• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.159-172
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• 1997

This paper proposes a prosodic representation system of the Kyungnam dialect of Korean, based on the ToBI system. In this system, diverse intonation patterns are transcribed on the four parallel tiers: a tone tier, a break index tier, an orthographic tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones marked with diacritics in order to represent various pitch events. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, in order to represent degrees of connectiveness in speech by associating each inter-word position with a break index. In this, each break index represents a boundary of some kind of constituent. This system can contribute not only to a more detailed theory connecting prosody, syntax, and intonation, but also to current text-to-speech synthesis approaches, speech recognition, and other quantitative computational modellings.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.87-92
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• 1998

In general, the synthesis unit database was constructed by recording isolated word. In that case, each boundary of word has typical prosodic pattern like a falling intonation or preboundary lengthening. To get natural synthetic speech using these kinds of database, we must artificially distort original speech. However, that artificial process rather resulted in unnatural, unintelligible synthetic speech due to the excessive prosodic modification on speech signal. To overcome these problems, we gathered thousands of sentences for synthesis database. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we trained speech recognizer with the recorded speech, and then segmented phone boundaries automatically. In addition, we used laryngo graph for the epoch detection. From the automatically generated synthesis database, we chose the best phone and directly concatenated it without any prosody processing. To select the best phone among multiple phone candidates, we used prosodic information such as break strength of word boundaries, phonetic contexts, cepstrum, pitch, energy, and phone duration. From the pilot test, we obtained some positive results.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.51-61
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• 2004

This study compared pitch range, total duration of utterances, pause, boundary tones and mean duration of intonation final syllables of 4 sentences produced by 5 transgenders (male to female) to those of twenty normal adults. Voice analysis was performed by Praat (version 4.049). The results showed that there were differences in pitch range, total duration of utterances, pause, boundary tones and mean duration of intonation final syllables among the 3 groups(transgenders, normal males and normal females).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.39-49
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean intonation phrase (IP) boundary tones in the reading of a Korean text. Korean IP boundary tones play various roles in speech communication. They indicate prosodic constituents' boundaries while simultaneously performing pragmatic and grammatical functions. In order to express and understand Korean utterances correctly, it is necessary to understand the Korean IP boundary tone system. To investigate the IP boundary tone produced by Chinese speakers, we have specifically examined the type of boundary tones, the degree of internal pitch modulation of boundary tones, and the pitch difference between penultimate syllables and boundary tones. The results of each analysis were compared to the IP boundary tones produced by Korean native speakers. The results show that IP boundary tones were realized higher than penultimate syllables.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.7
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• pp.461-471
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic data for development of Korean teaching programs for immigrant women from multicultural families through the acoustic analysis of their prosodic phrasing and intonation pattern. The results showed that immigrant women showed some differences in most of the prosodic characteristics from a Korean women's group: Immigrant women realized the first word of a sentence in an intonational phrase while Korean women did in an accentual phrase. They also haven't yet correctly learned the tone type of the first of an accentual phrase which differs depending on the type of its first segment yet. As a result, they showed many diverse intonation patterns compared to Korean women. Furthermore, the immigrant women's groups showed some differences between them in a few prosodic characteristics. Philippine women, whose residence duration in Korea is relatively longer than that of Vietnamese women, were more similar to Korean women: Vietnamese women read a sentence with a larger number of intonational phrases than Philippine women did. And they realized sentence-final boundary tone of a yes-no question not only in 'H%' but also in 'HL%' while, like Korean women, Philippine women did only in 'H%'.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.219-234
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• 2000

The study of boundary tones in connected speech or dialogues is one of the most underdeveloped areas of Korean prosody. This. paper concerns the boundary tones of intonational phrase-final morphemes which are shown in the speech corpus of dialogues. Results of phonetic analysis show that different kinds of boundary tones are realized, depending on the positions of the intonational phrase-final morphemes in the sentences.. This study has also shown that boundary tone patterning is somewhat related to the sentence structure, and for better speech recognition and speech synthesis, it presents a simple model of boundary tones based on the fundamental frequency contour. The results of this study will contribute to our understanding of the prosodic pattern of Korean connected speech or dialogues.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.117-126
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• 2005

This study investigates the prosodic characteristics of Korean through the analysis of a large database. One female and one male speakers each read 650 sentences and they were segmentally and prosodically labeled. Statistical analyses were done on these utterances regarding the tonal pattern and the size of prosodic units, correlation between the size of higher level prosodic units and the number of lower level prosodic units. and the slope and F0 of the falling and rising contours of an accentual phrase. The results showed that the duration and the number of words and syllables of a prosodic unit were significantly different not only between speakers but also between its positions within a higher level prosodic nit. The munber of a prosodic unit showed a high correlation with the duration and the number of syllables of its higher level units. The slope of the falling contour within an accentual phrase was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables. The slope was different depending on the first tone type of an accentual phrase, which could be explained with the F0 rising and the different amount of rising between tones when an accentual phrase starts with an H tone. The slope of the falling contour across an accentual phrase boundary showed a constant and larger value compared to one within an accentual phrase. The rising contours in the beginning and end of an accentual Phrase were similar in their slopes but they differ in the amount of F0 change : the former showed a larger amount of change. The slope of the rising contour which forms an accentual Phrase on its own was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.75-84
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• 2012

HMM-based Text-to-Speech systems generally utilize context dependent tri-phone units from a large corpus speech DB to enhance the synthetic speech. To downsize a large corpus speech DB, acoustically similar tri-phone units are clustered based on the decision tree using context dependent information. Context dependent information includes phoneme sequence as well as prosodic information because the naturalness of synthetic speech highly depends on the prosody such as pause, intonation pattern, and segmental duration. However, if the prosodic information was complicated, many context dependent phonemes would have no examples in the training data, and clustering would provide a smoothed feature which will generate unnatural synthetic speech. In this paper, instead of complicate prosodic information we propose a simple three prosodic boundary types and decision tree questions that use rising tone, falling tone, and monotonic tone to improve naturalness. Experimental results show that our proposed method can improve naturalness of a HMM-based Korean TTS and get high MOS in the perception test.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.175-185
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• 2003

Japanese and Turkish are syntactically similar to each other, and there are syntactic structures that become ambiguous in terms of NP's and VP's modified by adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers of Sendai dialect of Japanese and Turkish use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurements were made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese and Turkish to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese and Turkish creates the same ambiguities. In this paper, I look at duration, F0, and pause as observed in their speech and see how each language uses three prosodic elements in disambiguation. The results show that both speakers of Sendai dialect in Japan and those of Ankara dialect in Turky use lengthening of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.137-143
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• 2006

The aim of this paper is to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean distant speech. Four speakers (2 males and 2 females) produced 36 2-syllable words in both distant-talking and normal environments. totaling 288 spoken 2-syllable words. The results showed that ratios of second syllable to first syllable in vowel duration and vowel energy were significantly larger in the distant-talking environment compared to the normal environment and f0 range also bigger in the distant-talking environment. In addition, 'HL%' contour boundary tone in the second syllable and/or 'L+H' contour tone in the first syllable were used in the distant-talking environment.