• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.151-163
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• 2015

In this study, we aim to describe kinematic characteristics of Korean /l/-flapping in two speech rates (fast vs. comfortable). Production data was collected from seven native speakers of Seoul Korean (four females and three males) using electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA), which provided two dimensional data on the x-y plane. We examined kinematic properties of the vertical/horizontal tongue tip gesture, the vertical/horizontal (rear) tongue body gesture, and the jaw gesture in an /i/-/i/ context. Gestural landmarks of the vertical tongue tip gesture are directly measured. This serves as the actual anchoring time points to which relevant measures of other trajectories referred. The study focuses on velocity profiles, closing/opening spatiotemporal properties, constriction duration, and constriction minima were analyzed. The results are summarized as follows. First, gradiently distributed spatiotemporal values of the vertical tongue tip gesture were on a continuum. This shows more of a reduction in fast speech rate, but no single instance of categorical reduction (deletion). Second, Korean /l/-flapping predominantly exhibited a backward sliding tongue tip movement, in 83% of production, which is apparently distinguished from forward sliding movement in English. Lastly, there was an indication of vocalic reduction in fast rate, truncating spatial displacement of the jaw and the tongue body, although we did not observe positional variations with speech rate. The present study shows that Korean /l/-flapping is characterized by mixed articulatory properties with respect to flapping sounds of other languages such as English and Xiangxiang Chinese. Korean /l/ flapping demonstrates a language-universal property, such as the gradient nature of its flapping sounds that is compatible with other languages. On the other hand, Korean /l/-flapping also shows a language-particular property, particularly distinguished from English, in that a backward gliding movement occurs during the tongue tip closing movement. Although, there was no vocalic reduction in V2 observed in terms of jaw and tongue body height, spatial displacement of these articulators still suggests truncation in fast speech rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.103-111
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• 2013

Traditionally it has been assumed that written abilities are completely dependent on phonology. Therefore spoken and written language skills in aphasic patients have been known to exhibit similar types of impairment. However, a number of latest studies have reported the findings that support the orthographic autonomy hypothesis. The purpose of this study was to examine whether fluent aphasic patients have discrepancy between speaking and writing skills, thereby identifying whether the two skills are realized through independent processes. To this end, this study compared the K-FAST speaking and writing tasks of 30 aphasia patients. In addition, 16 aphasia patients, who were capable of producing sentences not only in speaking but also in writing, were compared in their performances at each phase of the sentence production process. As a result, the subjects exhibited different performances between speaking and writing, along with statistically significant differences between the two language skills at positional and phonological encoding phases of the sentence production process. Therefore, the study's results suggest that written language is more likely to be produced via independent routes without the mediation of the process of spoken language production, beginning from a certain phase of the sentence production process.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.183-195
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• 2005

In the present study, we investigated development of verb inflections or endings in 3- to 5-year old Korean-speaking children using 28 action verbs for both comprehension and production tasks. For each verb, a l0-second long motion picture and a sheet of paper with three random-ordered color pictures representing 'before, in the middle of, at the end of' the action were generated. A past tense inflection' -et ta,' two present progressive verb endings '-enta' & '-ko itta.' a future tense ending '-elyeko hanta' were tested. In the comprehension task, children were asked to point to a picture correctly representing the tense of a presented verb. In the production task, children were asked to produce a verb with correctly marking the tense of a presented picture. The order of the two tasks were counterbalanced across the children, and the motion pictures were only presented in the first task. Across the ages, the performance accuracies on both comprehension and production tasks were the highest for the past tense marking followed by two present progressive and future tense markings. For each verb endings, the changes of accuracies across ages were analyzed in both tasks. The types of errors for production tasks were also reported.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.87-97
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• 2002

