• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.87-101
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• 2022

In addition to administering a questionnaire (J-survey), which questions individuals on subjective vocal fatigue, voice samples were collected before and after speech-language pathology sessions from 50 female speech-language pathologists in their 20s and 30s in the Daejeon and Chungnam areas. We identified significant differences in Korean Vocal Fatigue Index scores between the fatigue and non-fatigue groups, with the most prominent differences in sections one and two. Regarding acoustic phonetic characteristics, both groups showed a pattern in which low-frequency band energy was relatively low, and high-frequency band energy was increased after the treatment sessions. This trend was well reflected in the low-to-high ratio of vowels, slope LTAS, energy in the third formant, and energy in the 4,000-8,000 Hz range. A difference between the groups was observed only in the vowel energy of the low-frequency band (0-4,000 Hz) before treatment, with the non-fatigue group having a higher value than the fatigue group. This characteristic could be interpreted as a result of voice abuse and higher muscle tonus caused by long-term voice work. The perturbation parameter and shimmer local was lowered in the non-fatigue group after treatment, and the noise-to-harmonics ratio (NHR) was lowered in both groups following treatment. The decrease in NHR and the fall of shimmer local could be attributed to vocal cord hypertension, but it could be concluded that the effective voice use of speech-language pathologists also contributed to this effect, especially in the non-fatigue group. In the case of the non-fatigue group, the rhamonics-to-noise ratio increased significantly after treatment, indicating that the harmonic structure was more stable after treatment.

• MALSORI
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• no.27_28
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• pp.27-56
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• 1994

Processes involving the change of vowel height are natural enough to be found in many languages. It is essential to have a better feature specification for vowel height to grasp these processes properly, Standard Phonology adopts the binary feature system, and vowel height is represented by the two features, i.e., [\pm high] and [\pm low]. This has its own merits. But it is defective because it is misleading when we count the number of features used in a rule to compare the naturalness of rules. This feature system also cannot represent more than three degrees of height, We wi31 discard the binary features for vowel height. We consider to adopt the multivalued feature [n high] for the property of height. However, this feature cannot avoid the arbitrariness resulting from the number values denoting vowel height. It is not easy to expect whether the number in question is the largest or not It also is impossible to decide whether a larger number denotes a higher vowel or a lower vowel. Furthermore this feature specification requires an ad hoc condition such as n > 3 or n \geq 2, whenever we want to refer to a natural class including more than one degree of height The altelnative might be Particle Phonology, or Dependency Phonology. These might be apt for multivalued vowel height systems, as their supporters argue. However, the feature specification of Particle Phonology will be discarded because it does not observe strictly the assumption that the number of the particle a is decisive in representing the height. One a in a representation can denote variant degrees of height such as [e], [I], [a], [a ] and [e ]. This also means that we cannot represent natural classes in terms of the number of the particle a, Dependency Phonology also has problems in specifying a degree of vowel height by the dependency relations between the elements. There is no unique element to represent vowel height since every property has to be defined in terms of the dependency relations between two or more elements, As a result it is difficult to formulate a rule for vowel height change, especially when the phenomenon involves a chain of vowel shifts. Therefore, we suggest a new feature specification for vowel height (see Chapter 3). This specification resorts to a single feature H and a few >'s which refer exclusively to the degree of the tongue height when a vowel is pronounced. It can cope with more than three degrees of height because it is fundamentally a multivalued scalar feature. This feature also obviates the ad hoc condition for a natural class while the [n high] type of multivalued feature suffers from it. Also this feature specification conforms to our expection that the notation should become simpler as the generality of the class increases, in that the fewer angled brackets are used, the more vowels are included, Incidentally, it has also to be noted that, by adopting a single feature for vowel height, it is possible to formulate a simpler version of rules involving the changes of vowel height especially when they involve vowel shifts found in many languages.