• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전자공학회 1999년도 하계종합학술대회 논문집
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• pp.699-707
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• 1999

It cannot be argued that speech is the most natural interfacing tool between men and machines. In order to realize acceptable speech interfaces, highly advanced speech recognizers and synthesizers are inevitable. Text-to-Speech(TTS) technology has been attracting a lot of interest among speech engineers because of its own benefits. Namely, the possible application areas of talking computers, emergency alarming systems in speech, speech output devices fur speech-impaired, and so on. Hence, many researchers have made significant progresses in the speech synthesis techniques in the sense of their own languages and as a result, the quality of currently available speech synthesizers are believed to be acceptable to normal users. These are partly why the MPEG group had decided to include the TTS technology as one of its MPEG-4 functionalities. ETRI has made major contributions to the current MPEG-4 TTS among various MPEG-4 functionalities. They are; 1) use of original prosody for synthesized speech output, 2) trick mode functions fer general users without breaking synthesized speech prosody, 3) interoperability with Facial Animation(FA) tools, and 4) dubbing a moving/animated picture with lib-shape pattern information.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2006년도 춘계 학술대회 발표논문집
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권1호
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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.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제40호
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• pp.51-63
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• 2000

There are sentences where sentence stress is imposed on a specific word. These sentences are called 'focused sentences'. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the variation of pitch, duration, amplitude in focused words. It is noted that pitch of a focused word is higher than that of unfocused words irrespective of the accentual pattern, and that contour tones such as HL or LH are realized longer when these tones appear in focused words. Not only the noun but also the following particle like '-boda' is higher when these words are in focus. Hence pitch is proved to be the most salient prosodic feature of the focused sentence.

• 한국언어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국언어정보학회 2007년도 정기학술대회
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• pp.405-414
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• 2007

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a text-to-speech system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to predict symbolic markers from text (i.e., prosodic phrase boundaries, accent, and intonation boundaries), and then using these markers to generate pitch, intensity, and durational patterns for the synthesis module of the system. In this paper, a novel method for annotating the prosodic structure of Thai sentences based on dependency representation of syntax is presented. The goal of the annotation process is to predict from text the rhythm of the input sentence when spoken according to its intended meaning. The encoding of the prosodic structure is established by minimizing speech disrhythmy while maintaining the congruency with syntax. That is, each word in the sentence is assigned a prosodic feature called strength dynamic which is based on the dependency representation of syntax. The strength dynamics assigned are then used to obtain rhythmic groupings in terms of a phonological unit called foot. Finally, the foot structure is used to predict the durational pattern of the input sentence. The aforementioned process has been tested on a set of ambiguous sentences, which represents various structural ambiguities involving five types of compounds in Thai.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.23-42
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• 2006

This paper reports a preliminary result of an acoustic study on the stress and intonational system in Lakhota, a native American language. It investigates how the stress and intonation in Lakhota are phonetically manifested; and how the stress interacts with other prosodic factors. The results preliminarily obtained from one native Lakhota speaker suggest that the primary cue of the stress is relatively high F0 which is often accompanied by higher intensity (for the vowel) and longer VOT (for aspirated stops). The results also indicate that stress is not reliably marked by duration. The stress system, however, interacts with the intonational pattern, such that, for example, intonational peak falls on the stressed syllable with a general pattern of L+H* and that it interacts with the boundary tone L%, resulting in mid tone utterance-finally. This paper can be viewed largely as a qualitative study on an understudied native American language, Lakhota and as forming a basis for further development of its stress and intonation system whose acoustic properties of its prosodic system have not been investigated before.

• 음성과학
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권2호
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• pp.65-71
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to examine the prosodic pattern of the children with high functioning autism spectrum disorder(HFASD) according to sentence type. The participants were 18 children aged from 7 - 9 years; 9 children with HFASD and 9 typical development children(TD) of the same chronological age with HFASD children. Sentence reading tasks were conducted in this study. Seven interrogative sentences and 7 declarative sentences were presented to the participants and were asked to read the sentences three times. Mean values of F0, F0 range, intensity, speech rate and pitch contour were measured for each sentence. The results showed that for F0 range, significant main effect and interaction effect were observed in the subject group and sentence type. There were significant differences in intensity, mean F0, speech rate, pitch contour across sentence types. The results of this study indicated that HFASD showed no difference in intonation across sentence types. Speakers' intention may have a negative effect on pragmatic aspects. These results suggest that the assessment and intervention of prosody be important for HFASD.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국음향학회 1994년도 제11회 음성통신 및 신호처리 워크샵 논문집 (SCAS 11권 1호)
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• pp.91-94
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• 1994

This paper is a study on the design and implementation of the Korean Tet-to-Speech system. In this paper, parameter symthesis method is chosen for speech symthesis method and PARCOR coeffient, one of the LPC analysis, is used as acoustic parameter, We use a diphone as synthesis unit, it include a basic naturalness of human speech. Diphone DB is consisted of 1228 PCM files. LPC synthesis method has defect that decline clearness of synthesis speech, during synthesizing unvoiced sound In this paper, we improve clearness of synthesized speech, using residual signal as ecitation signal of unvoiced sound. Besides, to improve a naturalness, we control the prosody of synthesized speech through controlling the energy and pitch pattern. Synthesis system is implemented at PC/486 and use a 70Hz-4.5KHz band pass filter for speech imput/output, amplifier and TMS320c30 DSP board.