• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.207-214
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• 2001

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.21-31
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• 2001

The effects of focus on prosodic phrasing, F0, and duration are investigated paying attention not only to the target of focus but also to the constituents that are outside the domain of focus in Korean. We find that the constituents preceding and following the focused word tend to be dephrased. Dephrasing does not always cover up to the Intonation Phrase boundary contrary to Jun's (1993) claim. Dephrasing caused by focus determines F0 and durational difference between focused and neutral sentences. Syntactic constituency is also shown to playa role in prosodic phrasing.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.23-42
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• 1997

This study has two main purposes. One is to explore the relationship between syntactic aspects and prosodic aspects in Standard Korean. The other is to provide speech synthesis with the information about such relationship. This study will focus on the prosodic behavior of subjective particles'-i/-ga', '-eun/-neun'. The prosodic features of subjective particles are described respectively. How do the elements such as the position of particles in a sentence, the sentence constituents, the length of the sentence and the rhythmic boundaries influence on the prosodic behavior are also investigated.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.71-74
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to observe how Korean listeners detect a target phoneme with 'Focus' represented by prosodic prominence and question-induced semantic emphasis. According to the automated phoneme detection task using E-Prime, Korean listeners detected phoneme targets more rapidly when the target-bearing words were in prominence position and in question-induced position. However, when phoneme targets were in prominence position, response time was much faster than in question-induced position. The results suggest that the prosodic prominence which is explicit method of focus representation be more effective than question-inducing, implicit method of it, in phoneme detecting.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.37-45
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• 2014

Korean wh-questions and yes-no questions have morphologically the same structure. In speech, however, two types of questions are distinguished by prosodic difference. In this study, we examined if Korean native speakers can distinguish wh-question and yes-no questions produced by Chinese Korean leaners based on the prosodic information contained in the sentences. For this purpose, we performed perception analysis, and 15 Korean native speakers participated in the perception test. The results show that two types of interrogative sentences produced by Chinese Korean leaners were not distinguished by constant pitch contours. These results reveal that Chinese Korean leaners cannot match prosodic meaning and prosodic form. The most saliant prosodic feature used perceptually by native speakers to discriminate two types of interrogative sentences is pitch difference between the F0 pick of wh-word and boundary tone.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.15-21
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• 2019

Korean and English are both known to show on-focus pitch range expansion and post-focus pitch range compression (PFC). But it is not clear if this prosodic similarity would make it easy for Korean speakers to learn English focus prosody. In the present study, we conducted a production experiment using phone number strings to examine whether Korean learners of English produce a native-like focus prosody. Korean learners of English were classified into three groups (advanced, intermediate and low) according to their English proficiency and were compared to native speakers. Results show that intermediate and low groups of speakers did not increase duration, intensity, and pitch in the focus positions, nor did they compress those cues in the post-focus positions. Advanced speakers noticeably increased the acoustic cues in the focus positions to a similar extent as native speakers. However, their performance in post-focus positions was quite far from that of native speakers in terms of pitch and excursion size. These results thus demonstrate a lack of positive transfer of focus prosody from Korean to English in L2 learning, and learners may have to relearn it from scratch, which is consistent with a previous finding. More importantly, the results provide further support for the view proposed in other works that acoustic properties of PFC were not easily transferred from one language to another.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.203-217
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• 2000

In spoken language, the characteristics of prosodic realization are related to the meaning of utterance. The pitch pattern of an interrogative sentence which differs from that of declarative sentences can be considered in this respect.. If we consider the question-answer pair, we can find that the most important variation comes from the intended meaning of asking. In this paper, we experiment with four kinds of interrogative sentences and show that the difference in pitch patterns of interrogative sentences can be explained in relation to the focus phenomena that is, the differences of the boundary tones in interrogative sentences are due to the differences in the prosodic domain of focus. For a relevant explanation with the focus phenomena, we divided focus into the categories: emphatic focus, which plays a role in delivering the speaker's intended meaning for the sentence interpretation, and informational focus, delivers the central intended meaning of the utterance. The results can be summarized in three points. First, High boundary tone delivers the meaning of asking. Second, the realization of different boundary tones that are found in wh-question and alternative question are just phonetic variations caused by focusing. Third, the high rise boundary tone in echo questions is related to the meaning of surprise or incredulity, and this relation is a consensus of existing opinion, that is, the speaker's attitude of surprise can raise the pitch range. From these results we can distinguish between boundary type and phonetic variation, and we can also give appropriate meaning to the different boundary tones in interrogative sentences that have been regarded as merely a part of sentence type.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.131-145
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• 2004

The informative or important entities in utterances are focused and the focused items are usually accompanied by changes in phonetic manifestation. Phonetic realizations triggered by focus include changes of tonal contours as well as segmental strengthening. Focus in Korean is characterized by new phrase initiation, dephrasing, and initial tone contour with an enlarged pitch range in addition to segmentally lengthened initial segment. Focusing on the prosodic cues which play an important role in delivering the speakers' intention, this study aims to find out what intonational characteristics of Korean focus are realized by English learners of Korean. The English learners are divided into two groups according to their fluency in Korean, and the differences in focus realization between each group are discussed. Furthermore, the phonological and phonetic realizations of focus by English learners of Korean are compared to those by Korean native speakers. The results of this study yields two suggestions for Korean intonation education of L2 learners. First, the comparison between the two speaker groups can give better understanding in how and why the Korean intonation of English speakers is different from that of Koreans. Second, each phonological and phonetic characteristic of focus realization can weigh differently and its realization provides a criterion for evaluation of L2 Korean proficiency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2010

The current study exploresacoustic variation induced by prosodic contexts in different speech styles,with a focus on motherese or child-directed speech (CDS). The patterns of variation in the acoustic expression of voicing contrast in English stops, and the role of prosodic factors in governing such variation are investigated in CDS. Prosody-induced acoustic strengthening reported from adult-directed speech (ADS)is examined in the speech data directed to infants at the one-word stage. The target consonants are collected from Utterance-initial and -medial positions, with or without focal accent. Overall, CDS shows that the prosodic prominence of constituents under focal accent conditions variesin the acoustic correlates of the stop laryngeal contrasts. The initial position is not found with enhanced acoustic values in the current study, which is similar to the finding from ADS (Choi, 2006 Cole et al, 2007). Individualized statistical results, however, indicate that the effect of accent on acoustic measures is not very robust, compared to the effect of accent in ADS. Enhanced distinctiveness under focal accent is observed from the limited subjects' acoustic measures in CDS. The results indicate dissimilar strategies to mark prosodic structures in different speech styles as well as the consistent prosodic effect across speech styles. The stylistic variation is discussed in relation to the listener under linguistic development in CDS.