• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.59-69
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the variation of pitch contour observed in the reading of Korean sentences produced by Chinese Korean-learners. In the reading context, Korean sentence intonation can be described by considering accentual phrases' pitch pattern and intonational phrases' boundary tone. But when APs and IPs connect to each other to form sentences, another aspect of speech production must be considered, that is declination of pitch contour. So, in order to examine how Chinese speakers produce Korean sentence intonation, we have analysed the sentences' pitch contours produced by fourteen Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to decline the pitch contour in shorter sentences, but for longer sentences, the declination was not observed. Moreover, even though Chinese speakers produced sentences with declination, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.109-119
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• 2013

The purpose of this paper is to show the tendency of evaluators in the pronunciation evaluation of English utterances. The tendency was visualized using the evaluation model of English pronunciation proposed in [1]. One hundred fifty female university students and four evaluators participated in the study. Students read eight English sentences aloud as evaluators evaluated English pronunciation by their own criteria. The models based on their pronunciation evaluation proved to be efficient in showing their evaluation tendency in terms of the fundamental frequency, intensity, segmental durations, and segmental spectra as compared to those of the five native speakers of English chosen for building the models. However, human evaluators were not always consistent in their evaluation and sometimes gave conflicting scores to the same students.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to show the aerodynamic characteristics and differences in muscle tension dysphonia and adductor spasmodic dysphonia to predict factors which will provide additional information while preparing for the objective examination standard to distinguish the two dysphonias. Forty-eight individuals diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia and adductor spasmodic dysphonia participated in this study. PAS was used in order to find the aerodynamic characteristics for the two dysphonias. The outcomes of this study show that the airflow variation and glottal resistance of the two groups showed noticeable differences. This study concludes that the aerodynamic characteristics may be used as additional information on diverse evaluations to classify muscle tension dysphonia and adductor spasmodic dysphonia.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.47-54
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to analyse prosodic characteristics of accentual phrases (AP, hereafter) produced by Chinese learners of Korean in Korean text reading. The study is restricted only to the initial APs. Subjects are students who have been studying Korean at a beginner level. The results showed that Chinese learners of Korean tended to make errors in the realization of the tonal patterns of the initial 2 syllables of the initial APs. Also they showed different F0 slopes across the initial and second syllables in the initial APs. Chinese learners of Korean, therefore, need to focus on the prosodic characteristics of the initial 2 syllables of Korean APs to realize fluent Korean intonation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.31-38
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• 2013

This study investigated the influence of English vowel pronunciation training to English word-initial stop pronunciation. For that purpose, VOT values of English stops produced by twenty Korean English learners(five Youngnam dialect male speakers, five Youngnam dialect female speakers, five Kangwon dialect male speakers, and five Kangwon dialect female speakers) were measured using the Speech Analyzer and their post-training production was compared with their pre-training production. The result shows that post-training VOT values of voiced stops became closer to those of native English speakers in all four groups. Hence, it can be inferred that vowel pronunciation training is effective for correcting pronunciation of voiced vowels by analyzing the change of the quality of following vowels(especially low vowels) and the degree of giving stress.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.227-232
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• 2013

Since a reverberation filter is generally much shorter than the corresponding dereverberation filter, a single-channel speech dereverberation method based on reverberation filter estimation has been developed to improve its performance. Unfortunately, a typical reverberation filter still requires too many coefficients to be accurately estimated using limited speech observations. In order to exploit sparseness of reverberation filter coefficients, in this paper, we present an algorithm to impose a sparse prior to the process of reverberation filter estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that the sparse prior imposition further improves performance of the speech dereverberation method based on reverberation filter estimation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.3-15
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• 2013

The acoustic analysis of diadochokinesis(DDK) has been used to evaluate dysarthria. However, there has not been an automatic method to evaluate dysarthria. The aim of this study was to introduce a new automated program to measure DDK tasks and to apply this to clinical patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease(IPD). Fourty-seven patients with IPD and a healthy control group of twenty participants were selected with every DDK task recorded three times. Twenty-five acoustic parameters in the program were developed. The relevant parameters were times of DDK, pitch related parameters, intensity parameters which were analyzed by 2-way ANOVA. Significant differences between the groups were found in the times of DDK, pitch related parameters, and intensity parameters. The findings indicated that the pitch of control group was more stable than that of the IPD. Even though the patients with IPD had a higher intensity value, this phenomenon was caused by the weakness of the IPD group who could not control their speech with a breath.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.211-216
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• 2013

The IVA(Independent Vector Analysis) is a well-known FD-ICA method used to solve the frequency permutation problem. It generally works quite well for blind source separation problems, but still needs some improvements in the frequency bin permutation problem. This paper proposes a post-processing method which can improve the source separation performance with the IVA by fixing the remaining frequency permutation problem. The proposed method makes use of the correlation coefficient of power ratio between frequency bins for separated signals with the IVA-based 2-channel source separation. Experimental results verified that the proposed method could fix the remaining frequency permutation problem in the IVA and improve the speech quality of the separated signals.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.195-200
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• 2013

This study investigates formant transition shapes of Korean front vowels produced by native speakers of Seoul Korean. Sixteen speakers (eight male and eight female speakers) produced [pVt] syllables where the vowels were [i, e, ɛ]. F1, F2, and F3 transition shapes were estimated by presenting formant values at 11 points by dividing the vowel duration into 10 different time intervals. The results indicated that the male and female speakers overall demonstrated similar formant transition shapes and measurement points arriving at the maximum and minimum formant values for the three front vowels. As for the vowels [e] and [ɛ], both male and female speakers showed similar formant values across the 11 measurement points and similar measurement points arriving at the maximum and minimum values, indicating that the two Korean vowels have been merged not only in the steady-state formant values, but also in the dynamic transition shapes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.93-97
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• 2013

This paper is on designing an indoor driving simulator to evaluate the performance of in-car speech recognizer when influenced by the elements, which lower the success rate of speech recognition. The proposed simulator simulates vehicle noise which was pre-recorded in diverse driving environments and driver's speech. Additionally, the proposed Lombard effect conversion module in this simulator enables the speech recorded in a studio environment to convert into various possible driving scenarios. The relevant experimental results have confirmed that the proposed simulator is a feasible approach for realizing an effective method as it achieved similar speech recognition results to the real driving environment.