• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.51-66
• /
• 2022

This study aims to help Korean English learners to learn English pronunciation by revealing which suprasegmentals affect the implementation of English sentences closer to native English speakers when they read English sentences. To this end, Korean middle school English learners were selected as subjects and research data were gathered through sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamative), as well as syllables. Speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, F0 range, and rhythm among suprasegmentals were used for analysis of these English sentence utterances. Mean analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were performed. The results showed that speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, and F0 range affected the evaluation of fluency levels. In the regression analysis between all suprasegmentals and fluency levels, the suprasegmentals that most affected fluency levels were speech rate and F0 range. Rhythm had no meaningful relation with fluency levels. Therefore, when teaching English pronunciation, it is necessary to teach students to increase their speech rate and F0 range. In addition, students should be trained to reduce both the number and the duration of pauses during utterance to improve their fluency. It is noteworthy that of the four sentence types, exclamative sentences were produced with faster speech rate, fewer pauses, shorter pause duration, and higher rhythm values.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.29-38
• /
• 2022

This study aimed to analyze the speech appearing in the National Institute of Korean Language's Daily Conversation Speech Corpus (2020) and reveal how the speech rate and the frequency of turn-taking affect the change in prosody units. The analysis results showed a positive correlation between intonation phrase, word phrase frequency, and speaking duration as the speech speed increased; however, the correlation was low, and the suitability of the regression model of the speech rate was 3%-11%, which was weak in explanatory power. There was a significant difference in the mean speech rate according to the frequency of the turn-taking, and the speech rate decreased as the frequency of the turn-taking increased. In addition, as the frequency of turn-taking increased, the frequency of intonation phrases, the frequency of word phrases, and the speaking duration decreased; there was a high negative correlation. The suitability of the regression model of the turn-taking frequency was calculated as 27%-32%. The frequency of turn-taking functions as a factor in changing the speech rate and prosodic units. It is presumed that this can be influenced by the disfluency of the dialogue, the characteristics of turn-taking, and the active interaction between the speakers.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.35 no.4
• /
• pp.319-329
• /
• 2016

The present study was to test if breathing training in melodic intonation therapy (MIT) ameliorated the articulation intelligibility of Broca's aphasics or not. The experimental group did breathing training (2 stages) that preceded the MIT. In order to evaluate the efficacy of the MIT intervention, the VOT (Voice Onset Time), the TD (Total Delay), the voice sound intensity and the expiratory volume of the subjects, closely associated with articulation intelligibility were measured before and after the intervention. It was shown that, in the experimental group after the MIT intervention, the VOT and TD were increased on bilabial/p/, alveolar consonant /t/, and soft palatal /k/(p < 0.05), but no significant differences were found on affricate /c/ and fricative /s/(p > 0.05). In the control group, no significant increases in the VOT and TD were observed on all articulation points(p > 0.05). The voice sound intensity which influences the verbal articulation increased in the experimental group after the intervention(p < 0.05), whereas no significant changes were observed in the control group. In conclusion, the breathing training in the MIT was found to result in improving the articulation intelligibility of Broca's aphasiacs.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.56-64
• /
• 1995

In this paper we extracted control rules of synthetical pauses and syllable durations depending on pronunciation speed in Korean speech from the spoken sentences recorded by 18 professional announcers. Pause rules were divided into three categories : pause between sentences(PBS), pause between clauses(PBC) and pause between intonational phrases(PBI). From the analysis results it is found that comparing the slowly spoken sentence with the fast spoken sentence the duration difference between them is due to the synthetical pause increments, expecially, of PBS and PBC. In addition, it is also found that the increment ratio of the mean syllable duration Is low. On the other hand, PBI was not pronounced in the fast spoken sentences. PBI was pronounced at the pronunciation speed(PS) over some PS.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.37-45
• /
• 2020

