• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.93-111
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• 2001

This study investigates the contribution of vocalic information following the release of an initial stop to the identification of the three-way stop contrast (aspirated, lax, and tense) in Korean. Recent studies showed that there is a strong interaction between consonant types and tone. The findings raise questions concerning Korean listeners' use of tonal (or vocalic F0) variation in differentiation initial tense, lax, and aspirated stops. The above issues are addressed in the present study using a cross-splicing methodology. The overall results show that low vocalic F0 provided the most salient information for lax stops; tense and aspirated stop identification depended on a combination of VOT, F0, and H1-H2 characteristics. The perceptual dominance of F0 over VOT for lax stops is consistent with the size of the F0 difference in utterance-initial position, as well as their prominent role in Korean intonational phonology.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.93-104
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• 2001

The author analyzed acoustic parameters of ten Korean numbers produced by ten male students using Praat. Variations of f0, F1, F2 and F3 within and between speakers were examined by determining an average and standard deviation of the parameters of each number and by comparing the acoustic values with one another. Results showed that each subject produced the numbers within a certain range of variation across time. Thus, speaker identification can be more certain using dynamic information of the acoustic parameters within each vocalic segment. Also, percent difference of within-subjects' variation to that of between-subjects can be utilized to determine which sounds would be better stimuli for speaker identification. According to the criteria, the number '2' proved the best stimulus while the number '7' was the worst. Future studies will be necessary to explore robust methods of speaker identification under noisy conditions.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.343-348
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• 1996

This paper examines the contribution of vocalic information (after the onset of voicing) to the perception of Korean alveolar stops: the aspirated /$t^{h}$/, the lenis /t/, and the fortis /$t^{*}$/. These stops have been analyzed as differing in VOT (Abramson & Lisker, 1964), the glottal width or aspiration (Kim, 1970), and F0 and intensity build-up (Han & Weitzman, 1970). These studies focused on the articulatory and acoustic qualities of the consonants and often assumed that the consonantal portion before the onset of voicing plays the main role in maintaining the three-way distinction. In contrast, the role of the following vowels was given less attention. In order to investigate the contribution of the following vowels, a perceptual study was conducted using stimuli cross-spliced from three naturally produced syllables [$t^{h}al$] 'mask', [tal] 'moon', and [$t^{*}al$]) 'daughter'. Stimuli were presented to 12 Korean listeners for identification. Each subject responded to a total of 486 tokens. The results show that vowels play the primary role when the cut occurs at the star of voicing. Even with cuts at 10 ms and 40 ms into voicing, the following vowel still plays a clear role. This suggests that vowels carry the important information for distinguishing the three stops.