• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.162-173
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• 1998

Writing a CAI program containing Chinese characters requires a common Chinese character code to share information for educational purposes. A Chinese character code setting needs to allow a mixed use of both vowel and stroke order, to represent Chinese characters in simplified Chinese as well as in Japanese version, and to have a conversion process for data exchange among different sets of Chinese codes. Waste in code area is expected when vowel order is used because heteronyms are recognized as different. However, using stroke order facilitates in data recovery preventing duplicate code generation, though it does not comply with the phonetic rule. We claim that the first and second level Chinese code area needs to be expanded as much as academic and industrial circles have demanded. Also, we assert that Unicode can be a temporary measure for an educational code system due to its interoperability, expandability, and expressivity of character sets.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-25
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• 2003

A laryngograph was developed to measure the open and closed movements of vocal folds in our laboratory. This study attempted to evaluate its performance by comparing its glottal data with that of the original laryngograph. Ten normal Korean adults Participated in the experiment. Each subject produced a sustained vowel /a/ for about five seconds. This study compared f0 values, contact quotients of the duration of closed vocal folds over one glottal pulse, and area quotients of the closed over open vocal folds derived from glottal waves using both the original and new laryngographs. Results showed that the mean and standard deviation of the two laryngographs were almost comparable with a correlation coefficient 0.662 but minor systematic shift below those of the original laryngograph was observed. The absolute mean difference converged into 1 Hz, which indicates a possibility of adopting some threshold of rejecting inappropriate pitch values beyond a threshold value. The contact quotient of the normal subjects came out slightly over the 50% in a citation speech. Finally, the area quotient converged into 1. We will pursue further studies on the abnormal patients in the future.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2024

The Korean three-way stop contrast (lenis, aspirated, fortis) is currently undergoing a sound change, such that the primary cue distinguishing lenis and aspirated stops is shifting from voice onset time (VOT) to F0. Despite recent discussions of this shift, research on voice quality, traditionally considered an additional cue signaling the contrast, remains sparse. This study investigated the extent to which the associated voice quality [as reflected in the acoustic measurements of H1^*-H2^*, H1^*- A1^*, and cepstral peak prominence (CPP)] contributes to the three-way stop contrast, and how the realization is conditioned by prominence- vs. boundary-induced prosodic strengthening amid the ongoing sound change. Results for 12 native Korean speakers indicate that there was a substantial distinction in voice quality among the three stop categories with the breathiness of the vowel being the greatest after the lenis, intermediate after the aspirated, and least after the fortis stops, indicating the role of voice quality in the maintenance of the three-way stop contrast. Furthermore, prosodic strengthening has different effects on the contrast and contributes to the enhancement of the phonological contrast contingent on whether it is induced by prominence or boundary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2020

This study identified the substitution of /u/ for /o/ (e.g., pyəllo [pyəllu]) in Korean based on the speech corpus as a function of grammar items. Korean /o/ and /u/ share the vowel feature [+rounded], but are distinguished in terms of tongue height. However, researchers have reported that the merger of Korean /o/ and /u/ is in progress, making them indistinguishable. Thus, in this study, the frequency of the phonetic manifestation /u/ of the underlying form of /o/ for each grammar item was calculated in The Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Seoul Corpus 2015) which is a large corpus from a total of 40 speakers from Seoul or Gyeonggi-do. It was then confirmed that linking endings, particles, and adverbs ending with /o/ in the word-final position were substituted for /u/ approximately 50% of the stimuli, whereas, in nominal items, they were replaced at a frequency of less than 5%. The high rates of substitution were the special particle "-do[du]" (59.6%) and the linking ending "-go[gu]" (43.5%) among high-frequency items. Observing Korean pronunciation in real life provides deep insight into its theoretical implications in terms of speech recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2022

Previous studies have provided important findings on children's speech production development. They have revealed that essentially all aspects of children's speech shift toward adult-like characteristics over time. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the perceptual aspects of children's speech tokens, as perceived by naive adult listeners. To fill the gap between children's production and adults' perception, we conducted cross-sectional perceptual studies of monosyllabic words produced by children aged two to six years. Monosyllabic words in the consonant-vowel-consonant form were extracted from children's speech samples and presented aurally to five listener groups (20 listeners in total). Generally, the agreement rate between children's production of target words and adult listeners' responses increases with age. The perceptual responses to tokens produced by two-year old children induced the largest discrepancies and the responses to words produced by six years olds agreed the most. Further analyses were conducted to identify the sources of disagreement, including the types of segments and syllable structure. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development and perception of children's speech across age groups.