• 음성과학
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.7-19
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• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.

• Journal of Platform Technology
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.3-8
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• 2018

This paper proposes a technique for recognizing online handwritten cursive data obtained by tracing a motion trajectory while a user is in the 3D space based on a convolution neural network (CNN) algorithm. There is a difficulty in recognizing the virtual character input by the user in the 3D space because it includes both the character stroke and the movement stroke. In this paper, we divide syllable into consonant and vowel units by using labeling technique in addition to the result of localizing letter stroke and movement stroke in the previous study. The coordinate information of the separated consonants and vowels are converted into image data, and Korean handwriting recognition was performed using a convolutional neural network. After learning the neural network using 1,680 syllables written by five hand writers, the accuracy is calculated by using the new hand writers who did not participate in the writing of training data. The accuracy of phoneme-based recognition is 98.9% based on convolutional neural network. The proposed method has the advantage of drastically reducing learning data compared to syllable-based learning.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권4호
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• pp.175-185
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate the acoustic durations of Korean vowels followed by either voiced or voiceless consonants. Six healthy adult speakers (2 females and 4 males) recorded nonsense syllables in which voiced (/b, d, g/) or voiceless (/p', t', k', $p^{h},t^{h},k^{h}$) consonants follow three different vowels (/i, a, u/) embedded in a carrier phrase. Results showed that vowels preceding voiced consonants (e.g., haba) were significantly longer in duration than those preceding voiceless consonants (e.g., hiP' a or $hip^{h}a$). Also vowels were longer in duration when occurring before velar-stops than before bilabial-stop and dental-stops. Finally, the duration of the low vowel (/a/) was substantially longer than that of the high vowels (/i, u/). These findings may be applicable to speech synthesis or therapy.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.35-46
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• 2006

This study investigated whether there are differences between Korean-English bilingual and Korean monolingual children on phonological awareness skills. Participants were 11 Korean-English bilingual children and 12 Korean monolingual children. The children's ages ranged between 6 and 7 years. The results were as follows. First, the bilingual children significantly outperformed monolingual children on overall phonological awareness tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly higher than monolinguals on all three types of phonological awareness tasks (segmentation, deletion, and blending). Second, there was a significant difference between the groups with respect to phonological units of the tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly better than monolinguals on the phonemic unit tasks, but two groups did not differ significantly on syllabic unit tasks. There was an interaction effect between unit size(syllables and phonemes) and group (bilinguals and monolinguals). Third, there were correlations for both bilingual and monolingual children between overall phonological awareness skills and word recognition skills.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.47-58
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• 2006

People tend to control their speech rate to help those with listening problems such as hearing impaired people. The aim of this study was to investigate effects of speech rate on the sentence perception by 10 adults with cochlear implantation. The sample speech included 42 sentences at normal, slow, and very slow speed focusing on the overall duration, vowel or pause duration. The subjects listened to the speech and wrote down what they heard. Each correct syllable of the content words in the sentence was counted to obtain the score. Partial points were given to the incomplete syllables. Results of this study were as follows: 1. The changes of speech rate had some influence on the sentence perception score by the cochlear implanted people. 2. In slow pause condition, the controlled speech rate had a positive effect on the perception score.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권3호
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• pp.89-101
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• 2003

This paper investigates edge effects on the relationship between the underlying tonal sequence and its surface realization in the IP-final Accentual Phrase within the Optimality Theoretic framework. I will examine the way in which AP tones are aligned with their associated syllables in IP-final position. In Korean. Jun's (1996) 'see-saw effect' does not allow any two identical tones if they are marking a boundary of a prosodic group. A phonetic experiment conducted in this paper suggests that the 'see-saw effect' only apply to H boundary tones. Furthermore, it will be shown that the timing of tonal peaks is determined through the ranking of a set of violable constraints. The AP tonal realization is achieved through the access to the global intonation in a complicated way. In the course of discussion, pitch patterns in IP-medial Accentual Phrase will also be discussed.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.189-197
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• 2008

In the process of speech therapy, fluency is acquired and speech rate increases in the process when the behavioral modification strategy, inducing speech fluency by making speech rate slower intentionally in an early stage, is applied. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the pause characteristics in slowed speech intentionally of treated stutterer. In this study, 10 developmental stutterers who had well established fluency in speech were involved. We had collected each 200 syllables sample of intentionally much slowed speech and a little slowed one in reading task. To measure the features of pause, total frequency of pauses, total durations of pauses, average duration of pauses and proportions of pause were investigated. The findings were as follows: Both the total durations and total frequency of pauses of much slowed speech were higher than that of a little slowed one. However, both the average duration and proportions of pauses of much slowed speech were not significantly higher than that of a little slowed one.

• 대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.157-162
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• 1990

In this study, a peripheral auditory model is used as a frequency feature extractor and a recurrent network which has recurrent links on input nodes is constructed in order to show the reliability of the recurrent network as a recognizer by executing recognition tests for 4 Korean place names and syllables. In the case of using the general learning rule, it is found that the weights are diverged for a long sequence because of the characteristics of the node function in the hidden and output layers. So, a refined weight compensation method is proposed and, using this method, it is possible to improve the system operation and to use long data. The recognition results are considerably good, even if time worping and endpoint detection are omitted and learning patterns and test patterns are made of average length of data. The recurrent network used in this study reflects well time information of temporal speech signal.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.87-98
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• 2000

Timing in speech is determined by many factors. In this paper, we introduce and discuss some factors that have generally been regarded as important in speech timing. They include stress, syllable structure, consonant insertion or deletion, tempo, lengthening at clause, phrase and word boundaries, preconsonantal vowel shortening, and compensation between segments or within phonological units (e.g., word, foot), compression due to the increase of syllables in word or foot level, etc. and each of them may playa crucial role in the structuring of speech timing in a language. But some of these timing factors must interact with each other rather than be independent and the effects of each factor on speech timing will vary from language to language. On the other hand, there could well be many other factors unknown so far. Finding out and investigating new timing factors and reinterpreting the already-known timing factors should enhance our understanding of timing structures in a given language or languages.

• 음성과학
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• 제2권
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• pp.95-108
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• 1997

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.