• Title/Summary/Keyword: segmental production

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The relationship between segmental production by Japanese learners of Korean and pronunciation evaluation (일본인 한국어 학습자의 분절음 실현과 발음 평가의 상관성)

  • Hong, Hyejin;Ryu, Hyuksu;Chung, Minhwa
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.6 no.4
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    • pp.101-108
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    • 2014
  • This study investigates the effects of Japanese learners' Korean segmental production on pronunciation evaluation by Korean native raters. Read speech from 24 learners whose native language is Japanese are transcribed at the phonemic level, and confusion matrices are generated based on the phonemic transcriptions. The deviance from the canonical pronunciation found in the learners' speech is analyzed in terms of phoneme substitutions, vowel insertions, and consonant deletions. Each learner's pronunciation is rated impressionistically by 5 Korean native raters. The result shows that the deviance from the canonical pronunciation is strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores. Especially, the rates of phoneme substitutions and vowel insertions which are very strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores.

Acoustic Measurement of English read speech by native and nonnative speakers

  • Choi, Han-Sook
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.3 no.3
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    • pp.77-88
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    • 2011
  • Foreign accent in second language production depends heavily on the transfer of features from the first language. This study examines acoustic variations in segments and suprasegments by native and nonnative speakers of English, searching for patterns of the transfer and plausible indexes of foreign accent in English. The acoustic variations are analyzed with recorded read speech by 20 native English speakers and 50 Korean learners of English, in terms of vowel formants, vowel duration, and syllabic variation induced by stress. The results show that the acoustic measurements of vowel formants and vowel and syllable durations display difference between native speakers and nonnative speakers. The difference is robust in the production of lax vowels, diphthongs, and stressed syllables, namely the English-specific features. L1 transfer on L2 specification is found both at the segmental levels and at the suprasegmental levels. The transfer levels measured as groups and individuals further show a continuum of divergence from the native-like target. Overall, the eldest group, students who are in the graduate schools, shows more native-like patterns, suggesting weaker foreign accent in English, whereas the high school students tend to involve larger deviation from the native speakers' patterns. Individual results show interdependence between segmental transfer and prosodic transfer, and correlation with self-reported proficiency levels. Additionally, experience factors in English such as length of English study and length of residence in English speaking countries are further discussed as factors to explain the acoustic variation.

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Durational Correlates of Prosodic Categories: The Case of Two Korean Voiceless Coronal Fricatives

  • Yoon, Kyu-Chul
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.12 no.1
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    • pp.89-105
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    • 2005
  • This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

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Reduction and Frequency Analyses of Vowels and Consonants in the Buckeye Speech Corpus

  • Yang, Byung-Gon
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.4 no.3
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    • pp.75-83
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    • 2012
  • The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.

Molecular Cloning, Segmental Distribution and Ontogenetic Regulation of Cationic Amino Acid Transporter 2 in Pigs

  • Zou, Shi-geng;Zhi, Ai-min;Zhou, Xiang-yan;Zuo, Jian-jun;Zhang, Yan;Huang, Zhi-yi;Xu, Ping-Wen;Feng, Ding-yuan
    • Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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    • v.22 no.5
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    • pp.712-720
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    • 2009
  • The goal of this study was to elucidate the expression and segmental distribution of the glomerular cationic amino acid metabolism transporter-2 (CAT-2) and thus to improve our understanding of porcine cationic amino acid transporters and amino acid absorption. Porcine CAT-2 was cloned, sequenced and characterized. The predicted amino acid sequence of porcine CAT-2 shared 86.1% and 92.1% identity with human and mouse CAT-2A, respectively. The tissue distribution patterns and ontogenic changes of CAT-2 mRNAs were determined by real-time Q-PCR. The results showed that porcine CAT-2 was highly expressed in the heart and intestinal tract (duodenum, ileum and jejunum). In addition, the mRNA of CAT-2 was found in liver, lung, kidney, brain and muscle. Within the intestinal tract, CAT-2 mRNA was most abundant in the ileum and rarely expressed in the duodenum. In the duodenum, the levels of CAT-2 mRNA reached their peak on day 7 (p<0.05) while in the jejunum, levels were low on day 1 and 7 and increased rapidly after day 26 before peaking on days 30 and 60 (p<0.05). The levels then dramatically decreased by day 90 (p<0.05). In the ileum, levels achieved their maximum on day 30 and then decreased significantly on day 60 (p<0.05).

Autocrine mechanism for viability enhancement of BAL eosinophils after segmental antigen challenge in allergic asthmatics.

