발화 속도에 따른 운율 단위의 빈도 변이에 대한 시험적 연구

Abstract

Intuitively, we expect that the more rapidly we produce speech, the less number of intonation phrases(IP) and accentual phrases(AP) are made if other conditions are the same. In order to verify this and to evaluate the effect of speech rate in generating prosodic units, 8 utterance groups(4 sentences*2 gender groups) of 240 read speeches of Korean central variant were studied prosodically and statistically as well. In the concrete, correlation analysis was applied first to the 8 groups each, and 5 cases out of 16(8 utterance groups*2 correlations) were found to have significant correlations between speech rate and IP, or speech rate and AP(Pearson coefficients: -0.4 ~ -0.65). Secondly, regression analysis was applied to the 5 cases each to find out the prediction power of the correlations. The powers were not so strong(15 ~ 42%). The consequences of this study are as follows: Firstly, 4 cases out of 5 were about IP frequency, which could be explained by the fact that IP is more closer to breath than AP. Secondly, 4 cases out of 5 were of male, but this can not be explained either sociolinguistically or physiologically. Thirdly, it could be said that IP and AP are generated separately. Fourthly, We can guess that there seems to exist other factors such as syntactic or semantic structure of the sentence, speech style, and speaker's mood etc., which take part in producing prosodic units, and they might act in different proportions in different cases. It could be supported by the various correlations in the 5 cases.