• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.77-88
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• 2011

Foreign accent in second language production depends heavily on the transfer of features from the first language. This study examines acoustic variations in segments and suprasegments by native and nonnative speakers of English, searching for patterns of the transfer and plausible indexes of foreign accent in English. The acoustic variations are analyzed with recorded read speech by 20 native English speakers and 50 Korean learners of English, in terms of vowel formants, vowel duration, and syllabic variation induced by stress. The results show that the acoustic measurements of vowel formants and vowel and syllable durations display difference between native speakers and nonnative speakers. The difference is robust in the production of lax vowels, diphthongs, and stressed syllables, namely the English-specific features. L1 transfer on L2 specification is found both at the segmental levels and at the suprasegmental levels. The transfer levels measured as groups and individuals further show a continuum of divergence from the native-like target. Overall, the eldest group, students who are in the graduate schools, shows more native-like patterns, suggesting weaker foreign accent in English, whereas the high school students tend to involve larger deviation from the native speakers' patterns. Individual results show interdependence between segmental transfer and prosodic transfer, and correlation with self-reported proficiency levels. Additionally, experience factors in English such as length of English study and length of residence in English speaking countries are further discussed as factors to explain the acoustic variation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.61-68
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• 2018

Phonological awareness, or consciousness of speech sounds and operational skill with them, develops in the order word > syllable > phoneme, over the ages of four to seven. Among the various types of phonological awareness tasks, the deletion task has a higher level of difficulty because it requires operation and deletion of sounds within words. This task also has a high correlation with reading proficiency. This study utilized a deletion task with 20 questions to see how operational development depended on age and gender. The deletion task, with 20 questions, was tested on four- to six-year old children developing normally (N = 90). The results showed that phonological awareness performance improved with age. This age effect was not accompanied by a gender effect; age and gender interacted. The study confirmed the development of phonological awareness in four- to six-year-old children who were developing normally. The deletion task can be used to effectively detect the risk of difficulties with phonological awareness in preschoolers with speech, language, and reading problems.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.90-97
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• 2000

This paper describes an speaker-adaptive speech recognition system which make a reliable recognition of speech signal for new speakers. In the Proposed method, an speech spectrum of new speaker is adapted to the reference speech spectrum by using Parameters of a 1st linear transformation network at the front of phoneme classification neural network. And the recognition system is based on semicontinuous HMM(hidden markov model) which use the multilayer perceptron as a fuzzy vector quantizer. The experiments on the isolated word recognition are performed to show the recognition rate of the recognition system. In the case of speaker adaptation recognition, the recognition rate show significant improvement for the unadapted recognition system.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.116-122
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a new method which generates the trajectory of the mouth shape for the characters by the user inputs. It is based on the character at a basis syllable and can be suitable to the mouth shape generation. In this paper, we understand the principle of the Korean language creation and find the similarity for the form of the mouth shape and select it as a basic syllable. We also consider the articulation of this phoneme for it and create a new mouth shape trajectory and apply at face of an 3D avatar.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.141-151
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• 2014

This study reports anti-hierarchical initial-syllable lengthening of an utterance-internal phrase in Korean. That is, the phrase-initial syllable (e.g., /a/ of "apa-do" or /ma/ of "mapa-do") starting with a voiced phoneme (i.e., vowels or voiced consonants) manifests itself as significantly longer when it is preceded by another phrase without a pause than when it leads an utterance or follows a pause utterance-internally. The phenomenon was examined with regard to two other factors: (1) tempo and (2) tenseness of the consonant (/p, $p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/) following the target syllable /a/. First, the effect of tempo on initial lengthening was not significant. Apart from the statistical significance, however, a tendency was observed, i.e., the slower the tempo is, the greater the lengthening. By contrast, the faster the tempo is, the higher the ratio (%) of lengthening. Second, contrary to our expectations, initial-syllable lengthening was even greater before tense stops /$p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/ than before lax stop /p/ regardless of tempo, and it was remarkable when it comes to the ratio (%), which means that initial lengthening is free of the pre-consonantal vowel shortening effect. Final-syllable lengthening is a pre-boundary marker, while the initial-syllable lengthening is regarded as a post-boundary marker of a phrase.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.165-173
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• 2015

