• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.115-122
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• 2016

This study investigates the acoustic-phonetic features and speech intelligibility of Lombard speech in children with intellectual disability, by examining the effect of Lombard speech at 3 levels of non-noise, 55dB, and 65dB. Eight children with intellectual disability read sentences and played speaking games, and their speech were analyzed in terms of intensity, pitch, vowel space of /a/, /i/, and /u/, VAI(3), articulation rate and speech intelligibility. Results showed, first, that intensity and pitch increased as noise level increased; second, that VAI(3) increased as the noise level increased; third, that articulation rate decreased as noise intensity increased; finally, that speech intelligibility increased as noise intensity increased. The Lombard speech changed the VAI(3), vowel space, articulation rate, speech intelligibility of the children with intellectual disability as well. This study suggests that the Lombard speech will be clinically useful for the persons who have intellectual disability and difficulties in self-control.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.21-24
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• 2005

This paper presents durational characteristics of Korean Lombard speech using data, which consist of 500 Lombard utterances and 500 normal utterances of 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females). Each file was segmented and labeled manually and the duration of each segment and each word was extracted. The durational change of Lombard effect in comparison with normal speech was analyzed using a statistical method. The results show that the duration of words with Lombard effect is increased in comparison with normal style, and that the average unvoiced consonantal duration is reduced while the average vocalic duration is increased. Female speakers show a stronger tendency towards lengthening the duration in Lombard speech, but without statistical significance. Finally, this study also shows that the speakers of Lombard speech could be classified according to their different duration rate.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.35S no.12
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• pp.93-102
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• 1998

In noisy environments, human speech productions are influenced by noises(Lombard effect), and speech signals are contaminated. These distortions dramatically reduce the performance of speech recognition systems. This paper proposes a method of the Lombard effect compensation and noise suppression in order to improve speech recognition performance in noise environments. To estimate the intensity of the Lombard effect which is a nonlinear distortion depending on the ambient noise levels, speakers, and phonetic units, we formulate the measure of the Lombard effect level based on the acoustic speech signal, and the measure is used to compensate the Lombard effect. The distortions of speech under noisy environments are cancelled out as follows. First, spectral subtraction and band-pass filtering are used to cancel out noise. Second, energy nomalization is proposed to cancel out the variation of vocal intensity by the Lombard effect. Finally, the Lombard effect level controls the transform which converts Lombard speech cepstrum to clean speech cepstrum. The proposed method was validated on 50 korean word recognition. Average recognition rates were 82.6%, 95.7%, 97.6% with the proposed method, while 46.3%, 75.5%, 87.4% without any compensation at SNR 0, 10, 20 dB, respectively.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2E
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• pp.71-76
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• 2005

Compared to normal speech, distant-talking speech is characterized by the acoustic effect due to interfering sound and echoes as well as articulatory changes resulting from the speaker's effort to be more intelligible. In this paper, the acoustic features for distant-talking speech due to the articulatory changes will be analyzed and compared with those of the Lombard effect. In order to examine the effect of different distances and articulatory changes, speech recognition experiments were conducted for normal speech as well as distant-talking speech at different distances using HTK. The speech data used in this study consist of 4500 distant-talking utterances and 4500 normal utterances of 90 speakers (56 males and 34 females). Acoustic features selected for the analysis were duration, formants (F1 and F2), fundamental frequency, total energy and energy distribution. The results show that the acoustic-phonetic features for distant-talking speech correspond mostly to those of Lombard speech, in that the main resulting acoustic changes between normal and distant-talking speech are the increase in vowel duration, the shift in first and second formant, the increase in fundamental frequency, the increase in total energy and the shift in energy from low frequency band to middle or high bands.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.59-68
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• 1994

This paper describes the performance assessment test and analysis of test results on a Korean speech recognizer which recognizes Lombard effect received speech in noisy environment, as a basic performance assessment research. In the assessement test, standard speech data were first manipulated close to speech uttered in a noisy environment, and then performance assessment tests were carried out along with the assessment items (the type of noise, SNR) in two ways-one with Lombard effect received speech(LES), the other with not received(NLES). As a result, when 90% of recognition rate is set to be a recognition limit, it was achieved at 10dB SNR point with LES, while at 30dB with NLES. This 20dB of SNR difference indicates Lombard effect should be considered in real world assessment test. The type of noises didn't affect performance of recognizers in out tests. ANOVA analysis, in evaluating several kinds of recognizers, showed every assessment item affecting the recognition performance could be quantified.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.93-97
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• 2013

