• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.138-147
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• 2011

While most Korean speech databases are developed for adults' speech, not for children's speech, there are various children's speech databases based on other languages. Because there are wide differences between children's and adults' speech in acoustic and linguistic characteristics, the children's speech database needs to be developed. In this paper, to find the differences between them in Korean, we built speech recognizers using HMM and tested them according to gender, age, and the presence of VTLN(Vocal Tract Length Normalization). This paper shows the speech recognizer made by children's speech has a much higher recognition rate than that made by adults' speech and using VTLN helps to improve the recognition rate in Korean.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.647-654
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• 2022

Although the fields in which is utilized children's speech recognition is on the rise, the lack of quality data is an obstacle to improving children's speech recognition performance. This paper proposes a new method for improving children's speech recognition performance by additionally using adult speech data. The proposed method is a transformer based domain adversarial training using dynamically weighted loss to effectively address the data imbalance gap between age that grows as the amount of adult training data increases. Specifically, the degree of class imbalance in the mini-batch during training was quantified, and the loss function was defined and used so that the smaller the data, the greater the weight. Experiments validate the utility of proposed domain adversarial training following asymmetry between adults and children training data. Experiments show that the proposed method has higher children's speech recognition performance than traditional domain adversarial training method under all conditions in which asymmetry between age occurs in the training data.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

This paper proposes a new feature extraction algorithm to improve children's speech recognition in Korean. The proposed feature extraction algorithm combines three methods. The first method is on the vocal tract length normalization to compensate acoustic features because the vocal tract length in children is shorter than in adults. The second method is to use the uniform bandwidth because children's voice is centered on high spectral regions. Finally, the proposed algorithm uses a smoothing filter for a robust speech recognizer in real environments. This paper shows the new feature extraction algorithm improves the children's speech recognition performance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.117-123
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• 2011

Most individuals with hearing impairment have difficulty in understanding speech in noisy situations. This study was conducted to investigate sentence recognition ability using the Korean Standard-Sentence Lists for Preschoolers (KS-SL-P2) in pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. The subjects of this study were 10 pre-school age children with hearing aids, 12 pre-school age children with cochlear implants, and 10 pre-school age children with normal hearing. Three kinds of signal-to-noise (SNR) conditions (+10 dB, +5 dB, 0 dB) were applied. The results for all pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids presented a significant increase in the score for sentence recognition as SNR increased. The sentence recognition score in speech noise were obtained with the SNR +10 dB. Significant differences existed between groups in terms of their sentence recognition ability, with the cochlear implant group performing better than the hearing aid group. These findings suggest the presence of a sentence recognition test using speech noise is useful for evaluating pre-school age children's listening skill.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.35-46
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• 2006

This study investigated whether there are differences between Korean-English bilingual and Korean monolingual children on phonological awareness skills. Participants were 11 Korean-English bilingual children and 12 Korean monolingual children. The children's ages ranged between 6 and 7 years. The results were as follows. First, the bilingual children significantly outperformed monolingual children on overall phonological awareness tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly higher than monolinguals on all three types of phonological awareness tasks (segmentation, deletion, and blending). Second, there was a significant difference between the groups with respect to phonological units of the tasks. The bilinguals performed significantly better than monolinguals on the phonemic unit tasks, but two groups did not differ significantly on syllabic unit tasks. There was an interaction effect between unit size(syllables and phonemes) and group (bilinguals and monolinguals). Third, there were correlations for both bilingual and monolingual children between overall phonological awareness skills and word recognition skills.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.52-59
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• 2012

Children develop their language skill rapidly between age 3 and 5. To meet the child's language development through a variety of experiences, it is necessary to develop age-appropriate contents. So it needs to develop various contents using speech interface for children, but there is no speech database of korean children. In this paper, we develop speech database of 3 to 5 years old children in korean. For collecting accurate children's speech, child education experts examine in the speech database development process. The words for database are selected from MCDI-K in two stage and children speak a word three times. Such collected speech are tokenized by child and word and stored in database. This speech database will be transferred through web and, hopefully, be the foundation of development of children-oriented contents.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.7-14
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• 2005

This study investigated the reading ability of Korean second-graders and the relationship between reading and phonological awareness and RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming) ability. A language-based reading assessment battery was used. Children at the end of the Korean second-grade were still at the developmental stage of decoding skill and seemed to be at Chall's stage 1. Findings indicated significant correlations between reading ability and phonological awareness and between reading ability and RAN ability. Therefore, the importance of phonological processing could be extended to syllable-based alphabetic languages.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2012

This study in the treatment of autistic horse therapy of children with disabilities that affect the perception of parents is to some extent how well treatment for a sense of purpose and a horse therapy was to evaluate the expectations. As parents of autistic children with disabilities a questionnaire study of 100 people was used as a research tool. Analysis of the frequency analysis method, Chi-square Analysis were analyzed by taking advantage of each. Parents interested in horse therapy and children who do not have the experience of riding. In addition, Parents who have children age 10-20 riding in the response was that there would be effects Understanding mainly ride horses in the horse therapy is physical exercise. And therapy and exercise that combines specific area of expertise, as is the way to help. In addition, behavior modification, and it is used as a way to improve. Expectations in the therapeutic horse therapy should be major(occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy). Horse therapy is suitable for individual therapy at least for 2-3 weeks and the Confederacy.

• 재활복지
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.233-246
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• 2017

The present study is a basic study for application of Augmented Reality (AR) to verb teaching for children with language developmental disorders and is intended to examine validity for the list of verbs at the beginning of development. To confirm the validity of the verbs list, the appropriateness of the verbs was evaluated by three professors with certification of KSLP (Korean Speech-Language Pathologist) working in the department of Speech-Language Pathology at the university. The motion validity test was conducted by showing motion implemented as AR to eight master's students in Speech-Language Pathology major, having them record verbs that came to their mind, and evaluating in the conformity. The second motion validity test was conducted by using 5-point Likert scales to 87 undergraduates in Speech-Language Pathology major and having them see the motions in AR and marked the degrees to which them see the motions conform to the relevant verbs on the scales. Using the SPSS 21.0 program, descriptive statics analyses of the results were conducted. Through this all process, thirty verbs were selected as having content validity. It could be seen that when AR based communication system are applied, things and backgrounds that complement the insufficient movements of motions and help motion recognition should be also provided. In future studies, the 3D images of the AR based communication system will be complemented and the content validity will be verified with typically developing children and the children with language developmental disorders.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.64 no.10
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• pp.497-503
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• 2021

Reading disability (dyslexia) refers to an unexpected difficulty with reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. Dyslexia is most commonly caused by a difficulty in phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects the ability of an individual to speak, read, and spell. In this paper, I describe reading disabilities by focusing on their underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Neurobiological studies using functional brain imaging have uncovered the reading pathways, brain regions involved in reading, and neurobiological abnormalities of dyslexia. The reading pathway is in the order of visual analysis, letter recognition, word recognition, meaning (semantics), phonological processing, and speech production. According to functional neuroimaging studies, the important areas of the brain related to reading include the inferior frontal cortex (Broca's area), the midtemporal lobe region, the inferior parieto-temporal area, and the left occipitotemporal region (visual word form area). Interventions for dyslexia can affect reading ability by causing changes in brain function and structure. An accurate diagnosis and timely specialized intervention are important in children with dyslexia. In cases in which national infant development screening tests have been conducted, as in Korea, if language developmental delay and early predictors of dyslexia are detected, careful observation of the progression to dyslexia and early intervention should be made.