• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.331-344
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• 2019

This study aims to analyse science-gifted elementary students' perception of speech in general school class, school science class, and science-gifted class and the relationship between their voluntary speech and scientific creativity. For this, 39 fifth-graders in the Science-Gifted Education Center at Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education in Korea were asked about their frequency of voluntary speech on each class situation, the reasons for such behavior, and their general opinions about speech. Also, researchers collected the teachers' observation on students' speech in class. To get the scores for students' scientific creativity, four different subjects of tasks were presented. The students' scientific creativity scores were used for correlation analysis with their frequency of speech. The main findings from this study are as follows: First, science-gifted elementary students tended to be passive in science-gifted class compared to general school and school science class. Second, the main reason for the low frequency of students' speech in school classes is that they do not have many opportunities to make presentations. Third, a survey of students' general thoughts on speech showed that more students wanted to make a speech voluntarily in class than the opposite. Fourth, the four different scientific creativity tasks had little correlation. Fifth, the correlations between the frequency of voluntary speech and the scores of scientific creativity were mostly low, with significant results only for plant task. Sixth, the correlations between the frequency of voluntary speech and the two components that make up scientific creativity, originality and usefulness, were also mostly low, but significant results for both were found in plant task, with originality having a higher correlation than usefulness. Based on this results, this study discussed the meanings and implications of students' voluntary speech on elementary science education and creativity education.

• Journal of Fisheries and Marine Sciences Education
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.808-817
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• 2016

This study aims at reviewing differences of awareness toward speech-language therapy according to background variables of child-care teachers, and establishing a basic data necessary for special education support programs afterwards based on child-care centers and its characteristics with the results. Researcher carried out a survey by objecting child-care teachers of Chungcheongbuk-do, Korea, and looked into existence of some differences through SPSS 20.0 for Window, independent sample t-Test, ANOVA, Scheffe post verification on background characteristics such as level of education, working career, license grade, whether or not to have objects of speech-language objects in the class. Research results are same as follows. First, significant differences in awareness of child-care teachers toward speech-language therapy appeared from license grade among characteristics like level of education, license grade, whether or not to have objects of speech-language therapy in the class. Second, significant differences were displayed from whether or not to have objects of speech-language therapy in the class among characteristics such as level of education, working career, license grade, and whether or not to have objects of speech-language therapy. When putting these results together, a conclusion could be made such like awareness of child-care teachers toward speech-language therapy and therapists is able to be different a little according to background variables of teachers.

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.51-72
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to design Speech Database for Korean pronunciation education. For this purpose, I investigated types of speech errors of Korean-learners, made texts for recording, which involves all types of speech errors, and showed how to gather speech data and how to tag their informations. It's natural that speech data should include Korean-learners' speech and Korean people's speech, because Speech DB that I try to develop is for teaching Korean pronunciation to foreigners. So this DB should have informations about speakers and phonetic informations, which are about phonetic value of segments and intonation of sentences. The intonation of sentence varies with the type of sentence, the structure of prosodic units, the length of a prosodic unit and so on. For this reason, Speech DB must involve tags about these informations.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.37-40
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• 2021

This paper presents a design of a speech to sign language converter for deaf and hard of hearing people. The device is low-cost, low-power consumption, and it can be able to work entirely offline. The speech recognition is implemented using an open-source API, Pocketsphinx library. In this work, we proposed a context-oriented language model, which measures the similarity between the recognized speech and the predefined speech to decide the output. The output speech is selected from the recommended speech stored in the database, which is the best match to the recognized speech. The proposed context-oriented language model can improve the speech recognition rate by 21% for working entirely offline. A decision module based on determining the similarity between the two texts using Levenshtein distance decides the output sign language. The output sign language corresponding to the recognized speech is generated as a set of sequential images. The speech to sign language converter is deployed on a Raspberry Pi Zero board for low-cost deaf assistive devices.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.345-363
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare the speech rate of advanced Korean(L2) learners and Korean native speakers in spontaneous utterances. Specifically, the current study investigated the difference of the two groups' speech pattern according to utterance length. Eight advanced Korean(L2) learners and eight Korean native speakers participated in this study. The data were collected by recording their conversation and physical measurements (speaking rate, articulatory rates, pause and several types of speech disfluency) were taken on extracted 120 utterances from 12 out of the 16 participants. The findings show that advanced Korean learners' speech pattern is similar to that of Koreans in the short-length utterance. However, in the long-length utterance, two groups show different speech patterns; while the articulatory rate of Korean native speakers increased in the long-length utterance, that of Korean learners decreased. This suggests that the frequency of speech disfluency factors might affect this result.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.83-93
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• 2013

