• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.3-16
• /
• 2003

ㆍAcoustic characteristics of stops in speech with contextual variability ㆍPosibility of stop recognition by post processing technique ㆍFurther work - Speech database - Modification of decoder - automatic segmentation of acoustic parameters

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.259-280
• /
• 2003

The paper discusses the way in which speech sounds are being evaluated and transcribed in various fields of speech sciences, and suggests ways for a more accurate transcription. The academic fields explored are of phonetics, speech processing, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The discussion centers on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), most commonly used in these fields, and other less widely-accepted transcription conventions such as the TOnes and Break Indices (ToBI), the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), an extension of the official Korean Romanization (KORBET), and the American-English transcription system in the TIMIT database (TIMITBET). These transcription conventions are dealt with Korean, English, and Korean-accented English. The paper demonstrates that each transcription can exclusively be recommended for a specific need from different academic fields. Due to its publicity, the IPA is best suited for phonetic evaluation in the fields of phonetics, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The rest of the transcriptions are useful for keyboard-inputting the phonetically evaluated data from all these fields as well as for sound transcription in speech engineering, because they use convenient letter symbols for typing, searching, and programming. Several practical suggestions are made to maintain the transcriptional efficiency and consistency to accommodate the intra-and inter-transcriber variability.

• MALSORI
• /
• v.55
• /
• pp.119-130
• /
• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate some acoustical characteristics of the voice quality features from the emotional speech database. Six different parameters are measured and compared for 6 different emotions (normal, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, boredom) and from 6 different speakers. Inter-speaker variability and intra-speaker variability are measured. Some intra-speaker consistency of the parameter change across the emotions are observed, but inter-speaker consistency are not observed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.37-44
• /
• 2023

This study investigates perceptual confusions of English fricatives among 121 Korean elementary school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with shorter periods of learning English. The objective is to examine how they perceive English fricative consonants and to provide educational guidelines. Two sets of English fricative identification tasks-voiceless fricatives and voiced fricatives-were administered to participants in a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) setting. Their phonemic awareness of the fricatives was visualized in perceptual confusion maps via multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings are explored in terms of the impacts of Korean EFL learners' L1 linguistic aspects and a comparison with L1 learners. Learners' phonemic awareness patterns are then compared with their relative importance in speech intelligibility based on a functional load hierarchy. The results indicated that Korean elementary EFL learners recognized English fricatives in a manner largely akin to L1 learners, suggesting their ongoing acquisition progress. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the young EFL learners possess sufficient phonemic awareness for most high functional load segments but encounter some difficulties with one high and one low functional pair. The findings of this study offer suggestions for diagnosing language learners' phonemic awareness abilities, thereby aiding in the development of practical guidelines for language instructional design and helping educators make informed decisions regarding teaching priority in L2 classes.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2006.05a
• /
• pp.59-62
• /
• 2006

Young children's speech is compared to adult-to-adult speech and adult-to-child speech by measuring durations and variability of each segment in CVC words. The results demonstrate that child speech exhibits an inconsistent timing relationship between consonants and vowels within a word. In contrast, consonant and vowel durations in adult-to-adult speech and adult-to-child speech exhibit significant relationships across segments, despite variability of segments when speaking rate is decreased. The results suggest that temporal patterns of young children are quite different from those of adults, and provide some evidence for lack of motor control capability and great variance in articulatory coordination.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1
• /
• pp.153-200
• /
• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.274-274
• /
• 1996

