• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.165-169
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• 2014

Intelligibility of speech transmitted to listeners can significantly be degraded in noisy environments such as in auditorium and in train station due to ambient noises. Noise-masked speech signal is hard to be recognized by listeners. Among the conventional methods to improve speech intelligibility, consonant-vowel intensity ratio (CVR) approach reinforces the powers of overall consonants. However, excessively reinforced consonant is not helpful in recognition. Furthermore, only some of consonants are improved by the CVR approach. In this paper, we propose the corrective weighting (CW) approach that reinforces the powers of consonants according to syllable-type such as consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel-consonant (VC) in Korean differently, considering the level of listeners' recognition. The proposed CW approach was evaluated by the subjective test, Comparison Category Rating (CCR) test of ITU-T P.800, showed better performance, that is, 0.18 and 0.24 higher than the unprocessed CVR approach, respectively.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.743-773
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• 2011

In this research, the writer has done a comparative analysis of 4,791 trisyllabic modern Chinese vocabularies from "a dictionary for trisyllabic modern Chinese word" and the corresponding Korean words written in Chinese characters out of 170,000 vocabularies hereupon that are collected in "new age new Korean dictionar y". Aa a result, we have the total 407 pairs of corresponding group with the following 3 types: 1) Chinese : Korean 3(2) : 3 syllable Chinese characters with completely same form-morpheme and same meaning, use, class (376pairs, 92.38% of 407), 2) Chinese : Korean 3 : 3 syllable Chinese characters with completely same form-morpheme and partly same meaning, use, class (18pairs, 4.42% of 407), 3)Chinese : Korean 3 : 3 syllable Chinese characters with completely same form-morpheme and different meaning, use, class (13pairs, 3.19% of 407).

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.323-327
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• 1994

There have been three contrastive claims over the classification of Korean. To answer the classification question, timing variables which would determine the durations of syllable, word and foot were investigated with various words either in isolation or in sentence contexts using Soundcoup/16 on Macintosh P.C., and a total of 284 utterances, obtained from six Korean speakers, were used. It was found 1) that the durational pattern for words tended to maintain in utterances, regardless of position , subjects and dialects 2) that the syllable duration was determined both by the types of phoneme and by the number of phonemes, the word duration both by the syllable complexity and by the number of syllables, and the foot duration by the word complexity, 3) that there was a constractive relationship between foot length in syllables and foot duration and 4) that the foot duration varied generally with word complexity if the same word did not occur both in the first foot and in the second foot. On the basis of these, it was concluded that Korean is a word timed language where, all else being equal, including tempo, emphasis, etc., the inherent durational pattern for words tends to maintain in utterances. The main difference between stress timing, syllable timing and word timing were also discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.198-206
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• 1996

Using eighteen text materials from various goners of present-day Japanese, we collected phonologically reduced forms frequently observed in conversational Japanese, and classified them in search of unified explanation of phonological reduction phenomena. We found 7,516 cases of reduced forms which we divided into 43 categories according to the types of phonological changes they have undergone. The general tendencies ale that deletion and fusion of a phoneme or an entire syllable takes place frequently, resulting in the decrease in the number of syllable. Typical examples frequently observed throughout the materials are : $~/noda/{\rightarrow}~/nda/,{\;}-/teiru/{\rightarrow}~/teru/,{\;}~/dewa/{\rightarrow}~/zja/,{\;}~/tesimau/{\rightarrow}~/cjau/$. From morphosyntactic point of view phonological reduction often occurs at the NP and VP morpheme boundaries. The following findings are drawn from phonological observations of reduction. (1) Vowels are more easily deleted than consonants. (2) Bilabials(/m/, /b/, and /w/ are the most likely candidates for deletion. (3) In a concatenation of vowels, closed vowels are absorbed into open vowels, or two adjacent vowels come to create another vowel, in which case reconstruction of the original sequence is not always predictable. (4) Alveolars are palatalized under the influence of front vowels. (5) Regressive assimilation takes place in a syllable starting with ill, changing the entire syllable into phonological choked sound or a syllabic nasal, depending on the voicing of following phoneme.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.15-19
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• 2005