This paper quantitatively calculated the speech frequency of the discourse markers 'a', 'eo', and 'eum' and the speech duration of these discourse markers using the Seoul Corpus, a spontaneous speech corpus. The sound durations were confirmed with Praat, the Seoul Corpus was analyzed with Emeditor, and the results were presented by statistical analysis with R. Based on the corpus analysis, the study investigated whether a particular factor is preferred by speakers of particular categories. The most prominent feature of the corpus is that the sound durations of female speakers were longer than those of men when using the 'eum' discourse marker in a final position. In age-related variables, teenagers uttered 'a' more than 'eo' in an initial position when compared to people in their 40s. This study is significant because it has quantitatively analyzed the discourse markers 'a', 'eo', and 'eum' by gender and age. In order to continue the discussion, more precise research should be conducted considering the context. In addition, similarities can be found in "e" and "ma" in Japanese(Watanabe & Ishi, 2000) and 'uh', 'um' in English(Gries, 2013). afterwards, a study to identify commonalities and differences can be predicted by using the cross-linguistic analysis of the discourse.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.33-40
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this research was to find out the relation between Korean learners' English proficiency and the ratio of the length of the stressed vowel in a monosyllabic noun to that of the unstressed vowel in an article of the noun phrases (e.g., "a cup", "the bus", etcs.). Generally, the vowels in monosyllabic content words are phonetically more prominent than the ones in monosyllabic function words as the former have phrasal stress, making the vowels in content words longer in length, higher in pitch, and louder in amplitude. This study, based on the speech samples from Korean-Spoken English Corpus (K-SEC) and Rated Korean-Spoken English Corpus (Rated K-SEC), examined 879 English noun phrases, which are composed of an article and a monosyllabic noun, from sentences which are rated on 4 levels of proficiency. The lengths of the vowels in these 879 target NPs were measured and the ratio of the vowel lengths in nouns to those in articles was calculated. It turned out that the higher the proficiency level, the greater the mean ratio of the vowels in nouns to the vowels in articles, confirming the research's hypothesis. This research thus concluded that for the Korean English learners, the higher the English proficiency level, the better they could produce the stressed and unstressed vowels with more conspicuous length differences between them.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.25 no.6
• /
• pp.585-591
• /
• 2015

In transcription for spoken language research, labeling is a work linking text-represented utterance to recorded speech. Most existing labeling tools have been working manually. Semi-automatic labeling we are proposing consists of automation module and manual adjustment module. Automation module extracts voice boundaries utilizing G.Saha's algorithm, and predicts utterance boundaries using the number and length of utterance which established utterance text. For maintaining existing manual tool's accuracy, we provide manual adjustment user interface revising the auto-labeling utterance boundaries. The implemented tool of our semi-automatic algorithm speed up to 27% than existing manual labeling tools.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.43-51
• /
• 2023

In this paper, we propose an approach for dialect classification based on the speed and pause of speech utterances as well as the age and gender of the speakers. Dialect classification is one of the important techniques for speech analysis. For example, an accurate dialect classification model can potentially improve the performance of speaker or speech recognition. According to previous studies, research based on deep learning using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features has been the dominant approach. We focus on the acoustic differences between regions and conduct dialect classification based on the extracted features derived from the differences. In this paper, we propose an approach of extracting underexplored additional features, namely the speed and the pauses of speech utterances along with the metadata including the age and the gender of the speakers. Experimental results show that our proposed approach results in higher accuracy, especially with the speech rate feature, compared to the method only using the MFCC features. The accuracy improved from 91.02% to 97.02% compared to the previous method that only used MFCC features, by incorporating all the proposed features in this paper.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
• /
• 2018.10a
• /
• pp.40-43
• /
• 2018

대화 발화 예측(Next Utterance Classification)은 Multi-turn 대화에서 마지막에 올 발화를 정답 후보들 중에서 예측을 하는 연구이다. 기존에 제안된 LSTM 기반의 Dual Encoder를 이용한 모델에서는 대화와 정답 발화에 대한 관계를 고려하지 않는 문제와 대화의 길이가 너무 길어 중간 정보의 손실되는 문제가 존재한다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 두 문제를 해결하기 위하여 ESIM구조를 통한 단어 단위의 attention, 대화의 turn별 문장 단위의 attention을 제안한다. 실험 결과 총 5000개의 검증 대화 데이터에 대하여 1 in 100 Recall@1의 성능이 37.64%로 기존 모델 대비 약 2배 높은 성능 향상을 나타내었다.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.25-32
• /
• 2020

An analysis of emotional English utterances with 7 emotions (calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgust, surprised) was conducted using the measurement of prosodic distance between 672 emotional and 48 neutral utterances. Applying the technique proposed in the automatic evaluation model of English pronunciation to the present study on emotional utterances, Euclidean distance measurement of 3 prosodic elements such as F0, intensity and duration extracted from emotional and neutral utterances was utilized. This paper, furthermore, extended the analytical methods to include Euclidean distance normalization, z-score and z-score normalization resulting in 4 groups of measurement schemes (sqrF0, sqrINT, sqrDUR; norsqrF0, norsqrINT, norsqrDUR; sqrzF0, sqrzINT, sqrzDUR; norsqrzF0, norsqrzINT, norsqrzDUR). All of the results from perceptual analysis and acoustical analysis of emotional utteances consistently indicated the greater effectiveness of norsqrF0, norsqrINT and norsqrDUR, among 4 groups of measurement schemes, which normalized the Euclidean measurement. The greatest acoustical change of prosodic information influenced by emotion was shown in the values of F0 followed by duration and intensity in descending order according to the effect size based on the estimation of distance between emotional utterances and neutral counterparts. Tukey Post Hoc test revealed 4 homogeneous subsets (calm