This study was aim to compare the phonological error patterns and PCC(Percentage of Correct Consonants) derived from the single word and spontaneous speech contexts of the speech sound disorders with unknown origin(SSD). The present study suggest that the development phonological error patterns and non-developmental error patterns of the target children, in according to speech context. The subjects were 15 children with SSD up to the age of 5 from 3 years of age. This research use 37 words of APAC(Assessment of Phonology & Articulation for Children) in the single word context and 100 eojeol in the spontaneous speech context. There was no difference of PCC between the single word and the spontaneous speech contexts. Significantly different developmental phonological error patterns between the single word and the spontaneous speech contexts were syllable deletion, word-medial onset deletion, liquid deletion, gliding, affrication, fricative other error, tensing, regressive assimilation. Significantly different non-developmental phonological error patterns were backing, addtion of phoneme, aspirating. The study showed that there was no difference of PCC between elicited single word and spontaneous conversational context. And there were some different phonological error patterns derived from the two contexts of the speech sound disorders. The more important interventions target is the error patterns of the spontaneous speech contexts for the immediate generalization and rising overall intelligibility.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.33-36
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• 2000

어휘독립 고립단어인식은 미리 훈련된 부단어(sub-word) 단위의 음향모델을 이용하여 수시로 변하는 인식대상어휘를 인식하는 것이다. 본 논문에서는 소용량 음성 데이터베이스를 이용하여 어휘독립음성인식 시스템을 구성하였다. 소용량 음성 데이터베이스에서 미관측문맥 종속형 부단어에 대한 처리에 효과적인 백오프 기법을 이용한 음소 군집화 방법으로 문턱값을 변화시키며 인식실험을 수행하였다. 그리고 훈련용 데이터의 부족으로 인하여 문맥 종속형 부단어 모델이 훈련용 데이터베이스로 편중되는 문제를 deleted interpolation 방법을 이용하여 문맥 종속형 부단어 모델과 문맥 독립형 부단어 모델을 병합함으로써 해결하였다. 그 결과 음성인식의 성능이 향상되었다.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.298-308
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• 2012

This study was designed to examine the phoneme recognition errors of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners on a consonant-by-consonant basis, to show (1) how each HI ear perceives individual consonants differently and (2) how standard clinical measurements (i.e., using a tone and word) fail to predict these differences. Sixteen English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables of six signal-to-noise ratios in speech-weighted noise were presented at the most comfortable level for ears with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The findings were as follows: (1) individual HI listeners with a symmetrical pure-tone threshold showed different consonant-loss profiles (CLPs) (i.e., over a set of the 16 English consonants, the likelihood of misperceiving each consonant) in right and left ears. (2) A similar result was found across subjects. Paired ears of different HI individuals with identical pure-tone threshold presented different CLPs in one ear to the other. (3) Paired HI ears having the same averaged consonant score demonstrated completely different CLPs. We conclude that the standard clinical measurements are limited in their ability to predict the extent to which speech perception is degraded in HI ears, and thus they are a necessary, but not a sufficient measurement for HI speech perception. This suggests that the CV measurement would be a useful clinical tool.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.1E
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• pp.1-7
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• 2007

One result of the trend towards globalization is an increased number of projects that focus on natural language processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, for example, hold great promise in facilitating global communications and collaborations. Unfortunately, to date, most research projects focus on single widely spoken languages. Therefore, the cost to adapt a particular ASR tool for use with other languages is often prohibitive. This work takes a more general approach. We propose an International Phoneticizing Engine (IPE) that interprets input files supplied in our Phonetic Language Identity (PLI) format to build a dictionary. IPE is language independent and rule based. It operates by decomposing the dictionary creation process into a set of well-defined steps. These steps reduce rule conflicts, allow for rule creation by people without linguistics training, and optimize run-time efficiency. Dictionaries created by the IPE can be used with the Sphinx speech recognition system. IPE defines an easy-to-use systematic approach that can lead to internationalization of automatic speech recognition systems.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2015.07a
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• pp.155-158
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• 2015

단어의 유사도 측정 알고리즘은 DB 인덱싱, 필터링, 소스코드 분석 소프트웨어, 음성 인식 등 다양한 분야에서 활용되고 있다. 하지만 기존의 단어의 유사도만 비교하는 시스템에는 발음이 비슷한 유사단어나 오타가 있는 유사단어들은 측정을 못하는 단점이 있다. 언어의 유사도 측정에서는 알파벳만으로 볼게 아니라 언어 발음의 발화적 특성 또한 고려되어야 한다. 본 논문에서는 글로벌 시장에서의 다국적 기업들의 제품이나 문화 수출 등의 도움이 되는 각 나라의 금기어와의 발화적 특성까지 고려한 단어 유사도를 측정 할 수 있는 시스템을 제안한다. 11개국의 4개 언어 총 21487개의 금기어 단어를 금기어 데이터로 사용하였다. 제안하는 방법의 성능을 평가하기 위하여 타 알고리즘과의 성능비교와 여러 나라의 다양한 언어의 사용자들로부터 사용자 평가를 수행하였고 제안하는 방법이 발음 유사도를 측정하지 않는 알고리즘보다 우수한 성능을 보임을 확인하였다.