The purpose of this study is to analyze the speech duration in Korean-speaking aphasics. Five patients with nonfluent aphasia (2 with traumatic brain injury and 3 with strokes) and five normal adults participated in this experiment. The mean age in patients with nonfluent aphasia was $45.8\pm2.3$ years and $47.4\pm2.3$ years for the normal adults. The Computerized Speech Lab was used to evaluate the acoustic characteristics of the subjects. Voice onset time, vowel duration, total duration, hold and consonant duration were evaluated for the monosyllabic and the polysyllabic words. The patients with nonfluent aphasia did not show the voicing bar on hold area, however, it was seen in the normal persons in the intervocalic position. Explosion duration of glottalized stops in the intervocalic position was significantly prolonged in nonfluent aphasics in comparison with the normal persons. This suggestes that the laryngeal adjustment is disturbed in these patients. Consonant duration, vowel duration, and total duration of the polysyllabic words were significantly longer in the patients with nonfluent aphasia than those of the normal persons. These results demonstrate the disturbances in controlling articulatory muscles during sound production in patients with nonfluent aphasia. The objective and quantitative analysis based on the acoustic characteristics of nonfluent aphasics, will be very useful in therapeutic planning and on the the effects of speech therapy.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.430-431
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• 1996

Among the scholars of second language (L2) acquisition who have used prosodic considerations in syntactic analyses, pausing and intonation contours have been used to define utterances in the speech of second language learners (e.g., Sato, 1990). In recent research on conversational analysis, it has been found that lexically marked causal clause combining in the discourse of native speakers can be distinguished as "intonational subordination" and "intonational coordination(Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, forthcoming.)". This study uses Pienemann's Processability Theory (1995) for an analysis of the speech of native speakers of Japanese (L1) learning English. In order to accurately assess the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development, it is shown that pitch, loudness, and timing must all be considered together with the syntactic analysis of interlanguage speech production. Twelve Japanese subjects participated in eight fifteen minute interviews, ninety-six dyads. The speech analyzed in this report is limited to the twelve subjects interacting with two different non-native speaker interviews for a total of twenty-four dyads. Within each of the interviews, four different tasks are analyzed to determine the stage of acquisition of English for each subject. Initially the speech is segmented according to intonation contour arid pauses. It is then classified accoding to specific syntactic units and further analysed for pitch, loudness and timing. Results indicate that the speech must be first claasified prosodic ally and lexically, prior to beginning syntactic analysis. This analysis stinguishes three interlanguage lexical categories: discourse markers, coordinator $s_ordinators, and transfer from Japanese. After these lexical categories have been determined, the psycholinguistic stages of syntactic development can be more accurately assessed.d.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2021

Speech is a spatiotemporally coordinated structure of constriction actions at discrete articulators such as lips, tongue tip, tongue body, velum, and glottis. Like other human movements (e.g., reaching), each action as a linguistic task is completed by a synergy of involved basic elements (e.g., bone, muscle, neural system). This paper discusses how speech tasks are dynamically related to joints as one of the basic elements in terms of robotics of speech production. Further this introduction of robotics to speech sciences will hopefully deepen our understanding of how speech is produced and provide a solid foundation to developing a physical talking machine.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.285-287
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• 2007

The primary goal of this study is to find out how the effect of speaking rate has some influence on the production and perception across languages. Through both experiments of production and perception, an English native speaker changes both production and perception simultaneously. Especially the production of the temporal features changes relatively fast. On the contrary, Chinese and Korean speakers changes their production rather than perception by following the speaking rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2015

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

Previous research on syntactic processing shows that the interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence is frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another. The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on the production of disambiguating prosody for English ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, 40 speakers gave default readings of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences. Questioning was used to prove intended meanings behind default readings. Intended meanings were treated as interpretation biases when a majority of speakers read a sentence with the same intended meaning. The size of the majority was used to establish bias strength. In Experiment 2, 10 speakers were instructed to use prosody to disambiguate given alternate meanings of the sentences from Experiment 1. The results indicated an effect of bias strength on disambiguating prosody: speakers used temporal juncture cues to reliably disambiguate alternate meanings for sentences with a weak interpretation bias, but not for those with a strong bias. Overall, the results indicated that interpretation biases strongly affect the production of prosody.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.