• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제56호
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• pp.159-172
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• 2005

This paper analyzes the vocal tract area estimation algorithm used as a part of a speech analysis program to help deaf children correct their pronunciations by comparing their vocal tract shape with normal children's. Assuming that a vocal tract is a concatenation of cylinder tubes with a different cross section, we compute the relative vocal tract area of each tube using the reflection coefficients obtained from linear predictive coding. Then, we obtain the absolute vocal tract area by computing the height of lip opening with a formula modified for children's speech. Using the speech data for five Korean vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/), we investigate the effects of the sampling frequency, frame size, and model order on the estimated vocal tract shape. We compare the vocal tract shapes obtained from deaf and normal children's speech.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제39호
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• pp.53-71
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• 2000

With the 130 patients who were diagnosed as functional articulation disorders with no physical problems, a statistical study was performed to investigate their background information and phonological processes of errors. The results are as follows: (1) Males showed higher prevalence than females, and 5-year-old-patients showed the highest in age. (2) Most patients showed errors of 2~5 phonemes (3) The most frequent errors were found in plosives and alveolar sounds, and the most frequent phonological process of errors in the aspects of manner and place of articulation were stop-assimilations and alveolar assimilations, respectively.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제48호
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• pp.1-17
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• 2003

Among the types of dysarthria, spastic and flaccid types are the most prominent manifestations. The objectives of the present research are (1) to discover the phonetic contrasts that differentiate spastic dysarthria from flaccid dysarthria, (2) to analyze the degrees of predictability of each phonetic contrast for intelligibility in spastic and flaccid dysarthrias and to compare them. The 'phonemic contrast word intelligibility pairs' for dysarthric speakers were tested and proved to be useful for clinical assessment of and research on dysarthria. In the group of spastic type, it showed that initial fricative vs. affricate and front vs. back vowel contrasts are transmitted relatively less effectively than flaccid type. In the group of flaccid type, initial glottal vs null contrast is transmitted less effectively than spastic type. The overall intelligibility of spastic dysarthria was predicted by multiple regression analysis with 88% accuracy by three phonetic contrasts(initial fricative vs. affricate; front vs. back vowels; initial consonant correlates). And the intelligibility of flaccid dysarthria was predicted by two phonetic contrasts(initial nasal vs. stop, front vs. back vowels) with 60% accuracy.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제66호
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• pp.61-72
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• 2008

This paper proposes a method to improve pathological and normal voice classification performance by combining multiple features such as auditory-based and higher-order features. Their performances are measured by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The combination of multiple features proposed by the frame-based LDA method is shown to be an effective method for pathological and normal voice classification, with a 87.0% classification rate. This is a noticeable improvement of 17.72% compared to the MFCC-based GMM algorithm in terms of error reduction.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.47-55
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• 2015

This study examined whether speech acceptability was changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations. Both speech rate and voice loudness reportedly are associated with acceptability and intelligibility. Speech samples by twelve speakers with mild dysarthria were recorded. Speech rate and loudness changes were made by digitally manipulating habitual sentences. 3 different loudness levels (70, 75, & 80dB) and 4 different speech rates (normal, 20% rapidly, 20% slowly, & 40% slowly) were presented to 12 SLPs (speech language pathologists). SLPs evaluated sentence acceptability by 7-point Likert scale. Repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant change in speech acceptability. A faster speech rate (20% rapidly) rather than habitual and slower rates (20%, 40% slowly) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.001). An increased vocal loudness (up to 80dB) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.05). Speech rate and loudness changes in the prosodic properties of speech may contribute to improved acceptability.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제67호
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• pp.17-31
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• 2008

This study was designed to explore the analogical reasoning and metaphoric understanding in typically developing children and language impaired children. 13 Language-impaired children were matched to 16 typically developing children on the basis of receptive vocabulary age. All 29 children were enrolled in the 1st to 3rd grade in regular elementary schools. All were administered analogical reasoning and metaphoric tasks. Results indicated that the children with language disabilities did not perform as well as the receptive vocabulary matched group on the two tasks. In addition, we found that both of children with and without language disabilities did not have relationship between analogical reasoning and metaphoric understanding.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.99-112
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• 2010

This study attempted to review the recent, high-quality evidence-based practical research related to the treatment effectiveness of voice disorders which focus on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and translational research of vocal fold tissue engineering for vocal fold regeneration. Methodology including PICO (P; Populations or Patients, I; Interventions, C; Comparison group (control, placebo, gold standard), O; Outcomes or measures made) information for RCTs and animal models (species), regenerative therapy method, and outcomes of translational research for clinical application was summarized and discussed for future voice disorder research.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.173-179
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• 2011

The present study was performed to investigate the intelligibility of voice disorder patients by providing the various background noise levels. Four sets of 12-sentence-stimuli produced by 11 voice disorder patients were prepared, and 5 minute-news from radio broadcasting studio were used as a background noise. 30 listeners assigned intelligibility score of each sentence with visual analog scale. Each set of sentences was provided with 20dB, 10dB, 0dB noise (same intensity with stimuli), and, finally, with no noise. As results, as background noise level increased, intelligibility scores were lowered with statistical significance. Even though in the same severity, more loud background noise showed much lower scores than less loud noise. When 10dB noise was provided, intelligibility scores showed the biggest difference among the degree of severity.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권3호
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• pp.123-132
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• 2009

This study investigates the differences in nasalance across handicap, gender, and vowels and the correlation between nasal energy and oral energy both of which are used to compute nasalance. For this study, 20 hearing-impaired adults and 20 normal hearing adults as a control group were asked to read 7 Korean vowels (/$\alpha$, $\Lambda$, o, u, ɯ, i, $\varepsilon$/). Subjects' readings were recorded by NasalView and analyzed by Praat. Results showed that the hearing impaired group (HL) has a significantly higher nasalance than the normal hearing group(NH), and that there was a significant positive correlation between nasal energy and oral energy. A higher nasalance of the hearing impaired group seems to be due to an improper velopharyngeal control which is caused by lack of a proper auditory feedback.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.115-121
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• 2014

This paper investigates the relationship between acoustic characteristics and voice handicap index for 29 males with esophageal speakers. Acoustic characteristics were measured by using a sustained vowel /a/ three times. The stable vocalization for 2 seconds was analyzed by MDVP program. Specifically, relationships between four VHI scores (total, functional, physical, and emotional) and three acoustic characteristics (jitter, shimmer, and NHR) were investigated using the Pearson correlation coefficient. As results, we found no relationship between NHR and VHI scores. However, both jitter and shimmer had statistically significant correlations with all four VHI scores. This research will contribute to establishing a baseline related to speech characteristics in voice rehabilitation with esophageal speakers. Further research could be done to examine the overall quality of life survey, which is widely used as a subjective measure about voice for patients with esophageal speakers.