• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.298-308
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• 2012

This study was designed to examine the phoneme recognition errors of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners on a consonant-by-consonant basis, to show (1) how each HI ear perceives individual consonants differently and (2) how standard clinical measurements (i.e., using a tone and word) fail to predict these differences. Sixteen English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables of six signal-to-noise ratios in speech-weighted noise were presented at the most comfortable level for ears with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The findings were as follows: (1) individual HI listeners with a symmetrical pure-tone threshold showed different consonant-loss profiles (CLPs) (i.e., over a set of the 16 English consonants, the likelihood of misperceiving each consonant) in right and left ears. (2) A similar result was found across subjects. Paired ears of different HI individuals with identical pure-tone threshold presented different CLPs in one ear to the other. (3) Paired HI ears having the same averaged consonant score demonstrated completely different CLPs. We conclude that the standard clinical measurements are limited in their ability to predict the extent to which speech perception is degraded in HI ears, and thus they are a necessary, but not a sufficient measurement for HI speech perception. This suggests that the CV measurement would be a useful clinical tool.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.295-302
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to develop Korean Consonant Perception Test (KCPT), that is a phonemic level including elementary data to evaluate speech and consonant perception ability of the normal and the hearing impaired qualitatively and quantitatively. KCPT was completed with meaningful monosyllabic words out of possible all Korean monosyllabic words, considering articulation characteristics, the degree of difficulty, and the frequency of the phonemic appearance, after assembling a tentative initial and final consonants testing items using four multiple-choice method which were applied to the seven final consonant regulation and controlled with the familiarity of the target words. Conclusively, the final three hundred items were developed including two- and one-hundred items for initial and final testing items, respectively, with the evaluation of the 20 normal hearing adults. Through this process, the final KCPT was composed upon the colloquial frequency following identification of no speakers' variances statistically and elimination of the highly difficult items. The 30 hearing impaired were tested with KCPT and found that the half lists, A and B, were not different statistically and the initial and final testing items were appropriate for evaluating initial and final consonants, respectively.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.124-130
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: The study investigated vowel context effects on the perception of stop consonants in Malayalam. It also probed into the role of vowel context effects in determining the frequency of occurrence of various consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in Malayalam. Subjects and Methods: The study used a cross-sectional pre-experimental post-test only research design on 30 individuals with normal hearing, who were native speakers of Malayalam. The stimuli included three stop consonants, each spoken in three different vowel contexts. The resultant nine syllables were presented in original form and five gating conditions. The consonant recognition in different vowel contexts of the participants was assessed. The frequency of occurrence of the nine target syllables in the spoken corpus of Malayalam was also systematically derived. Results: The consonant recognition score was better in the /u/ vowel context compared with /i/ and /a/ contexts. The frequency of occurrence of the target syllables derived from the spoken corpus of Malayalam showed that the three stop consonants occurred more frequently with the vowel /a/ compared with /u/ and /i/. Conclusions: The findings show a definite vowel context effect on the perception of the Malayalam stop consonants. This context effect observed is different from that in other languages. Stop consonants are perceived better in the context of /u/ compared with the /a/ and /i/ contexts. Furthermore, the vowel context effects do not appear to determine the frequency of occurrence of different CV syllables in Malayalam.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.124-130
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: The study investigated vowel context effects on the perception of stop consonants in Malayalam. It also probed into the role of vowel context effects in determining the frequency of occurrence of various consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in Malayalam. Subjects and Methods: The study used a cross-sectional pre-experimental post-test only research design on 30 individuals with normal hearing, who were native speakers of Malayalam. The stimuli included three stop consonants, each spoken in three different vowel contexts. The resultant nine syllables were presented in original form and five gating conditions. The consonant recognition in different vowel contexts of the participants was assessed. The frequency of occurrence of the nine target syllables in the spoken corpus of Malayalam was also systematically derived. Results: The consonant recognition score was better in the /u/ vowel context compared with /i/ and /a/ contexts. The frequency of occurrence of the target syllables derived from the spoken corpus of Malayalam showed that the three stop consonants occurred more frequently with the vowel /a/ compared with /u/ and /i/. Conclusions: The findings show a definite vowel context effect on the perception of the Malayalam stop consonants. This context effect observed is different from that in other languages. Stop consonants are perceived better in the context of /u/ compared with the /a/ and /i/ contexts. Furthermore, the vowel context effects do not appear to determine the frequency of occurrence of different CV syllables in Malayalam.