  • Cho, Seung-Kil;Stephen P. Peters;Kim, Chang-Jong
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society of Applied Pharmacology
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    • 1996.04a
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    • pp.254-254
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    • 1996
  • Eosinophils are known to be important effector cells in pathogenesis of asthma. The elucidation of mechanism by which eosinophil survival is regulated in vivo at sites of inflammation is critical tn our understanding of asthma pathogenesis. The maintenance of these cells at site of inflammation depends upon tile balance between its tendency to undergo apoptosis and tile local eosinophil-viability enhancing activity, Qualitative and quantative phenotypic differences have been observed between bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and peripheral blood (PB) eosinophils (EOS). We hypothesize that BAL EOS Possess altered functional feature compared to PB EOS. BAL and PB EOS were obtained from ragweed allergic asthmatics after segmental antigen challenge (SAC) at 24 hour or one week, and purified over percoll and CDl6 negative selection. Cells were cultured in duplicate in RPMI, 15% FCS and 1% penicillin/streptomycin without exogenous cytokines. Eosinophil purity and viability was >92%. BAL. EOS viability was 69${\pm}$4.4% versus 39${\pm}$1.6% for PB EOS (p<0.005) at 48 hour time point, and this difference was maintained through day 5 (32${\pm}$7.6% vs. 3.0${\pm}$ 1.4%, p<0.05), Among BAL EOS, those harvested one week after SAC appeared to have an prolonged survival compared to those harvested at 24 hour. Coculture of BAL and PB EOS resulted in significant viability enhancement than expecteed. Direct neutralization of GM-CSF activity, not IL-3 and EL-5, markedly decreased tile survival of BAL EOS in culture, and abrogated tile viability enhancing activity of their culture supernatants in a dose dependent manner. We conclude that BAL EOS activated in vivo possess enhanced viability compared to PB EOS. Mixing and neutralization experiments suggest a role for autocrine production of GM-CSF.

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Development of Sizing System according to the Lower-Body Analysis for the Abdominal Obesity Adult Females (복부비만 성인여성의 하반신 체형분석에 따른 하의류 치수체계 연구)

  • Lim, Jiyoung
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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    • v.44 no.2
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    • pp.310-320
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    • 2020
  • This study established a lower garment sizing system for abdominal obesity adult women aged 30-59 based on 277 females selected from the 7th Size Korean Anthropometric survey. The criteria for subjects in this study were over 25 kg/㎡ of the BMI, over 85 cm of waist, and over 0.8 waist hip ratio. The results are as follows. The lower body analysis of abdominal obesity adult women showed that average circumference items were larger than the ordinary size, and the average length items were smaller. The standard deviation was applied around the average values of waist circumference and hip circumference for the suggestion of a lower garment sizing system for abdominal obesity adult women. The interval between the designation was ±1.5 cm with a waist circumference of 100 cm and ±2.5 cm with an average hip circumference of 100 cm. We established 13 designation sections in consideration of the cover ratio and cover efficiency. The cover ratio in the 13 nominal sections was 71.5%. The segmental distribution rate presented in the results will also be useful for production planning in specific sizes that helped enable rational production.

Analysis of Lower-body and Development of Suit-pants Size System for the Elderly Males (노년기 남성의 하반신 체형 분석 및 하의류 치수 체계 연구)

  • Lim, Jiyoung
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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    • v.43 no.5
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    • pp.768-777
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    • 2019
  • This study established a lower garment sizing system for elderly men over 65 years of age based on 535 males selected from the 5th Korean Anthropometric survey. The results are as follows. Most elderly men body measurements were smaller for adult males (except for the waist area); however, abdominal obesity has changed to body type. The standard deviation was applied around the average values of waist circumference and hip circumference for the suggestion of a lower garment sizing system for elderly men. The interval between the designation was ${\pm}2.5cm$ with an average waist circumference of 86 cm and ${\pm}2cm$ with an average hip circumference of 92 cm. A total of 13 designation sections were established in consideration of the cover ratio and cover efficiency. The cover ratio in the 13 nominal sections was 77.2%. The segmental distribution rate presented in the results will also be useful for production planning in specific sizes and enable rational production.

Correlation between Consonants' Place and Vowel Duration in English and Korean (자음의 조음 위치와 인접 모음 길이의 상관성에 관한 연구: 영어와 한국어의 경우)

  • Oh, Eun-Jin
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.9 no.3
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    • pp.201-210
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    • 2002
  • This paper explores whether there is correlation between consonants' place and duration of adjacent vowels in English and Korean. The results showed that in English the vowels preceding alveolar stops were in general longer than the vowels before bilabial or velar stops. Consonants appeared to have their inherent length due to their place and to exhibit some compensatory effects on the duration of preceding vowels. This effect can be explained in a physiological term that the tongue tip is the organ which might be more agile in articulatory movement than the tongue body for the velars or the lower lip (and the jaw) for the bilabials is and the shorter production time of the alveolars caused the lengthening of the adjacent vowels. However, this physiological account did not hold in the case of Korean, which exhibited less consistent patterns across speakers for the consonants' place and the vowel duration. The segmental duration seemed to be timed quite consistently within a language but the pattern was not universal across languages.

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The Role of Contrast in Prosodically Induced Acoustic Variation

  • Choi, Han-Sook
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.1 no.3
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    • pp.29-37
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    • 2009
  • This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.

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