• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.161-169
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of speech intelligibility of spontaneous speech and the vowel space parameters in patients with Parkinson's disease. Ten PD patients (M=5, F=5) and a corresponding control group of ten normal adults participated in this study. Firstly, subjects were asked to tell a story about their hometown and youth in order to analyze speech intelligibility. Secondly, the subjects were also asked to repeat four vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/) five times in order to compare their vowel spaces. The results were as follows: (1) the speech intelligibility of the PD group was lower than that of the control group. (2) Four parameters including vowel area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, F2i/F1u ratio were significantly different in each group. For instance, vowel area and F2 ratio were wider and higher, respectively. As a result, a decrease in speech intelligibility of patients with PD is likely to show different types of errors from the normal group. The results of this research are meaningful in a sense that they could provide the objective standard of speech intelligibility and vowel space parameters.

• 대한후두음성언어의학회지
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.11-19
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• 1996

Reinke's edema is used for describing varying degrees of chronic swelling of the vocal folds. The acoustic analysis of Reinke's edema has not been reported so far in this country. The purpose of this study is to clarify acoustic and aerodynamic characteristics of the Reinke's edema. Several acoustic evaluations ＆ aerodynamic studies were done in 20 Reinke's edema patients and the data was compared with those of 20 normal controls. Videolaryngoscopy also was done to classify the severity in grading. We used C-Speech, Doctor speech science, and Phonatory function analyser. In C-Speech, we compared jitter, shimmer, and SNR(signal to noise ratio) of normal and Rrinke's edema patient. In Doctor speech science, we compared NNE(Glottal noise energy), speech fundamental frequency, voice quality between two groups. And in phonatory function analyser for aerodynamic function test, we compared speech intensity, airflow rate, and expiratory pressure between two groups. In conclusion, Reinke's edema patients showed lower voice pitches than normal, additionally jitter, shimmer, SNR(signal to noise ratio), NNE(Glottal noise energy), airflow rate, and expiratory pressure may be meaningful parameters for diagnosis and prognosis for treatment.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.67-78
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• 2016

This study examined the affective prosodic characteristics observed from the children with cochlear implant (CI, hereafter) and normal hearing (NH, hereafter) along with listener's perception on them. Speech samples were acquired from 15 normal and 15 CI children. 8 SLPs(Speech Language Pathologists) perceptually evaluated affective types using Praat's ExperimentMFC. When it comes to the acoustic results, there were statistically meaningful differences between 2 groups in affective types [joy (discriminated by intensity deviation), anger (by intensity-related variables dominantly and duration-related variables partly), and sadness (by all aspects of prosodic variables)]. CI's data are much more louder when expressing joy, louder and slower when expressing anger, and higher, louder, and slower when it comes to sadness than those of NH. The listeners showed much higher correlation when evaluating normal children than CI group(p<.001). Chi-square results revealed that listeners did not show coherence at CI's utterance, but did at those of NH's (CI(p<.01), normal(p=.48)). When CI utterances were discriminated into 3 emotional types by DA(Discriminant Analysis) using 8 acoustic variables, speed related variables such as articulation rate took primary role.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권4호
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• pp.189-200
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• 2003

The objective of this study was to examine two new parameters by which we could screen people with malignant vocal folds. The new parameters were the difference sums and Pearson correlation coefficients between adjacent pairs of intensity level matrices of narrow-band spectra. Audio files from the Korean Disordered Speech Database were analyzed by Praat, a speech analysis software, to obtain matrices of 400 intensity levels at 16 time points of each sustained vowel spectra. We limited our study to 12 normal subjects and 20 patients with malignant vocal folds who recorded at least three Korean vowels at a sound-proofed booth in Busan National University Hospital. Results indicated that the average coefficients of the abnormal subjects were much lower than those of the normal subjects while the average difference sums of the patients were much higher than those of the normal ones. Also, we found that the degree of the malignancy of the vocal folds was related to the coefficients and sums. However, some subjects at the initial stages of cancerous vocal folds yielded almost comparable coefficients and difference sums to those of the normal speakers. Further studies on larger databases will be desirable to set certain criteria or threshold levels for screening people with vocal fold diseases.

• 한국산학기술학회논문지
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• 제15권5호
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• pp.2930-2936
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• 2014

본 연구는 이완형 마비말장애군 15명과 정상군 15명을 대상으로 표준화된 문단 읽기 과제인 "가을" (김향희, 1996) 검사를 통해 말속도와 쉼 특성을 측정하여 집단 간 비교 분석하였다. 그 결과, 이완형 마비말장애군의 전체 속도 및 조음속도는 정상군보다 유의미하게 느렸으며, 전체 쉼 시간 및 문장 내 쉼 시간 또한 정상군보다 유의미하게 길었고, 전체 쉼빈도 및 문장 내 쉼 빈도 역시 정상군보다 유의미하게 높았다(p<0.05). 그러나 문장 간 쉼 구간과 쉼 빈도는 두 집단 간 유의한 차이가 없었다. 이러한 결과는 이완형 마비말장애인의 말속도 지표를 제공하고, 말속도를 정상 범주로 조절하기 위해서는 조음 속도를 증가시킬 뿐만 아니라, 문장 내 쉼 구간 및 쉼 빈도를 감소시키는 중재가 함께 이루어져야 한다는 것을 시사한다.