• MALSORI
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• no.45
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• pp.1-14
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• 2003

This paper criticizes S. Kim (1992), claiming that the perception of place cues in the reduced stop consonant clusters ('reducing' means 'cutting off' the acoustic silence in stop clusters) largely depends on the acoustic characteristics such as formant transition and noise frequency distribution of stop burst, rather than the closure duration time as advocated by S. Kim (1992). The claim is based on the perception test conducted upon 111 stimuli over 10 subjects. The finding is that, when the closure duration is cut off up to the point where only one stop is perceived, place of the second stop, not the first one, in the cluster is in most cases perceived regardless of the places of the first and second stops. It is likely that the place cues of the stop in the prevocalic position mask those in the postvocalic position.

• 재활복지
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.295-314
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to supply the baseline data for auditory rehabilitation in the field through error type and rate of the phoneme which the hearing impaired feel difficulty to discriminate. Thirty participants with sensorineural hearing loss heard KCPT lists through recorded voice by male and female to get the data about error type and KCPT score accordance with talker's gender. In the initial consonant test list, /ㄷ/, /ㅂ/, /ㅃ/, /ㅉ/, /ㅌ/ showed more than 30% error rate while /ㄱ/and /ㄷ/ showed in final consonant test list. The most common error type was the initial consonant substitution or the final consonant substitution for the initial or final consonant test lists. Talker's gender effect was not signigicant showing no statistical difference between the scores when compared results from male voice and female voice. It means that KCPT can be used regardless of talker's gender in clinics.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.99-107
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• 2022

This study attempted to analyze the consonant perception ability and errors and to verify compatibility items for hearing impaired children wearing hearing aids and cochlear implants using the Phoneme Perception Test for School-Aged children (PPT-S). As a result of the study, it was found that children with hearing impairments have more difficulty in perceiving final consonants than initial consonants. The hard type of PPT-S, in which the articulation method and articulation place of the target and foil words are similar, felt more difficult than the easy type. Among the initial consonants, the incorrect response rate for aspiration sound was higher. In the case of final consonants, the incorrect answer rate for 'ㄷ' and 'ㅁ' was relatively higher. There was no significant difference in the percentage of correct response rate according to the gender of the speaker. The above results can be usefully used as basic data for standardizing of PPT-S and evaluating the intervention effects before and after hearing rehabilitation with hearing impaired children.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.25-36
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• 2021

This study examined the perception and production of eight English fricatives /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ by thirty Chinese English majors and thirty Chinese middle school students through a fricative identification test, an intelligibility test, and a goodness rating test and focused on error patterns and the perception-production relationship. The results showed that substitution errors occurred frequently in the perception and production of English fricatives by both the English majors and the middle school students. Further, the error patterns were attributed to various influencing factors such as the negative transfer from Chinese consonant inventory, hypercorrection or overcompensation mistakes, deficiency of L2 teaching, and acoustic similarities. Significant overall correlations were found between the fricative perception and production by the two subject groups but were not manifested in all the eight fricatives, indicating that Chinese learners' perceptual competence of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their productive excellence of those sounds in all cases. Furthermore, precedences of perception over production were incompletely manifested in the eight fricatives, which suggested that perception might not always be a necessary prerequisite for production. Additionally, subject group and vowel context differences were observed. The English majors performed better than the middle school students, both perceptually and productively, and the subjects' performances in perception and production varied when vowel contexts changed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.95-101
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• 2014

This paper investigated the effects of frequency band limitation on perceptual characteristics of Korean consonants. Monosyllabic speech (144 syllables of CV type, 56 syllables of VC type, 8 syllables of V type) produced by two announcers were low- and high-pass filtered with cutoff frequencies ranging from 300 to 5000 Hz. Six listeners with normal hearing performed perception test by types of filter and cutoff frequencies. We reported phoneme recognition rates and types of perception error of band-limited Korean consonants to examine how frequency distortion in the process of speech transmission affect listener's perception. The results showed that recognition rates varied with the following factors: position in a syllable, manner of articulation, place of articulation, and phonation types. Consonants in the final position were stronger to the frequency band limitation than those in the initial position. Fricatives and Affricates are stronger than stops. Fortis consonants were less stronger than their lenis or aspirated counterparts. Types of perception error also varied depending on such factors as consonant's place of articulation: In case of bilabial stops, they were perceived as alveolar stops with while in cases of alveolar and velar stops, there were changes in phonation types without any change in the place of articulation.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.186-191
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The overall result showed that the proportion of perception accuracy of the target consonants was rather low, amounting to only 55%. There was also a positional effect since the accuracy rates for perceiving the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate of the target consonant identification was higher in intervocalic position before stress (70%) and initial onset position (67%) than in intervocalic position after stress (45%) and final coda position (36%). Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except intervocalic position after stress. The perception patterns were accounted for by the markedness and perceptual factors in conjunction with stress location.