• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.207-221
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• 2003

Phonetic voicing does not support the phonological distinction of voiced/voiceless in English stops. The present study is aimed at defining the nature of voicing of English voiced stops. A review of the literature reveals that the voicing is position-conditioned and its length is notably inconsistent relative to the closure duration. No consistent relationships are found between vocal fold adduction and glottal pulsing in initial position. Stress reduced the voicing, etc. The hypothesis for experiments was: (1) active voicing: stress generates longer (stronger) voicing during the closure duration of a voiced stop; (2) passive voicing: stress induces shorter (weaker) voicing during the closure. Instead the voiced stop becomes more voiced when the preceding vowel (syllable) is stressed. The literature review and the results of two experiments comparing English and Slovakian suggested that the voicing of English voiced stops is passive (i.e., a coarticulation of glottal pulsing for adjacent vowels-syllables) and should be distinguished from active voicing in some other languages.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.555-574
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• 2002

This study concerns the constraints of English Poetic Meter. In English poems, the metrical pattern doesn't always match the linguistic stress on the lines. These mismatches are found differently among the poets. For the lexical stress mismatched with the weak metrical position, W⇒ Strength is established by the concept of the strong syllable. The peaks of monosyllabic words mismatched with the weak metrical position are divided according to which side of the boundary of a phonological domain they are adjacent to. Adjacency Constraint I is suggested for the mismatched peak which is adjacent to the left boundary of a phonological domain; /sup */Peak] and Adjacency ConstraintⅡ for the mismatched peak which is adjacent to the right boundary of a phonological domain. These constraints are various according to the poets (Pope, Milton and Shakespeare) : /sup */[Peak [-stress], /sup */W⇒ Strength and /sup */Peak] in Pope; /sup */[+stress][Peak[-stress] and /sup */Peak] in Milton; /sup */[ +stress][Peak[-stress], /sup */W⇒Strength and Adjacency ConstraintⅡ in Shakespeare.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.95-101
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• 2014

This paper investigated the effects of frequency band limitation on perceptual characteristics of Korean consonants. Monosyllabic speech (144 syllables of CV type, 56 syllables of VC type, 8 syllables of V type) produced by two announcers were low- and high-pass filtered with cutoff frequencies ranging from 300 to 5000 Hz. Six listeners with normal hearing performed perception test by types of filter and cutoff frequencies. We reported phoneme recognition rates and types of perception error of band-limited Korean consonants to examine how frequency distortion in the process of speech transmission affect listener's perception. The results showed that recognition rates varied with the following factors: position in a syllable, manner of articulation, place of articulation, and phonation types. Consonants in the final position were stronger to the frequency band limitation than those in the initial position. Fricatives and Affricates are stronger than stops. Fortis consonants were less stronger than their lenis or aspirated counterparts. Types of perception error also varied depending on such factors as consonant's place of articulation: In case of bilabial stops, they were perceived as alveolar stops with while in cases of alveolar and velar stops, there were changes in phonation types without any change in the place of articulation.

• MALSORI
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• no.40
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• pp.1-12
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• 2000

This paper investigated how $/\int/$ in English and German is perceived and interpreted in the loanwords in Korean. $/\int/$ in these languages does not show one-to-one correspondence in Korean: $/\int/$ in the coda position in English and German is perceived as [swi] in Korean while $/\int/$ in the onset position is perceived as [syu]. This paper examined phonetic characteristics of $/\int/$ in English and German through its acoustic analysis and attempted to figure out which factor could explain this surface distribution of [swi] and [syu]; phonological (onset vs. coda) or phonetic (coarticulation) factor. Two acoustic features of $/\int/$ in English and German were examined: duration and energy Peak frequency of the frication noise. German $/\int/$ Perceived as [swi] in Korean showed higher energy Peak frequency and longer duration than that perceived as [syu] in Korean. English iii perceived as [swi] also showed longer duration than that Perceived as [syu] in Korean but energy Peak frequency showed different behavior. English $/\int/$ showed coarticulation with the preceding vowel rather than being affected by its position in the syllable in English. This paper concludes that 1)Phonetic characteristics used are duration and energy Peak frequency of its frication noise when $/\int/$ in English and German are adopted in Korean, 2)duration is used prior to energy peak frequency, which can be used as an enhancing feature.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.59-75
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• 2002

Aerodynamic analysis study was performed on 14 normal subjects (2 males, 12 females) with nonsense syllables composed of Korean bilabial stops (/p, p', $p^{h}$) and their preceding and/or following vowels, /i, a, u/. That is, [pi, p'i, $p^{h}i$, pa, p'a, $p^{h}a$, pu, p'u, $p^{h}u$, ipi, apa, upu, $ip^{h}i$, $ap^{h}a$, $up^{h}u$, ip'i, ap'a, up'u]. All measures were taken and analysed using Aerophone II voice function analyzer and included peak air pressure, mean air pressure, maximum flow rate, volume, mean SPL and phonatory SPL. A t-test and one-way ANOVA were employed for analysis. A post-hoc analysis was performed with Scheffe and Bonferroni. The results were as follows: First, MSPL. and MAP of /p, p', $p^{h}$/ were significantly different in different positions (initial and medial position). In addition, different vowel environment also produced significantly different aerodynamic characteristics those consonants. Especially the lax consonant /p/ was significantly different /i, a, u/ vowel environments. The tense consonant /p'/ was significantly different only /i/ vowel environment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-62
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• 2007

