Sahyang Kim

Hongik University · Department of English Education

This study investigates whether high-variability phonetic training, also known as multi-talker phonetic training, enhances Seoul Korean listeners' weightings of acoustic cues to English lexical stress and does so more than single-talker perceptual training. Seoul Korean listeners at an intermediate proficiency in English completed a cue-weighting s...

This data article provides acoustic data for individual speakers’ production of coda voicing contrast between stops in English, which are based on laboratory speech recorded by twelve native speakers of American English and twenty-four Korean learners of English. There were four pairs of English monosyllabic target words with voicing contrast in th...

This acoustic study explores how Korean learners produce coarticulatory vowel nasalization in English that varies with prosodic structural factors of focus-induced prominence and boundary. N-duration and A1-P0 (degree of V-nasalization) are measured in consonant-vowel-nasal (CVN) and nasal-vowel-consonant (NVC) words in various prosodic structural...

This study explores processing characteristics of a glottal stop in Maltese which occurs both as a phoneme and as an epenthetic stop for vowel-initial words. Experiment 1 shows that its hyperarticulation is not necessarily mapped onto an underlying form, although listeners may interpret it as underlying at a later processing stage. Experiment 2 sho...

This article provides individual speakers’ acoustic durational data on preboundary (phrase-final) lengthening in Japanese. The data are based on speech recorded from fourteen native speakers of Tokyo Japanese in a laboratory setting. Each speaker produced Japanese disyllabic words with four different moraic structures (CVCV, CVCVN, CVNCV, and CVNCV...

In two experiments, it was investigated whether potentially contrastive segmental information in the form of an epenthetic glottal stop in Maltese can influence syntactic parsing decisions. The glottal stop in Maltese serves a dual function as a phoneme used for lexical contrast and a non-contrastive phone that may mark a prosodic juncture. In both...

This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that prosodic learning is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French–Korean) than...

This study compares prosodic structural effects on nasal (N) duration and coarticulatory vowel (V) nasalization in NV (Nasal-Vowel) and CVN (Consonant-Vowel-Nasal) sequences in Mandarin Chinese with those found in English and Korean. Focus-induced prominence effects show cross-linguistically applicable coarticulatory resistance that enhances the vo...

This article provides some supplementary analysis data of speech production and perception of glottal stops in the Semitic language Maltese. In Maltese, a glottal stop can occur as a phoneme, but also as a phonetic marker of vowel-initial words (as in the case with Germanic languages like English). Data from four experiments are provided, which wil...

This article provides acoustic measurements data for vowel nasalization which are based on speech recorded from fifteen (8 female and 7 male) native speakers of American English in a laboratory setting. Each individual speaker's production patterns for the vowel nasalization in tautosyllabic CVN and NVC words are documented in terms of three acoust...

In this acoustic study, preboundary lengthening (PBL) in Japanese is investigated in relation to the prosodic structure in disyllabic words with different moraic and pitch accent distributions. Results showed gradient progressive PBL effects largely independent of the mora count. The domain of PBL is better explained by the syllable structure than...

This EMA study explores effects of morphological structure on intergestural timing in different prosodic-structural contexts in Korean by examining articulatory realization of homophonous pairs of different underlying morphological structures (tautomorphemic (C1)V1C2V2 vs. heteromorphemic (C1)V1C2+V2, where '+'=a morpheme boundary). The intergestur...

This study investigates how the fine-grained phonetic realization of tonal cues impacts speech segmentation when the cues signal the same word boundary in the native and unfamiliar languages but do so differently. Korean listeners use the phrase-final high (H) tone and the phrase-initial low (L) tone to segment speech into words (Kim, Broersma, & C...

Many languages mark vowel-initial words with a glottal stop. We show that this occurs in Maltese, even though the glottal stop also occurs as a phoneme in Maltese. As a consequence, words with and without an underlying (phonemic) glottal stop (e.g., a glottal stop-zero minimal pair qal /Ɂɑ:l/ vs. ghal /ɑ:l/ Engl., 'he said'-'because') can become ho...

