• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.271-279
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• 2007

We suggest a novel method for the evaluation of cochlear implant (CI) speech processing strategy based on neural spike train decoding. From formant trajectories of input speech and auditory nerve responses responding to the electrical pulse trains generated from a specific CI speech processing strategy, optimal linear decoding filter was obtained, and used to estimate formant trajectory of incoming speech. Performance of a specific strategy is evaluated by comparing true and estimated formant trajectories. We compared a newly-developed strategy rooted from a closer mimicking of auditory periphery using nonlinear time-varying filter, with a conventional linear-filter-based strategy. It was shown that the formant trajectories could be estimated more exactly in the case of the nonlinear time-varying strategy. The superiority was more prominent when background noise level is high, and the spectral characteristic of the background noise was close to that of speech signals. This confirms the superiority observed from other evaluation methods, such as acoustic simulation and spectral analysis.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.131-138
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• 2016

This study analyzes the characteristics of good impression using speech manipulation scripts and investigates the characteristics of preferred speech voice. Fourty male and female college students participated in this study. They have been exposed to the Gyeongsang dialect spoken by their friends and family for more than 15 years. Two sample voices(1 male and 1 female), considered as giving good impression, were subject to voice analysis. Two students were asked to read the sample paragraph of 'Walking' and their voice samples were analyzed through Praat. The collected speech data were manipulated into 4 different sets by changing pitch level, degree of loudness and speech rate. First, both men and women received good impression more from pitch-lowered sound than from the original one. Second, men tended to receive good impression more from slightly louder voice than from the natural-pitched one. Third, it was shown that men often felt more drowned to a voice at slightly faster speech rate than at the original speech rate. Overall, both male and female listeners favored lower pitch over the original pitch. Men tended to prefer louder voice sound while women preferred less loud one. Men received better impression at a lower speech rate but women at a faster speech rate.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.334-338
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• 2000

Even though it is not practical, yet there is a trend of the researches related to the anesthesia on the determination of depth of anesthesia and level of consciousness in the view point of neurophysiological aspects. That is, quantification of physiological signals which represent human brain function and pharmacological response could be used to find the level of consciousness based on the changes in physiological signals. This research was performed to analyze the relationship between parameters extracted from LAEP(long latency auditory evoked potential) and the amount of sedatives injected to the patients. Seventeen patients were participated for the experiment. Two different sedatives, midazolam and diazepam, were injected intramuscularly, and LAEPs caused by 1KHz and 2KHz auditory tone bust were obtained. It was found that amplitude of extracted parameters from LAEP, N100 and P300, were reduced as dose of sedatives were increased. Results of this study could be used for extracting more meaningful index and establishing algorithm for predicting changes of level of consciousness induced by sedatives.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.111-121
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• 2015

The present study examines the auditory boundary between Korean /o/ and /u/ on a synthesized vowel continuum by Chinese learners of Korean language. Preceding researches reported that the Chinese learners have difficulty pronouncing Korean monophthongs /o/ and /u/. In this experiment, a nine-step continuum was resynthesized using Praat from a vowel token from a recording of a male announcer who produced it in isolated form. F1 and F2 were synchronously shifted in equal steps in qtone (quarter tone), while F3 and F4 values were held constant for the entire stimuli. A forced choice identification task was performed by the advanced learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as their native language. Their experiment data were compared to a Korean native group. ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) analysis and logistic regression were performed to estimate the perceptual boundary. The result indicated the learner group has a different auditory criterion on the continuum from the Korean native group. This suggests that more importance should be placed on hearing and listening training in order to acquire the phoneme categories of the two vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.61-66
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to examine the speaking rate(overall speaking rate and articulatory rate) of Parkinson's disease patients with palilalia(PDP). Palilalia is traditionally characterized by not only compulsive repetitions of words and phrases, but also by increased rate of speech based on auditory perception. Since Souques(1908) first characterized palilalia as fast speech rate from the perspective of auditory perception, few studies have evaluated PDP speech using acoustic methods. To compare the speech rate between PDP and normal subjects, we included five PDP and eight control subjects(age over 55), as well as the date acquired under reading tasks(standardized Korean paragraph). The difference in median of the overall speaking rate was not statically significant between the PDP group(median 5.25, IQR 1.30) and normal group(median 4.76, IQR 0.71). The PDP, however, had a significantly higher syllables per second on the articulatory rate(median 6.60, IQR 1.04) than normal subjects(median 5.60, IQR 0.52). Results indicated no differences in pause over 250msec and disfluency duration between the two groups. To provide useful insight into PDP speech, multiple levels of analysis should be employed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.147-154
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of voice improvement when vocal training, which relaxes the vocal contact, is applied to children with vocal nodules. Subjects included 20 5- to 12-year-old boys with vocal nodules in Otolaryngology and for whom voice therapy had been advised. The vocal therapy was conducted for 40 minutes per a week for a total of eight times. Results were evaluated by videostroboscopy, auditory-perceptual evaluation of GRBAS Scale, aerodynamic test, and acoustic analysis before and after therapy. As a result, first, the size of vocal nodules was reduced and the unstable pattern of vocal contact was improved. Glottic closure was increased and Phase symmetry was decreased during vocal vibration. Mucosal wave was increased and muscle tension of the larynx was reduced. Second, auditory-perceptual evaluation showed that subjects' overall quality of voice improved. GRBAS Scale Evaluation showed that the characteristics of the subjects' voice which were rough, breathy, and strained and breathy were reduced after therapy. Third, the measurements of acoustic parameters showed a statistically significant improvement. The fundamental frequency of the subejects' voice was increased and values of Jitter and Shimmer, NHR, [H1-H2] decreased. Fourth, the maximum phonation time of children was increased. These results imply that vocal relaxation training conducted in this study has a very positive effect to improve the voice of children with vocal nodules.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.897-906
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• 2016