This presents the preliminary results from work in progress of a paired study of the acquisition of voiceless stops by Spanish speakers learning English, and American English speakers learning Spanish. For this study the hypothesis was that the American speakers would have no difficulty suppressing the aspiration in Spanish unaspirated stops; the Spanish speakers would have difficulty acquiring the aspiration necessary for English voiceless stops, according to Eckman's Markedness Differential Hypothesis. The null hypothesis was proved. All subjects were given the same set of disyllabic real words of English and Spanish in carrier phrases. The tokens analyzed in this report are limited to word-initial voiceless stops, followed by a low back vowel in stressed syllables. Tokens were randomized and then arranged in a list with the words appearing three separate times. Aspiration was measured from the burst to the onset of voicing(VOT). Both the first language (Ll) tokens and second language (L2) tokens were compared for each speaker and between the two groups of language speakers. Results indicate that the Spanish speakers, as a group, were able to reach the accepted target language VOT of English, but English speakers were not able to reach the accepted range for Spanish, in spite of statistically significant changes of p<.OOl by speakers in both groups of learners. A closer analysis of the speech samples revealed wide variability within the speech of native speakers of English. Not only is variability in English due to the wide range of VOT (120 msecs. for English labials, for example) but individual speakers showed different patterns. These results are revealing for the demands requied in experimental designs and the number of speakers and tokens requied for an adequate description of different languages. In addition, a simple report of means will not distinguish the speakers and the respective language learning situation; measurements must also include the RANGE of acceptability of VOT for phonetic segments. This has immediate consequences for the learning and teaching of foreign languages involving aspirated stops. In addition, the labelling of spoken language in speech technology is shown to be inadequate without a fuller mathematical description.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.19-33
• /
• 2019

This paper examines the perception of Korean phonemes by Egyptian learners of Korean and presents the learnability gradient of Korean consonants and vowels through High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). 50 Egyptian learners of Korean (27 low proficiency learners and 23 high proficiency learners) participated in 10 sessions of HVPT for Korean vowels, word initial and final consonants. Participants were tested on their identification ability of Korean vowels, word initial consonants, and syllable codas before and after the training. The results showed that both low and high proficiency groups did benefit from the training. Low proficiency learners showed a higher improvement rate than high proficiency learners. Based on the HVPT results, a learnability gradient was established to give insights into priorities in teaching Korean sounds to Egyptian learners.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Biology
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.66-72
• /
• 2002

The intraspecific variability, habitats, and morphological characteristics of eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) along the eastern coast of Korea were examined during June to August 1998. Morphological characteristics including shoot height, leaf length, leaf width, number of leaf veins, and shape of leaf apex were measured, and eelgrass habitats were analyzed using character correlation, principal components and cluster analyses. The morphological characteristics varied with the habitat types and water depth. Eelgrass beds distributed mostly in lagoons, ports and bays along the east coast of the Korean peninsula. The quantitative morphological features that enabled recognition of the two phonetic groups were short- narrow and long-broad leaf types. Leaf apex in particular varied with the habitat characteristics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.25-32
• /
• 2017

Besides their effect on the f0 contour of the following vowel, Korean stops are undergoing a sound change in which a partial or complete consonantal merger on voice onset time (VOT) is taking place between aspirated and lax stops. Many previous studies on sound change have mainly focused on group-normative effects, that is, effects that are representative of the population as a whole. Few systematic quantitative studies of change in adult individuals have been carried out. The current study examines whether the sound change holds for individual speakers. It focuses on inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability on sound change in contemporary Korean. Speech data were collected for thirteen Seoul Korean speakers studying abroad in America. In order to minimize the possible effects of speech production, socio-phonetic factors such as age, gender, dialect, speech rate, and L2 exposure period were controlled when recruiting participants. The results showed that, for nine out of thirteen speakers, the consonantal merger is taking place between the aspirated and lax stop in terms of VOT. There were also intra-speaker variations on the merger in three aspects: First, is the consonantal (VOT) merger between the two stops is in progress or not? Second, are VOTs for aspirated stops getting shorter or not (i.e., the aspirated-shortening process)? Third, are VOTs for lax stops getting longer or not (i.e., the lax-lengthening process)? The results of remarkable inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability indicate a synchronous speech sound change of the stop system in contemporary Korean. Some speakers are early adopters or active propagators of sound change whereas others are not. Further study is necessary to see whether the inter-speaker differences exceed intra-speaker differences in sound change.