• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.7-14
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• 2018

The paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of voicing in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2,342 different sentences, and comprises more than five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender, voicing, and place of articulation as independent factors. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that acoustic signals interact in a complex way to signal the gender, place, and voicing of fricatives. Classification experiments using a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) revealed that 78.7% of fricatives are correctly classified. The majority of errors stem from the misclassification of /θ/ as [f] and /ʒ/ as [z]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 78.7%. Most errors result from the classification of female speakers as male speakers. The paper contributes to the understanding of the effects of voicing and gender on fricatives in a large-scale speech corpus.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.51-70
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• 2009

This study focuses on the asymmetrical realization of homorganic nasal-obstruent stop clusters in English when they occur word medially and word finally. This uneven realization of NC clusters is not only controlled by the place of articulation of the cluster constituents but also by the agreement of voicing feature specifications of the cluster elements. We propose context-sensitive constraints, which are more specified versions than *NC (Pater, 1996, 1999, 2004). The result of the study reveals that homorganic NC clusters consisting of coronal place feature are faithfully realized word finally while they are constrained word medially. The deletion of voiceless post-nasal coronal stop should be considered a new language specific strategy to avoid *NC.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.107-121
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• 2000

In this paper, I investigate the acoustic correlates of a vowel's coarticulatory dynamics manifested in preceding and following consonants along two dimensions of the vocal tract: place of articulation and degree of constriction. Two dimensional coarticulation is not necessarily executed either concomitantly or proportionally, and the modification induced by coarticulation with a vowel in CVC structures is merely restricted to the CV portion; that is, the prevocalic consonant is modified solely in its constriction location. This is consistent with the observation that C-to-V place assimilation does not accompany consonant lenition in phonology, which suggests that phonetic nature is effectively reflected in phonological patterns.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권2호
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• pp.41-49
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, syllabic stress information, the location in a word, location in utterance, speech rate of three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants. The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The result indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants.

• 한국콘텐츠학회논문지
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• 제15권8호
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• pp.424-433
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• 2015

본 연구는 조음거리와 발성유형에 따른 영유아의 자음 음운인식 능력에서의 차이를 규명해 보기 위해 한국어 장애음을 대상으로 반복측정 실험설계를 통해 진행되었다. 집단 내 변인인으로서의 조음거리는, 연음과 경음의 자질을 갖는 1음절 초성의 조음 위치에 의해 구분된 조음점 간 거리로서 음운인식 수행도의 차이에 구조적으로 영향을 미치는지를 확인하고자 하였다. 실험결과, 음운차이 인식 수행력에서 조음거리를 변인으로 한 주효과를 확인하였는데, 그 거리가 멀어질수록 수행력이 점강하였다. 이는 동일위치나 근접거리 조음점 조건의 음운인식 수행도가 조음점 간 거리가 먼 조건에서의 수행도에 비해 민감한 반응을 보임으로써, 당해 조음점에 인접한 말소리들을 인식하는 능력이 우선 발달하는 결과를 시사함은 물론, 조음 유사성이 조기 음운습득에 영향을 끼칠 수 있음을 말해준다 하겠다. 아울러 집단 간 요인에서도 연령효과를 확인할 수 있었는데, 연령이 높을수록 조음거리에 영향을 덜 받는 경향이 있었으며 인접거리 조건에서는 남아대비, 여아의 수행력이 우수함을 알 수 있었다. 발성유형 중 긴장성을 피험자 내 변인으로 설정한 조건의 주효과는 나타나지 않았지만 연령의 주효과 및 성별과의 상호작용을 통해 연령상승에 따른 긴장음의 인식률의 유의한 상승을 관찰하였고, 긴장음 내에서는 여아의 변별력이 더 우수함을 확인할 수 있었다.

• 대한통합의학회지
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.291-305
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• 2020

Purpose : The duration of speech segments reflects children's speech motor development. The purpose of this study was to determine whether segmental sound and word duration varies by age among preschool children. Methods : A total of 60 children aged 4~5 years participated in this study. Participants took the picture-naming test to produce single-word speech data. The duration of the consonant at the initial position of the word and the final position of the word, the voice onset time of plosive, the duration of the vowel following the initial consonant, and the duration of the word were measured. Results : As age increased, the duration of the initial consonant, the duration of the word, and the voice onset time decreased significantly. The main effects of age, manner of articulation, and place of articulation on the duration of the initial consonant were significant. The duration of consonants in the nasal sound and plosives and the duration of bilabial and alveolar sound differed significantly between groups. The main effects of age and vocal type on voice onset time were significant. The main effect of age on the duration of the consonant in the final position of word and on the duration of the vowel were not statistically significant. Conclusion : The results of this study showed that the duration of segmental sound and the word were associated with speech development between 4 and 5 years old. Accordingly, duration of the segmental sound and the word may serve as an acoustic cue as they reflect speech development and speech motor control maturity.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.51-67
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• 2006

