This paper describes the effect of new recognition unit, a unit based on semisyllable, and its post processing method. A recognition unit based on semi-syllable expresses Korean connected digit's coarticulation effect. An existing method using semi-syllable limits next models, derived from current recognized models, to make complete connected digit sequence. However, this paper uses a new method to make complete connected digit sequence. The new post-processing method recognizes isolated digit words which include digits sequence from the digit combinations being able to occur from current recognized semi-syllable sequence. This method gives an improved accuracy rate than that of existing method. This new post processing provides two advantages. 1) It corrects current mis-recognized semi-syllable unit. 2) When people say each digit, they say it without regard to saying duration.

In this paper, we implement the large variable vocabulary speech recognition system, which is characterized by no additional pre-training process and no limitation of recognized word list. We have designed the system in order to achieve the high recognition rate using the decision tree based state tying algorithm and in order to reduce the processing time using the gaussian selection based variable flooring algorithm, the limitation algorithm of the number of nodes and ENNS algorithm. The gaussian selection based variable flooring algorithm shows that it can reduce the total processing time by more than half of the recognition time, but it brings about the reduction of recognition rate. In other words, there is a trade off between the recognition rate and the processing time. The limitation algorithm of the number of nodes shows the best performance when the number of gaussian mixtures is a three. Both of the off-line and on-line experiments show the same performance. In our experiments, there are some differences of the recognition rate and the average recognition time according to the distinction of genders, speakers, and the number of vocabulary.

New speech synthesis algorithms capable of flexible prosody (especially F0) modification are desired for a high quality TTS system. TD-PSOLA is the most popular synthesis algorithm. The algorithm shows very high quality when F0 modification is limited. However, the quality degradation due to pitch epoch detection error becomes severe as the F0 modification factor becomes large. On the other hand, the vocoder framework is very flexible in F0 manipulation. The synthesized speech quality from the vocoder is far from natural human speech and suffers from buzziness. To remedy the buzzy quality from the vocoder and make more natural synthetic speech, we propose a mixed phase vocoder.

Modulated components of a speech signal are frequently used for speech coding, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Time-frequency representation (TFR) reveals some information about instantaneous frequency, instantaneous bandwidth and boundary of each component of the considering speech signal. In many cases, the extraction of AM-FM components corresponding to instantaneous frequencies is difficult since the Fourier spectra of the components with time-varying instantaneous frequency are overlapped each other in Fourier frequency domain. In this paper, an efficient method decomposing speech signal into AM-FM components is proposed. A variable bandwidth filter is developed for the decomposition of speech signals with time-varying instantaneous frequencies. The variable bandwidth filter can extract AM-FM components of a speech signal whose TFRs are not overlapped in timefrequency domain. Also, amplitude and instantaneous frequency of the decomposed components are estimated by using Hilbert transform.

In this paper, we experimented with speaker change detection that uses a statistical method for NOD (News On Demand) service. A specified speaker's change can find out content of each data in speech if analysed because it means change of data contents in news data. Speaker change detection acts as preprocessor that divide input speech by speaker. This is an important preprocessor phase for speaker tracking. We detected speaker change using GLR(generalized likelihood ratio) distance base division and BIC (Bayesian information criterion) base division among matrix method. An experiment verified speaker change point using BIC base division after divide by speaker unit using GLR distance base method first. In the experimental result, FAR (False Alarm Rate) was 63.29 in high noise environment and FAR was 54.28 in low noise environment in MDR (Missed Detection Rate) 15% neighborhood.

This study explored the effectiveness of a hierarchical treatment of aphasic perseveration (TAP) program in a Korean client with transcortical sensory aphasia. The subject with 52% perserveration score (Korean version of Boston Naming Test : K-BNT) was 44 year-old female with MCA (Middle cerebral artery) infarction. The experimental design used was an alternating treatment design with the hierarchical TAP and conventional audio-visual stimulation. The frequency of occurrence of perseverative behaviors and correct response in naming performance were analyzed and compared. It was claimed that the hierarchical TAP was more effective in naming performance than conventional audio-visual stimulation in terms of correct naming response. The frequency of occurrence of perseverative behaviors was lower in hierarchical TAP but the difference was relatively small. Unlike in English, sentence completion task was no longer stimulable while unison speech was very stimulable among the specific strategies of TAP program in Korean. Therefore, it could be said that TAP is language-dependent.

