• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.7-17
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• 1998

The purpose of this preliminary study on Korean vowel duration was to find how different syllable types and kinds of plosives influence vowel duration. The vowel duration of the Front Mid and Low vowels (/$\varepsilon$/(에), /e/(어), /${\ae}$/(애), /a/(아)) was found to be longer than that of High and Back vowels (/i/(이), /i/(으), /u/(우), /o/(오)). Compared with single vowels (V), Vowels followed by a consonant (CV) were shortened by 79.3% and vowels between consonants (CVC) were shortened by 38.5%, respectively. These results suggest that the influence of consonants upon Korean vowel duration depend on syllble types and the manner or place of articulation.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.1083-1092
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• 2007

In Unicode, two types of Hangul encoding schemes are currently in use, namely, the "precomposed modern Hangul syllables" model and the "conjoining Hangul characters" model. The current Unicode Hangul conjoining rules allow a precomposed Hangul syllable to be a member of a syllable which includes conjoining Hangul characters; this has resulted in a number of different Hangul encoding implementations. This unfortunate problem stems from an incomplete understanding of the Hangul writing system when the normalization and encoding schemes were originally designed. In particular, the extended use of old Hangul was not taken into consideration. As a result, there are different ways to represent Hangul syllables, and this cause problem in the processing of Hangul text, for instance in searching, comparison and sorting functions. In this paper, we discuss the problems with the normalization of current Hangul encodings, and suggest a single efficient rule to correctly process the Hangul encoding in Unicode.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.187-200
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• 2002

The purpose of the present study is to see in terms of $F_{0}$ variation in Japanese how discourse focus and the lexical word accent interact with each other in realizing overall intonation patterns. Discourse focus causes prosodic restructuring of phrase structures and, as a result, largely affects pitch contours, whereas the lexical word accent is said to delimit the $F_{0}$ into a certain range. Measurement of $F_{0}$ was made of utterances of Japanese sentences to observe behavior of pitch contours with varied focus assignment and lexical accent specifications. The utterances were obtained in question-answer discourse contexts so that in a sentence, either one NP was always focused or no focus was assigned. I set four points for $F_{0}$ measurement; $F_{1s},F_{1m}, F_{2s}$, and $F_{2m}$, two for each noun phrase corresponding to $F_{0}$ at the beginning of the first syllable and that of the vocalic portion of the second syllable in the two NP's. The results of present study were as follows: (1) for all combination of lexical accent types, the $F_{0}$ rise both in NP1 and NP2 are higher when focused than when not focused. (2) NP2 starts a new accentual phrase when focused, showing even higher $F_{0}$ than NP1, the latter of which implies that in forming a new accentual phrase by focusing, catathesis does not seem to take effect on NP2 preceded by accented NP1. (3) unfocused NP2 preceded by unaccented NP1 has higher $F_{0}$ than those preceded by accented NP1.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.54-61
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• 2016

Because a word is the basic unit of language processing, studies of the word recognition processing and the variables that contribute to word recognition processing are very important. Word frequency and word length are recognized as important factors on word recognition. This study examined the effects of those two variables on the Korean word recognition processing. In Experiment 1, two types of Hangul words, pure Hangul words and Hangul words with Hanja counterparts, were used to explore the frequency effects. A frequency effect was not observed for Hangul words with Hanja counterparts. In Experiment 2, the word length was manipulated to determine if the word length effect appears in Hangul words. Contrary to the expectation, one syllable words were processed more slowly than two syllable words. The possible explanations for these results and future research directions are discussed.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.325-353
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• 2016

The visual span refers to the number of letters that can be accurately recognized without moving one's eyes. The size of the visual span is affected by sensory factors such as perimetric complexity, crowding, and mislocation of letters. Korean Hangul utilizes rather unique alphabetic-syllabary writing system, quite different from English and Chinese writing systems. Due to this combinatorial nature of the script, the visual span for Hangul characters can also be affected by the letter type (e.g., CV vs CVCC). The present study examined the effect of syllable complexity on the visual span for Hangul by comparing letter recognition accuracy across four letter type conditions (C only, CV, CVC, and CVCC). We also aimed to determine the meaningful letter type(s) that is associated with differences in reading abilities in Korean. Using a trigram presentation method, we found that overall recognition accuracy declined as syllable complexity increased. However, the visual span for CVC type was greater than that for CV type, suggesting that the effect is not necessarily linear, and that there might be other factors affecting the visual span for these types of letters. C and CV type showed fairly strong positive correlations with reading comprehension, suggesting that these might be the meaningful units for measuring visual span in relating to reading abilities.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.193-212
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• 2010

