The purpose, this experimental study was to identify pronunciation difficulties between male and female Korean speakers in their articulation of English vowels. Ten English mono-syllabic words were spoken six times by six male and six female college students. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by Pitch Works. Results show that Korean female speakers uttered English vowels more similar to those uttered by English native speakers than did Korean male speakers. While Korean male speakers could not readily distinguish between /i/ and /I/, /u/ and /v/, and /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/, respectively, Korean female speakers had difficulty only with /$\epsilon$/ and /ae/. The tentative results suggests that on the whole Korean speakers have difficulty in discriminating tense vowels from lax vowels, and they also have articulatory problems pronouncing low and back vowels such as /ae/. /a/ and /c/.

This paper argues that news speech entails a distinct intonational pattern from natural speech, effectively reflecting that it primarily focuses on providing new information. We conducted a phonetic experiment to compare the tonal contours between news speech and natural speech, examining the distributions of pitch accents and the overall pitch ranges. We utilized 70 American Press (AP) radio news utterances and 70 natural utterances extracted from TV dramas. Results show that news speech involves 3.38 H*'s (including L+H* and !H*) within an intonational phrase (IP) or intermediate phrase (ip) whereas natural speech, 1.8 in average. The number of IP/ip's per sentence is 3 in news speech, which is shown in the highest rate of 32.07% of the news speech, but it is merely 1, taking up the highest 41.42% in natural speech. Next, declination tends to be prevented in news speech, and the pitch range is much greater in news speech than in natural speech. Finally, a secondary stress syllable is comparatively frequently given a pitch accent in news speech, explicitly distinct from natural speech. These results can be interpreted as stating that news has the particular purpose of providing new information; every content word tends to be given a H* or its related pitch accent like L+H* or !H* because news speech assumes that every word conveys new information. This definitely brings about more IP/ip's per sentence due to a human physiological constraint; that is, more H*'s will cause more respiratory breaks. Also, greater pitch ranges and pitch accents imposed on secondary stress may be attributed to exaggerating new information.

This paper is to show the diphthong system of Jeju dialect speakers in their 70s or more on the basis of the acoustic analysis of their phonetic data. It is revealed through the analysis of their phonetic data that they clearly distinguish such diphthongs as [we], [w$\epsilon$], [yc] and [yo]. However, this paper shows that they are phonetically insensitive to the separation between [ye] and [y$\epsilon$] and they seldom make a precise pronunciation of diphthong [iy], which male speakers tend to pronounce to be [i] and female speakers to be [i].

This study was analyzed the syllable structure of Korean and Chinese using subjective sound similarity judgement tasks with both Korean-chinese and Chinese students in Shenyang, China. 86 college students were administered with the tasks which lasted about 20 min. in a small group setting. Both Korean-chinese and Chinese students showed the sensitivity for the CV sub-syllabic unit and the CV+C was the building block for phonetic representation for both languages. This syllabic similarity of Korean and Chinese may be a help for Korean-chinese to become horizontal bilinguals. Further studies are needed to specify the mechanism that will explain the syllabic perception of CV+C in both Korean and Chinese which was different from that of C+VC structure dominance in English.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of rhythm therapy program on MPT(Maximum Phonation Time) and acoustic parameters in patients with Parkinson's disease. The therapy program utilized 5 Korean traditional rhythms: jinngyang, jungmori, jungjungmori, jajinmori, and semachi. The therapy consisted of counseling regarding vocal hygiene and actual therapy procedures. Six subjects with Parkinson's disease participated in the study; 3 subjects in experimental group and the other 3 subjects in control group. The pre- and post- acoustic analyses were performed in both groups. The results of this study were as follows; 1) MPT was significantly increased in the experimental group, 2) mono-pitch was significantly improved in the experimental group, 3) mono-loudness was significantly improved in the experimental group, and finally, HNR was significantly increased in the experimental group compared to the control group.