Vocal nodule is one of the representative chronic diseases of vocal folds, and it can be cured by surgical removal or voice therapy. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of the accent method, one of the popular effective voice therapy, in the patients with vocal nodule. Authors executed the accent method in 17 patients with vocal nodule who visited the Voice & Speech Therapy Clinic, Pusan National University Hospital analysed the voice before and after treatment using the local findings, acoustic analysis and aerodynamic analysis MPT. The voice was analysed with MDVP of CSL and MPT was checked using stop watch. The parameters included Fo, Jitter, Shimmer and noise to harmonic ratio(NHR) as acoustic analysis. The results were obtained as follows. In the evaluation by the local findings, it was improved to 77% in the patients of vocal nodule. Jitter and Shimmer were shown to be improved significantly. In particular, it was shown to be improved significantly in patients with vocal nodule. As the result of this study, the improvement of aerodynamic aspect was more statistically significant than that of acoustic parameters. When I generalized the above mentioned results, we suggest that it is a useful voice therapy which can be helpful to the improvement of voice, applying the accent method to the vocal nodule patients, and there are currently many methods to be used in the voice therapy, but it is thought which the accent method is the good treatment as the alternatives of keeping the continuous medical treatment.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the syllable and phoneme frequencies in the spontaneous speech of some Korean children. Sixty four normally developing children aged from 2 to 5 were involved (male: female=1 : 1, 16 children in each age group). Fifty connected utterances were analyzed using the KCLA (Korean Computerized Language Analysis) 2.0 and Exel. The findings were as follows: 1) /i/ was the most frequently used syllable and was followed by /yo/, /k/, /s'/, /nen/ and so on. 2) The most frequently used Korean phonemes were syllable-initial consonant /k/, syllable- medial vowel /a/ and syllable-final consonant /n/. 3) All seven syllable final consonants (/p,t,k,m,n,n,l/) were used more frequently in the word-medial position than in the word-final position. Three syllable initial consonants(/k, I, s'/) were used more frequently in the word-medial position than in the word-initial position. The syllable and phoneme frequencies in the Korean children's spontaneous speech will provide valuable information in interpreting the severity of phonological disorder and in developing tools for the Korean phonological assessment and intervention.

This study was designed to evaluate the phonological characteristics in profound hearing-impaired children. 10 males and 10 females participated in this study and all were prelingually hearing impaired. 7 children were educated at deaf school and 13 children at general elementary school with private clinic. Their hearing levels were more than 95dB HL and did not appear any wave by ABR. The results can be summarized as following: The articulation accuracy of hearing impaired children was 54.19% and most distinguished phonological patterns of the hearing impaired children were alveolarization and stop assimilation. The accurate articulation phonation was significantly different from education system between deaf school and general school. The error articulation degrees in profound hearing impaired children at general school seemed meaningfully smaller than those in hearing impaired children at deaf school.

Language is one aspect of cognition, along with attention and concentration, learning and memory, visuospatial abilities, and executive function. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of language intervention by cognitive approach on language expressive performance in a patient with conduction aphasia. This study used several tasks such as Attention and concentration task, visual memory tasks, memory tasks, categorization, divergent thinking, self-monitoring and evaluate thinking. The effects of treatment were evaluated by periodic probing of both trained and untrained familiar words in three tasks; picture naming, answering to questions and telling stories. The results showed improvements both in trained and untrained words. Therefore, we concluded that expressive language performance of this aphasic patient is amenable to this intervention, and that cognitive therapy approach can be useful.

