• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.129-138
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• 2012

Reading fluency is an important variable in reading comprehension. However, a limited number of studies on reading fluency are available in Korea. The purpose of this study is to review the articles about reading fluency during last 10 years and to present a direction for future research. Forty research papers from the Journal of Learning Disabilities and Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools were selected from 2002 to 2012. These papers were analyzed in terms of their subjects and research methods. About 64% of the articles focused on typically developing children and children with dyslexia. About 67% of the research consisted of descriptive studies. Based on these results, suggestions were made for future research on reading fluency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.109-115
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• 2012

This paper mainly aims to investigate how differently choral speech and altered auditory feedback (i.e., delayed auditory feedback, frequency-altered feedback) enhance speech fluency during sentence reading. To do this, a stuttering reduction rate was used and measured how much stuttering in frequency was reduced during each of the fluency enhancing conditions (i.e, typical choral reading, DAF, FAF) relative to typical solo reading. The results showed that stuttering frequency was reduced in the three fluency enhancing conditions and the highest mean value in stuttering reduction rate was observed during typical choral reading. Some discussion was provided in relation to the stuttering reduction rate observed during typical choral reading and its further speculation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.127-133
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• 2010

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between sentence repetition and sentence production in school-age children. The participants included 120 school-age children through 1st to 6th grades who were then divided into three grade groups (lower grade: 1st to 2nd grades, intermediate grade: 3th to 4th grades, and higher grade: 5th to 6th grades). The repetition task consisted of 32 sentences that were classified by sentence length (5, 6, 7, and 8 words) and structure (conjunctive and embedded sentences). The sentence production task utilized Lee's (2007) grammaticality judgement and sentence combining task. The findings of present study were as follows. (1) The higher grade performed significantly better than the lower and intermediate grades. (2) The participants performed significantly worse when imitating longer sentences than when imitating shorter ones. In addition, there were interaction effects between grade groups and sentences length. (3) The participants performed significantly better when imitating conjunctive rather than embedded sentences. (4) There was significantly positive correlation between the sentence repetition and sentence production task.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.121-125
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to compare the characteristics of nasalance in speakers with spastic cerebral palsy (CP) according to the types of sentence used for nasalance test. Twenty-eight speakers with spastic CP participated in this study. The experiment was conducted by analyzing nasalance of prolonged vowel utterance using the Sea sentence, the Zoo sentence, and the Mother sentence. The three sentences differ in the ratio of nasal consonants. The results show significant differences among the types of sentence for nasalance test.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.87-95
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• 2010

In this paper, we address issues associated with mixed-lingual text-to-speech based on context-dependent HMMs, where there are multiple sets of HMMs corresponding to each individual language. In particular, we propose smoothing techniques of synthesis parameters at the boundaries between different languages to obtain more natural quality of speech. In other words, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) at the language boundaries are smoothed by applying several linear and nonlinear approximation techniques. It is shown from an informal listening test that synthesized speech smoothed by a modified version of linear least square approximation (MLLSA) and a quadratic interpolation (QI) method is preferred than that without using any smoothing technique.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.99-112
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• 2010

This study attempted to review the recent, high-quality evidence-based practical research related to the treatment effectiveness of voice disorders which focus on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and translational research of vocal fold tissue engineering for vocal fold regeneration. Methodology including PICO (P; Populations or Patients, I; Interventions, C; Comparison group (control, placebo, gold standard), O; Outcomes or measures made) information for RCTs and animal models (species), regenerative therapy method, and outcomes of translational research for clinical application was summarized and discussed for future voice disorder research.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.71-75
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• 2010

The PESQ is an objective speech quality evaluation measure that is known to have a high correlation with a subjective speech quality measure such as MOS. To examine whether it could be useful as an objective quality measure of synthetic speech, we carried out both subjective evaluation tests with MOS and DMOS and an objective evaluation test with PESQ for HMM-based Korean synthetic speech signals and analyzed the correlation between them. Experimental results have shown that the PESQ has correlations of 0.87 with MOS and 0.92 with DMOS. It means that the PESQ holds much promise for evaluating the quality of synthetic Korean speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.77-85
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient feature vector processing technique to guard the Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) system against a variety of noises. In the proposed approach, emotional feature vectors are extracted from speech processed by comb filtering. Then, these extracts are used in a robust model construction based on feature vector classification. We modify conventional comb filtering by using speech presence probability to minimize drawbacks due to incorrect pitch estimation under background noise conditions. The modified comb filtering can correctly enhance the harmonics, which is an important factor used in SER. Feature vector classification technique categorizes feature vectors into either discriminative vectors or non-discriminative vectors based on a log-likelihood criterion. This method can successfully select the discriminative vectors while preserving correct emotional characteristics. Thus, robust emotion models can be constructed by only using such discriminative vectors. On SER experiment using an emotional speech corpus contaminated by various noises, our approach exhibited superior performance to the baseline system.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.7-16
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• 2000

It is a great honour for me to speak to you today on the Korean's problems in learning English pronunciation. First of all I would like to thank Prof. H. B. Lee, President of the Phonetic Society of Korea for calling upon me to make a keynote speech at this International Conference on Phonetic Sciences. The year before last when the 1 st Joint Summit on English Phonetics was held at Aichi Gakuin University in Japan, the warm hospitality given to me and my colleagues by the English Phonetic Society of Japan was so great that I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the English Phonetic Society of Japan and especially to Prof. Masaki Tsuzuki, President of the Society. Korean learners of English have a lot of problems in learning English pronunciation. Some vowel problems seem to be shared by Japanese learners but other problems, especially in consonants, are peculiar to Koreans owing to the nature of phonological rules peculiar to the Korean language. Of course, there are other important problems like speech rhythm and intonation besides vowels and consonants. But they will not be included here because of limited time.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.338-349
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• 2000

Pronunciation teaching is once again coming into the foreground of ELT. Japan is, however, lagging far behind many countries in the development of pronunciation curricula and in the actual speech performance of the Japanese learners of English. The reasons for this can be found in the prevalence of communicative methodologies unfavorable for pronunciation teaching, in the lack of trained professionals, and in the large numbers of students in Japanese foreign language classes. This paper offers a way to promote foreign language pronunciation teaching in Japan and other countries by means of employing computer and internet facilities. The paper outlines the major directions of using modem speech technologies in pronunciation classes, like EVF (electronic visual feedback) training at segmental and prosodic levels; automated error detection, testing, grading and fluency assessment. The author discusses the applicability of some specific software packages (CSLU, SUGIspeech, Multispeech, Wavesurfer, etc.) for the needs of pronunciation teaching. Finally, the author talks about the globalization of pronunciation education via internet resources, such as computer corpora and speech and pronunciation training related web pages.