This study was analyzed to change of /i/ formant follow cochlear implantation periods for hearing impaired children with cochlear implantation. 20 hearing impaired children participated and acoustic analysis of /i/ was used CSL(Computerized Speech Lab; Model 4300b) annually. The data was captured the first formant, $2^{nd}$ & 3th formant frequency of /i/ and was analyzed using ANOVA. Multiple range test to investigate difference between group was treat with LSD and Duncan. The results of /i/ formant analysis for hearing impaired children with cochlear implantation, each formant at a year keeping with cochlear implantation was located at high frequency. In accordance with CI periods, the each formant decreased significantly, especially between a year and $2^{nd}$ year taking with cochlear implantation.

Electrodermal activity(EDA) is a bio-electric signal which occurs at the skin surface during the sweating. EDA reflects the activity of the sympathetic axis of the autonomic nervous system. EDA is associated with the eccrine sweat gland at the palmar and plamar surface. This study was aimed to characterize the relationship between EDA and auditory stimulus intensities. Acoustic stimulus used in this study were 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz of narrow band noise, which were representative of speech frequencies in audible range. Stimulus intensity between 90 and 30 dB in 10 dB within dynamic range. After deriving the minimum stimulus intensity(threshold of skin potential) which elicited skin potential, and then the latency and amplitude were derived from waveform of skin potential, each latency and amplitude were compared to stimulus intensity. The waveform of skin potential were recorded stably, and the threshold of skin potential appeared nearly the hearing threshold level of the participant. The latency was decreased and the amplitude was increased according to the increase of the stimulus intensity. These results suggest that auditory evoked skin potential can be applicable to auditory assessment and audiological diagnosis tool.

The purpose of the present study were (1) to assess differences in tongue performances and speech intelligibility between normal and dysarthric speakers; and (2) to analyze the possible interrelationships between tongue strength, range of motion, and speech intelligibility in dysarthric patients. In order to measure maximum strength of anterior and lateral tongue strength, a force transducer has been designed. And a ruler was used for guaging range of motion. 'Word intelligibility test' was administered to each group. The results were analyzed by a quantitative statistical method(t test, Pearson product- moment correlation, and one-way ANOVA). The results were as follows; (1) dysarthric speakers showed significantly poorer performance than the normal in the tongue strength, range of motion, and speech intelligibility tasks; (2) the correlation between speech intelligibility and instrumental tongue performance was high in the dysarthric group; and (3) instrumental assessment was coincide with perceptual judgement of dysarthric tongue performance. The present investigation demonstrated that tongue weakness is causally related to articulation deficits in dysarthric. The clinical use of the force transducer would help a speech pathologist to quantify the degree of tongue weakness.

Apraxia of phonation (AOP) has often been described as a feature of apraxia of speech or of severe non-fluent type of aphasia. Pure AOP is rare and, to our knowledge, only two cases have been reported. Brain lesion sites of the reported cases were not those sites known to be responsible for apraxia of speech. This study presents a case of AOP which resulted from the secondary stroke in the left corona radiata immediately following the first stroke in the left temporoparietal lobe. A 61-year old right-handed man shwoed a global type of aphasia after the first cerebral infarction, but was able to generate spontaneously some short fragments of speech. On the day after the first infarction, he suffered from the secondary infarction, leaving him a complete loss of voluntary phonation. He did not showed any significant change in language functions. Several occurrences of involuntary phonation were observed upon laughing or crying. He was also able to cough unintentionally. A vidoe-stroboscopic examination failed to reveal any evidence of structural and functional impairment in larynx. Although this case is not of pure form of AOP, AOP appeared after the secondary stroke without significant changes of language impairment since the first stroke. Therefore, AOP may be a consequence of the brain lesion from the secondary stroke even though we cannot rule out the possibility of an additive effect of the secondary to the first stroke.

The purpose of this study was to examine the awareness level of the prolonged sound rules in elementary school students. The participants in this study were 148 elementary school students in grades 1 through 6. Their awareness level of the prolonged sound rules was evaluated on reading tasks composed of 40 words and sentences. An one-way ANOVA followed by Scheffe hoc tests showed the showed the statistically significant difference between the groups for the awareness level of prolonged sound rules. The younger the children, the larger differences in the awareness of prolonged sound rules. The awareness might affect their cognitive development and a systematic instruction may be helpful especially in lower graders. In conclusion, the findings of this study showed significant differences in the awareness level of the prolonged sound rules at both words and sentences level. It was also found that as the age of children increases, the awareness level of the prolonged sound rules tends to increase which appeared to be completed by the 3rd grade.