The purpose of our study was to provide effective speech evaluation items examining the variables of speech that successfully predict the speech intelligibility in CP children. The subjects were 55 children with spastic type cerebral palsy. As for the speech evaluation, we performed a speech subsystem evaluation and a speech intelligibility test. The results of the study are as follows. The evaluation task for the speech subsystems consisted of 48 task items within an observational evaluation stage and three levels of severity. The levels showed correlations with gross motor functions, fine motor functions, and age. Second, the evaluation items for the speech subsystems were rearranged into seven factors. Third, 34 out of 48 task items that positively correlated with the syllable intelligibility rating were as follows. There were four items in the observational evaluation stage. Among the nonverbal articulatory function evaluation items, there were 11 items in level one. There were 12 items in level two. In level three there were eight items. Fourth, there were 23 items among the 48 evaluation tasks that correlated with the sentence intelligibility rating. There was one item in the observational evaluation stage which was in the articulatory structure evaluation task. In level one there were six items. In level two, there were eight items. In level three, there was a total number of eight items. Fifth, there was a total number of 14 items that influenced the syllable intelligibility rating. Sixth, there was a total number of 13 items that influenced the syllable intelligibility rating. According to the results above, the variables that influenced the speech intelligibility of CP children among the articulatory function tasks were in the respiratory function task, phonatory function task, and lip and chin related tasks. We did not find any correlation for the tongue function. The results of our study could be applied to speech evaluation, setting therapy goals, and evaluating the degree of progression in children with CP. We only studied children with the spastic type of cerebral palsy, and there were a small number of severe degree CP children compared to those with a moderate degree of CP. Therefore, when evaluating children with other degrees of severity, we may have to take their characteristics more into account. Further study on speech evaluation variables in relation to the severity of the speech intelligibility and different types of cerebral palsy may be necessary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.25-31
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• 2018

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the pronounced words present in the Buckeye Corpus and compared the frequency distribution of these processes by sex and age groups to provide a clearer understanding of spoken English to linguists and phoneticians. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus using R. Next, the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated using R scripts, and a frequency distribution by vowel process types, as well as sex and age groups, was created. The results revealed that 95% of the orthographic words contained the same number of syllables, whereas 5% had different numbers of vowels, thereby proving that speakers tend to preserve vowels in spontaneous speech. In addition, deletion processes were preferred in natural speech. Most vowel deletions occurred with an unstressed syllable. Chi-square tests were performed to calculate dependence in the distribution of phonological process types for male and female groups and young and old groups. The results showed a very strong correlation. This finding indicates that vowel processes occurred in approximately the same pattern in natural and spontaneous speech data regardless of sex and age, as well as whether or not the vowel processes were identical. Based on these results, the author concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can greatly enhance practical understanding of spoken English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.41-48
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• 2018

This study examined the acoustic characteristics of Korean alveolar fricatives of normal children. Developing children aged 3 and 7, typically produced 2 types of nonsense syllables containing alveolar fricative /sV/ and /VsV/ sequences where V was any one of three corner vowels (/i, a, and u/). Stimuli containing the speech materials used in a production experiment were presented randomly to 12 speech language pathologists (SLPs) for a perception test. The SLPs responded by selecting one of seven alternative sounds. Acoustic measures such as duration of frication noise, normalized intensity, skewness, and center of gravity were examined. There was significant difference in acoustic measures when comparing vowels. Comparison of syllable structures indicated statistically significant differences in duration of frication noise and normalized intensity. Acoustic parameters could account for the perceptual data. Relating the acoustic and perception data by means of logistic regression suggests that duration of frication noise and normalized intensity are the primary cues to perceiving Korean fricatives.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.60-64
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• 1989

In this paper, an local path constraint Is proposed in order to increase the speech recognition rate. An input speech signal is analyzed by autocorrelation and LPC coefficient as parameters. The local path constraint of the proposed type was compared with the conventional five types. The speechs used in this search are the subway stops, and the 130 words pronounced 10 times for the different 13 words consisting of 11 characters of syllable by 2 male and 1 female are tested. As a result, we proved that this proposed type is the most optimal type and the recognition rate of $94.6\%$ is obtained .

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.265-269
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• 2007

This paper reports an compared acoustic analysis on speech produced by two Korean groups, normal and AOS, focusing on utterances of V-CV structures. Major concerns include: 1) types of errors (distortion/substitution) according to the place of articulation, 2) duration of each syllable, 3) VOTs of stop sounds, and 4) F1 and F2 of vowels. In terms of the differences in these phonetic characteristics between the two groups, we aim to clarify some characteristics of AOS and to provide fundamental criteria for diagnosing and evaluating the disease.