This study explores the phonetic nature of phonological stop voicing contrast in American English by investigating how phonetic implementation of the voicing contrast is modulated by the prosodic structure along the continuum of phonetic voicing. In particular, the present study examines (1) the effects of two kinds of prosodic strengthening that c...

Theories of the phonetics-prosody interface suggest that prosodic strengthening that arises with prosodic structuring is not simply a low-level phonetic phenomenon, but it serves as a phonetic hallmark of a higher-order prosodic structure in reference to linguistic (phonological) contrast. The present study builds on this theoretical premise by exa...

The data reported in this article contain eleven (6 female and 5 male) individual speaker's speech production patterns for the word-initial voiced and voiceless stops (/p,t/ and /b,d/) in American English. The production patterns are documented in the acoustic parameter: the Integrated Voicing Index (IVI) obtained from Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vo...

(Seoul) Korean has been analyzed as having an Accentual Phrase (AP) with a L(HL)H tonal pattern for APs beginning with a lenis segment (Jun, 1998). This tonal information modulates Korean listeners’ speech segmentation (Kim & Cho, 2009; Tremblay, Shin, Kim, & Cho, 2018). This study investigates whether French- and English-speaking late learners of...

Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and pho...

This study investigates focus and boundary effects on Korean nasal consonants and vowel nasalization. Under focus, nasal consonants lengthen in CVN# but shorten in #NVC, enhancing [nasal] vs [oral]. Vowels resist nasalization under focus, enhancing [oral]. Domain-initial nasal consonants denasalize, exercising no coarticulatory influence. Domain-fi...

This study investigated articulation of preboundary lengthening (PBL) in tri-syllabic pseudo words (bábaba, babába, bababá) in American English. Results from 10 speakers showed that PBL was modulated by the degree of prominence, i.e., the less prominent, the more PBL. PBL was attracted to the penultimate stressed syllable but only when the word rec...

This study investigates whether listeners’ experience with a second language learned later in life affects their use of fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue to word boundaries in the segmentation of an artificial language (AL), particularly when the cues to word boundaries conflict between the first language (L1) and second language (L2). F0 signals...

Raw data elicited from the AL segmentation task (Data.csv). The Participant column contains the participant identification code; the Group column specifies the group to which the participant belonged (EngUs = monolingual English listeners; EngFr = L1-English L2-French listeners; FrenchFrance = monolingual French listeners; FrenchUS = L1-French L2-E...

This study explores the relationship between prosodic strengthening and linguistic contrasts in English by examining temporal realization of nasals (N-duration) in CVN# and #NVC, and their coarticulatory influence on vowels (V-nasalization). Results show that different sources of prosodic strengthening bring about different types of linguistic cont...

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were expl...

Recent studies on perceptual learning have indicated that listeners use some form of pre-lexical abstraction (an intermediate unit) between the acoustic input and lexical representations of words. Patterns of generalization of learning that can be observed with the perceptual learning paradigm have also been effectively examined for exploring the n...

This study investigated how the L1 phonetics-prosody interface transfers to L2 by examining prosodic strengthening effects (due to prosodic position and focus) on English voicing contrast (bad-pad) as produced by Korean vs English speakers. Under prosodic strengthening, Korean speakers showed a greater F0 difference due to voicing than English spea...

This study examines articulatory characteristics of the three-way contrast in labial stops / p p h p */ (lenis, aspirated, fortis, respectively) in Korean in phrase-initial and phrase-medial prosodic positions with a two-fold goal. First, it investigates supralaryngeal articulatory reflexes of the stops and explores articulatory invariance of these...

Fig. 1. Duration of the three precursor stimuli (Let's hear) in Experiment 1 and the respective segment durations. The small circles indicate the pitch contour as estimated after resynthesis for each stimulus, with a scale indicated on the “WD-Full” stimulus that is valid for all three pitch curves. The “IP-FULL” (IP natural) and the “Wd-FULL” (Wd...

