• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.103-109
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of the Korean corpus of spontaneous speech, also called the Seoul corpus. The corpus contains the audio recording of the interview-style spontaneous speech from the 40 native speakers of Seoul Korean. The talkers are divided into four age groups; talkers in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties. Each age group has ten talkers, five males and five females. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described. The corpus containing around 220,000 phrasal words was phonemically labeled along with information on the boundaries for Korean phrasal words and utterances, which were additionally romanized. According to the test result of labeling consistency, the inter-labeler agreement on phoneme identification was 98.1% and the mean deviation on boundary placement was 9.04 msec. The corpus will be made available for free to the research community in March, 2015.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2009

This study examines how young speakers of Seoul Korean produce tri-consonantal clusters /1kt/ and /1pt/ as in palk-ta ('to be bright') and palp-ta ('to step on'). Production data were collected from 20 speakers of Seoul Korean. The results of narrow transcription of the data showed that simplification is not obligatory as some speakers often preserve all three consonants. When simplified, there was a clear asymmetry between /1kt/ and /1pt/. Speakers showed no clear preference for either C1 preservation (C1=/1/) or C2 preservation (C2=/k/ in /1kt/ and /p/ in /1pt/) in production of /1kt/, but in production of /1pt/, strong preference was found for C1-preserved to C2-preserved variant. When compared with production data in Cho (1999), simplification patterns appear to have changed over the past 10 years, in a direction to preserve the first member of the cluster (/1/) more often, especially with /1kt/. There was no substantial between-item variation, indicating that simplification patterns are not lexically specified. Finally, the results suggest that the process of tri-consonantal simplification has not been fully phonologized in the grammar of the language as evident in substantial inter- and intra-speaker variation.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.927-937
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• 2018

In this paper the comparative study of the consonants of Pyongyang and Seoul dialects of Korean is performed from the perspective of the signal processing which can be regarded as the basis of engineering applications. Until today, the most of speech signal studies were primarily focused on the vowels which are playing important role in the language evolution. In any language, however, the number of consonants is greater than the number of vowels. Therefore, the research of consonants is also important. In this paper, with the vowel study of the Pyongyang dialect, which was conducted by phonological research and experimental phonetic methods, the consonant studies are processed based on an engineering operation. The alveolar consonant, which has demonstrated many differences in the phonetic value between Pyongyang and Seoul dialects, was used as the experimental data. The major parameters of the speech signal analysis - formant frequency, pitch, spectrogram - are measured. The phonetic values between the two dialects were compared with respect to /시/ and /씨/ of Korean language. This study can be used as the basis for the voice recognition and the voice synthesis in the future.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.65-72
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• 2004

The force of articulation is different between voiced and voiceless consonants in the binary opposition system. However, the Korean voiceless stop consonants have a triple opposition system: lenis, aspirated, and glottalized. The aim of this study is to find the primary distinctive feature between the force of articulation and the aspiration for the three different types of Korean stops. Two native speakers of the Seoul dialect participated to this study. The corpus was composed of less than eight syllabic words containing consonants in word-initial position and intervocalic position. Radiocinematography and Mingography were used to analyze the articulatory tension and acoustic characteristics. Korean stops have independent features of articulatory tension and aspiration, in which the indices are different according to position. However, in this system which does not have the opposition of sonority, the force of articulation is the primary distinctive feature and the feature of aspiration is subsidiary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.23-29
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• 2016

The present study tested if individual speakers showing great sound change in segments (i.e., vowels and fricatives) also had innovative changing patterns in suprasegmental properties (i.e., lexical pitch accents) in Kyungsang Korean. The acoustic analysis at a group level first confirmed the presence of group level differences in distinguishing /ɨ-ʌ/ and /s-s'/ both of which had different phonemic distinction from Seoul Korean. Younger speakers had more innovative segmental change than older speakers, and even within the younger generation, female speakers produced more innovative phonetic variants than male speakers. Regarding the individual observation within the younger group, the younger speakers with large acoustic distinction in vowels and fricatives also showed acoustically less distinct accent patterns, indicating the innovative sound change pattern consistent across segment and suprasegmental properties. The group and individual observations suggested that linguistic innovators introduced new phonetic variants with consistent degree of changing pattern between segment and suprasegmental properties.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.224-228
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• 1996

