• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.67-76
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to compare professional (Pro) and non-professional (Non-pro) voice users with voice disorders in self-reporting voice evaluation using Korean-Voice Handicap Index (K-VHI) and Korean-Voice Related Quality of Life (K-VRQOL). In addition, those were compared by voice quality and voice disorder type. 94 Pro and 106 Non-pro were asked to fill out the K-VHI and K-VRQOL, perceptually evaluated on GRBAS scales, and divided into three types of voice disorders (functional, organic and neurologic) by an experienced speech-language pathologist and an otolaryngologist. The results showed that the functional (F) and physical (P) scores of K-VHI in Pro group were significantly higher than those in Non-pro group. As the voice quality evaluated by G scale got worse, the scores of all aspects except emotional (E) of K-VHI and social-emotional (SE) of K-VRQOL were higher. All scores of K-VHI and K-VRQOL in neurologic voice disorders were significantly higher than those in functional and organic voice disorders. In conclusion, professional voice users are more sensitive to their functional and physical handicap resulted by their voice problems and that goes double for the patients with severe and neurologic voice disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.59-65
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• 2015

This study was conducted to identify the differences in voice characteristic variables before and after taking a certain amount of high-caffeine. Linear PCM-M10 Recorder (SONY) was used for the recorder and basic frequency of the voice (Fo), frequency fluctuation rate (jitter), amplitude fluctuation rate (shimmer) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) were measured using TF-32(University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). First, prolonged phonation analysis results of /ah/ by male subjects showed the shimmer values after taking high-caffeine increased statistically significantly(p<.05) compared with before the intake and SNR values significantly decreased. (p<.05). On the other hand, female subjects didn't show any statistically significant differences in all variables. Second, male subjects showed statistically significant increased shimmer values after the intake compared with before the intake at /ah/ of syllable 'na' and /ah/ in 'ra' in 'autumn' paragraph (p<.05), and jitter values significantly increased at /ah/ in 'ah' (p<.05). However, female subjects didn't show any statistically significant differences in all variables. Results of this study showed that high-caffeine intake more affects male subjects than female subjects. In male subjects, shimmer and SNR changed at vowel prolonged phonation, /ah/, and study results showed that shimmer and SNR in 'Autumn' paragraph /na/, /ra/ and jitter in /ah/ could be identified as the variables to show the voice change.

• Journal of Dental Rehabilitation and Applied Science
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.238-244
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• 2017

Pathologic attrition leads to pathologic damage on occlusal plane, functional disorders, occlusal disharmony, esthetic problems, pulpal lesion, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder. In this case, treatment plan should be considered for possibility of vertical dimension loss, occlusal pattern, esthetics, phonetics, amount of vertical dimension increase. This case report was a 71-year-old man who had severely worn dentition. Full mouth rehabilitation was carried out with vertical dimension increase due to limited space for prosthesis. After evaluation of provisional restorations for patient's compliance, final restorations were fabricated and routine clinical assessments were made. This case presents that a satisfactory clinical result was achieved by restoring the worn dentition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.21-26
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• 2015

The aim of this study is to synthesize pathological breathy voice and to make a cepstral peak prominence (CPP) table following breathiness ranks by cepstral analysis to supplement reliability of the perceptual auditory judgment task. KlattGrid synthesizer included in Praat was used. Synthesis parameters consist of two groups, i.e., constants and variables. Constant parameters are pitch, amplitude, flutter, open phase, oral formant and bandwidth. Variable parameters are breathiness (BR), aspiration amplitude (AH), and spectral tilt (TL). Five hundred sixty samples of synthetic breathy vowel /a/ for male were created. Three raters participated in ranking of the breathiness. 217 were proved to be inadequate samples from perceptual judgment and cepstral analysis. Finally, 343 samples were selected. These CPP values and other related parameters from cepstral analysis are classified under four breathiness ranks (B0~B3). The mean and standard deviation of CPP is $16.10{\pm}1.15$ dB(B0), $13.68{\pm}1.34$ dB(B1), $10.97{\pm}1.41$ dB(B2), and $3.03{\pm}4.07$ dB(B3). The value of CPP decreases toward the severe group of breathiness because there is a lot of noise and a small quantity of harmonics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.3-10
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• 2015

In this paper, different frequency scales in cepstral feature extraction are evaluated for the text-independent speaker recognition. To this end, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCCs), and bilinear warped frequency cepstral coefficients (BWFCCs) are applied to the speaker recognition experiment. In addition, the spectro-temporal features extracted by the cepstral-time matrix (CTM) are examined as an alternative to the delta and delta-delta features. Experiments on the NIST speaker recognition evaluation (SRE) 2004 task are carried out using the Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) method and the joint factor analysis (JFA) method, both based on the ALIZE 3.0 toolkit. Experimental results using both the methods show that BWFCC with appropriate warping factor yields better performance than MFCC and LFCC. It is also shown that the feature set including the spectro-temporal information based on the CTM outperforms the conventional feature set including the delta and delta-delta features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.139-150
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• 2015

