Speech rhythm in Korean: Experiments in speech cycling (original) (raw)
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Non-native speech rhythm: A large-scale study of English pronunciation by Korean learners
Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 2007
Kim, Jong-mi, Suzanne Flynn, and Mira Oh. 2007. Non-native speech rhythm: A large-scale study of English pronunciation by Korean learners. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 13.2. 219-250. To what degree do the rhythmical properties of the native language emerge in the acquisition of a second language? Specifically, would non-native English-a stress-timed language-evidence effects of Korean-a so-called syllable-timed language? In this study, we analyze the speech data from 111 adult native speakers of Korean at an intermediate level learning English as a second language, in comparison with those from 29 adult native speakers of English. The study involves a pre-and posttest analysis of speech elicited in a reading task. We focus on the acoustic quantification of the vowel duration in relation to F0 trace and formant location in all elicited speech that involve 1) stress alternation ('John was 'sick of 'Fred and 'Sandy), 2) stress assignment (a 'blackboard vs. a black 'board), and 3) stress reduction (add vs. addition). The results indicate that the speech rhythm contrast is manifested in both stress alternation and stress reduction in terms of the pair-wise variability of the vowel duration between the two groups of native and learner speech of English. These results are further supported by independent evidence from the developmental aspect in English pronunciation and perception.
Experimental phonetic study of the syllable duration of Korean with respect to the positional effect
Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96
The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic structure of Korean related to the syllable duration varying with its positional difference. An attempt is made in this study to ananlyze and describe the concrete correlation between the syllable lengthening and its position in the utterance at the initial and final positions. Using the syllable [na] at the final and initial position of a prosodic phrase in the Korean version of 'the North Wind and the Sun', it has found that the ratio of phrase final versus phrase initial syllable lengthening was approximately 1.8:1 for 4 subjects taking part in the test. In the case of nonsense data, we found that the ratio was approximately 1.6:1 for 2 out of 3 subjects. The results of this study might indicate that Korean tends to have a high rate of final lengthening. We can tentatively classify it, therefore, as a stress-timed language. Still, there is no denying that further studies should be done before we can be absolutely certain about the classification of languages along the dichotomy scale.
Measures of Speech Rhythm in East-Asian Tonal Languages
The most frequently used variables for language rhythm categorisation have been measured for some tonal languages. Cantonese, Mandarin, Thai and Vietnamese are languages which ground their prosodic properties on phonological tones and are supposed to reserve secondary role to stress whose functions are controversially bounded to prominence patterns of constituency. Therefore, a distinctive characterisation in terms of speech rhythm is not usually acknowledged for them. In spite of these phonological expectancies, our results reflect a clear-cut distribution of these languages along timing categories corresponding to languages traditionally considered as stress-timed or syllable-timed (e.g. English vs. Spanish). The differences shown by the speech samples we analysed seem to be due to phenomena related to specific syllable compression patterns and vowel reduction / lengthening strategies affected by tone and more general prosodic rules.
Linguistic factors affecting timing in Korean with application to speech synthesis
Seventh European Conference on …, 2001
This paper describes the results of a study of the phonetic and phonological factors affecting the rhythm and timing of spoken Korean. Stepwise construction of a CART model was used to uncover the contribution and relative importance of phrasal, syllabic, and segmental contexts. The model was trained from a corpus of 671 read sentences, yielding 42,000 segments each annotated with 69 linguistic features. On reserved test data, the best model showed a correlation coefficient of 0.73 with a RMS prediction error of 26 ms. Analysis of the classification tree during and after construction shows that phrasal structure had the greatest influence on segmental duration. Strong lengthening effects were shown for the first and last syllable in the accentual phrase. Syllable structure a nd the manner features of surrounding segments had smaller effects on segmental duration. The model has application within Korean speech synthesis.
