• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2022

Previous studies have provided important findings on children's speech production development. They have revealed that essentially all aspects of children's speech shift toward adult-like characteristics over time. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the perceptual aspects of children's speech tokens, as perceived by naive adult listeners. To fill the gap between children's production and adults' perception, we conducted cross-sectional perceptual studies of monosyllabic words produced by children aged two to six years. Monosyllabic words in the consonant-vowel-consonant form were extracted from children's speech samples and presented aurally to five listener groups (20 listeners in total). Generally, the agreement rate between children's production of target words and adult listeners' responses increases with age. The perceptual responses to tokens produced by two-year old children induced the largest discrepancies and the responses to words produced by six years olds agreed the most. Further analyses were conducted to identify the sources of disagreement, including the types of segments and syllable structure. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development and perception of children's speech across age groups.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.392-400
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose an effective speech reinforcement technique base on ITU-T G.729A CS-ACELP codec under the near-end background noise environments. In general, since the intelligibility of the far-end speech for the near-end listener is significantly reduced under near-end noise environments, we require a far-end speech reinforcement approach to avoid this phenomena. In contrast to the conventional speech reinforcement algorithm, we reinforce the excitation signal of the codec's parameters received from the far-end speech signal based on the G.729A speech codec under various background noise environments. Specifically, we first estimate the excitation signal of ambient noise at the near-end through the encoder of the G.729A speech codec, reinforcing the excitation signal of the far-end speech transmitted from the far-end. we specially propose a novel approach to directly reinforce the excitation signal of far-end speech signal based on the decoder of the G.729A. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the CCR (Comparison Category Rating) test of the method for subjective determination of transmission quality in ITU-T P.800 under various noise environments and shows better performances compared with conventional SNR Recovery methods.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.327-353
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• 2017

This study analyzed how an aspect of translation can be shown on the 'Kureru type(くれる類)' verbs in "Kokoro", which was a Japanese modern novel when it was reproduced by translators. It focused on 'the use in accordance with a subject of expression and the other person' and 'the object of movement'. 'The use in accordance with a subject of expression and the other person' could be summarized as follows: The 'Kureru type' verbs were not translated only in accordance with the use of vocabulary in a dictionary. 'Kudasaru' was used in many examples of letter writing when 'the giver' was younger and it was translated to a polite form in Korean. 'Kureru' had a characteristic when 'the giver' was older in Korean translation. The act of parents was translated to an honorific form if parents were 'givers' regardless of whether a listener was an internal character or an external character in parent-child relationships. The degree of politeness was different in English translation when the 'Kureru type' verbs were used for asking a favor request command. 'Please' was used more for 'Kudasaru' than 'Kureru'. An aspect of translation in accordance with 'the object of movement' could be summarized as follows: The 'Kureru type' verbs were used as main verbs. 'Kureru' and 'Kudasaru' were translated to 'Juda' 'Jusida' in Korean translation, but they were translated to various vocabulary words in accordance with the characteristic of 'the object of movement' and were translated to imply a specific act, the process of possession and the result of possession in English translation. The 'Kureru type' verbs were also used as auxiliary verbs. The translated vocabulary words for Korean translation and English translation were different in accordance with whether the movement of things other than the movement of act was included or not. Examples were translated predominantly to expressions of profit such as '-Jada' '-Dalla' '-Jusida' when there was a movement of act as well as specific things in Korean translation. Also, some examples were translated to expressions of profit when there was the movement of act with an abstract matter and there was only the act of the object of movement, but many examples were translated to the act of first verbs. Examples were translated predominantly to the act of first verbs when there was the movement which included specific things and abstract matters or there was only the movement of act in English translation. Expressions of asking a favor request such as 'Kureru' and 'Kudasaru' were translated to '-Dalla' '-Juseyo' in Korean translation, but they were translated to expressions which specify an act while focusing on the structure of sentences or the function of language, such as 'must', 'ask', 'wish', 'would', and 'would like to' 'please' in English translation.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.17-32
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• 2021

Speaker recognition is generally divided into speaker identification and speaker verification. Speaker recognition plays an important function in the automatic voice system, and the importance of speaker recognition technology is becoming more prominent as the recent development of portable devices, voice technology, and audio content fields continue to expand. Previous speaker recognition studies have been conducted with the goal of automatically determining who the speaker is based on voice files and improving accuracy. Speech is an important sociolinguistic subject, and it contains very useful information that reveals the speaker's attitude, conversation intention, and personality, and this can be an important clue to speaker recognition. The final ending used in the speaker's speech determines the type of sentence or has functions and information such as the speaker's intention, psychological attitude, or relationship to the listener. The use of the terminating ending has various probabilities depending on the characteristics of the speaker, so the type and distribution of the terminating ending of a specific unidentified speaker will be helpful in recognizing the speaker. However, there have been few studies that considered speech in the existing text-based speaker recognition, and if speech information is added to the speech signal-based speaker recognition technique, the accuracy of speaker recognition can be further improved. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel method using speech style expressed as a sentence-final ending to improve the accuracy of Korean speaker recognition. To this end, a method called sentence sequencing that generates vector values by using the type and frequency of the sentence-final ending appearing in the utterance of a specific person is proposed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, learning and performance evaluation were conducted with a actual drama script. The method proposed in this study can be used as a means to improve the performance of Korean speech recognition service.