• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.97-106
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to (1) establish a Korean adult normative data for Iowa Oral Performance Instrument, (2) investigate the characteristics of maximal tongue and lip strength and tongue endurance scores according to age and gender, and (3) examine the correlation of those scores. The results showed that there were no significant differences of gender in maximal tongue strength and tongue endurance scores. But there were significant differences of age in maximal tongue and lip strength and tongue endurance scores. The data will provide an important database for speech language pathology with the purpose of diagnosis and treatment of tongue and lip dysfunction.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.81-88
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• 2014

The normal aging process on speech production and these changes are perceived by listeners. This study examined whether age perception changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations in normal listeners, comparing the prosodic changes according to age and sex in adulthood. The older and younger voices were resynthesized by manipulation of the speaking rate and pitch to shift the perceived age of the groups toward each other. Two-way repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant shift in perceived age of young and old voices. The manipulation of the speaking rate resulted in a significant shift in perceived age for the older and younger groups. A significant shift in age estimates was not observed for the younger male group when pitch was manipulated. There were significant gender-by-age group interactions for prosodic manipulation type. Age-related changes in the prosodic properties of speech may ultimately influence speech perception.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.153-161
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• 2014

The current study reports the results from a cross-modal naming experiment investigating the effects of a prosodic boundary location on the comprehension of ambiguous dative NPs in Korean (Yeongmi-ka Ceonghi-eykey norae-rul pwulecwu-n pwuin-ul ${\cdots}$). The underlined dative NP, Ceonghi-eykey, can temporarily be attached to the embedded rel-marked verb, pwulecwu-n ('sing-rel') or to the matrix verb to appear later. Participants heard sentence fragments manipulated for the location of Intonation Phrase boundary (the biggest prosodic boundary in the model of Seoul Korean) and right after that, had to name visually presented naming targets, which resolve the ambiguity of dative NPs. The prosodic manipulation did not result in difference in naming time, suggesting that the location of a prosodic boundary failed to influence the way Korean listeners interpreted ambiguous dative NPs. Possible reasons for the null effect were discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.29-34
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• 2014

In the Vector Taylor Series (VTS)-based noisy speech recognition methods, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are usually trained with clean speech. However, better performance is expected by training the HMM with noisy speech. In a previous study, we could find that Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimation of the training noisy speech in the log-spectrum domain produce improved recognition results, but since the proposed algorithm was done in the log-spectrum domain, it could not be used for the HMM adaptation. In this paper, we modify the previous algorithm to derive a novel mathematical relation between test and training noisy speech in the cepstrum domain and the mean and covariance of the Multi-condition TRaining (MTR) trained noisy speech HMM are adapted. In the noisy speech recognition experiments on the Aurora 2 database, the proposed method produced 10.6% of relative improvement in Word Error Rates (WERs) over the MTR method while the previous MMSE estimation of the training noisy speech produced 4.3% of relative improvement, which shows the superiority of the proposed method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.9-20
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose an automatic fluency evaluation algorithm for English speaking tests. In the proposed algorithm, acoustic features are extracted from an input spoken utterance and then fluency score is computed by using support vector regression (SVR). We estimate the parameters of feature modeling and SVR using the speech signals and the corresponding scores by human raters. From the correlation analysis results, it is shown that speech rate, articulation rate, and mean length of runs are best for fluency evaluation. Experimental results show that the correlation between the human score and the SVR score is 0.87 for 3 speaking tests, which suggests the possibility of the proposed algorithm as a secondary fluency evaluation tool.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.31-41
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• 2001

This paper aims to provide preliminary evidence that (at least part of) phonetic phenomena are not simply automatic or arbitrary, but are explained by the functional guidelines, ease of articulation and maintenance of contrasts. The first study shows that languages with more high vowels (e.g., French) allow larger consonantal deviation from its target than languages with less high vowels (e.g., English). This is interpreted as achieving the economy of articulation to a certain extent in order to avoid otherwise extreme articulatory movement to be made in CV syllables due to strict demand on maintaining vocalic contrasts. The second study shows that Russian plain bilabial consonant allows less amount of undershoot due to the neighboring vowels than does English bilabial consonant. This is probably due to the stricter demand on maintaining the consonantal contrasts, plain vs. palatalized, existing only in Russian.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.73-78
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• 2015

This study explores the degree of velarization of English word-final /l/ (i.e., /l/-darkness) according to the lexical status. Lexical status is defined as whether a speech stimulus is considered as a word or a non-word. We examined the temporal and spectral properties of word-final /l/ in terms of the duration and the frequency difference of F2-F1 values by varying the immediate pre-liquid vowels. The result showed that both temporal and spectral properties were contrastive across all vowel contexts in the way of real words having shorter [l] duration and low F2-F1 values, compared to non-words. That is, /l/ is more heavily velarized in words than in non-words, which suggests that lexical status whether language users encode the speech signal as a word or not is deeply involved in their speech production.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

Previous research on syntactic processing shows that the interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence is frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another. The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on the production of disambiguating prosody for English ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, 40 speakers gave default readings of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences. Questioning was used to prove intended meanings behind default readings. Intended meanings were treated as interpretation biases when a majority of speakers read a sentence with the same intended meaning. The size of the majority was used to establish bias strength. In Experiment 2, 10 speakers were instructed to use prosody to disambiguate given alternate meanings of the sentences from Experiment 1. The results indicated an effect of bias strength on disambiguating prosody: speakers used temporal juncture cues to reliably disambiguate alternate meanings for sentences with a weak interpretation bias, but not for those with a strong bias. Overall, the results indicated that interpretation biases strongly affect the production of prosody.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.27-35
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to examine the lexical representation of phonological variants derived from optional vs. obligatory phonological processes. Given that place assimilation is optionally processed, whereas nasal assimilation is obligatory in Korean, a long-term repetition priming experiment was conducted, using a shadowing task. Korean speakers shadowed words containing either assimilated or unassimilated consonants in three priming conditions and their shadow responses were evaluated. It was shown that in both place and nasal assimilations, shadowing latencies for unassimilated stimuli were longer than those for assimilated stimuli in the mismatched condition. These results suggest that even in the optional assimilation, assimilated variants were processed more easily and faster than the canonical variants. The present results argue against the frequency-based account of multiple lexical representation (Connine, 2004; Connine & Pinnow, 2006; Ranbom & Connine, 2007; $B{\ddot{u}rki$, Ernestus, & Frauenfelder, 2010; $B{\ddot{u}rki$, Alario, & Frauenfelder, 2011).