Sound pressure level, subglottic air pressure, vital capacity, adduction/abduction rate, and phonatory efficiency were measured in 19 opera singers, 17 Korean traditional 'Pansori' singers, and 20 non-singers; subjects' mean age was 25.9(SD=7.2) and the singers had been singing professionally for 5-10 years. One-way ANOVA and Scheff$\w'{e}$ post-hoc analysis were used to analyze aerodynamic data and to identify significant differences among groups. Sound pressure level, peak subglottic air pressure, and phonatory efficiency were found to be significantly different among three groups of the subjects. Differences in aerodynamic properties were discussed for their significance in diagnosis and treatment of voice disorders in professional singers.

Speech intelligibility in patients with complete dentures is an important clinical problem depending on the material used. The objective of this study was to investigate the speech of two edentulous subjects fitted with a complete maxillary prosthesis made of two different palatal materials: chrome-cobalt alloy and acrylic resin. Three patients with complete dentures in the experiment group and ten people in the controls groups participated in the experiment. CSL, Visi-Pitch were used to measure speech characteristics. The test words consisted of a simple vowel /e/, meaningless three syllabic words containing fricative, affricated and stops sounds, and sustained fricative sounds /s/ and /$\int$/. The analysis speech parameters were vowel and lateral formants, VOT, sound durations, sound pressure level and fricative frequency. Data analysis was conducted by a series of paired T-test. The findings like the following: (1) Vowel formant one of patients with complete denture is higher than that of the control group (p<0.05), while lateral formant three of patients with complete denture is lower than that of the control group (p<0.0l). (2) Patients with complete denture produced lower speech intelligibility with low fricative frequency (/$\int$/) than control group (p<0.0). The speech intelligibility of patients with metal prosthesis was higher than that of those with resin prosthesis (p<0.05). (3) Fricative, lateral and stop sound durations of patients with complete denture were longer than those of the control group (p<0.01 and p<0.05), respectively. Total sound durations of patients with metal prosthesis were similar to that of the control group (p<0.05), while those with resin prosthesis had a shorter duration (p<0.01). This implied that those with metal prosthesis had higher speech intelligibility than those with resin prosthesis. (4) Patients with complete denture had higher sound pressure levels /t/ and /c/ than the control group (p<0.01). However, sound pressure levels for /c/ of patients with metal prosthesis or resin prosthesis was similar to the control group (p<0.05). (5) Patients with complete denture had higher fundamental frequency than the control group (p<0.01).

The limited capacity model has been used to explain linguistic interactions and trade-offs that occur in children's speech. The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the interrelationship of MLU (as an index of syntactic development) and fluency in the spontaneous speech of normal children. Twenty normal children's (ten girls and ten boys, aged 36-48 months) spontaneous speech samples were obtained during free-play interactions with their mothers or other adults. The results indicated that the MLU of disfluent utterances were significantly longer than that of fluent utterances. Also, disfluencies occurred more frequently in longer utterances than in shorter utterances. In addition, the utterances where disfluencies occurred more than 2 times were longer than those where disfluencies occurred once. These results imply that the increase of MLU appear to affect not only the occurrence of disfluent utterances, but also the number of disfluencies within the utterances. In other' words, these findings show that there are trade-off effects between MLU and fluency. This is discussed within a limited capacity framework.

American English vowels and Korean vowels were compared by the plotformant method. For American English vowels, six General American English speakers pronounced English words in the b_t environment. For Korean vowels eight Kyongsang dialect speakers and eight Seoul dialect speakers pronounced Korean words in the environments of k_t, p_t and t_t. The formant plots were obtained by plotting F1/F2 tokens of 13 American English vowels on the F1xF2 plane. In spite of personal variations the 13 vowel spaces of all six American English speakers maintained their relative positions with some overlaps. Clear distinctions were made between i-I, e-$\varepsilon$, u-$\sigma$, and o-c. The domain of c and $\alpha$ overlapped for three American English speakers, but it did not for three other speakers. The 8 Korean vowel spaces of Kyongsang dialect speakers and Seoul dialect speakers were very similar and maintained their relative positions. No distinction was made between e and $\varepsilon$. In contrast with American English e which is a neutral vowel, Korean e was a back vowel. The comparison of 13 American English vowel positions and 8 Korean Vowel positions is expected to shed some light on the errors of English vowel pronunciation of Korean learners.

