• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.79-90
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• 2021

This single-subject study examined the effects of repetitive speech training at the word and sentence levels using speech cues on the percentage of correct consonants (PCC) and speech intelligibility of children with cerebral palsy (CP). Three children aged between 5-8 years with a history of CP participated in the study. Thirty-minute intervention sessions were provided four times a week for four weeks. The intervention included repeated training of words and sentences containing target phonemes using two instructions of speech cues, "big mouse" and "strong voice". First, the children improved their average PCC and speech intelligibility, but an effect size analysis indicated that the effect was different for each child, and the effect size for speech intelligibility was higher than for PCC. Second, the intervention effect was generalized to untrained words and sentences. Third, the maintenance effects of PCC and speech intelligibility were very high. These findings suggests that repeated speech training using speech cues is an intervention technique that can help improve PCC and speech intelligibility in children with CP.

• Conservation Science in Museum
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• v.24
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• pp.117-132
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• 2020

The painting layer of Payathonzu temple mural paintings in the ruins of Bagan Myanmar has been damaged due to various reasons. In this study, the applicability of Neem resin, a traditional Myanmar adhesive, as a fixative on the painting layer was examined. Cow glue and Paraloid B-72 were selected as fixatives in the comparison group, and pseudo-specimens with conditions similar to the original mural paintings were produced to examine the changes before and after applying the fixatives and according to the deterioration experiments. As a result of conducting the experiments and comparing the fixatives, it was found that changes on the surface such as smudge, yellowing and gloss are greater with the application of higher concentration of Neem resin than with other fixatives. However, such changes were relatively small under the condition of 4% concentration. It was also confirmed that chromaticity and glossiness vary greatly between before- and after-application of the fixatives but that such discrepancies tend to decrease at 4% concentration compared to other concentrations. As for fixation strength, it was found that the fixation capacity of Neem resin on the base and painting layers is overall higher than other fixatives as the concentration is increased. Therefore, the applicability of 4% concentration of Neem resin as a fixative on the painting layer was confirmed considering the low surface changes according to environmental factors, low color discrepancy and glossiness, and characteristics of excellent fixation strength. It is believed that the findings of this study could be used as basic data for the preservation of Payathonzu temple mural paintings in the future.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.81-90
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• 2020

This paper describes a method of building Korean conversational speech data in the emergency medical domain and proposes an annotation method for the collected data in order to improve speech recognition performance. To suggest future research directions, baseline speech recognition experiments were conducted by using partial data that were collected and annotated. All voices were recorded at 16-bit resolution at 16 kHz sampling rate. A total of 166 conversations were collected, amounting to 8 hours and 35 minutes. Various information was manually transcribed such as orthography, pronunciation, dialect, noise, and medical information using Praat. Baseline speech recognition experiments were used to depict problems related to speech recognition in the emergency medical domain. The Korean conversational speech data presented in this paper are first-stage data in the emergency medical domain and are expected to be used as training data for developing conversational systems for emergency medical applications.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.359-366
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• 2022

In this paper, we present the Korean menu-ordering Sentence Text-to-Speech (TTS) system using conformer-based FastSpeech2. Conformer is the convolution-augmented transformer, which was originally proposed in Speech Recognition. Combining two different structures, the Conformer extracts better local and global features. It comprises two half Feed Forward module at the front and the end, sandwiching the Multi-Head Self-Attention module and Convolution module. We introduce the Conformer in Korean TTS, as we know it works well in Korean Speech Recognition. For comparison between transformer-based TTS model and Conformer-based one, we train FastSpeech2 and Conformer-based FastSpeech2. We collected a phoneme-balanced data set and used this for training our models. This corpus comprises not only general conversation, but also menu-ordering conversation consisting mainly of loanwords. This data set is the solution to the current Korean TTS model's degradation in loanwords. As a result of generating a synthesized sound using ParallelWave Gan, the Conformer-based FastSpeech2 achieved superior performance of MOS 4.04. We confirm that the model performance improved when the same structure was changed from transformer to Conformer in the Korean TTS.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.11-18
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• 2004

The on-line games in the past were played by only two persons exchanging data based on one-to-one connections, whereas recent ones (e.g. MMORPG: Massively Multi-player Online Role-playings Game) enable tens of thousands of people to be connected simultaneously. Specifically, Korea has established an excellent network infrastructure that can't be found anywhere in the world. Almost every household has a high-speed Internet access. What made this possible was, in part, high density of population that has accelerated the formation of good Internet infrastructure. However, this rapid increase in the use of on-line games may lead to surging traffics exceeding the limited Internet communication capacity so that the connection to the games is unstable or the server fails. expanding the servers though this measure is very costly could solve this problem. To deal with this problem, the present study proposes the load distribution technology that connects in the form of local clustering the game servers divided by their contents used in each on-line game reduces the loads of specific servers using the load balancer, and enhances performance of sewer for their efficient operation. In this paper, a cluster system is proposed where each Game server in the system has different contents service and loads are distributed efficiently using the game server resource information such as CPU utilization. Game sewers having different contents are mutually connected and managed with a network file system to maintain information consistency required to support resource information updates, deletions, and additions. Simulation studies show that our method performs better than other traditional methods. In terms of response time, our method shows shorter latency than RR (Round Robin) and LC (Least Connection) by about 12%, 10% respectively.