The current study examines the role of post-lexical tonal patterns of a prosodic phrase in word segmentation. In a word spotting experiment, native Korean listeners were asked to spot a disyllabic or trisyllabic word from twelve syllable speech stream that was composed of three Accentual Phrases (AP). Words occurred with various post-lexical intonation patterns. The results showed that listeners spotted more words in phrase-initial than in phrase-medial position, suggesting that the AP-final H tone from the preceding AP helped listeners to segment the phrase-initial word in the target AP. Results also showed that listeners' error rates were significantly lower when words occurred with initial rising tonal pattern, which is the most frequent intonational pattern imposed upon multisyllabic words in Korean, than with non-rising patterns. This result was observed both in AP-initial and in AP-medial positions, regardless of the frequency and legality of overall AP tonal patterns. Tonal cues other than initial rising tone did not positively influence the error rate. These results not only indicate that rising tone in AP-initial and AP_final position is a reliable cue for word boundary detection for Korean listeners, but further suggest that phrasal intonation contours serve as a possible word boundary cue in languages without lexical prominence.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.187-201
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• 2000

This study was done to investigate the English vowels in relation to the foreign accent. In this study, I also tried to find out the foreign accent of the English diphthong /o/ and front low vowel /${\ae}$/ when Koreans speak English. The reason why I chose these vowels is that these vowels, /o/ and /${\ae}$/, are difficult for Koreans to discern and pronounce. Koreans show a foreign accent in their pronunciation. In order to find out the reason for a Korean foreign accent, experiments were carried out with the help of acoustic instruments. According to the results of the experiment, Koreans showed a foreign accent in their English pronunciation of vowels in relation to their utterance positions. Americans showed a final lengthening effect but Koreans showed a final shortening effect. This means that Koreans showed a foreign accent in the final stressed syllable of a sentence. In addition to this, the duration of two English vowels, /o/ and /${\ae}$/, showed considerably different features between Koreans and Americans. In fact, in the pronunciation of the diphthong /o/, the tongue moves from one position to another. The two articulations of a diphthong can be described as the nucleus plus a glide. However, most Koreans have no idea of this phenomenon and pronounce the diphthongs like two separate monophthongs. This causes a great difference in the lengths of English diphthong /o/ between Koreans and Americans.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.93-105
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• 2000

The English schwa sound has special characteristics which are distinct from other vowels. It is non-phonemic and occurs only in an unstressed syllable. Compared with the English schwa, the Korean /e/ is a full vowel which has phonemic contrast. This paper had three aims. One was to see whether there is any relationship between English full vowels and their reduced vowel schwas. Second was to see whether there is any possible target in the English schwa sounds which are derived from different full vowels. The third was to compare the English non-phoneme vowel schwa and the Korean full vowel /e/ in terms of articulatory positions and duration. The study results showed that there is no relationship between each of the full vowels and its schwa. The schwa tended to converge into a possible target which was F1 456 and F2 1560. The Korean vowel /e/ seemed to have its distinct position speaker-individual which is different from the neutral tongue position. The evidence that the Korean /e/ is a back vowel was supported by the Seoul dialect speaker. In duration, the English schwa was much shorter than the full vowels, but there was no significant difference in length between the Korean /e/ and other Korean vowels.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.142-143
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• 1997

The purpose of this paper is to assess the psychological status of the phoneme, syllable, and various postulated subsyllabic units in Korean by applying the Sound Similarity Judgment (SSJ) task, to compare the results with those in English, and to discuss the advantage and disadvantage of the SSJ task as a tool for linguistic research. In Experiment 1, 30 subjects listened to pairs of 56 eve words which were systematically varied from 'totally different' (e.g., pan-met) to 'identical' (e.g., pan-pan). Subjects were then asked to rate sound similarity of each pair on a 10-point scale. Not very surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between the number of phonemic segments matched and the similarity score provided by the subjects. This result was in accord with the previous results from English (e.g., Vitz & Winkler, 1973; Derwing & Nearey, 1986) and supported the assumption that the phoneme is the basic phonological unit in Korean and English. However, there were sharply contrasting results between the two languages. When the pairs shared two phonemes (e.g., pan-pat; pan-pen; pan-man), the pairs sharing the fIrst two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Quite to the contrary, in the comparable English experiments, the pairs sharing the last two phonemes were judged significantly more similar than the other two types of pairs. Experiment 2 was designed to conflrm the results of Experiment 1 by controlling the 'degree' of similarity between phonemes. For example, the pair pan-pam can be judged more similar than the pair pan-nan, although both pairs share the same number of phonemes. This could be interpreted either as confirming the result of Experiment 1 or as the fact that /n/ is more similar to /m/ than /p/ is to /n/ in terms of shared number of distinctive features. The results of Experiment 2 supported the former interpretation. Thus, the results of both experiments clearly showed that, although the 'number' of matched phonemes is the important predictor in judging sound similarity of monosyllabic pairs of both languages, the 'position' of the matched phonemes exerts a different influence in judging sound similarity in the two languages. This contrasting set of results may provide interesting implications for the internal structure of the syllable in the two languages.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.1092-1096
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• 2009

While Korean allows the same consonants at the coda of the preceding syllable and at the onset of the following syllable, English does not allow the geminate consonant in the same position. Due to this difference between Korean and English, Korean learners of English tend to incorrectly produce geminate consonants for English geminate graphemes as in summer. Based on this observation, a pilot study was designed to investigate how Korean learners of English perceive and produce English doubleton graphemes and singleton graphemes. Twenty Korean college students were asked to perform a forced-choice perception test as well as a production test for the 36 real word stimuli which consist of near minimal pairs of singleton and doubleton graphemes. The result showed that the accuracy rates for the word with singleton graphemes were relatively high both in perception and production (78.6% and 76.1%, respectively), while those for the word with doubleton graphemes were low both in perception and production (55.3% and 61.7%, respectively). Also, spectrographic analyses were provided where more production errors were witnessed in doubleton grapheme words than singleton grapheme words.