This study was designed to determine what components of spoken language have been relatively neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension in Korea and to suggest a model of listening process. Two types of tests were undertaken using spoken and written forms of English with secondary school teachers of English and college students. Findings: Hearing power has been generally neglected in the teaching of listening comprehension. Hearing power which can be thought as an active process is defined as an ability to transfer the sequence of discrete phonetic segments without word boundary into the sequence of words in phonemic representations by using both nonlinguistic factors and linguistic factors including perception rules based on phonetics and phonology. Vocabularies, hearing-speaking power, syntactic structures and idiomatic expressions are to be taught for spoken English. A model of listening process was suggested and discussed.

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate characteristics of English vowels uttered by Korean regional dialect speakers. Ten English mono-syllabic words, and eight Korean mono-syllabic words, were uttered six times by nine female graduate students from three areas: Seoul, Yongnam and Honam. Formant frequencies were measured from sound spectrograms made by the PC Quirer. Results showed that Seoul dialect speakers uttered English vowels more similar to those uttered by English native speakers than did the other dialect speakers. In particular, Yongnam dialect speakers have articulatory problems pronouncing the back vowels(/u/, /$\upsilon$/, /c/), while Honam dialect speakers have problems pronouncing the front vowels(/i/. /I/, /$\varepsilon$/, /$\ae$/). Even though each group has different problems pronouncing English vowels, Korean speakers generally have difficulty in discriminating tense vowels(/i/ and /u/) from the lax vowels(/I/ and /$\upsilon$/). It appears that the width of Korean speakers' articulatory movements is comparatively narrower than those of native English speakers.

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.

This study was done to find out the difference in vowel length between English produced by Americans and KATUSA soldiers. Though English pronunciation by Koreans shows different features in many ways, I focused on English vowel length of KATUSA soldiers. I wanted to know if English low vowels show a foreign accent by comparing vowel lengths in English produced by Americans and KATUSA soldiers. The reason I wanted to deal with English low vowels is that most Koreans have difficulty in pronouncing them. Therefore I selected three English low vowels, /$\{\ae}$, /c/, and/$\alpha$/, as the experimental object, and I tried to find out the foreign accent of them. In this study, I also tried to find out the vowel lengths in relation to their utterance positions and see the foreign accent of English low vowels. I investigated the difference of the English low vowels lengths between Americans and KATUSA soldiers using information gathered from experimental results.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problems Korean students, having acoustic structure of Korean vowels, have when they pronounce English vowels by measuring formant frequencies. The experimental results show that the pronunciation of English vowels by Korean students is partially influenced by their Korean vowels. There is little distinction between /i/ and /I/, /U/ and /u/ due to the absence of short and long vowels in Korean pronunciation. Also, as observed in typical Korean vowel pronunciation, there is little difference between the F1 values of /$\varepsilon$/ and /$\{\ae}$/ by Korean speakers, resulting in inaccurate English pronunciation. In addition, compared to English native speakers, Korean speakers show the biggest difference in F1 value of /c/. The fact that they make pronunciation of /c/ covering /e/, /$\Lambda$/ and /c/ positions probably accounts for such phenomenon. The results of this experiment show the interference of Korean that occurred in some English vowels by native Korean speakers.

Using eighteen texts from various genera of present-day Japanese, I collected phonologically reduced forms frequently observed in conversational Japanese, and classified them in search of a unified. explanation of phonological phenomena. I found 7,516 cases of reduced forms which I divided into 43 categories according to the types of phonological changes they have undergone. The general tendencies are that deletion and fusion of a phoneme or an entire syllable takes place frequently, resulting in the decrease in the number of syllables. From a morphosyntactic point of view, phonological reduction often occurs at the NP and VP morpheme boundaries. The following findings are drawn from phonetical observations of reduction. (1) Vowels are more easily deleted than consonants. (2) Bilabials ([m], [b], and [w]) are the most likely candidates for deletion. (3) In a concatenation of vowels, closed vowels are absorbed into open vowels, or two adjacent vowels come to create another vowel, in which case reconstruction of the original sequence is not always predictable. (4) Alveolars are palatalized under the influence of front vowels. (5) Regressive assimilation takes place in a syllable starting with [r], changing the entire syllable into a phonological choked sound or a syllabic nasal, depending on the voicing of the following phoneme.

