• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2016

This study examined the deletion of onset consonant in the word-internal structure in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. It used the dataset of speakers in their 20s extracted from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Yun et al., 2015). The proportion of deletion of word-internal onset consonants was analyzed using the linear mixed-effects regression model. The factors that promoted the deletion of onsets were primarily the types of consonants and their phonetic contexts. The results showed that onset deletion was more likely to occur for a lenis velar stop [k] than the other consonants, and in the phonetic contexts, when the preceding vowel was a low central vowel [a]. Moreover, some speakers tended to more frequently delete onset consonants (e.g., [k] and [n]) than other speakers, which reflected individual differences. This study implies that word-internal onsets undergo a process of gradient reduction within individuals' articulatory strategies.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

It was shown in speech production studies that the preparation unit of spoken word production is language particular, such as onset phonemes for English and Dutch, syllables for Mandarin Chinese, and morae for Japanese. However, there have been inconsistent results on whether the onset phoneme is a planning unit of spoken word production in Korean. In this study, two sets of experiments investigated possible influences of task demands on the phonological preparation in native Korean adults, namely, implicit priming and word naming with the form preparation paradigm. Only the word naming task, but not the implicit priming task, showed a significant onset priming effect, even though there were significant syllable priming effects in both tasks. Following the attentional theory ($O^{\prime}S{\acute{e}}aghdha$ & Frazer, 2014), these results suggest that task demands might play a role in the absence/presence of onset priming effects in Korean. Native Korean speakers could maintain their attention to the shared onset phonemes in word naming, which is not very demanding, while they have difficulties in allocating their attention to such units in a more cognitive-demanding implicit priming, even though both tasks involve accessing phonological codes. These findings demonstrate that there are cross-linguistic differences in the first selectable unit in preparation of spoken word production, but within a single language, the preparation unit might not be immutable.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.291-305
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• 2020

Purpose : The duration of speech segments reflects children's speech motor development. The purpose of this study was to determine whether segmental sound and word duration varies by age among preschool children. Methods : A total of 60 children aged 4~5 years participated in this study. Participants took the picture-naming test to produce single-word speech data. The duration of the consonant at the initial position of the word and the final position of the word, the voice onset time of plosive, the duration of the vowel following the initial consonant, and the duration of the word were measured. Results : As age increased, the duration of the initial consonant, the duration of the word, and the voice onset time decreased significantly. The main effects of age, manner of articulation, and place of articulation on the duration of the initial consonant were significant. The duration of consonants in the nasal sound and plosives and the duration of bilabial and alveolar sound differed significantly between groups. The main effects of age and vocal type on voice onset time were significant. The main effect of age on the duration of the consonant in the final position of word and on the duration of the vowel were not statistically significant. Conclusion : The results of this study showed that the duration of segmental sound and the word were associated with speech development between 4 and 5 years old. Accordingly, duration of the segmental sound and the word may serve as an acoustic cue as they reflect speech development and speech motor control maturity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to examine the voice onset times(VOTs) of the voiceless and voiced stops from the ten young male speakers of the Buckeye corpus[9]. The factors that are known to affect VOTs were also extracted, including the place of articulation, height of following vowels, location within word, presence of a preceding [s], status of the target word with respect to the content versus function word, presence of a syllabic stress, word frequency and speech rate. Findings from this work mostly agreed with those from earlier studies on English, but with some exceptions and new discoveries. We hope that this work can contribute to figuring out the nature and properties of the spontaneous speech of English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of the English voiceless stops [p, t, k] found in the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1]. Three young female speakers were chosen for this study and their VOT values were semi-automatically extracted along with other factors. The factors used for the analysis were place of articulation, location in word, syllabic stress, content word or not, word frequency calculated from the corpus, and the speech rate expressed in syllables per second. Results showed that, for the three places of articulation of each speaker, all the factors had a statistically significant effect on the VOT values. This paper has significance in that the materials used for the analysis were from a corpus of spontaneous natural English speech.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.11
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• pp.2800-2812
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable-word boundary misalignment cost on word segmentation in Korean continuous speech. Previous studies have demonstrated the important role of syllabification in speech segmentation. The current study investigated whether the resyllabification process affects word recognition in Korean continuous speech. In Experiment I, under the misalignment condition, participants were presented with stimuli in which a word-final consonant became the onset of the next syllable. (e.g., /k/ in belsak ingan becomes the onset of the first syllable of ingan 'human'). In the alignment condition, they heard stimuli in which a word-final vowel was also the final segment of the syllable (e.g., /eo/ in heulmeo ingan is the end of both the syllable and word). The results showed that word recognition was faster and more accurate in the alignment condition. Experiment II aimed to confirm that the results of Experiment I were attributable to the resyllabification process, by comparing only the target words from each condition. The results of Experiment II supported the findings of Experiment I. Therefore, based on the current study, we confirmed that Korean, a syllable-timed language, has a misalignment cost of resyllabification.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.427-452
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• 2003

