• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.175-181
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• 2015

This study aims to compare the differences between 'consonant inventory size' and 'phonological variability' in order to examine the phonological development and characteristics of the late-talkers and typically developing expressive language agematched children and to consider the correlations between them. The study participants included fifteen late-talkers and fifteen typically developing expressive language age-matched children(TED group). The results are as follows. First, as regards consonant inventory size, there was a significant difference between late-talkers and TED group. The late-talkers' consonant inventory size was less than TED group. Second, as regards phonological variability, there was a significant difference between late-talkers and TED group. The late-talkers' phonological variability was higher than TED group. Third, in the case of late-talkers, there was no significant correlation between consonant inventory size and phonological variability; however in the case of TED group, there was a significant negative correlation between consonant inventory size and phonological variability. Therefore, phonological ability should be considered in evaluation and intervention of late-talkers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.153-163
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• 2015

This study investigated the trends of mobile applications which were developed for prompting speech and language skills for children with disabilities, and analyzed the function and contents of these applications as a tool of speech and language therapy. For this analysis, twenty applications among 71 ones were selected according to the exclusion criteria. These applications were classified by the 8 using types of contents and analyzed the function of mobile applications by the revised mobile contents evaluation standard (ease of use, value of education, interest level, and interactivity). As a results, applications for augmentative and alternative communication were developed much more than any other types. And the ease of use got the highest score whereas the interest level got the lowest score in whole evaluation analysis. The result of this study would suggest way to evaluate applications for speech language therapy and to contribute to developing the contents and function of mobile applications aims to help children with disabilities improving their speech and language skills.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2011

The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate the correlation between English word-final stop and the duration of vowels before word-final stop and (2) to suggest a way to detect pronunciation errors and teach the pronunciation of English word-final stops. For these purposes, 18 Korean speakers' production was recorded and analysed using Speech Analyzer and their production was compared with that of native English speakers. In addition, two native English speakers evaluated the subjects' pronunciation. The major findings are the voicing dependent effect of the English vowels produced by native Korean speakers is lower than that of native English speakers; Korean speakers release English word-final stops less than native English speakers; and the pronunciation of English word-final stops and the duration of adjacent vowels are closely related in that the pronunciation score of final stops and the ratio of vowels between the vowels before voiced stops and voiceless stops are correlated. In addition, this study concludes with pedagogical suggestions that may be useful for English pronunciation teaching.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2011

The present study reports the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation at word boundaries in Chinese-Korean interlanguage. Twelve Chinese learners of Korean and four Korean native speakers recorded obstruent#nasal sequences in noun compounds and verb phrases, and their different production patterns were examined in detail. While nasalization of the word-final obstruents occurred only in 11.7% of the obstruent#nasal sequences for the Chinese learners, the Korean native speakers showed complete nasalization of those sequences. However, there was small, but consistent effect of learning on the production of external sandhi in L2, because there were shown to be differences in the rate of nasalization between the two proficiency groups of Chinese participants. On average, the intermediate level learners nasalized the target stops at the rate of 16%, and the beginning level learners showed the 7% nasalization rate. In addition, it was found that the context difference such as noun compounds versus verb phrases does not influence the nasalization pattern across word boundaries.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.45-50
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• 2011

Formant structure of speech associated with five different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness) was analysed. Acoustic separability of vowels (or emotions) associated with a specific emotion (or vowel) was estimated using F-ratio. According to the results, neutral showed the highest separability of vowels followed by anger, happiness, fear, and sadness in descending order. Vowel /A/ showed the highest separability of emotions followed by /U/, /O/, /I/ and /E/ in descending order. The acoustic results were interpreted and explained in the context of previous articulatory and perceptual studies. Suggestions for the performance improvement of an automatic emotion recognition system and automatic speech recognition system were made.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.111-116
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to analyze the association between self-reported voice problems and voice disorders in the Korean adult population. Data were collected from the 4th Korea National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (2008) from 3,135 subjects (1,310 men and 1,825 women) aged 19 years and older. Multi-nominal logistic regression analyses were used to examine the association between self-reported voice problems and voice disorders in the Korean adult population. Adjusting for covariates (age, sex, education level, job, smoking, alcohol drinking, thyroid disorders, pain and discomfort during the last 2 weeks), self-reported voice problems included independently associated functional voice disorders (OR=4.70, 95% CI: 3.14-7.03) and organic voice disorders (OR=3.89, 95% CI: 1.57-9.65). The results of the present study verified that self-reported voice problems are valuable indicators for voice disorders. Further research is needed to ascertain the effect of self-reported voice problems on voice disorder in adults.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.87-94
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• 2011

The decision directed (DD) approach is widely used to determine a priori SNR from noisy speech signals. In conventional speech enhancement systems with a DD approach, a priori SNR is estimated by using only the magnitude components and consequently follows a posteriori SNR with one frame delay. We propose a phase-dependent two-step a priori SNR estimator based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) in the log-mel spectral domain so that we can consider both magnitude and phase information, and it can overcome the performance degradation caused by one frame delay. From the experimental results, the proposed estimator is shown to improve the output SNR of enhanced speech signals by 2.3 dB compared to the conventional DD approach-based system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.67-75
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• 2011

In Korean, 'Aspiration Merger' is the result of the heteromorphemic sequence of lenis stop and /h/ becoming a single aspirated stop word-medially. However, the contrast between lenis stop-plus-/h/ and an underlying aspirated stop is maintained when they span Phonological Phrase boundaries. By varying the position in the prosodic domain such as APP (Across Phonological Phrase) and PPM (Phonological Phrase Medial) positions, the phonetic properties of the two categories are compared. In the results from noise duration and change of intensity, lenis stop-plus-/h/ show a large difference between the APP and PPM positions. The results from a noise duration comparison show that the two categories are completely neutralized into aspirated stop in the PPM position and the complete neutralization is sensitive to prosodic phrasing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.11-18
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• 2010

This study compared classical operatic singing and applied music singing using the vocal assessment software, Dr. Speech and SPEAD from Lx Speech Studio. Participants in this study included: eight female operatic singers (mean 22.6 yrs, average career 7.5 yrs); eight male operatic singers (mean 25.6 yrs, average career 7.3 yrs); eight female applied music singers (mean 25.1 yrs, average career 6.1 yrs); and eight male applied music singers (mean 27.6 yrs, average career 6.8 yrs). The results demonstrated significantly higher closed quotient values in female applied music singers during singing (p<.05). In addition, higher closed quotient values in speaking were presented in male classical singers and longer MPT was obtained in female operatic singers (p<.05). Furthermore, singer's formants were identified in all male operatic singers and in three female operatic singers. In contrast, only one applied music male and one female singer showed singer's formants while singing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.239-244
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate two phonological error patterns on coronal feature of children with functional articulation disorders and to compare them with those of general children. We tested 120 children with functional articulation disorders and 100 general children from 2~4 years of age with 'Assessment of Phonology & Articulation for Chidren(APAC)'. The results were as follows: (1) 37 disordered children substituted [+coronal] consonants for [-coronal] consonants (fronting of velars) and 9 disordered children substituted [-coronal] consonants for [+coronal] consonants (backing to velars). (2) Theses two phonological patterns were affected by the articulatory place of following phoneme. (3) The fronting pattern of children with articulation disorders was similar with that of general children, but their backing pattern was different with that of general children. These results show the clinical usefulness of coronal feature in phonological pattern analysis, the need of articulatory assessment with various phonetic context, and the importance of error contexts in clinical judgment.