In English textbooks, there are three kinds of English intonation representations: Trager & Smith's, Weak-strong, Audio-lingual way. Each representation has its merits and demerits. Therefore, just one of them is insufficient to represent English intonation properly. Trager & Smith's representation is relevant to show holistic intonation itself. In contrast to this merit, it is not appropriate to represent downstep, declination, etc. With Weak-strong, it is good to show weak and strong point in the sentence. It is not, however, consistent with intonation. Instead of these representations, some textbooks accept Audio-lingual method. Audio-lingual method gives students more chances to hear native speakers' intonations. But it doesn't give ways to understand English intonation itself. In English textbooks, they don't have any hierarchies dependent upon students' proficiency. In spite of various intonations, they just accept a few limited intonation models. Thus, it is necessary to review all kinds of intonation representations and to develop more advanced and relevant English intonation representation.

This study investigates the accentual realization of negation denying the presupposition of a previous utterance compared with that of a general negation. Specifically we study what types and positions of accent are realized in the speech of Korean speakers using English as a second language as well as English native speakers. Gussenhoven (1983) and Bolinger (1985, 1986) suggested that when presupposition of previous utterances is denied through negation, focal accent is assigned to empty (functional) words, rather than negative morphemes. The results of this study, however, show that negation sentences denying presupposition have accents not only on empty (functional) words but also on content words. Almost every English native speaker places an H* accent on the negative morphemes themselves (not, no, nothing, etc.) in general negation, as well as on the other lexical items-verbs and prepositions in our data-in negations denying presuppositions. On the other hand, Korean speakers hardly distinguish between the two kinds of negation sentences, unlike native speakers through accentual differences. Rather, they give accent an every content word, including the negative morphemes in both general negations and negations denying presuppositions. Therefore, the results of this study do not absolutely support the previous studies on the denial of presupposition.

The sentences with the same surface word order may be realized with the pragmatically different meanings, depending on the contexts under which they could appear. Semantically, their meaning differences have been explained in terms of the different information structures (Steedman 2000), whereas prosodically, they can be explained in terms of the different compositions of intonational components which make their own semantic contributions (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). In other words, the different intonation realizations of the sentences with the same word order reflect the different information structures. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the information structure and the intonational meaning by way of analysing the production of the sentences with ambiguous scopes of the English focus particle 'only'. In contrast to the previous quantitative approaches to the scopes of the focus particle 'only', two independent levels of information structure (Steedman 2000)-theme/rheme, and focus/ background-make it possible to consistently explain the intonational phenomena.

The conjunctive marker '-ko' in Korean can be interpreted as meaning either conjunctive 'and' or ordering 'and then'. The interpretation of '-ko' is ambiguous in written texts but not in spoken texts. It is because the meaning of the utterance is determined by the combination of the text with its prosody. The two meanings of ' -ko' can be explained by the theory of implicature, which was introduced by Grice (1973, 1981). This paper examines the meaning of the marker '-ko' with respect to the relation between its meaning and prosody. The results of the experiments in this paper showed that the prosodic phrasing in Korean influences the interpretation of the marker '-ko'. When two constituents combined by '-ko' are realized in the same accentual phrase, the marker can be interpreted as meaning 'exactly be orderly'. This meaning can be classified as the Particularlized Conversational Implicature (PCl) in Gricean theory. In the other cases of phrasing, the marker '-ko' can mean either 'conjunctive' or 'be orderly' by the Generalized Conversational Implicature (GCI). The fact that phrasing determines the interpretations of the marker '-ko' can be seen as supporting the view that prosody interacts with various levels of linguistic phenomena from phonology to pragmatics.