This study investigates the speech rhythm of Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese-accented English and Mandarinaccented English using acoustic rhythmic measures. They were compared with four languages in the BonnTempo corpus: German and English (stress-timed) and French and Italian (syllable-timed). Six Cantonese and six Beijing Mandarin native speakers were recorded reading the North Wind and the Sun story with a normal speech rate, telling the story semi-spontaneously and reading the English version of the story. Both raw and normalised rhythmic measures were calculated using vocalic, consonantal and syllabic durations (∆C, ∆V, ∆S, %V, VarcoC, VarcoV, VarcoS, rPVI_C, rPVI_S, nPVI_V, nPVI_S). Results confirm the syllabletiming impression of Cantonese and Mandarin. Data of the two foreign English accents poses a challenge to the rhythmic measures because the two accents are syllable-timed impressionistically but were classified as stress-timed by some of the rhythmic measures (∆C, rPVI_C, nPVI_V, ∆S, VarcoS, rPVI_S and nPVI_S). VarcoC and %V give the best classification of speech rhythm in this study.
Realization of English Medial Consonant Clusters by Korean Speakers
Studies in English Language & Literature, 2013
The purpose of the current study is to investigate the realization of speech rhythm in English as spoken by Korean learners of English. The study particularly aims to examine the rhythm metrics of English read speech by learners who speak Busan or the South Kyungsang dialect of Korean. Twenty-four learners whose L1 is Busan Korean and eight native speakers of English read a passage wherein five sentences were segmented and labeled as vocalic and intervocalic intervals. Various rhythm metrics such as %V, Varcos, and Pairwise Variability Indexes (PVIs) were calculated. The results show that Korean learners read English sentences with significantly more vocalic and consonantal intervals at a slower speech rate than native English speakers. The analyses of rhythm metrics revealed that when the speech rate was not normalized, Korean learners' English showed more variability in the length of consonantal and vocalic intervals. However, speech-rate-normalized rhythm metrics for vocalic intervals indicated that Korean learners transferred their L1 rhythmic structures (a syllable-timed language) into their L2 speech (a stress-timed language). Overall, the results suggest that Korean learners' English reflects the rhythmic characteristics of their L1. The effect of the learners' L1 dialect on the realization of L2 speech rhythm is also speculated.
The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm
Journal of Phonetics, 2012
The performance of the rhythm metrics ΔC, %V, PVIs and Varcos, said to quantify rhythm class distinctions, was tested using English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean and Spanish. Eight participants per language produced speech using three elicitation methods, spontaneous speech, story reading and reading a set of sentences divided into "uncontrolled" sentences from original works of each language, and sentences devised to maximize or minimize syllable structure complexity ("stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" sets respectively). Rhythm classifications based on pooled data were inconsistent across metrics, while cross-linguistic differences in scores were often statistically non-significant even for comparisons between prototypical languages like English and Spanish. Metrics showed substantial inter-speaker variation and proved very sensitive to elicitation method and syllable complexity, so that the size of both effects was large and often comparable to that of language. These results suggest that any cross-linguistic differences captured by metrics are not robust; metric scores range substantially within a language and are readily affected by a variety of methodological decisions, making crosslinguistic comparisons and rhythmic classifications based on metrics unsafe at best.
The rhythmic organization of speech can vary between languages. In the present research we studied rhythmic variability between Mandarin, Cantonese and Thai using automatically retrieved prosodic temporal characteristics from read speech. We measured the variability of intervals between amplitude peaks in the amplitude envelope (<10 Hz) and the durational characteristics of intervals with and without glottal activity (voiced and unvoiced intervals) in speech. Results for between language comparisons revealed significant differences between languages in both amplitude peak interval variability and voiced-voiceless interval durational characteristics. Results are discussed in connection with language specific phonotactic/phonological properties and hypotheses about the perceptual significance of the acoustic measurements in terms of speech rhythm.
The measurement of rhythm: a comparison of Singapore and British English
Journal of Phonetics, 2001
This paper investigates the contrasting rhythmic properties of two varieties of English: Singapore English, which is often described as syllable-timed, and British English, which is more usually assumed to be stress-timed. Recordings were made of six speakers of each variety. For each stretch of continuous speech obtained from the recordings, the normalized duration of consecutive syllables (except for the "nal-syllable) was compared, to derive a variability index (VI). It was found that there is a signi"cantly greater variability in this measure of syllable-to-syllable duration for British English, which supports previous indications that, by comparison, Singapore English might indeed be regarded as being more syllable-timed. Additionally, it was found that there is little evidence of the in#uence of speaking rate on the measured di!erences in rhythm, but there is some evidence that the greater frequency of reduced syllables with a schwa in British English contributes to the di!erence between the two varieties.