The data accumulated in this database will be used to develop a speaker identification system. This may also be applied towards, but not limited to, fields of phonetic studies, sociolinguistics, and language pathology. We plan to supplement the large-scale speech corpus next year, in terms of research methodology and content, to better answer the needs of diverse fields. The purpose of this study is to develop a speech corpus for standard Korean speech. For the samples to viably represent the state of spoken Korean, demographic factors were considered to modulate a balanced spread of age, gender, and dialects. Nine separate regional dialects were categorized, and five age groups were established from individuals in their 20s to 60s. A speech-sample collection protocol was developed for the purpose of this study where each speaker performs five tasks: two reading tasks, two semi-spontaneous speech tasks, and one spontaneous speech task. This particular configuration of sample data collection accommodates gathering of rich and well-balanced speech-samples across various speech types, and is expected to improve the utility of the speech corpus developed in this study. Samples from 639 individuals were collected using the protocol. Speech samples were collected also from other sources, for a combined total of samples from 1,012 individuals.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-105
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• 2015

This research mainly focuses on intonational characteristics of synchronous English speech. Intonation contours were extracted from 1,848 utterances produced in two different speaking modes (solo vs. synchronous) by 28 (12 women and 16 men) native speakers of English. Synchronous speech is found to be slower than solo speech. Women are found to speak slower than men. The effect size of speech rate caused by different speaking modes is greater than gender differences. However, there is no interaction between the two factors (speaking modes vs. gender differences) in terms of speech rate. Analysis of pitch point features has it that synchronous speech has smaller Pt (pitch point movement time), Pr (pitch point pitch range), Ps (pitch point slope) and Pd (pitch point distance) than solo speech. There is no interaction between the two factors (speaking modes vs. gender differences) in terms of pitch point features. Analysis of sentence level features reveals that synchronous speech has smaller Sr (sentence level pitch range), Ss (sentence slope), MaxNr (normalized maximum pitch) and MinNr (normalized minimum pitch) but greater Min (minimum pitch) and Sd (sentence duration) than solo speech. It is also shown that the higher the Mid (median pitch), the MaxNr and the MinNr in solo speaking mode, the more they are reduced in synchronous speaking mode. Max, Min and Mid show greater speaker discriminability than other features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.107-116
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• 2015

The present experiment investigated the effect of word length on the length of f0 intervals for North Kyungsang children. In order to find out the lengths of the f0 intervals, the f0 values at the midpoints of vowels in words were measured. F0 estimates were computed as intervals consistent with the logarithmic scale corresponding to the number of syllables in the words. The results indicated that the mean f0 intervals in words of different lengths showed a significant difference for the HH in HH vs. HHL and the LH in LH vs. LLH for North Kyungsang children. Adult speakers from the North Kyungsang region significantly differed only within the HH in HH vs. HHL. Adult speakers made a noticeable contribution in this characteristic from the children. The result of the adult study was presented to confirm whether the children used a North Kyungsang dialect. With respect to individual speaker differences, the North Kyungsang children showed more or less consistent patterns in quantile-quantile plots for the HH vs. HHL, but for the HL vs. LHL and LH vs. LLH, there were more variations than for the HH vs. HHL. The individual speakers' variation was the largest for the HL vs. LHL and the smallest for HH vs. HHL. Considering these results, the effect of word length on f0 intervals tended to show pitch accent-type-specific characteristics in the process of prosodic acquisition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.57-65
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• 2015

This study aimed to identify the development pattern of final stop consonant perception using the gating task. Sixty-four subjects participated in the study: 16 children aged 4 years, 16 children aged 5 years, 17 children aged 6 years, and 15 adults. One-syllable words with consonant-vowel-consonant(CVC) structure, mokㄱ-motㄱ and papㄱ-patㄱ were used as stimuli in order to remove the redundancy of acoustic cues in stimulus words, 40ms-length (-40ms) and 60ms-length (-60ms) from the entire duration of the final consonant were deleted. Three conditions (the whole word segment, -40ms, -60ms) were used for this speech perception experiment. 48 tokens (4 stimuli ${\times}3$ conditions ${\times}4$ trials) in total were provided for participants. The results indicated that 5 and 6 year olds showed final consonant perception similar to adults in stimuli, papㄱ-patㄱ and only the 6-year-old children showed perception similar to adults in stimuli, 'mokㄱ-motㄱ. The results suggested that younger typically developing children require more acoustic information to accurately perceive final consonants than older children and adults. Final consonant perception ability may become adult-like around 6 years old. The study provides fundamental data on the development pattern of speech perception in normal developing children, which can be used to compare to those of children with communication disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.117-124
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of gender in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2342 different sentences, comprising over five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender as an independent factor. The results of acoustic analyses revealed that the most acoustic properties of voiceless sibilants turned out to be different between male and female speakers, but those of voiceless non-sibilants did not show differences. A classification experiment using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) revealed that 85.73% of voiceless fricatives are correctly classified. The sibilants are 88.61% correctly classified, whereas the non-sibilants are only 57.91% correctly classified. The majority of the errors are from the misclassification of /ɵ/ as [f]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 77.67%. Most of the inaccuracy results are from the classification of female speakers in non-sibilants. The results are accounted for by resorting to biological differences as well as macro-social factors. The paper contributes to the understanding of the role of gender in a large-scale speech corpus.