This study was an attempt to determine acoustic characteristics in myna bird's notes. Two myna birds' sounds imitating a normal male voice in his late 20's were sampled and analyzed. The analyses included the mean values of F1, F2, F3 and pitch contours. The results were as follows; First, there was a significan difference in the mean values of F1, F2, and F3 in isolatd vowel /a/ and /i/ between the myna birds' sounds and the human voice. However, there was no apparent difference in pitch contour of their formants. Second, there was a difference in pitch contour of their formants in their sentence ('hn-nyung-ha-se-yo?' meaning 'How are you?') production. Namely, the myna birds' pitch contour was located higher than that of the human's.

This study aimed at investigating the effects of CPAP therapy on hypernasality in flaccid dysarthria. The subject was a flaccid dysarthric patient with hypernasality. An A-B-A experimental research design was used. The therapy program was conducted 16 sessions. During CPAP therapy, the subjects was required to repeat single-word utterances in the form VNCV. The results showed some improvement in decreasing hypernasality.

The purpose of this study was to propose a preliminary norm for 'Korean-Test of Articulation for Children(K-TAC)'. The K-TAC was designed to test 19 Korean consonants in various phonetic contexts through 37 words. We collected the data of 220 normally developing children aged 2;6(years;months) to 6;5. We analyzed the mean percentage of consonants correct and the age of acquisition for K-TAC. The results were as follows: first, The mean percentage was over 60% at late 2 years of age, over 80% at th age of 3, and over 90% after the age of 4. There were significant differences among age groups. Second, based on the criterion of correct production by 75% of children, Korean children acquired stops and nasals except for SF velars, glottal fricative, SF liquid and affricates by late 2 or 3 years of age. After that they acquired SF velars at the age of 4 and SI liquid at the age of 5. However, they could not acquire alveolar fricatives by the age of late 6. Third, if the distorted sounds were scored as correct, they acquired SI liquid at 4 years of age and alveolar fricatives at 5 years of age.

The sub-Nyquist nonuniform sampling (SNNS) and the perfect reconstruction (PR) formula are proposed for the development of a systematic method to obtain minimal representation of a speech signal. In the proposed method, the instantaneous sampling frequency (ISF) varies, depending on the least upper boundary of spectral support of a speech signal in time-frequency domain (TFD). The definition of the instantaneous bandwidth (IB), which determines the ISF and is used for generating the set of samples that represent continuous-time signals perfectly, is given. Also, the spectral characteristics of the sampled data generated by the sub-Nyquist nonuniform sampling method is analyzed. The proposed method doesn't generate the redundant samples due to the time-varying property of the instantaneous bandwidth of a speech signal.

An efficient GMM (Gaussian mixture modeling) method based on LPCA (local principal component analysis) with VQ (vector quantization) for speaker identification is proposed. To reduce the dimension and correlation of the feature vector, this paper proposes a speaker identification method based on principal component analysis. The proposed method firstly partitions the data space into several disjoint regions by VQ, and then performs PCA in each region. Finally, the GMM for the speaker is obtained from the transformed feature vectors in each region. Compared to the conventional GMM method with diagonal covariance matrix, the proposed method requires less storage and complexity while maintaining the same performance requires less storage and shows faster results.

This paper describes the automated call routing for call center system based on speech recognition. We focus on the task of automatically routing telephone calls based on a users fluently spoken response instead of touch tone menus in an interactive voice response system. Vector based call routing algorithm is investigated and normalization method suggested. Call center database which was collected by KT is used for call routing experiment. Experimental results evaluating call-classification from transcribed speech are reported for that database. In case of small training data, an average call routing error reduction rate of 9% is observed when normalization method is used.