• The Korean Journal of Malacology
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2008

The histochemical characteristics and ultrastructure of the mantle in the spiny top shell, Batillus cornutus were described using light and electron microscopy. The simple epidermal layer wrapped on the top and bottom of the centrally located connective tissue. And then the epidermal layer were divided into the outer epidermal layer near a shell and the inner epidermal layer closed to the visceral mass. The connective tissue layer was composed of the collagen fiber muscularfiber bundle and hemolymph sinus. Mucous cells in the apical mantle contained acid and neutral mucopolysaccaride, and acidic carboxylated mucopolysaccaride in the mid and marginal mantle. The mantle thickness, epidermal layer thickness and hemolymph sinus area displayed a trend of reduction from the marginal zone to the apical zone. From TEM observation, it was possible to distinguish epithelium, ciliated cell, absorptive cell and secretory cell in the epidermal layer. The epithelia were columnar and the nucleus was elliptical. The free surface were covered with microvilli. The lateral membranes of epithelium was con nected with neighboring cells by the zonular occludens, zonular adherens and membrane interdigitation. Ciliated cell on free surface had cilia and microvilli, and numerous mitochondria in the apical cytoplasm. In the epidermal layer, it observed 2 type cells having absorptive function. The absorptive cells were columnar in shape, and contained microvilli, pinocytotic vesicles, mitochondria and lysosomes of various electron density. Secretory cells can be divided into four types (A, B, C, D) depending on the cell shape and characteristics of secretory granules. These cells were unicellular glands and had similar characteristics to previously reported on the mantle of the gastropod and bivalves.

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2017

The relationships between the ability to understand changes in meaning depending on the prosody of spoken words and the ability to perceive pitch and melodic contour in cochlear implants (CI) recipients were examined. Fifteen postlingual CI recipients were measured in terms of speech prosody perception, speech perception, pitch discrimination (PD), and melody contour identification (MCI). The speech prosody perception test consists of words with positive (PW) and neutral meaning (NW). Participants were asked to identify the meaning of words depending on the conditions of positive and negative prosody. The MCI consists of subtests 1 and 2 with different chance levels to choose. Then, the relationships between speech prosody perception, speech perception, PD, and MCI performance were analyzed. There was a significant difference in identifying the meaning of words expressed in a different prosody between the PW and NW conditions. Speech prosody perception showed a significant correlation with MCI 1 while there was no significant relationship with speech perception. Although speech perception may be possible after CI, limited spoken word comprehension due to decreased sensitivity for prosodic changes may persist in CI recipients. In addition, there was a limitation in perception of melodic contour change compared to pitch discrimination, which is related to speech prosody perception.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.81 no.3
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• pp.676-687
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• 2020

Purpose To analyze the altered brain regions and intrinsic brain activity patterns in trauma-exposed firefighters without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Materials and Methods Resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) was performed for all subjects. Thirty-one firefighters over 40 years of age without PTSD (31 men; mean age, 49.8 ± 4.7 years) were included. Twenty-six non-traumatized healthy controls (HCs) (26 men; mean age, 65.3 ± 7.84 years) were also included. Voxel-based morphometry was performed to investigate focal differences in the brain anatomy. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis was performed to investigate differences in spontaneous brain characteristics. Results The mean z-scores of the Seoul Verbal Learning Test for immediate and delayed recall, Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) score for animals, and COWAT phonemic fluency were significantly lower in the firefighter group than in the HCs, indicating decreased neurocognitive function. Compared to HCs, firefighters showed reduced gray matter volume in the left superior parietal gyrus and left inferior temporal gyrus. Further, in contrast to HCs, firefighters showed alterations in rsfMRI values in multiple regions, including the fusiform gyrus and cerebellum. Conclusion Structural and resting-state functional abnormalities in the brain may be useful imaging biomarkers for identifying alterations in trauma-exposed firefighters without PTSD.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.213-232
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• 2000

The development of the knee joint was studied by electron microscopy in human fetuses ranging from 20 mm to 260 mm crown-rump length ($7\sim30$ weeks of gestational age). The appearance of the primordium of the meniscus and cruciate ligament was conspicuous as the mesenchymal cells , preceeding that of joint space at 30 mm fetus. The primitive joint cavity was first seen in the interzone from the 40 mm fetus and its intermediate layer proceeded developing as a narrow cleft which was closely incorporated with two chondrogenic layers. Poorly differentiated mesenchymal cells of the meniscus at 40 mm fetus containing predominantly free ribosomes differentiated into fibroblasts at 60 mm fetus. By 100 mm fetus, the fibroblast in inner zone of the meniscus presented as oval profiles with a short cell processes, whereas middle and peripheral zones presented as elongated cells. Differentiation of the synovial membrane coincided with clarification of the joint cavity When dilatation of the synovial cavity occurred, the two types of synovial cells were identified at 60 mm fetus. By 100 mm fetus a majority of the intimal cells were B-type. B-type cells were clearly distinguishable from A-type cells by their content of extensive rough endoplasmic reticula and well developed Golgi complexes. In contrast, A-type cells had numerous filopodia, pinocytotic vesicles, lysosomes and large vacuoles. At 260 mm fetus the B-type cells were also a majority of intimal cells. At 260 mm fetus the inner zone of the meniscus was filled with parallel oriented fascicles of collagenous fibers and oval fibroblasts. The middle zone was constituted of parallel and radially arranged fibers and fibroblasts. The outer zone was populated by elongated fibroblasts encircled by crossed collagenous fibers with the blood vessels. At 30 mm fetus the fibroblasts of the cruciate ligament contained rough endoplasmic reticula and mitochondria. Collagen fibrils were noted within narrow cytoplasmic processes which were continued with the extracellular space. Collagen fibrils of ligament were filled in the bulk of extracellular space at 100 mm fetus. By $150\sim260mm$ fetus, the cruciate ligaments were constituted of longitudinally oriented bundle of collagen fibrils with irregular rows of round cells between.