• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제13권3호
• /
• pp.15-20
• /
• 2021

In line with recent attention to the multimodal expression of politeness, the present study examined the association between polite speech and acoustic features through the analysis of vowels produced in casual and polite speech contexts in Korean. Fourteen adult native speakers of Seoul Korean produced the utterances in two social conditions to elicit polite (professor) and casual (friend) speech. Vowel duration and the first (F1) and second formants (F2) of seven sentence- and phrase-initial monophthongs were measured. The results showed that polite speech shares acoustic similarities with vowel production in clear speech: speakers showed greater vowel space expansion in polite than casual speech in an effort to enhance perceptual intelligibility. Especially, female speakers hyperarticulated (front) vowels for polite speech, independent of speech rate. The implications for the acoustic encoding of social stance in polite speech are further discussed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제13권1호
• /
• pp.25-36
• /
• 2021

This study examined the perception and production of eight English fricatives /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ by thirty Chinese English majors and thirty Chinese middle school students through a fricative identification test, an intelligibility test, and a goodness rating test and focused on error patterns and the perception-production relationship. The results showed that substitution errors occurred frequently in the perception and production of English fricatives by both the English majors and the middle school students. Further, the error patterns were attributed to various influencing factors such as the negative transfer from Chinese consonant inventory, hypercorrection or overcompensation mistakes, deficiency of L2 teaching, and acoustic similarities. Significant overall correlations were found between the fricative perception and production by the two subject groups but were not manifested in all the eight fricatives, indicating that Chinese learners' perceptual competence of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their productive excellence of those sounds in all cases. Furthermore, precedences of perception over production were incompletely manifested in the eight fricatives, which suggested that perception might not always be a necessary prerequisite for production. Additionally, subject group and vowel context differences were observed. The English majors performed better than the middle school students, both perceptually and productively, and the subjects' performances in perception and production varied when vowel contexts changed.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권3호
• /
• pp.197-218
• /
• 2000

The vocal tract shapes were measured from tracheoesophageal speakers during the sustained phonation of five Korean vowels /u/, /o/, /a/, /e/, /i/ using magnetic resonance image(MRI). The subject's original vowel utterances with speech intelligibility and the synthesized vowels from MR images were analyzed. The results were as follows: (1) The vowels /a/, /e/, /i/ were perceived as the same sounds of actual subject's speech, but the vowels /o/ and /u/ were perceived as /$\partial$/ and strained /u/, respectively. (2) The synthesized vowels /a/ and /e/ from the MR images were perceived as the same sounds, but the vowels /u/, /o/, /i/ were perceived as different sounds. (3) The synthesized vowel by the expanded pharyngeal segment of 3 times in vowel /o/ was perceived as more natural than that of 2 times. The pharyngeal areas with varied sizes should be experimented to secure better speech production because the correct shapes of the vocal tract lead to distinct vowel production.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권3호
• /
• pp.109-119
• /
• 2014

This article represents a first step in a large study aimed at elucidating the relationship between production and perception involved in sound change of /o/ in (Seoul) Korean. In this paper we present the results of a production study and a perception experiment. For the production study we examined vowel production data of 20 young adult speakers, measuring the first and second formants, then conducted a discriminant analysis based on those values. In terms of their F1-F2 values, the distribution of /o/ and /u/ were close, and even overlapping in some circumstances, which is consistent with the literature. This tendency was more apparent among the female speakers than the males. Moreover, with the females' distributions, /o/ was frequently categorized as /u/, suggesting that the direction of the sound change is indeed increasing from /o/ to /u/. Next, to investigate the effects of this proximity on perception, we used the production data of five randomly selected speakers from the production study as stimuli for a perception experiment in which 21 young adult native speakers of (Seoul) Korean performed a vowel identification task and provided a Goodness rating on a 5-point scale. We found that while rates of correctness were high, when these correctness scores were weighted by the Goodness rating, these "weighted correctness" scores were lower in some cases, indicating a degree of confusion in distinguishing between the two vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.101-108
• /
• 2014

This study investigates the effects of Japanese learners' Korean segmental production on pronunciation evaluation by Korean native raters. Read speech from 24 learners whose native language is Japanese are transcribed at the phonemic level, and confusion matrices are generated based on the phonemic transcriptions. The deviance from the canonical pronunciation found in the learners' speech is analyzed in terms of phoneme substitutions, vowel insertions, and consonant deletions. Each learner's pronunciation is rated impressionistically by 5 Korean native raters. The result shows that the deviance from the canonical pronunciation is strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores. Especially, the rates of phoneme substitutions and vowel insertions which are very strongly correlated with the pronunciation evaluation scores.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제60호
• /
• pp.47-66
• /
• 2006

This study examined the effect of English-language experience on Korean- and Japanese-English late learners' production of English unstressed vowels in terms of four acoustic phonetic features: F0, duration, intensity and vowel reduction. The learners manifested some improvement with experience. The native-like attainment of a phonetic feature, however, was related to the phonological status of that feature in the speakers' native language. The results suggest that the extent to which the non-native speakers' production of English unstressed vowels improved with English-language experience varied as a function of their native language background.