This paper is intended as a study on how an utterance is divided into rhythmic units in Standard Korean with respect to its syntactic structure. With respect to the data in this study I used 150 sentences which contained similar number of words and various syntactic structures. Those sentences were read by 7 speakers of Seoul dialect in a conversation style. Each sentence was read twice in a normal speed and twice in a fast speed. As a total, 4200 sentences were recorded. Then listening to them, the author marked the sentences with two kinds of boundaries i.e. strong and weak. To explore the relationship between rhythmic units and syntactic structure I devised a framework of grammatical symbols. Each symbol is designed to have both syntactic and morphological information at the same time. So I assigned those grammatical symbols to the sentences. Having sentences marked with grammatical symbols on the one hand, and with the rhythmic boundaries on the other hand, 1 could show the relationship between rhythmic units and syntactic structure; which syntactic structures are likely to be pronounced as one rhythmic unit, and which are on the rhythmic boundaries.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.25-36
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• 1998

The prosodic properties of Korean and English stress were examined with focus on syllable duration and pitch by loan words. 14 loan words were selected by the criteria of the numbers of syllables and stress positions. 3 Korean males using Seoul dialect and 3 American males using general American English served as subjects. Each tokens were uttered 3 times and second one was chosen to be analysed by CSL. We measured the duration and F0 of each syllable. In English, duration is the most salient acoustic correlates of stress, and pitch is the second. In Korean, by contrast, it seems that neither duration nor pitch is the acoustic features of stress, from our data

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.81-90
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• 2020

This paper describes a method of building Korean conversational speech data in the emergency medical domain and proposes an annotation method for the collected data in order to improve speech recognition performance. To suggest future research directions, baseline speech recognition experiments were conducted by using partial data that were collected and annotated. All voices were recorded at 16-bit resolution at 16 kHz sampling rate. A total of 166 conversations were collected, amounting to 8 hours and 35 minutes. Various information was manually transcribed such as orthography, pronunciation, dialect, noise, and medical information using Praat. Baseline speech recognition experiments were used to depict problems related to speech recognition in the emergency medical domain. The Korean conversational speech data presented in this paper are first-stage data in the emergency medical domain and are expected to be used as training data for developing conversational systems for emergency medical applications.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.33-44
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• 1999

This paper aims to analyze whether the phenomenon of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ is a hypercorrection or not in the North Korean dialects. Most North Koreans pronounce /i/(gold) as /kum/ because the vowel /i/ merges into the peripheral vowel space of /u/ in their dialects. The merger of back vowel is one of most distinctive characters in North Korean dialects. But some speakers pronounce /chubann/(exile) as /chiban/. This time /u/ in peripheral space moves to /i/ in central vowel space. It seems that the vowels /i/ and /u/ exchange places with each other when they uttered in North Korean. Though it was observed that the vowel movement of /i/$\rightarrow$/u/ was caused by the merger of back vowels, the reason why vowel /u/ moves in the opposite direction, that is, the central space of vowel /i/ has not been analyzed yet. This experiment starts with hypothesis that the movement of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ might be caused by hypercorrection. The first step of this research is to analyze /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ pronunciation of North Koreans. The second step is to compare the results of North Korean pronunciation with those of South Korean pronunciation and observe whether tendency of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/pronunciation can also be found in the standard Seoul dialect and other South Korean dialects.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

The present thesis examines the correlation of VOT and F0 in the three-way distinction of Korean obstruents, conducting production and perception tests. In the production test, one female native speaker of Korean with a Seoul dialect (the author) recorded 15 repetitions of a monosyllabic word list including /ka, kha, k*a, pa, pha, p*a, ta, tha, t*a, ca, cha, c*a/ in random order, VOT and F0 of the following vowels were measured, and the result was significant for the three-way distinction with a strong correlation between VOT and F0, and also in the VOT-F0 plot, no overlapping among the domains was observed. As for the perception test, I manipulated the data recorded in the production test, heightening or lowering their F0 values. In all, 14 subjects (seven males and seven females) participated in the identification test. The result was as follows: the fortis stimuli were not influenced by F0 changes, and the VOT and F0 values at the lenis-aspirated boundary were negatively correlated. From these results I concluded the following: 1) VOT and F0 can distinguish the three domains of Korean obstruents without overlapping; 2) the fortis perception does not need F0 as its acoustic cue; and 3) VOT and F0 in the distinction between the lenis and aspirated are in the phonetic trading relation[2].