The present study investigates the effects of syllable structure and prosodic prominence on the patterns of tonal alignment and scaling of the phrase-initial rise in Seoul Korean. Two syllable structures (Onset (/#CVC.../ as in minsa) vs. No-onset (/#VC.../ as in insa)) and two prominence conditions (Focus vs. Neutral) were considered. Results show...

The present study investigates effects of Boundary and Prominence (focus) on the /a/-to-/i/ tongue movement in Korean in two contexts: V#V and V#/m/V. Results show that the tongue movement at an IP boundary is larger, longer, and faster. Prominence effects show a relatively weaker but comparable pattern to the boundary effect, showing a larger, lon...

This study examines the coda voicing effect in English on production of preceding vowel by comparing L1 and L2 speech. Particular attention is paid to how coda voicing contrast is encoded in temporal vs. spectral dimensions, how the effect interacts with information structure (with varying focus types), and how the use of information structure diff...

This study explores the relationship between prosodic strengthening and linguistic contrasts in English by examining temporal realization of nasals in CVN# and #NVC, and their coarticulatory influence on vowels. Results show that different sources of prosodic strengthening bring about different types of linguistic contrasts. Prominence increased N-...

In this paper, we show that adult listeners who speak the same native language but live in different linguistic environments differ in their use of prosodic cues that signal word boundaries in the native language. Non-utterance-final word-final syllables have higher fundamental frequency in French. Adult native French listeners living in France or...

An articulatory study (using an Electromagnetic Articulography, EMA) was conducted to explore effects of prosodic boundary strength (Intonational Phrase/IP versus Word/Wd), and focus (Focused/accented, Neutral, Unfocused/unaccented) on the kinematic realization of /m/ in the coda ({\ldots}am#i{\ldots}) and the onset ({\ldots}a#mi{\ldots}) condition...

This acoustic study investigates effects of boundary and prominence on the temporal structure of s#CV and #sCV in English, and on the phonetic implementation of the allophonic rule whereby a voiceless stop after /s/ becomes unaspirated. Results obtained with acoustic temporal measures for /sCV/ sequences showed that the segments at the source of pr...

An articulatory study was conducted to explore effects of prosodic boundary and syllable structure on temporal realizations of /ma/ in C♯V vs. ♯CV in Korean (where ‘♯’ denotes an Intonational Phrase or a Word boundary). The vocalic gesture underwent boundary-induced lengthening more in C♯V than in ♯CV, implying that the boundary effect is largely l...

This study investigated how acoustic characteristics (i.e., duration, F1, F2) of English high front vowels /i, ?/ are modulated by boundary- and prominence-induced strengthening in native vs. non-native (Korean) speech production. The study also examined how the durational difference in vowels due to the voicing of a following consonant (i.e., voic...

Categorical perception experiments were performed on an English /b-p/ voice onset time (VOT) continuum with native (American English) and non-native (Korean) listeners to examine whether and how phonetic categorization is modulated by prosodic boundary and language experience. Results demonstrated perceptual shifting according to prosodic boundary...

This study demonstrates some new aspects of preboundary lengthening and preaccentual shortening on a test word banana in American English. Preboundary lengthening was found to be extended to the initial unstressed syllable beyond the main-stressed syllable, presenting more complexity than has previously been assumed. Preaccentual shortening was obs...

Studies have shown that listeners segmenting unfamiliar languages transfer native-language (L1) segmentation cues. These studies, however, conflated L1 and recent linguistic exposure. The present study investigates the relative influences of L1 and recent linguistic exposure on the use of prosodic cues for segmenting an artificial language (AL). Pa...

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages—Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)—participated. The words...

How do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic–phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless ‘unaspirated’ stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature {−spread glottis}; Korean ha...

This study investigates how the three-way contrastive bilabial stops (/p⁎,ph,p/, called fortis, aspirated and lenis, respectively) in word-medial position in Korean are distinct kinematically at the supralaryngeal articulatory level. Results of a magnetometer experiment with seven speakers of Seoul Korean showed that the three-way contrastive stops...

