The role of prosody in dialect authentication: Simulating Masan dialect with Seoul speech segments

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect with the speech segments from Seoul dialect. The dialect simulation was performed by transplanting the prosodic features of Masan utterances unto the same utterances produced by a Seoul speaker. Thus, the simulated Masan utterances were composed of Seoul speech segments but their prosody came from the original Masan utterances. The prosodic features involved were the fundamental frequency contour, the segmental durations, and the intensity contour. The simulated Masan utterances were evaluated by four native Masan speakers and the role of prosody in dialect authentication and speech synthesis was discussed. *