• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.23-31
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• 2011

This paper examines the production patterns of the acquisition of coda consonants in monosyllabic words in English-speaking children with cochlear implants. The data come from the transcribed speech of children with cochlear implants. This study poses three questions. First, do children with cochlear implants acquire onset consonants earlier than codas? Second, do children's productions have a bimoraic-sized constraint that maintains binary feet? Third, what patterns emerge from production of coda consonants? The results revealed that children with cochlear implants acquire onset consonants earlier than codas. With regard to the bimoraic-sized constraints, the productions of vowel type (i.e., monomoraic and bimoraic) were more accurate for monomoraic vowels than bimoraic ones for some children with cochlear implants, although accuracy in vowel productions showed high proportion regardless of vowel types. The variations of coda production exhibited individual differences. Some children produced less sonorant consonants with high frequency and others produced more sonorant ones. The results of this study were similar to those pertaining to children with normal hearing. In the process of coda consonant acquisition, the error patterns of prosody-sensitive production may be regarded as articulatory challenges to produce higher-level prosodic structures.

• MALSORI
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• no.39
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• pp.15-24
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• 2000

This study aims to reexamine Korean Lenis Stop Voicing (henceforth, LSV) and to specify its phonetic conditions in phonetic terms. LSV optionally occurs within certain prosodic domains. They are called 'Malthomak'(Lee, 1996),'phonological phrase'(Kang, 1992), or 'accentual phrase'(Jun, 1993). On the basis of Jun's phrasing, this study focuses on the more specific phonetic conditions of LSV in the accentual phrase medial position, sub-classifying voicing as complete and partial. The results shows that whether the stops become completely voiced or partially voiced was determined by the various phonetic environments, such as adjacent segments and following intonational phrase boundaries. It is shown that the conditions of LSV should be described in terms of more detailed phonetic environments and that they could be used in predicting the class of voicing.

• Language and Information
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2010

This study investigates the semantic and prosodic properties of the so-called contrastive topic. We posit two informational primitives, namely, topical feature [+-T] and focal feature [+-F], from which four different informational categories, i.e., [+T, +F], [+T, -F], [-T, +F], and [-T, -F], are yielded. It is proposed that the informational category of contrastive topic has focal property [+F] as well as topical property [+T]. Based on the semantic approach that regards the function of [+F] as identificational predication and that of [+T] as forming a semantic conditional clause, it is shown that the semantic function of contrastive topic, which is specified as [+T, +F], is the combination of these two functions, i.e., identificational predication in a semantic conditional clause. This is supported by a scrutinized exploration of the prosodic pattern of English contrastive topic.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.67-70
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• 2006

Prosody can be used to resolve syntactic ambiguity of a sentence. English relative clause construction with complex NP(the N1, N2, and RC sequence) has syntactic ambiguity and the clause can be interpreted as modyfying N1(high attachment) or N2(low attachment), Speakers and listeners can disambiguate those sentences based on the prosody. In this paper, we investigate the Korean English learners production on the prosodic structure of English relative clause construction. The production experiment shows that the beginner learners use the phrasing frequently and the advanced learners depend on both the phrasing and the accent. One of the characteristic of the Korean English learners' intonation is that the Korean accentual phrase tone pattern LHa is transferred to their production.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.55-65
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• 2012

In this study, the prosodic disambiguation of the syntactic attachment differences was investigated in relation to the effect of lexical bias. Speech materials were composed of N1-conj-N2-PP phrases such as "walkers and runners with dogs." The results show that the use of durational pattern is dominant over the pitch pattern to differentiate the attachment differences. The characteristic pitch contour was the rise and fall over N1 and N2 in the high attachment. The pitch contour in the low attachment was the rise and fall over N2 and N3 although the frequency of such patterns was lower for the low attachment case. For the durational pattern, the lengthening in the N2 region plays a significant role in the disambiguation of the syntactic attachments. The interaction between the lexical bias and the syntactic attachment was not statistically significant in the duration data.

• MALSORI
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• no.31_32
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• pp.195-205
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• 1996

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic structure of Korean related to the syllable duration varying with its positional difference. An attempt is made in this study to analyze and describe the concrete correlation between the syllable lengthening and its position in the utterance at the initial and final positions. Using the syllable [na] at the final and initial position of a prosodic phrase in the Korean version of 'the North Wind and the Sun', it has found that the ratio of phrase final versus phrase initial syllable lengthening was approximately 1.8:1 for 4 subjects taking part in the test. In the case of nonsense data, we found that the ratio was approximately 1.6:1 for 2 out of 3 subjects. The results of this study might indicate that Korean tends to have a high rate of final lengthening. We can tentatively classify it, therefore, as a stress-timed language. Still, there is no denying that further studies should be done before we can be absolutely certain about the classification of languages along the dichotomy scale.

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.51-72
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to design Speech Database for Korean pronunciation education. For this purpose, I investigated types of speech errors of Korean-learners, made texts for recording, which involves all types of speech errors, and showed how to gather speech data and how to tag their informations. It's natural that speech data should include Korean-learners' speech and Korean people's speech, because Speech DB that I try to develop is for teaching Korean pronunciation to foreigners. So this DB should have informations about speakers and phonetic informations, which are about phonetic value of segments and intonation of sentences. The intonation of sentence varies with the type of sentence, the structure of prosodic units, the length of a prosodic unit and so on. For this reason, Speech DB must involve tags about these informations.

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.15-29
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• 2003

When intonation in French is analysed in terms of a multi-dimentional and hierarchical structure, each of the prosodic units such as accent phrases(having different combinations of the basic tonemes L and H), pre-sentencial and post-sentencial long pauses, intonation phrases(containing boundary intonation), as well as intermediate phrases can be considered being realized on a separate tier. Unlike on the tiers where accent phrases and intonation phrases occur, an intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is realised on that of intermediate phrases. This intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is one of the significant factors that lead a basic French metrical rhythm. This paper first shows the types of combinations of the basic tonemes L and H found in French accent phrases. Secondly, this paper examines the roles intermediate phrases and plateaus play in French. Finally, this paper argues that intermediate phrases are the metrical units actually adopted as real utterance units in French.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.7-23
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• 2008

This paper investigates tonal patterns of the prosodic constituents of an AP and a PWD in Korean and their relation with the morphological/syntactic structure. Specifically, this paper asks the following questions: First, if there are more than one PWD in an AP, how is each PWD specified in terms of tones? Secondly, in case that there is only one PWD in an AP that consists of several morphemes, is there any preference of the association between tones and the morphemes that constitute that PWD? Thirdly, if an AP dominates a PWD and if a PWD contains at least one morpheme of the lexical category, it follows that an AP should contain at least one morpheme of the lexical category. Can this be verified with the experimental data? In order to answer these questions, Experiment I and II were conducted with the target material consisting of a stem and suffixes that varied in length. The results of this preliminary test show that as the number of syllables in the target material increases, the more number of an AP tonal pattern occurs in it and as a result, in some cases, an AP consisting of suffixes only may occur.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.7-19
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• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.