• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.27-36
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate the features of Korean infants' vocalizations according to the stages models. A total 88 infants, whose ages range from 1 to 18 months, participated in this study. This age is a critical period for vocal development. However, the study of infants' vocalizations has typically focused on children over the age of two. Because of restrictions related to the study of younger infants, from birth to the age of two, it is usually difficult to investigate what are the major features of their vocal development. Therefore, this study provides documentation and analysis of the features of infant vocalization and their vocal development stages. The results shows that the stages model of Oller & Lynch (1992) might be adapted for Korean infants' vocal development. Furthermore, the features of the infants' vocalization are not linearly appeared one stage to the next stage, but are overlapped (Koopmans-van Beinum & van der Stelt, 1986; Nathani et al., 2006; Oller, 1980; Stark, 1980; Vihman, 1996).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.17-25
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• 2010

This study explores whether Koreans exploit their native coda-neutralization process when recognizing words in Korean continuous speech. According to the phonological rules in Korean, coda-neutralization process must come before the liaison process, as long as the latter(i.e. liaison process) occurs between 'words', which results in liaison-consonants being coda-neutralized ones such as /b/, /d/, or /g/, rather than non-neutralized ones like /p/, /t/, /k/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, or /s/. Consequently, if Korean listeners use their native coda-neutralization rules when processing speech input, word recognition will be hampered when non-neutralized consonants precede vowel-initial targets. Word-spotting and word-monitoring tasks were conducted in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. In both experiments, listeners recognized words faster and more accurately when vowel-initial target words were preceded by coda-neutralized consonants than when preceded by coda non-neutralized ones. The results show that Korean listeners exploit the coda-neutralization process when processing their native spoken language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.137-143
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• 2010

In this paper, a speech endpoint detection algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm is a kind of state transition-based ones for speech detection. To reject short-duration acoustic pulses which can be considered noises, it utilizes duration information of all detected pulses. For the optimization of parameters related with pulse lengths and energy threshold to detect speech intervals, an exhaustive search scheme is adopted while speech recognition rates are used as its performance index. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline state-based endpoint detection algorithm. At 5 dB input SNR for the beamforming input, the word recognition accuracies of its outputs were 78.5% for human voice noises and 81.1% for music noises.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.145-151
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• 2010

In this paper, a robust feature compensation method is proposed for improving the performance of speech recognition. The proposed method is incorporated into the auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) based feature compensation. We employ variable weights for the ARMA filter according to the degree of speech activity, and pass the normalized cepstral sequence through the weighted ARMA filter. Additionally when normalizing the cepstral sequences in training, the cepstral means and variances are estimated from total training utterances. Experimental results show the proposed method significantly improves the speech recognition performance in the noisy and reverberant environments.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.153-161
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• 2010

Many isolated word recognition systems may generate non-similar words for recognition candidates because they use only acoustic information. The previous study [1,2] investigated several techniques which can exclude non-similar words from N-best candidate words by applying Levenstein distance measure. This paper discusses the various improving techniques of removing non-similar recognition results. The mentioned methods include comparison penalties or weights, phone accuracy based on confusion information, weights candidates by ranking order and partial comparisons. Through experimental results, it is found that some proposed method keeps more accurate recognition results than the previous method's results.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.93-100
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to compare the acoustic properties of fricatives, /ㅅ, ㅆ/ produced by children with functional articulation disorder and normal children (N=20, aged 6-7). All subjects showed significant differences in both the length of friction intervals and breathing intervals of fricatives according to the changes in the environment presented within each group. However, there is a difference in the extent of variation in length between the two groups. This means that children with functional articulation disorder have greater difficulty in adjusting fricative noises according to changes in the CV VCV environment than normal children.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.101-107
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• 2010

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of English pronunciation quality between native speakers of English and Korean learners of English. This study employs a novel method of independently evaluating the prosody and segmentals of English sentences. A set of stimuli were made by swapping the prosody and the segmentals of English sentences read by a native speaker of American English and a Korean learner of English. Evaluations of the difference level of stimuli pairs and the goodness of the pronunciation quality showed that both native speakers of English and Korean learners of English give priority to the segmentals but native speakers of English were more sensitive to the difference in prosody in the evaluation of English pronunciation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.123-133
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• 2010

Speech language pathologists depend on their voice for livelihood and are high risk group of voice disorders. But there are few studies on their prevalence of voice symptoms and voice handicap index. This study aimed to evaluate prevalence of voice symptoms and Korean voice handicap index with 86 speech language pathologists and 90 individuals employed in other occupations. We analyzed self-reported voice symptoms and voice handicap index using a questionnaire for this study. The results showed that the prevalence of voice symptoms of speech language pathologists is 60.5% and voice handicap index scores of speech language pathologists group are significantly higher than those of control group in physical and total score. And we found that alcohol history was a risk factor for voice symptoms. These findings indicate that special vocal hygiene program for speech language pathologists and follow up studies for comparisons of prevalence of voice symptoms and voice handicap index with other professional voice users are necessary.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.59-65
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• 2010

In this paper, we investigate acoustic characteristics of Korean /s/ when it is followed by both a high front and a round segment regardless of their order to one another. We show that Korean /s/ in this environment has characteristics of a labio-palatalized segment, being affected by both a high front and a round segment if they occur within the domain of a syllable. In the experiment, we show that Korean /s/ before a high front and a round segment shows a spectral shape different from that in other environments. Specifically, it is different from /s/ before a high front segment only, showing peaks around 2.5 kHz. Furthermore, it shows a rapid decrease of amplitude in 4-5 kHz, and sometimes another plateau of high peaks in 5-6 kHz. We also examined center of gravity frequency and band energy difference. Based on the results of this experiment, we argue that Korean /s/ is affected by the following segments within the domain of coarticulation, a syllable and that the degree of coarticulation is different from language to language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.67-74
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to explore the cross-linguistic difference in the spectral movement pattern of American English and Korean vowels. Eight American vowels /a/, /e/, /$\varepsilon$/, /i/, /I/, /o/, /u/, and /$\mho$/, and five Korean vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ in a fricative-vowel environment produced by adult speakers of each language were analyzed. The spectral movement patterns of the first two formant frequency values were measured and analyzed. The results showed that Korean vowels had minimal spectral movement, both in F1 and F2 values, as compared to American English vowels. Moreover, no consistent direction of movement was found in the three corner Korean vowels, while American English vowels showed consistent direction of movement for each vowel of the same phonemic category.