• Korean Journal of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
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• 제55권8호
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• pp.498-507
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• 2012

Background and Objectives We aimed to develop a Korean version of the velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) speech corpus system. Subjects and Method After developing a 3-channel simultaneous speech recording device capable of recording nasal/oral and normal compound speech separately, voice data were collected from VPI patients aged more than 10 years with/without the history of operation or prior speech therapy. This was compared to a control group for which VPI was simulated by using a french-3 nelaton tube inserted via both nostril through nasopharynx and pulling the soft palate anteriorly in varying degrees. The study consisted of three transcriptors: a speech therapist transcribed the voice file into text, a second transcriptor graded speech intelligibility and severity and the third tagged the types and onset times of misarticulation. The database were composed of three main tables regarding (1) speaker's demographics, (2) condition of the recording system and (3) transcripts. All of these were interfaced with the Praat voice analysis program, which enables the user to extract exact transcribed phrases for analysis. Results In the simulated VPI group, the higher the severity of VPI, the higher the nasalance score was obtained. In addition, we could verify the vocal energy that characterizes hypernasality and compensation in nasal/oral and compound sounds spoken by VPI patients as opposed to that characgerizes the normal control group. Conclusion With the Korean version of VPI speech corpus system, patients' common difficulties and speech tendencies in articulation can be objectively evaluated. Comparing these data with those of the normal voice, mispronunciation and dysarticulation of patients with VPI can be corrected.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제55권
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• pp.61-76
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• 2005

This paper aims to analyze the acoustic effects of vowels produced in a distant-talking environment. The analysis was performed using a statistical method. The influence of gender and speakers on the variation was also examined. The speech data used in this study consist of 500 distant-talking words and 500 normal words of 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females). Acoustic features selected for the analysis were the duration, the formants (Fl and F2), the fundamental frequency and the total energy. The results showed that the duration, F0, F1 and the total energy increased in the distant-talking speech compared to normal speech; female speakers showed higher increase in all features except for the total energy and the fundamental frequency. In addition, speaker differences were observed.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.53-64
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• 2000

Theoretically, alaryngeal speakers have difficulty in accomplishing the production of voiceless consonants. However, the perceptual studies often reveal a clear production of voiceless consonants giving good articulation scores in skilled alaryngeal speakers. The purpose of the present study was to clarify the production of voiceless stops in mode of articulation to normal speakers and skilled alaryngeal speakers. The acoustic characteristics of alaryngeal speech compared to the normal speech were investigated with special reference to the voiceless stop consonants. The surface electromyography from neck is used to monitor pharyngeal activity during speech. The general result is. that esophageal, shunt and neoglottal speakers realize the distinctions between the three types of [p] in a manner parallel to normals, whereas those using an electric voice generator do not.

• 전자공학회논문지B
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• 제32B권5호
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• pp.788-797
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• 1995

In this paper, a variable time-scale modification using SOLA(Synchronized OverLap and Add) is proposed, which takes into consideration the different time-scaled characteristics of voiced and unvoiced speech, Generally, voiced speech is subject to higher variations in length during time-scale modification than unvoiced speech, but the conventional method performs time-scale modification at a uniform rate for all speech. For this purpose, voiced and unvoiced speech duration at various talking speeds were statistically analyzed. The sentences were then spoken at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5 and 1.8 times normal speed. A clipping autocorrelation function was applied to each analysis frame to determine voiced and unvoiced speech to obtain respective variation rates. The results were used to perform variable time-scale modification to produce sentences at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5, 1.8 times normal speed. To evaluate performance, a MOS test was conducted to compare the proposed voiced/unvoiced variable time-scale modification and the uniform SOLA method. Results indicate that the proposed method produces sentence quality superior to that of the conventional method.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• 제18권2호
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• pp.75-82
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• 2021

Speech and language functions are highly cognitive and human-specific features. The underlying causes of normal speech and language function are believed to reside in the human brain. Developmental persistent stuttering, a speech and language disorder, has been regarded as the most challenging disorder in determining genetic causes because of the high percentage of spontaneous recovery in stutters. This mysterious characteristic hinders speech pathologists from discriminating recovered stutters from completely normal individuals. Over the last several decades, several genetic approaches have been used to identify the genetic causes of stuttering, and remarkable progress has been made in genome-wide linkage analysis followed by gene sequencing. So far, four genes, namely GNPTAB, GNPTG, NAGPA, and AP4E1, are known to cause stuttering. Furthermore, thegeneration of mouse models of stuttering and morphometry analysis has created new ways for researchers to identify brain regions that participate in human speech function and to understand the neuropathology of stuttering. In this review, we aimed to investigate previous progress, challenges, and future perspectives in understanding the genetics and neuropathology underlying persistent developmental stuttering.