• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.155-167
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• 2006

Hearing impairment children possess poor underlying perceptual knowledge of the sound system and show delayed development of segmental organization of that system. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness ability and word identification ability in hearing impaired children. 14 children with moderately severe hearing loss participated in this study. All tasks were individually administered. Phonological awareness tests consisted of syllable blending, syllable segmentation, syllable deletion, body-coda discrimination, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. Close-set Monosyllabic Words(12 items) and lists 1 and 2 of open-set Monosyllabic Words in EARS-K were examined for word identification. Results of this study were as follows: First, from the phonological awareness task, the close-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with the coda discrimination, phoneme blending and phoneme deletion. The open-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with phoneme blending, phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation. Second, from the level of phonological awareness, the close-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with the level of body-coda awareness and phoneme awareness while the open-set word identification showed a high positive correlation only with the level of phoneme awareness.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.95-102
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of the phonological discrimination ability and phonological working memory of 10 typically developing children aged 4, and 10 other children with Specific Language Impairments whose language age is similar. In orders to compare their phonological discrimination ability among phonological awareness, discrimination tasks were conducted at the syllable and phoneme levels. Also, in order to compare their phonological working memory, the subjects repeated nonsense syllables. The research results may be summarized as follows: First, the children with Specific Language Impairments demonstrated a lower performance than the typically developing children in phonological discrimination ability at both syllable and phoneme levels, and the difference between the groups was statistically significant. Second, the children with Specific Language Impairments exhibited a lower phonological working memory performance in all syllables compared with normal children. Although there was no significant difference in 2 and 3 syllables, a significant difference appeared as the length of the syllables became longer from 4 to 6 syllables. It is deemed necessary to conduct research into qualitative and quantitative differences through an formal assessment of the phonological awareness and phonological working memory of children with Specific Language Impairments.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.129-153
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• 2007

When English language teachers are deciding on their priorities for teaching pronunciation, it is imperative to know what kind of differences and errors are most likely to interfere with communication, and what special problems particular first-language speakers will have with English pronunciation. In other words, phoneme discrimination skill is an integral part of speech processing for the EFL learners' learning to converse in English. Training using sound visualization technique can be effective in improving second language learners' perceptions and productions of segmental and suprasegmental speech contrasts. This study assessed the efficacy of a pronunciation training that provided visual feedback for EFL learners acquiring pitch and durational contrasts to produce and perceive English phonemic distinctions. The subjects' ability to produce and to perceive novel English words was tested in two contexts before and after training; words in isolation and words in sentences. In comparison with an untrained control group, trainees showed improved perceptual and productive performance, transferred their knowledge to new contexts, and maintained their improvement three months after training. These findings support the feasibility of learner-centered programs using sound visualization technique for English language pronunciation instruction.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.37-50
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• 2003

In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of speech/music discrimination based on various feature parameters and classifiers. As for feature parameters, we consider High Zero Crossing Rate Ratio (HZCRR), Low Short Time Energy Ratio (LSTER), Spectral Flux (SF), Line Spectral Pair (LSP) distance, entropy and dynamism. We also examine three classifiers: k Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Gaussian Mixure Model (GMM), and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). According to our experiments, LSP distance and phoneme-recognizer-based feature set (entropy and dunamism) show good performance, while performance differences due to different classifiers are not significant. When all the six feature parameters are employed, average speech/music discrimination accuracy up to 96.6% is achieved.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.111-122
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• 2019

This study investigated the psychological effects of using a serious game with young learners in the English classroom compared with those of a dictionary application. A tablet PC-based serious game was created for the training of English phoneme discrimination for Korean 6th graders, and its psychological effects were measured using a paper-based survey and face-to-face interviews. The overall results revealed that the serious game had more positive psychological effects on young learners than the dictionary app. These findings provide supporting empirical evidence for using serious games in English classrooms.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