This paper is on designing an indoor driving simulator to evaluate the performance of in-car speech recognizer when influenced by the elements, which lower the success rate of speech recognition. The proposed simulator simulates vehicle noise which was pre-recorded in diverse driving environments and driver's speech. Additionally, the proposed Lombard effect conversion module in this simulator enables the speech recorded in a studio environment to convert into various possible driving scenarios. The relevant experimental results have confirmed that the proposed simulator is a feasible approach for realizing an effective method as it achieved similar speech recognition results to the real driving environment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.19-27
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• 2024

The Lombard effect is an involuntary response to speakers' experiences in the presence of noise during voice communication. This study aimed to investigate the Lombard effect by comparing the acoustic features of children and adults under different listening conditions. Twelve male children (5-9 years old) and 12 young adult men (24-35 years old) were recruited to produce speech under three different listening conditions (quiet, noise-55 dB, noise-70 dB). Acoustic analyses were then carried out to characterize their acoustic features, such as F0, intensity, duration, and vowel space area, under the three listening conditions. A Lombard effect was observed in the intensity and duration for children and adults who participated in this study under adverse listening conditions. However, we did not observe a Lombard effect in the F0 and vowel space areas of either group. These findings suggest that children can adjust their speech production in challenging listening conditions as much as adults.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.197-217
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• 1999

In a noisy class, the acoustic-phonetic features of the teacher and the perceptual features of learners are changed comparison with a quiet environment. Acoustical analyses were carried out on a set of French monosyllables consisting of 17 consonants and three vowel /a, e, i/, produced by 1 male speaker talking in quiet and in 50, 60 and 70 dB SPL of masking noise on headphone. The results of the acoustic analyses showed consistent differences in energy and formant center frequency amplitude of consonants and vowels, $F_1$ frequency of vowel and duration of voiceless stops suggesting the increase of vocal effort. The perceptual experiments in which 18 undergraduate female students learning French served as the subjects, were conducted in quiet and in 50, 60 dB of masking noise. The identification scores on consonants were higher in Lombard speech than in normal speech, suggesting that the speaker's vocal effort is useful to overcome the masking effect of noise. And, with increased noise level, the perceptual response to the French consonants given had a tendency to be complex and the subjective reaction score on the noise using the vocabulary representative of 'unpleasant' sensation to be higher. And, in the point of view on the L2(second language) acquisition, the influence of L1 (first language) on L2 examined in the perceptual result supports the interference theory.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.83-92
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• 1996

This paper describes Lombard effect compensation and noise suppression so as to reduce speech recognition error in noisy environments. Lombard effect is represented by the variation of spectral envelope of energy normalized word and the variation of overall vocal intensity. The variation of spectral envelope can be compensated by linear transformation in cepstral domain. The variation of vocal intensity is canceled by spectral magnitude normalization. Spectral subtraction is use to suppress noise contamination, and band-pass filtering is used to emphasize dynamic features. To understand Lombard effect and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, speech data are collected in simulated noisy environments. Recognition experiments were conducted with contamination by noise from automobile cabins, an exhibition hall, telephone booths in down town, crowded streets, and computer rooms. From the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.27-38
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• 2002

The purpose of this article is to present the acoustic parameters (VOT, jitter, shimmer, vF0, vAm, NHR, SPI, VTI, DVB, DSH) for consonants (/pipi/, /$p^{h}ip^{h}i$/, /p'ip'i/) and sustained vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/) produced by normal subjects and dysphonia patients at two vocal effort(normal, high) by Lombard effect using 60dB white noise. Lombard effect indicates the vocal effort increase in noisy situation. At normal vocal effort, in general the acoustic parameter values of patients are greater than normal. And in noisy situation, significant decrease of acoustic values is seen in normal compared with in dysphonia patients. The clinical implication of this finding, the vocal quality in dysphonia is not compensated by vocal effort as well as normal subjects because of the inefficiency caused by abnormal vocal fold appearance and function. And with this result, we can counsel that the voice quality can not be improved as well as the patient expect.