• Journal of Convergence Society for SMB
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.51-57
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• 2016

This study aims at investigating and comparing the vowel lengths of the eight stressed syllable vowels among the Korean college students with the English native speakers. To do this English sentences were uttered and recorded by twenty Korean subjects. Acoustic features were measured from a sound spectrogram with the help of the Praat software program and analyzed through statistical analysis. From the results of the experiment, I was able to find out that the differences of the lengths of the first syllable stressed vowels were significant. Especially in the pronunciation of the English front low vowel /${\ae}$/, native subjects pronounced significantly longer than Korean subjects, and this result could be used as a teaching material in pronunciation class.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.37-42
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• 2018

This study focuses on investigating and comparing the lengths of the five words, vowels, and the ratio of the length of vowels to that of words among the Korean college students with the English native speaker. English sentences were read and recorded by Korean subjects to do this experiment. The vowel lengths were measured from a sound spectrogram, the Praat software program, and these data were analyzed through statistical analysis. I could easily tell that there were differences between the groups and they were significant. In the English front low vowel /${\ae}$/, I was able to find out that native subjects pronounced differently from Korean subjects, and the differences were significant. However, the pronunciation of the English diphthong /ai/, native subjects pronounced significantly shorter than Korean subjects.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.139-156
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• 2001

Speech intelligibility in patients with complete dentures is an important clinical problem depending on the material used. The objective of this study was to investigate the speech of two edentulous subjects fitted with a complete maxillary prosthesis made of two different palatal materials: chrome-cobalt alloy and acrylic resin. Three patients with complete dentures in the experiment group and ten people in the controls groups participated in the experiment. CSL, Visi-Pitch were used to measure speech characteristics. The test words consisted of a simple vowel /e/, meaningless three syllabic words containing fricative, affricated and stops sounds, and sustained fricative sounds /s/ and /$\int$/. The analysis speech parameters were vowel and lateral formants, VOT, sound durations, sound pressure level and fricative frequency. Data analysis was conducted by a series of paired T-test. The findings like the following: (1) Vowel formant one of patients with complete denture is higher than that of the control group (p<0.05), while lateral formant three of patients with complete denture is lower than that of the control group (p<0.0l). (2) Patients with complete denture produced lower speech intelligibility with low fricative frequency (/$\int$/) than control group (p<0.0). The speech intelligibility of patients with metal prosthesis was higher than that of those with resin prosthesis (p<0.05). (3) Fricative, lateral and stop sound durations of patients with complete denture were longer than those of the control group (p<0.01 and p<0.05), respectively. Total sound durations of patients with metal prosthesis were similar to that of the control group (p<0.05), while those with resin prosthesis had a shorter duration (p<0.01). This implied that those with metal prosthesis had higher speech intelligibility than those with resin prosthesis. (4) Patients with complete denture had higher sound pressure levels /t/ and /c/ than the control group (p<0.01). However, sound pressure levels for /c/ of patients with metal prosthesis or resin prosthesis was similar to the control group (p<0.05). (5) Patients with complete denture had higher fundamental frequency than the control group (p<0.01).

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.112-117
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of revision cochlear implant (CI) surgery for better speech comprehension targeting patients with low satisfaction after first CI surgery. Subjects and Methods: Eight patients who could not upgrade speech processors because of an too early CI model and who wanted to change the whole system were included. After revision CI surgery, we compared speech comprehension before and after revision CI surgery. Categoies of Auditory Performance (CAP) score, vowel and consonant confusion test, Ling 6 sounds, word and sentence identification test were done. Results: The interval between surgeries ranged from eight years to 19 years. Same manufacturer's latest product was used for revision surgery in six cases of eight cases. Full insertion of electrode was possible in most of cases (seven of eight). CAP score (p-value=0.01), vowel confusion test (p-value=0.041), one syllable word identification test (p-value=0.026), two syllable identification test (p-value=0.028), sentence identification test (p-value=0.028) had significant improvement. Consonant confusion test (p-value=0.063), Ling 6 sound test (p-value=0.066) had improvement but it is not significant. Conclusions: Although there are some limitations of our study design, we could identify the effect of revision (upgrade) CI surgery indirectly. So we concluded that if patient complain low functional gain or low satisfaction after first CI surgery, revision (device upgrade) CI surgery is meaningful even if there is no device failure.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.112-117
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of revision cochlear implant (CI) surgery for better speech comprehension targeting patients with low satisfaction after first CI surgery. Subjects and Methods: Eight patients who could not upgrade speech processors because of an too early CI model and who wanted to change the whole system were included. After revision CI surgery, we compared speech comprehension before and after revision CI surgery. Categoies of Auditory Performance (CAP) score, vowel and consonant confusion test, Ling 6 sounds, word and sentence identification test were done. Results: The interval between surgeries ranged from eight years to 19 years. Same manufacturer's latest product was used for revision surgery in six cases of eight cases. Full insertion of electrode was possible in most of cases (seven of eight). CAP score (p-value=0.01), vowel confusion test (p-value=0.041), one syllable word identification test (p-value=0.026), two syllable identification test (p-value=0.028), sentence identification test (p-value=0.028) had significant improvement. Consonant confusion test (p-value=0.063), Ling 6 sound test (p-value=0.066) had improvement but it is not significant. Conclusions: Although there are some limitations of our study design, we could identify the effect of revision (upgrade) CI surgery indirectly. So we concluded that if patient complain low functional gain or low satisfaction after first CI surgery, revision (device upgrade) CI surgery is meaningful even if there is no device failure.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.187-201
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• 2000