The aim of this study is to provide some information on frequencies of occurrence for units of Korean phonemes and syllables analysing spontaneous speech spoken by 3 to 8-year-old Korean children. 49 Korean Children(7${\sim}$10 children for each age) were employed as subjects for this study. Speech data were recorded and phonemically transcribed. 120 utterances for each child were selected for analysis except one child whose data were only 91 utterances. The data size of the present study were 5,971 utterances, 5,1554 syllables, and 105491 phonemes. Among 19 consonants, /n/ showed highest frequency rate of these four conson ants were over 50% for all age groups. Among 18 vowels, /a/ was the most frequent one and /i/ and / ${\wedge}$ were the second and third respectively. The frequency rate of these four consonants were over 50% for all age groups. Frequently occurring syllable types were a part of grammatical word in most cases. Only 5${\sim}$6% of syllable types covered 50% of speech.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.179-184
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phonetic features of the lexical contrastive focus and the segmental contrastive focus. In this paper, I made two variables to study the realization of the contrastive focus. One is the three phonation types of the Korean plosive, a lenis, a fortis and an aspirate. The other is the positions of the segmental contrastive focus syllable in a word. I examined pitch, duration, intensity, VOT, formant, and so on. The realization of focus is different by the phonation types and the positions of the focused syllable.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.229-241
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• 2001

Using eighteen texts from various genera of present-day Japanese, I collected phonologically reduced forms frequently observed in conversational Japanese, and classified them in search of a unified. explanation of phonological phenomena. I found 7,516 cases of reduced forms which I divided into 43 categories according to the types of phonological changes they have undergone. The general tendencies are that deletion and fusion of a phoneme or an entire syllable takes place frequently, resulting in the decrease in the number of syllables. From a morphosyntactic point of view, phonological reduction often occurs at the NP and VP morpheme boundaries. The following findings are drawn from phonetical observations of reduction. (1) Vowels are more easily deleted than consonants. (2) Bilabials ([m], [b], and [w]) are the most likely candidates for deletion. (3) In a concatenation of vowels, closed vowels are absorbed into open vowels, or two adjacent vowels come to create another vowel, in which case reconstruction of the original sequence is not always predictable. (4) Alveolars are palatalized under the influence of front vowels. (5) Regressive assimilation takes place in a syllable starting with [r], changing the entire syllable into a phonological choked sound or a syllabic nasal, depending on the voicing of the following phoneme.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.8
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• pp.653-658
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a word spacing system which can be performed with just a small memory. We focus on significant memory reduction while maintaining the performance of the system as much as the latest studies. Our proposed method is based on the theory of Hidden Markov Model. We use only probability information not adding any rule information. Two types of features are employed: 1) the first features are the spacing patterns dependent on each individual syllable and 2) the second features are the values of transition probability between the two syllable-patterns. In our experiment using only the first type of features, we achieved a high accuracy of more than 91% while reducing the memory by 53% compared with other systems developed for mobile application. When we used both types of features, we achieved an outstanding accuracy of more than 94% while reducing the memory by 76% compared with other system which employs bigram syllables as its features.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.71-83
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• 1994

This paper deals with the improvement of the synthesized speech quality and naturality in the Korean TTS(Text-to-Speech) system. We had extracted the parameters(table2) such as its amplitude, duration and pitch period in a syllable through the analysis of speech waveforms(table1) in the time domain and synthesized syllables using them. To the frequencies of the Korean pronunciation large vocabulary dictionary we had synthesized speeches selected 229 syllables such as V types are 19, CV types are 80. VC types are 30 and CVC types are 100. According to the 4 Korean syllable types from the data format dictionary(table3) we had tested each 15 syllables with the objective MOS(Mean Opinion Score) evaluation method about the 4 items i.e., intelligibility, clearness, loudness, and naturality after selecting random group without the knowledge of them. As the results of experiments the qualities of them are very clear and we can control the prosodic elements such as durations, accents and pitch periods (fig9, 10, 11, 12).

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.41-54
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate predictors concerning preschoolers' ability to read words, in terms of their sub-skills of alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, and phonological processing. Fourteen literacy sub-tests and three types of reading tasks were administered to 289 kindergartners aged 4 to 6 in Busan. The main results are as follows. Sub-skills that predicted reading ability varied with children's age. Irrespective of children's age groups, knowledge of consonant names and digit naming speed commonly explained the reading of real words. In contrast, skills of syllable deletion and phoneme substitution and knowledge of alphabet composition principles were related to only 4-year-olds' reading skills. Exclusively included was digit memory in predicting 5-year-olds' reading abilities, and knowledge of vowel sounds in 6-year-olds' reading skills. The type of reading task also influenced reading ability. A few common variables such as knowledge of consonant names and vowel sounds, digit naming speed, and phoneme substitution skill explained all types of word reading. Syllable counting skills, however, had predictive value only for the reading of real words. Phoneme insertion skills and digit memory had predictive value for the reading of pseudo words and low frequency letters. Likewise, knowledge of consonant sounds and vowel stroke-adding principles were significant only for the reading of low frequency letters.