Vocal hygiene education is an indirect training approach to improve vocal function by educating all facets of optimal vocal health. Satisfaction levels of participants might be an important component of this indirect therapy for voice disorders. The authors aimed to investigate the satisfaction levels of vocal hygiene education in 51 patients with voice problems. We classified voice disorders of the participants according to three etiological categories (subgroups): organic, neurogenic, and functional. The survey consisted of three parts: 1) a condition of vocal hygiene education, 2) a degree of satisfaction of the present education, and 3) a request for future education. Participants responded to each item of the survey using a five-point Likert scale of 1 to 5 (1 being not at all and 5 being extremely). They also wrote down personal comments of improvement. Participants scored the vocal hygiene education offered by the speech-language pathologists between '3' and '4'. Specifically, the participants were highly satisfied with the specific and comprehensible explanation/instruction given by their speech-language pathologists. However, they were less satisfied with the tuition fee for the therapy sessions. Vocal hygiene education is offered individually to people in a clinical setting. Our results support the notion that vocal hygiene education can be an integral aspect of the treatment of voice problems in most cases.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.81-90
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• 2020

This paper describes a method of building Korean conversational speech data in the emergency medical domain and proposes an annotation method for the collected data in order to improve speech recognition performance. To suggest future research directions, baseline speech recognition experiments were conducted by using partial data that were collected and annotated. All voices were recorded at 16-bit resolution at 16 kHz sampling rate. A total of 166 conversations were collected, amounting to 8 hours and 35 minutes. Various information was manually transcribed such as orthography, pronunciation, dialect, noise, and medical information using Praat. Baseline speech recognition experiments were used to depict problems related to speech recognition in the emergency medical domain. The Korean conversational speech data presented in this paper are first-stage data in the emergency medical domain and are expected to be used as training data for developing conversational systems for emergency medical applications.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.65-70
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• 2021

This paper proposes a method for designing a large recording script for open domain English speech synthesis. For read-aloud style text, 12 domains and 294 sub-domains were designed using text contained in five different news media publications. For conversational style text, 4 domains and 36 sub-domains were designed using movie subtitles. The final script consists of 43,013 sentences, 27,085 read-aloud style sentences, and 15,928 conversational style sentences, consisting of 549,683 tokens and 38,356 types. The completed script is analyzed using four criteria: word coverage (type coverage and token coverage), high-frequency vocabulary coverage, phonetic coverage (diphone coverage and triphone coverage), and readability. The type coverage of our script reaches 36.86% despite its low token coverage of 2.97%. The high-frequency vocabulary coverage of the script is 73.82%, and the diphone coverage and triphone coverage of the whole script is 86.70% and 38.92%, respectively. The average readability of whole sentences is 9.03. The results of analysis show that the proposed method is effective in producing a large recording script for English speech synthesis, demonstrating good coverage in terms of unique words, high-frequency vocabulary, phonetic units, and readability.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.33-37
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• 2018

Korean students with much exposure to the relatively slow and clear speech used in most English classes in Korea can be expected to have difficulty understanding the casual style that is common in the everyday speech of English speakers. This research attempted to investigate an effective way to utilize casual speech in English education, by exploring the way different speech styles (clear vs. casual) affect Korean learners' comprehension of spoken English. Twenty Korean university students and two native speakers of English participated in a listening session. The English utterances were produced in different speech styles (clear slow, casual slow, clear fast, and casual fast). The Korean students were divided into two groups by English proficiency level. The results showed that the Korean students achieved 69.4% comprehension accuracy, while the native speakers of English demonstrated almost perfect results. The Korean students (especially the low-proficiency group) had more problems perceiving function words than they did perceiving content words. Responding to the different speech styles, the high-proficiency group had more difficulty listening to utterances with phonological variation than they did listening to utterances produced at a faster speed. The low-proficiency group, however, struggled with utterances produced at a faster speed more than they did with utterances with phonological variation. The pedagogical implications of the results are discussed in the concluding section.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.259-280
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• 2003

The paper discusses the way in which speech sounds are being evaluated and transcribed in various fields of speech sciences, and suggests ways for a more accurate transcription. The academic fields explored are of phonetics, speech processing, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The discussion centers on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), most commonly used in these fields, and other less widely-accepted transcription conventions such as the TOnes and Break Indices (ToBI), the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), an extension of the official Korean Romanization (KORBET), and the American-English transcription system in the TIMIT database (TIMITBET). These transcription conventions are dealt with Korean, English, and Korean-accented English. The paper demonstrates that each transcription can exclusively be recommended for a specific need from different academic fields. Due to its publicity, the IPA is best suited for phonetic evaluation in the fields of phonetics, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The rest of the transcriptions are useful for keyboard-inputting the phonetically evaluated data from all these fields as well as for sound transcription in speech engineering, because they use convenient letter symbols for typing, searching, and programming. Several practical suggestions are made to maintain the transcriptional efficiency and consistency to accommodate the intra-and inter-transcriber variability.