (2) percentage of occurrence of each process. Analyses in omission-addition processes demonstrated that postvocalic omission occurred most frequently, followed by velar-, alveolar-, and glottal omission. Analyses in substitution processes showed that fronting (palatal and velar), backing (alveolar), and alveolization occurred most frequently in terms of the place of sounds. In terms of assimilation, alveolar-, stopping, and aspiration assimilation occurred frequently. Analyses by the tenseness and aspiration showed similar occurrences among the 4 processes, with slightly higher occurrences in tensing and aspiration than lanxing and deaspiration. All of the processes decreased by age. The numbers of the processes showed by more than half of the children or exceeded 10％ of occurrence were 20 in 2-years of age, 10 in 3-years of age, 1 in 4-years of age, and none in ages of 5 and 6.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.73-81
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• 2013

Coda in the word-medial position plays an important role in acquisition of our speech. Accuracy of the coda in the word-medial position is important as a diagnostic indicator since it has a close relationship with degrees of disorder. Coda in the word-medial position only appears in condition of connecting two vowels and the sequence causes diverse phonological processes to happen. The coda in the word-medial position differs in production difficulty by the initial sound in the sequence. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the tendency of producing a coda in the word-medial position with consideration of an optional phonological process in spontaneous speech of three and four year old children. Data was collected from 24 children (four groups by age) without speech and language delay. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Sonorant coda in the word-medial position showed a high production frequency in manner of articulation, and alveolar in place of articulation. When the coda in the word-medial position is connected to an initial sound in the same place of articulation, it revealed a high frequency of production. 2) The coda in word-medial position followed by an initial alveolar stop revealed a high error rate. Error patterns showed regressive assimilation predominantly. 3) The order of difficulty that Children had producing codas in the word-medial position was $/k^{\neg}/$, $/p^{\neg}/$, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/. Those results suggest that in targeting coda in the word-medial position for evaluation, we should consider optional phonological process as well as the following initial sound. Further studies would be necessary which codas in the word-medial position will be used for therapeutic purpose.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.81-85
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• 2002

We present a statistical analysis of Korean phonological variations using automatic generation of phonetic transcription. We have constructed the automatic generation system of Korean pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes. These rules are derived from knowledge-based morphophonological analysis and government standard pronunciation rules. This system is optimized for continuous speech recognition by generating phonetic transcriptions for training and constructing a pronunciation dictionary for recognition. In this paper, we describe Korean phonological variations by analyzing the statistics of phonemic change rule applications for the 60,000 sentences in the Samsung PBS(Phonetic Balanced Sentence) Speech DB. Our results show that the most frequently happening obligatory phonemic variations are in the order of liaison, tensification, aspirationalization, and nasalization of obstruent, and that the most frequently happening optional phonemic variations are in the order of initial consonant h-deletion, insertion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants, and deletion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants. These statistics can be used for improving the performance of speech recognition systems.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.109-121
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• 2013

This study examined several kinematic properties of the primary articulator (the tongue dorsum) and the supplementary articulator (the jaw) in the articulation of the voiceless velar stop (/k/) within nonassimilating contexts. We examined in particular the spatiotemporal properties (constriction duration and constriction maxima) from the constriction onset to the constriction offset by analyzing a velar (/k/) followed by the coronal fricative (/s/), the coronal stop (/t/), and the labial (/p/) in across-word boundary conditions (/k#s/, /k#t/, and /k#p/). Along with these measurements, we investigated intergestural temporal coordination between C1 and C2 and the jaw articulator in relation to its coordination with the articulation of consonant sequences. The articulatory movement data was collected by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA). Four native speakers of Seoul Korean participated in the laboratory experiment. The results showed several characteristics. First, a velar (/k/) in C1 was not categorically reduced. Constriction duration and constriction degree of the velar (/k/) were similar within nonassimilating contexts (/k#s/=/k#t/=/k#p/). This might mean that spatiotemporal attributes during constriction duration were stable and consistent across different contexts, which might be subsequently associated with the nontarget status of the velar in place assimilation. Second, the gestural overlap could be represented as the order of /k#s/ (less) < /k#p/ (intermediate) < /k#t/ (more) as we measured the onset-to-onset lag (a longer lag indicated shorter gestural overlap.). This indicates a gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts may not be constrained by any of the several constraints including the perceptual recoverability constraint (e.g., more overlap in Front-to-Back sequences compared to the reverse order (Back-to-Front) since perceptual cues in C1 can be recovered anytime during C2 articulation), the low-level speech motor constraint (e.g., more overlap in lingual-nonlingual sequences as compared to the lingual-lingual sequences), or phonological contexts effects (e.g., similarity in gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts). As one possible account for more overlap in /k#t/ sequences as compared to /k#p/, we suspect speakers' knowledge may be receptive to extreme encroachment on C1 by the gestural overlap of the coronal in C2 since it does not obscure the perceptual cue of C1 as much as the labial in C2. Third, actual jaw position during C2 was higher in coronals (/s/, /t/) than in the labial (/p/). However, within the coronals, there was no manner-dependent jaw height difference in C2 (/s/=/t/). Vertical jaw position of C1 and C2 was seen as inter-dependent as higher jaw position in C1 was closely associated with C2. Lastly, a greater gap in jaw height was associated with longer intergestural timing (e.g., less overlap), but was confined to the cluster type (/kp/) with the lingual-nonlingual sequence. This study showed that Korean jaw articulation was independent from coordinating primary articulators in gestural overlap in some cluster types (/k#s/, /k#t/) while not in others (e.g., /k#p/). Overall, the results coherently indicate the velar stop (/k/) in C1 was robust in articulation, which may have subsequently contributed to the nontarget status of the velar (/k/) in place assimilation processes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.49-61
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• 2016