This study examined how duration of an unstressed final syllable in English is affected by conditions in the following word: stress (trochaic/iambic), accent (accented/unaccented), and initial stop voicing (voiced/voiceless). Results showed that the unstressed final syllable was shorter before an unstressed syllable, presumably due to polysyllabic...

This study investigated how three different kinds of hyper-articulation, one communicatively driven (in clear speech), and two prosodically driven (with boundary and prominence/focus), are acoustic-phonetically realized in Korean. Several important points emerged from the results obtained from an acoustic study with eight speakers of Seoul Korean....

The present study investigates supralaryngeal articulatory characteristics of denti-alveolar (coronal) stops /t, , / and /n/ in /aCa/ context in Seoul Korean. An Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA, Carstens) was used to explore kinematics of the consonants by examining the kinematic data of the tongue tip (the primary articulator for the coronal co...

The present study investigated the effects of two different sources of prosodic strengthening, i.e., boundary and accent, in the articulation of English high front vowels, /i/ and /I/. The vowels were investigated in vowel-initial ('eat' vs. 'it'), /h/-initial ('heat' vs. 'hit') and /p/-initial words ('Pete' vs. 'pit'), which were placed in varying...

This study investigated the role of phrase-level prosodic boundary information in word segmentation in Korean with two word-spotting experiments. In experiment 1, it was found that intonational cues alone helped listeners with lexical segmentation. Listeners paid more attention to local intonational cues (...H#L...) across the prosodic boundary tha...

This study examines how young speakers of Seoul Korean produce tri-consonantal clusters /1kt/ and /1pt/ as in palk-ta ('to be bright') and palp-ta ('to step on'). Production data were collected from 20 speakers of Seoul Korean. The results of narrow transcription of the data showed that simplification is not obligatory as some speakers often preser...

Although understanding of prosodic development is considered crucial for understanding of language acquisition in general, few studies have focused on how children develop native‐like prosody in their speech production. This study will examine the acquisition of lexical stress and postlexical pitch accent in two English–Spanish bilingual children....

To date, research on bilingual first language acquisition has tended to focus on the development of higher levels of language, with relatively few analyses of the acoustic characteristics of bilingual infants' and childrens' speech. Since monolingual infants begin to show perceptual divisions of vowel space that resemble adult native speakers divis...

Traditionally, English is classified as a stress-timed language while Spanish is classified as syllable-timed. Examining the contrasting development of rhythmic patterns in bilingual first language acquisition should provide information on how this differentiation takes place. As part of a longitudinal study, speech samples were taken of a Spanish/...

In a study of optical cues to the visual perception of stress, three American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. In a production analysis, stressed vs. unstressed syllables from these utterances were compared along many measu...

The criteria that distinguish the phonological rules from the phonetic rules based on categoricality versus gradiency have drawn considerable attention (cf. Keating, 1990; Pierrehumbert, 1990). Korean Post Obstruent Tensing (POT) rule has been claimed, based on acoustic data, to be a phonological rule and that its domain of application is an accent...

this paper, I will present articulatory data for fricatives, namely linguopalataldata, using Electropalatography (henceforth EPG). Cho & Keating (to appear), intheir EPG study of four denti-alveolar stops of Korean (/t/, /t*/, /t/, /n/), found that tense/t*/ has greater linguo-palatal contact than lenis /t/. They also found a higher degree offreedo...

The current study examined the pattern of prosodic phrasing and the distribution of post-lexical pitch accent types in a Spanish-English bilingual child. We collected utterances from natural interactions between parents and the child at the age of 2;6 and 3;0, and analyzed them using MAE_ToBI and SP_ToBI. Then we compared prosodic development acros...

This study examined effects of Prosodic Boundary and Syllable Structure on the CV intergestural timing in Korean, using an EMA. The intergestural timing was more stable in the tautosyllabic (#CV) than in the heterosyllabic (C#V) condition, in line with the lexically-specified intergestural timing hypothesis, and that it was found to be more stable...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2004. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-159).