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to propose the useful method to improve service affective quality by analyzing customer's service experiences and evaluating the satisfaction of the affective sensual responses to physical stimulus. Methods: While customers were experiencing the service, the customers evaluated the subjective satisfaction for the visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory senses on a scale of -3 to 3 at each stage of the service process. The customers described the positive and negative feelings about each sensory stimulus, and explained the reason for the subjective evaluation scores. After experiencing the whole service, customers evaluated the affective quality of the whole service. Results: The proposed method was applied to coffee shops. 35 male and female college students were evaluated for 15 coffee shops in Korea. Multiple regression analysis revealed that auditory and olfactory senses had a greater impact on service affective satisfaction than other senses. Conclusion: This method is useful to identify the factors that affect customer's affective quality and to find the target to improve physical environment more easily than existing methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Physical Medicine
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.127-133
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• 2011

Purpose: 본 연구는 단하지 보조기를 사용하는 뇌졸중환자의 시-거리 보행변수에 대한 청각신호 효과에 대한 알아보고자 하는 것이다. Methods: 9명의 뇌졸중환자가 본 연구에 참여하였으며 대상자는 보조기 착용이 없는 경우, 기존 보조기 착용의 경우 그리고 청각신호 보조기 착용의 경우에 각각 시-거리 보행 변수에 대해 측정하였다. 8대의 동작분석 카메라 시스템(Motion Analysis Corporation, Santa Rosa, USA)을 사용하여 시-거리 보행 변수를 측정하였으며 Wilcoxon rank sum test을 이용하여 양하지의 대칭성을 분석하였고 Friedman test를 사용하여 다른 보조기 사용에 따른 효과를 알아보았다. Results: 청각 신호 보조기의 경우, 손상측과 비손상측의 보행속도, 활보장 그리고 분속수가 대칭적으로 되었다. 손상측의 경우, 단하지 보조기를 착용하였을 때가 착용하지 않았을 때보다 대체적으로 보행 변수들이 증가하였다. 청각 신호 단하지 보조기를 착용하였을 때 손상측 하지의 보행 속도, 활보장, 보장, 양하지 지지 시간이 증가하였고 단하지 지지 시간은 감소하였다. Conclusion: 청각 신호 단하지 보조기 착용 시 보행 속도, 활보장, 보장은 보조기를 착용하지 않았을 때보다는 증가하였으나 청각 신호 단하지 보조기와 기존 단하지 보조기 착용 사이에는 차이가 없었다. 하지만, 본 연구의 결과는 청각 신호 단하지 보조기가 뇌졸중 환자의 시-거리 보행 변수를 개선할 수 있음을 보여주었고 앞으로 다양한 보행 변수들에 대한 연구가 필요하다고 생각한다.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.415-419
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• 2010

A variety of methods for sound source localization have been developed and applied to several applications such as noise detection system, surveillance system, teleconference system, robot auditory system and so on. In the previous work, we proposed the sound source localization using the spatially mapped GCC functions based on TDOA for robot auditory system. Performance of the proposed one for the noise effect and estimation resolution was verified with the real environmental experiment under the single source assumption. However, since multi-talker case is general in human-robot interaction, multiple source localization approaches are necessary. In this paper, the proposed localization method under the single source assumption is modified to be suitable for multiple source localization. When there are two sources which are correlated, the spatially mapped GCC function for localization has three peaks at the real source locations and imaginary source location. However if two sources are uncorrelated, that has only two peaks at the real source positions. Using these characteristics, we modify the proposed localization method for the multiple source cases. Experiments with human speeches in the real environment are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method for multiple source localization. In the experiments, mean value of estimation error is about $1.4^{\circ}$ and percentage of multiple source localization is about 62% on average.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.22-26
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: Music listening has a concomitant effect on structural and functional organization of the brain. It helps in relaxation, mind training and neural strengthening. In relation to it, the present study was aimed to find the effect of Carnatic music listening training (MLT) on speech in noise performance in adults. Subjects and Methods: A total of 28 participants (40-70 years) were recruited in the study. Based on randomized control trial, they were divided into intervention and control group. Intervention group underwent a short-term MLT. Quick Speech-in-Noise in Kannada was used as an outcome measure. Results: Results were analysed using mixed method analysis of variance (ANOVA) and repeated measures ANOVA. There was a significant difference between intervention and control group post MLT. The results of the second continuum revealed no statistically significant difference between post training and follow-up scores in both the groups. Conclusions: In conclusion short-term MLT resulted in betterment of speech in noise performance. MLT can be hence used as a viable tool in formal auditory training for better prognosis.