• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.107-117
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to revisit the property of tapping, based on the data from Yonbyon Korean. Taps have been described as short segments derived from corresponding stops or trills. It is also widely assumed that tapping occurs due to lenition to minimize articulatory effort. However, Yonbyon Korean data show that taps can occur in strong as well as weak positions The results of the acoustic experiments conducted in this study show that in syllable-onset position, obstruent taps consistently appear from the underlying laterals, while in intervocalic position, sonorant taps similar to American English taps occur. The results of this study provide evidence against the uniform account of tapping as the result of lenition.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.230-233
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• 2007

In the literature on the tense consonants in Korean, it has been proposed that this consonant is underlyingly represented by a single consonant (the singleton hypothesis) and that it is represented by a sequence of two lenis consonants (the geminate hypothesis). One piece of the empirical evidence supporting the geminate hypothesis is that the closure duration of tense consonants in intervocalic position is more than twice as long in comparison with their lenis counterparts. In this paper, we report on the closure duration of three types of plosives in various phonotactically permitted contexts in Korean. The results of the measurement show that the duration of the tense consonants in post-sonorant contexts is reduced by a third in comparison with that of the intervocalic ones. These temporal differences suggest that the measurement of closure durations in intervocalic position alone is not sufficient to sustain the geminate hypothesis.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.109-112
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• 2003

This paper aims at developing sample paragraphs for voice pitch assessment which is specifically designed for Koreans. Recently the demand for such a battery of sample sentences has been steadily increased among Korean speech therapists. In this paper, different sample paragraphs (two conventionally used paragraphs and three newly developed ones which consist mainly of sonorant sounds and different types of sentences), different softwares (Dr. Speech, Wavesurfer, Praat) and different techniques (automatic measurement and detailed measurement in which the researcher controls many aspects which might influence the measurement of pitch) will be compared for measuring fundamental frequency.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-103
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• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.103-113
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• 2016

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.205-208
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• 2004

The aim of this study is to analyse the adjustment of the proportion of segment duration in imitating voice. When imitating others' voices, how far is his/her original proportion of segment duration adjusted, and what is this adjustment like under various segments? In this study, I classified segments into consonants and vowels and consonants classified into obstruents and sonorants. The result of the analysis is as follows. ; (1)Individual variation in the proportion of obstruent is not significant, and when imitating, and its distribution is not typicalized. (2) Vowels has individual variation in the proportion of segment duration even under imitating. (3) Nasal has the most distinct individual variation even under imitating, compared with vowel and obstruent. For the further study, I should examine the characteristics of quantitative and qualitative changes in liquid (among sonorant) to find out which segment can best describe personnel characteristics of the proportion of segment duration in imitating voice.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

This study examines the duration of Korean lax and tense stops in the prosodic word-medial position, their interactions with nearby segments, and the phonological implications of these interactions. It first examines the lengthening of consonants at the function of the short lax stop. Experiment 1 shows that the sonorant C1 is significantly longer before a short lax stop C2 than before a long tense stop. Experiment 2 shows that the short lax stop C1 cancels the contrast between the lax and tense obstruent at C2, making them appear as long tense obstruents (Post-Stop Tensing Rule). We suggest that such lengthening phenomena occur in Korean to robustly preserve the contrastive length difference between C and CC. Second, this study examines the vowel shortening, known as Closed-Syllable Vowel Shortening, before a long tense stop or before the consonant sequence. Experiment 3 suggests that it be interpreted as temporal adjustment to make the interval from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel of near-equal length. Conclusively, we suggest that Korean speech be planned and controlled with two specific intervals. One is the duration of contrastive consonant intervals between vowels, and the other is the duration from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.73-81
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• 2013

Coda in the word-medial position plays an important role in acquisition of our speech. Accuracy of the coda in the word-medial position is important as a diagnostic indicator since it has a close relationship with degrees of disorder. Coda in the word-medial position only appears in condition of connecting two vowels and the sequence causes diverse phonological processes to happen. The coda in the word-medial position differs in production difficulty by the initial sound in the sequence. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the tendency of producing a coda in the word-medial position with consideration of an optional phonological process in spontaneous speech of three and four year old children. Data was collected from 24 children (four groups by age) without speech and language delay. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Sonorant coda in the word-medial position showed a high production frequency in manner of articulation, and alveolar in place of articulation. When the coda in the word-medial position is connected to an initial sound in the same place of articulation, it revealed a high frequency of production. 2) The coda in word-medial position followed by an initial alveolar stop revealed a high error rate. Error patterns showed regressive assimilation predominantly. 3) The order of difficulty that Children had producing codas in the word-medial position was $/k^{\neg}/$, $/p^{\neg}/$, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/. Those results suggest that in targeting coda in the word-medial position for evaluation, we should consider optional phonological process as well as the following initial sound. Further studies would be necessary which codas in the word-medial position will be used for therapeutic purpose.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.85-91
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• 1999

The purpose of this study is to investigate phonetic realization of flap [r], one of the allophones of Korean /l/. Phonetic realization of a segment is affected by not only its neighboring segments but also its prosodic position in an utterance. This study examined how various prosodic positions affect the phonetic realization of [r]. Effects of the four prosodic positions on the phonetic realization of [r] were examined: utterance initial, Intonation Phrase initial, Accentual Phrase initial, and Accentual Medial positions. Word positional effect was also examined: word initial, medial, and final positions. Acoustic and statistical analyses showed that flap [r] was realized in a variety of phonetic forms: from sonorant(the most reduced form) to short stop(the least reduced form). It was shown that generally. word-initial position is stronger than word-medial position. It was also shown that in many cases, utterance-initial position and intonation-phrase-initial position are stronger than accentual-phrase-initial and accentual-phrase-medial positions. Sonorants were observed more often in the prosodically weaker portions. VOT duration was also shorter in accentual-phrase-initial and accentual-phrase-medial positions.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.2203-2208
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• 2011

This study was to examine the change of vowel acoustic characteristics of the temporomandibular joint disorder patients by maintaining normal vocalization pattern of the temporomandibular joint through increasing the range of motion, that was, the oral cavity sonorant cavity of the temporomandibular joint, related to vowel articulation through temporomandibular training using the physical therapy. The subjects of this study were 3 male adults in 20-30s that were diagnosed with temporomandibular joint disorder. As a result of conducting temporomandibular training program using the physical therapy, the $1^{st}$ Formant Frequency(F1), $2^{nd}$ Formant Frequency(F2), and Fundamental Frequency(F0) of the temporomandibular joint disorder patients were increased compared to before and this showed the change of the $1^{st}$ Formant Frequency(F1) related to the open mouth grade of a vowel, as well as the $2^{nd}$ Formant Frequency(F2), and Fundamental Frequency(F0) related to the front-back of a vowel which shows the relationship between the temporomandibular joint, vowels and voice calculation.