This study examined the acoustic properties of initial stops in Korean, produced by Korean native speakers and English Korean learners. The productions of Korean native speakers were compared with those of beginners and advanced learners of Korean. Fundamental frequency(F0) and Voice Onset Time(VOT) were measured in condition of one or two syllable words, containing word-initial lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops. English Korean Learners showed that they produced stops with relatively shorter VOT and lower F0, compared with those of Korean native speakers. In case of the manner of articulation, English Korean learners have production difficulties in order of lenis stops, aspirated stops, and fortis stops. In regard to the place of articulation, English Korean learners showed production troubles in order of labial stops, velar stops, and alveolar stops. In the experiment of perception, it is hard for English Korean learners to distinguish stops of lenis and aspirated. Therefore, the results of production experiment were almost consistent with those of the perception experiment. Finally, according to both groups of proficiency, the results demonstrated that the advanced learners produce or perceive Korean stops easier than the beginners.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권2호
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• pp.155-180
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to acoustically analyze eight Korean monophthongs produced by 29 Taiwanese learners of Korean and 20 native speakers of Korean, and to compare their pronunciations in experimental phonetics. Using the first formants(F1) and the second formants(F2) of Korean monophthongs, we can estimate the tongue positions of vowels produced by participants. In order to compare them directly, we had to normalize participants' F1 and F2. The result shows that almost all vowels of the Taiwanese learners are significantly different from those of Korean native speakers in their F1 and F2 values without the /ㅏ/ vowel. In particular, when pronouncing Korean monophthongs, the Korean learners of Taiwan had a narrow area of the place of articulation compared to the Korean native speakers except for back vowels. Finally, it shows that the Korean learners in Taiwan had a narrower range of articulation and articulated the vowels towards the back a little comparing to the Korean native speakers.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.41-58
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• 2003

Coronal/non-coronal asymmetry refers to the typological trend wherein coronals rather than non-coronals are more likely targets in place assimilation. Although the phenomenon has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of unmarkedness in formalistic approaches to sound patterns, the examination of rules and representations cannot answer why there should be such a process in the first place. Furthermore, the motivation of coronal/non-coronal asymmetry has remained controversial to date even in the field of phonetics. The present study investigated the listeners' perception of coronal and non-coronal stops in the context of $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ after critically reviewing the three types of phonetic accounts for coronal/non-coronal asymmetry, i.e., articulatory, perceptual, and gestural overlap accounts. An experiment was conducted to test whether the phenomenon in question may occur, given the listeners' lack of perceptual ability to identify weaker place cues in VC transitions as argued by Ohala (1990), i.e., coronals have weak place cues that cause listeners' misperception. 5pliced nonsense $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ utterances were given to 20 native speakers of English and Korean. Data analysis showed that majority of the subjects reported $C_{2}\;as\;C_{1}$. More importantly, the place of articulation of C1 did not affect the listeners' identification. Compared to non-coronals, coronals did not show a significantly lower rate of correct identifications. This study challenges the view that coronal/non-coronal asymmetry is attributable to the weak place cues of coronals, providing evidence that CV cues are more perceptually salient than VC cues. While perceptual saliency account may explain the frequent occurrence of regressive assimilation across languages, it cannot be extended to coronal/non-coronal asymmetry.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권4호
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• pp.109-118
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• 2010

Using a speeded classification task (Garner, 1978), we investigated the perceptual interaction of distinctive features in Korean consonants. The main questions of this study were whether listeners can perceptually identify the component features that make up complex consonant sounds, whether these features are processed independently or dependently and whether there is a systematic hierarchy in their dependency. Participants were asked to classify syllables based on their difference in distinctive features in the task. Reaction times for this task were also gathered. For example, participants classified spoken syllables /ta/ and /pa/ as one category and /$t^ha$/ and /$p^ha$/ as another in terms of aspiration condition. In terms of articulation, participants classified /ta/ and /$t^ha$/ as one category and /pa/ and /$p^ha$/ as another. We assumed that the difference between their RTs represents their interdependency. We compared the laryngeal features and place features (Experiment 1), resonance features and place features (Experiment 2), and manner features and laryngeal features (Experiment 3). The results showed that distinctive features were not perceived in a completely independent way, but they had an asymmetric and hierarchical interdependency. The laryngeal features were found to be more independent compared to place and manner features. We discuss these results in the context of perceptual basis in phonology.