• 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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.143-153
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• 2002

This study was designed to determine (1) the effects of the following stop consonant on the vowel length in isolated bi-syllabic words, (2) the mechanism which renders vowels longer in duration before lax stops than tense stops, (3) where the aspiratory interval is included, in the vowel portion or the preceding consonantal portion and (4) the influence of the preceding consonants upon the duration of the following vowel. Measurements were made of five timing variables on acoustic signals as three native Korean speakers uttered isolated bi-syllabic /VCV/ words in which the vowel was identical, /$\alpha$/, and the C slot was filled with bilabial stops. Findings: (1) the vowel length before the lax stops was significantly longer than before the tense stops, while the difference in the vowel duration between the tense stops was insignificant or negligible, (2) the vowel length varied as a function of the articulatory force of the following consonants, regardless of the phonological unit of syllable, (3) The aspiratory interval is interpreted as a portion of the preceding consonant and (4) The effects of the preceding consonants on the final vowel length were not rule-governed.

• MALSORI
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• no.44
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• pp.33-46
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• 2002

This study was conducted to examine the effect of word length on auditory word recognition. Word length can be defined by several sublexical units, such as letters, phonemes, syllables, etc. To find out which sublexical units are influential in auditory word recognition, the auditory lexical decision task was used. In Experiment 1, we examined the partial correlation between the speed of reaction time and the number of sublexical units, and in Experiment 2, we executed ANOVA to find out which sublexical length variable was an influential unit. Through these two experiment, we concluded syllable length was the most important variable on auditory word recognition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.185-200
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• 2002

The current study confirmed the existence of an ip prosodic level in French intonation structure, as previously proposed by Sun-Ah Jun & $C\acute{e}cile$cile Fougeron (2000). However, in contrast to the previous suggestion of the plateau realized in an ip in several syntactic structures, the current study supposed that the plateau doesn't come from the different type of syntactic structures but arise from the unspecified syllables without any PA in an ip. Because if we limited ip phrasal tone to the syntactic structure, it would be difficult to find the more general reasons of ip level. Besides /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ we also used /$Hi^*$/ for the focused syllable in the current study. In emphasized sentences, in general, /$Hi^*$/ appeared in the first or second syllable of a leftward AP in an ip and /$H^*$/ in the final syllable of a rightmost AP of an ip, In contrast to these PAs, /$Hi^*$/ might appear in any syllable in an ip, but not to far from /$H^*$/ because the duration time and length t of plateau realized between /$Hi^*$/ and /$H^*$/ or /Hi/ and /$H^*$/ would make an essential harmonious rhythmic unit, Therefore, the current study determined the duration time and the number of syllables realized in each plateau in an ip level composed of more than one AP. As a phrase constituent structure, there is a practical need for intermediate prosodic units to allow for generalization over the many possible combinations of prosodic patterns that can occur. Further evidence is still needed to analyze and relate the different pitch ranges of the plateau of an ip according to the syntactic structure, to identify the considerable character in the French prosodic hierarchy.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.121-128
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• 2018

A Korean morphological analyzer adopts sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, which can generate an output sequence of different length from an input. In general, a seq2seq based Korean morphological analyzer takes a syllable-unit based sequence as an input, and output a syllable-unit based sequence. Syllable-based morphological analysis has the advantage that unknown words can be easily handled, but has the disadvantages that morpheme-based information is ignored. In this paper, we propose a reranking model as a post-processor of seq2seq model that can improve the accuracy of morphological analysis. The seq2seq based morphological analyzer can generate K results by using a beam-search method. The reranking model exploits morpheme-unit embedding information as well as n-gram of morphemes in order to reorder K results. The experimental results show that the reranking model can improve 1.17% F1 score comparing with the original seq2seq model.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.573-582
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• 2015

Edit distance metrics are widely used for many applications such as string comparison and spelling error corrections. Hamming distance is a metric for two equal length strings and Damerau-Levenshtein distance is a well-known metrics for making spelling corrections through string-to-string comparison. Previous distance metrics seems to be appropriate for alphabetic languages like English and European languages. However, the conventional edit distance criterion is not the best method for agglutinative languages like Korean. The reason is that two or more letter units make a Korean character, which is called as a syllable. This mechanism of syllable-based word construction in the Korean language causes an edit distance calculation to be inefficient. As such, we have explored a new edit distance method by using consonant normalization and the normalization factor.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.43-58
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• 2006

This study aims to investigate whether Chinese learning Korean and Korean native speakers show any difference in length and formant structures of the Korean liquid 'ㄹ' in the environments of v_v and v_# through the acoustic analysis of 10 Chinese learners' and 10 Koreans' utterances. The acoustic analysis of L2KSC DB shows that the length and formant structures of 'ㄹ' produced by Chinese learners are significantly different from the ones by Koreans. I explain these differences by contrasting the liquids and syllable structure constraints of the two languages, Chinese and Korean. In addition, I relate the F1 and F2's values to the tongue's movement when making a constriction, and conclude that Chinese learners pronounce the 'ㄹ' in the v_# environment with the tongue lower and backer than Koreans do.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.06d
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• pp.76-79
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• 1998

본 논문은 한국어 숫자를 연속적으로 또박또박 발음한 음성의 음절 구간 검출에 관한 내용이며 음절의 최소구간 및 스펙트럼 에너지를 이용하여 연속 음성에서 구간 검출 알고리즘을 제안한다. 숫자음 11개를 연속으로 발성하여 음절 구간을 검출하며 결정된 구간과 수작업으로 한 음절구간을 비교한다. 음절시작점인 경우에는 수작업시단과 동일하거나 항상 전방향이며 종단인 경우에는 92% 데이터가 $\pm$1 프레임내에 존재하며 제안된 알고리즘이 실용성이 있음을 보인다.

• Journal of Convergence Society for SMB
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.51-57
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• 2016

This study aims at investigating and comparing the vowel lengths of the eight stressed syllable vowels among the Korean college students with the English native speakers. To do this English sentences were uttered and recorded by twenty Korean subjects. Acoustic features were measured from a sound spectrogram with the help of the Praat software program and analyzed through statistical analysis. From the results of the experiment, I was able to find out that the differences of the lengths of the first syllable stressed vowels were significant. Especially in the pronunciation of the English front low vowel /${\ae}$/, native subjects pronounced significantly longer than Korean subjects, and this result could be used as a teaching material in pronunciation class.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.199-208
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• 2022

Korean is an agglutinative language, and one or more morphemes are combined to form a single word. Part-of-speech tagging method separates each morpheme from a word and attaches a part-of-speech tag. In this study, we propose a new Korean part-of-speech tagging method based on the Head-Tail tokenization technique that divides a word into a lexical morpheme part and a grammatical morpheme part without decomposing compound words. In this method, the Head-Tail is divided by the syllable boundary without restoring irregular deformation or abbreviated syllables. Korean part-of-speech tagger was implemented using the Head-Tail tokenization and deep learning technique. In order to solve the problem that a large number of complex tags are generated due to the segmented tags and the tagging accuracy is low, we reduced the number of tags to a complex tag composed of large classification tags, and as a result, we improved the tagging accuracy. The performance of the Head-Tail part-of-speech tagger was experimented by using BERT, syllable bigram, and subword bigram embedding, and both syllable bigram and subword bigram embedding showed improvement in performance compared to general BERT. Part-of-speech tagging was performed by integrating the Head-Tail tokenization model and the simplified part-of-speech tagging model, achieving 98.99% word unit accuracy and 99.08% token unit accuracy. As a result of the experiment, it was found that the performance of part-of-speech tagging improved when the maximum token length was limited to twice the number of words.