Korean is famous for having all voiceless stop sounds. Korean does have voiced stops but they are considered to exist only as the allophones of word initial /p, t, k/. My experiment shows the English word initial stop sounds [b, d, g] and the Korean lax stop series /p, t, k/ in word initial position are similar in the range of voice onset time. If English word initial[b, d, g] sounds are posited as voiced, then Korean word initial /p, t, k/ should be classified as voiced also. Phonetically English /b, d, g/ phonemes and Korean /p, t, k/ phonemes are very similar except the word initial [p, t, k] are devoiced slightly more, but not significant enough to be classified as voiceless than English word initial [b, d, g]. If we posit /b, d, g/ as Korean phonemes, it explains why Korean /p, t, k/ series has the allophones [b, d, g] instead of fortis stops /p', t', k'/ in Korean even though /p', t', k'/ has less positive VOT value than /p, t, k/. If we posit /b, d, g/ as Korean phonemes, then it does not cause spelling or pronunciation confusion either when Koreans learn English or English speakers learn Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2000

The aim of this research is to investigate acoustic characteristics of three different types of Korean Stops-plain, tensed, and aspirated-, and employ these as a base to determine which one(s) can be used as perceptual cues. In this paper, we have examined acoustic characteristics of Korean Stops, especially voice onset time(VOT), closure duration(CD), degree of pitch of following vowels and differences in the intensity of the Stops build-up after the onset of voicing. From the above characteristics, differences can be made between word-initial and word-medial positions. That is to say, in word-initial position, the three Korean Stops are distinguished by VOT and pitch, whereas in word-medial by CD, VOT and pitch. However, the acoustic characteristics do not have the same value as perceptual cues. In both word-initial, and medial positions, the immediately following vowels play the most important role in perceiving Korean Stops. And in case of word'-medial positions,. CD and VOT also play important perceptual roles. In order to have a more fine-grained distinction among Korean Stops, we think future research should be done to investigate which factor(s) of the following vowels is/are the most determinative perceptual cue(s). However, based on our investigation, we may conclude that it is highly plausible that pitch can be one of the most important perceptual cues when distinguishing the three Korean Stops.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.431-469
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• 2002

The main purpose of this paper is to present data about schm constructions in English and to examine them within the framework of Optimality Theory. American people sometimes reduplicate a word in deprecation using a prefix schm- or shm-, as in fancy-shmancy, and old-shmold. In these data, reduplicants surface as a copy of the whole word except the onset of the first syllable, which is replaced with schm. My data include some examples where the onset of the second syllable, not the first syllable, within the word reduplication is deleted and replaced with fixed segmentism schm, which seems to be infix rather than prefix. Above all, this study presents concrete evidence for the existence and function of ‘syllable’ and ‘foot’ known as prosodic categories by examining schm reduplication. Such extensions of schm-reduplcation also make predictions about types of outputs corresponding to their inputs.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.21-30
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• 2008

The current study investigated distributional properties of the Korean Accentual Phrase and their implication to word segmentation. The properties examined were the frequency of various AP tonal patterns, the types of tonal patterns that are imposed upon content words, and the average number and temporal location of content words within the AP. A total of 414 sentences from the Read speech corpus and the Radio corpus were used for the data analysis. The results showed that the 84% of the APs contained one content word, and that almost 90% of the content words are located in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was not an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were LH, LHH, and LHLH (78%), and 88% of the multisyllabic content words start with a rising tone in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were HH, HHLH, and HHL (72%), and 74% of the multisyllabic content words start with a level H tone in AP-initial position. The data further showed that 84.1% of APs end with the final H tone. The findings provide valuable information about the prosodic pattern and structure of Korean APs, and account for the results of a previous study which showed that Korean listeners are sensitive to AP-initial rising and AP-final high tones (Kim, 2007). This is in line with other cross-linguistic research which has revealed the correlation between prosodic probability and speech processing strategy.