We explored Dutch listeners' perception of Korean three-way contrast of fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. The three Korean stops are all voiceless word-initially, whereas Dutch distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, so Korean voiceless stops were expected to be difficult for the Dutch listeners. Among the three Korean stops, fortis stops are phonetically most similar to Dutch voiceless stops, thus they were expected to be the easiest to distinguish for the Dutch listeners. Dutch and Korean listeners carried out a discrimination task using three crucial comparisons, i.e., fortis-lenis, fortis-aspirated, and lenis-aspirated stops. Results showed that discrimination between lenis and aspirated stops was the most difficult among the three comparisons for both Dutch and Korean listeners. As expected, Dutch listeners discriminated fortis from the other stops relatively accurately. It seems likely that Dutch listeners relied heavily on VOT but less on F0 when discriminating between the three Korean stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to scientifically examine Kuhl's (2011), originally Johnson and Newport's (1989) critical period graph, from a perspective of auditory perception and linguistic discrimination. This study utilizes two types of experiments (auditory perception and linguistic phoneme discrimination) with five different age groups (5 years, 6-8 years, 9-13 years, 15-17 years, and 20-26 years) of Korean English learners. Auditory perception is examined via ultrasonic sounds that are commonly used in the medical field. In addition, each group is measured in terms of their ability to discriminate minimal pairs in Chinese. Since almost all Korean students already have some amount of English exposure, the researchers selected phonemes in Chinese, an unexposed foreign language for all of the subject groups. The results are almost completely in accordance with Kuhl's critical period graph for auditory perception and linguistic discrimination; a sensitive age is found at 8. The results show that the auditory capability of kindergarten children is significantly better than that of other students, measured by their ability to perceive ultrasonic sounds and to distinguish ten minimal pairs in Chinese. This finding strongly implies that human auditory ability is a key factor for the sensitive period of language acquisition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.4-10
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• 2000

The work presented in this paper is about a postprocessor, which improves the performance of automatic speech segmentation system by correcting the phoneme boundary errors. We propose a postprocessor that reduces the range of errors in the auto labeled results that are ready to be used directly as synthesis unit. Starting from a baseline automatic segmentation system, our proposed postprocessor trains the features of hand labeled results using multi-layer perceptron(MLP) algorithm. Then, the auto labeled result combined with MLP postprocessor determines the new phoneme boundary. The details are as following. First, we select the feature sets of speech, based on the acoustic phonetic knowledge. And then we have adopted the MLP as pattern classifier because of its excellent nonlinear discrimination capability. Moreover, it is easy for MLP to reflect fully the various types of acoustic features appearing at the phoneme boundaries within a short time. At the last procedure, an appropriate feature set analyzed about each phonetic event is applied to our proposed postprocessor to compensate the phoneme boundary error. For phonetically rich sentences data, we have achieved 19.9 % improvement for the frame accuracy, comparing with the performance of plain automatic labeling system. Also, we could reduce the absolute error rate about 28.6%.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.27-34
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• 2001

Utterance verification is used in variable vocabulary word recognition to reject the word that does not belong to in-vocabulary word or does not belong to correctly recognized word. Utterance verification is an important technology to design a user-friendly speech recognition system. We propose a new utterance verification algorithm for no-training utterance verification system based on the minimum verification error. First, using PBW (Phonetically Balanced Words) DB (445 words), we create no-training anti-phoneme models which include many PLUs(Phoneme Like Units), so anti-phoneme models have the minimum verification error. Then, for OOV (Out-Of-Vocabulary) rejection, the phoneme-based confidence measure which uses the likelihood between phoneme model (null hypothesis) and anti-phoneme model (alternative hypothesis) is normalized by null hypothesis, so the phoneme-based confidence measure tends to be more robust to OOV rejection. And, the word-based confidence measure which uses the phoneme-based confidence measure has been shown to provide improved detection of near-misses in speech recognition as well as better discrimination between in-vocabularys and OOVs. Using our proposed anti-model and confidence measure, we achieve significant performance improvement; CA (Correctly Accept for In-Vocabulary) is about 89％, and CR (Correctly Reject for OOV) is about 90％, improving about 15-21％ in ERR (Error Reduction Rate).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.79-94
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to compare phonological awareness ability of students with Down Syndrome(DS) and typically developing children(TD). TD and DS were equal the reading abilities(reading recognition). The subject were 10 DS and 10 TD, and were examined by test of phonological awareness. The test of phonological awareness was composed according to phonological units(word, syllable, phoneme) and task types(deletion, discrimination, blending). The results obtained in this study were as follows: The total score of phonological awareness ability of DS were significantly lower than TD. And the score of phonological awareness ability according to phonological units and task types were significantly lower than TD. But both DS and TD performed better on phonological deletion and blending task than discrimination. TD and DS represented different correlation between task types and phonological units. This means that TD performed better on all types of tasks and phonological units than DS.