• 한국콘텐츠학회논문지
• /
• 제22권2호
• /
• pp.326-336
• /
• 2022

본 연구는 한국 대학생들의 미국 영어 모음 발화를 자질적으로 분석하여 한국인의 영어 모음 발화의 특성을 알아보는 것을 목적으로 한다. 즉 영어 모음의 분절음 정확도 뿐만 아니라 혀의 전후설성, 혀높이, 원순성, 긴장성과 같은 모음의 자질적 특성들을 분석하여 한국인 학습자가 비교적 쉽게 습득할 수 있는 자질들과 어려워하는 영어모음의 자질들을 밝히고자 했다. 영어 비전공자 대학생들이 11개의 영어 모음 /i, ɪ, eɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, oʊ, ɔ, ʊ, u, ʌ/가 포함된 1음절 영어 단어를 발화한 음성자료를 통해, 분절음 정확도 뿐만 아니라 이를 4개의 모음 자질로 분석하였다. 자질 분석 결과, 모든 모음을 통해 전후설성이 가장 쉽게 발화한 자질로 확인된 반면 혀높이와 긴장성 자질은 발화에 어려움이 있는 자질로 확인되었다. 전반적으로 후설모음과 중저모음이 전설모음과 고모음 보다 혀높이와 원순성 자질에서 발화의 어려움을 나타냈다. 개별모음을 볼 때 이중모음 /eɪ/가 모든 자질에서 가장 높은 정확도를 보여 쉽게 습득되는 모음으로 확인되었다. 반면 /ɑ, ɔ, ʌ/는 혀높이와 원순성에서 공통적으로 발화의 어려움을 보였고 고모음 /i, ʊ, u/는 긴장성 자질에서 어려움을 보였다. 각 자질들 사이의 상관관계를 분석한 결과에서는 혀높이-원순성, 그리고 혀높이-긴장성 두 자질쌍이 강한 상관성을 나타냈다. 이와 같은 연구 결과를 바탕으로 실제 교실 학습에 적용할 수 있는 교육적인 함축점도 논의되었다.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제15권1호
• /
• pp.25-36
• /
• 2008

Language transfer means that the speaker's first language or previously acquired language influences on the production of the target language. This study aims at examining if there is native language influence on the production of English intonation by Korean speakers. The pitch accent patterns and the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent in the sentence produced by Korean speakers are compared to those of American English speakers. The results show that when the word receives emphatic accent in the sentence, American English speakers put H* accent on the stressed syllable of the word, but Korean speakers mostly assign high pitch on the last syllable of the word and have LH tonal pattern despite the fact that primary stress does not come on the last syllable within a word. In addition, comparison of the values of duration, F0, and intensity of the stressed vowel of the word with emphatic accent to those of the word with unmarked neutral accent shows that Korean speakers do not realize the intonation of the accented word appropriately because the values decrease even though the word has emphatic accent. This study finds out that there are differences in the production of English intonation of the word with emphatic accent between native speakers of English and Korean speakers, and that there is negative transfer of Korean intonation pattern to the production of English intonation by Korean speakers.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제9권3호
• /
• pp.169-184
• /
• 2002

Korean has two types of voiceless alveolar fricatives: a non-tense fricative /$S^{h}$ and a tense fricative /s'/. Twenty native speakers of Korean produced five pairs of isolated words containing word initial $S^{h}V$ and /s'V/ sequences where V was any one of five (/a, e, i, o, u/) of Korean vowels. Acoustic measures such as duration, fricative noise prominent frequency, energy change of following vowel, and fundamental frequency at vowel onset were examined. Results showed that among the parameters, aspiration noise duration of /s'/ in mid and low vowel contexts was less than 21 ms. In a perception experiment, where only the aspiration noise interval of the /$S^{h}$/ tokens was incrementally reduced, some listeners shifted perception from /$S^{h}$/ to /s'/.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제9권3호
• /
• pp.201-210
• /
• 2002

This paper explores whether there is correlation between consonants' place and duration of adjacent vowels in English and Korean. The results showed that in English the vowels preceding alveolar stops were in general longer than the vowels before bilabial or velar stops. Consonants appeared to have their inherent length due to their place and to exhibit some compensatory effects on the duration of preceding vowels. This effect can be explained in a physiological term that the tongue tip is the organ which might be more agile in articulatory movement than the tongue body for the velars or the lower lip (and the jaw) for the bilabials is and the shorter production time of the alveolars caused the lengthening of the adjacent vowels. However, this physiological account did not hold in the case of Korean, which exhibited less consistent patterns across speakers for the consonants' place and the vowel duration. The segmental duration seemed to be timed quite consistently within a language but the pattern was not universal across languages.