The present study investigates the perception of Korean phonation types by native speakers of Aymara. Perception tests were conducted on two sets of Korean speech materials to determine correspondence between Korean and Aymara 3-way contrasts and to find out which of the consonantal and vocalic part of the syllable is more influential in the perception of Korean phonation types. A set of manipulated stimuli, as well as a set of 12 spontaneous words, were prepared for the tests. The first syllable of the 12 Korean bisyllabic words of 3 series of phonation types(Lenis, Aspirated, and Fortis) in 4 places of articulation were split into consonantal and vocalic parts. And then the two parts were combined to form 9 tokens of CV sequences respectively for each place of articulation. Native speakers of Aymara were forced to match Korean stimuli with one of the 15 Aymara words which represent 3 series of consonant types(plain, aspirated, and ejective) in 5 places of articulation(bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar, and uvular). Results showed that the consonantal part is more influential than the vocalic part to the Aymara subjects' perception of Korean phonation types when the consonantal part is Aspirated in its phonation type, but the vocalic part is more influential than the consonantal part when the consonantal part is Lenis or Fortis in its phonation type. Response analysis showed that Aymara subjects tend to match Korean stops to Aymara ones in such a way that Lenis corresponds to aspirated, Aspirated to aspirated, and Fortis to plain.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.217-232
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• 2000

In this study, I investigate the role of post-consonantal fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue for automatic distinction of types of Korean stops and affricates. Rather than examining data obtained by restricting contexts to a minimum to prevent the interference of irrelevant factors, a relatively natural speaker independent speech corpus is analysed. Automatic and statistical approaches are adopted to annotate data, to minimise speaker variability, and to evaluate the results. In spite of possible loss of information during those automatic analyses, statistics obtained suggest that vowel F0 is a useful cue for distinguishing manners of articulation of Korean non-continuant obstruents having the same place of articulation, especially of lax and aspirated stops and affricates. On the basis of the statistics, automatic classification is attempted over the relevant consonants in a specific context where the micro-prosodic effects appear to be maximised. The results confirm the usefulness of this effect in application for Korean phone recognition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.27-39
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• 2003

This study attempts to verify the reliability of automatically generated segment labels as compared to those obtained by conventional labelling by hand. First of all, an autolabeller is constructed using the standard HMM speech recognition technique. For evaluation, we compare the automatically generated labels with manually annotated labels for the same speech data. The comparison is performed by calculating the temporal difference between an autolabel boundary and its corresponding hand label boundary. When the mismatched duration between two labels falls within 10 msec, we consider the autolabel as correct. The results suggest that overall 78% of autolabels are correctly obtained. It is found that the boundary of obstruents is better aligned than that of sonorants and vowels. In case of stop sound classes, strong stops in manner-of-articulation wise and velar stops in place-of-articulation wise show better performance in boundary alignment. The result suggests that more phone-specific consideration is necessary to improve autosegmentation performance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of the English voiceless stops [p, t, k] found in the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1]. Three young female speakers were chosen for this study and their VOT values were semi-automatically extracted along with other factors. The factors used for the analysis were place of articulation, location in word, syllabic stress, content word or not, word frequency calculated from the corpus, and the speech rate expressed in syllables per second. Results showed that, for the three places of articulation of each speaker, all the factors had a statistically significant effect on the VOT values. This paper has significance in that the materials used for the analysis were from a corpus of spontaneous natural English speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2022

This study aimed to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of plosives in the VCV syllables by the place of articulation and phonation type spoken by children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) in comparison with children with typical hearing (TH). In all, 15 children with bilateral CIs and 15 children with TH participated in this study, aged between 5 to 10 years. All children produced 9 VCV syllables and their VOT were analyzed by the Praat software. There was no significant difference in mean VOT between children with bilateral CIs and children with TH. However, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the place of articulation, such that the VOT for velars were longer than those for bilabials and alveolars. Additionally, there was a significant difference in mean VOT by the phonation type, such that the VOT of aspirated consonants were longer than those of lenis and fortis consonants. The results of this study suggest that children with bilateral CIs can distinguish the acoustic properties of plosive consonants and control the speech timing between the structures of the larynx and the oral cavity at a similar level as children with TH.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to examine the voice onset times (VOTs) of the three types of plosives from the Seoul Corpus male speakers in their twenties. In addition, the factors known to affect VOTs were analyzed, including the place and manner of articulation, speakers, location in words, type of following vowels and speech rates calculated from the three consecutive words. Much of the findings agreed with those from earlier studies on Korean and other languages and new discoveries were made.