This study was done to investigate the English vowels in relation to the foreign accent. In this study, I also tried to find out the foreign accent of the English diphthong /o/ and front low vowel /${\ae}$/ when Koreans speak English. The reason why I chose these vowels is that these vowels, /o/ and /${\ae}$/, are difficult for Koreans to discern and pronounce. Koreans show a foreign accent in their pronunciation. In order to find out the reason for a Korean foreign accent, experiments were carried out with the help of acoustic instruments. According to the results of the experiment, Koreans showed a foreign accent in their English pronunciation of vowels in relation to their utterance positions. Americans showed a final lengthening effect but Koreans showed a final shortening effect. This means that Koreans showed a foreign accent in the final stressed syllable of a sentence. In addition to this, the duration of two English vowels, /o/ and /${\ae}$/, showed considerably different features between Koreans and Americans. In fact, in the pronunciation of the diphthong /o/, the tongue moves from one position to another. The two articulations of a diphthong can be described as the nucleus plus a glide. However, most Koreans have no idea of this phenomenon and pronounce the diphthongs like two separate monophthongs. This causes a great difference in the lengths of English diphthong /o/ between Koreans and Americans.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.165-177
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• 2004

Western singers voice have been studied in music science since the early 20th century. However, Korean traditional singers voice have not yet been studied scientifically. This study is to find the physiological and acoustic characteristics of Pansori singers voices. Western singers participated for comparative purposes. Ten western singers and ten Pansori singers participated in this study. The subjects spoke and sung seven simple vowels /a, e, i, o, u, c, w/. An analysis of Glottal image was done by Scope View and acoustic characteristics of speech and singing voice were analyzed by CSL. The results are as follows: (1) Glottal gestures of Pansori singers showed asymmetric vocal folds. (2) Singing vowel formants of Pansori singers showed breathiness based on Spectrogram. (3) Music formant of western singers appeared in around 3kHz area, however, Pansori singers formant appeared in low frequency area. Modulation of vibrato showed 6 frequency per sec in case of western singers. Pansori singers showed no deep modulation of vibrato on spectrogram.

• Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
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• v.39
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• pp.9.1-9.5
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• 2017

Background: Nasalance is used to evaluate the velopharyngeal incompetence in clinical diagnoses using a nasometer. The aim of this study is to find the nasalance differences between Vietnamese cleft palate children and Korean cleft palate children by measuring the nasalance of five oral vowels. Methods: Ten Vietnamese cleft palate children after surgery, three Vietnamese children for the control group, and ten Korean cleft palate children after surgery with the same age participated in this experimentation. Instead of Korean control, the standard value of Korean version of the simplified nasometric assessment procedures (kSNAP) was used. Result: The results are as follows: (1) the highest nasalance score among the Vietnamese normal vowels is the low vowel /a/; however, that of Korean normal vowels is the high vowel /i/. (2) The average nasalance score of Korean cleft palate vowels is 18% higher than that of Vietnamese cleft palate vowels. There was a nasalance score of over 45% among the vowels /e/ and /i/ in Vietnamese cleft palate patients and /i/, /o/, and /u/ in Korean cleft palate patients. Conclusion: These different nasalance scores of the same vowels seem to cause an ethnic difference between Vietnamese and Korean cleft palate children.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.2
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• pp.241-246
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose VCCV units as a processing unit of language model and compare them with clauses and morphemes of existing processing units. Clauses and morphemes have many vocabulary and high perplexity. But VCCV units have low perplexity because of the small lexicon and the limited vocabulary. The construction of language models needs an issue of the smoothing. The smoothing technique used to better estimate probabilities when there is an insufficient data to estimate probabilities accurately. This paper made a language model of morphemes, clauses and VCCV units and calculated their perplexity. The perplexity of VCCV units is lower than morphemes and clauses units. We constructed the N-grams of VCCV units with low perplexity and tested the language model using Katz, absolute, modified Kneser-Ney smoothing and so on. In the experiment results, the modified Kneser-Ney smoothing is tested proper smoothing technique for VCCV units.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.55-68
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• 2004

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the relationship between English pronunciation and listening comprehension of English diphthongs and low vowels of Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Of 22 test sentences for listening comprehension, 15 sentences were recorded by native speakers and seven sentences were edited from Springboard by Oxford University Press. For the listening comprehension test, 90 subjects from two groups, Chungnam dialect speakers and Gyungnam dialect speakers, were selected. They listened to 22 sentences produced by audio cassette tape and completed a cloze exercise. By the results of this experiment, we observed that Korean collegians of Gyungnam province showed a better listening comprehension of words including front low vowels when they preceded voiced sounds than those of Chungnam province. When the back low vowel came in an open syllable, we also recognized the same result; Gyungnam province collegians showed better listening comprehension of words including back low vowels than those of Chungnam province. As the results of Hee-Suk Park & Jung-Soak Kim(2003) showed that Gyungnam province collegians pronounced the English low vowels longer than Chungnam province collegians, we discovered that there was a positive relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension, especially in Gyungnam province collegians. However regarding words including English diphthongs we discovered almost no relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension.