• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.171-176
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• 2009

Intelligibility measurement is one criterion for the assessment of the severity of speech disorders especially of dysarthric persons. Rate control, usually rate reduction, is used with many dysarthric speakers to improve their intelligibility. The purpose of this study is to compare how change intelligibility of speech produced by cerebral palsic speakers according to three speaking conditions. Speech samples were collected from 10 adults with cerebral palsy were asked to speak under three speaking conditions-(1) naturally(control), (2) more slowly(rate control), (3) louder and accurately(clear speech). In a perception test, after listening to the speech samples, a group of three judges were to write down whatever they heard. The result showed that total cerebral palsic subjects were divided into two subgroups according to their intelligibility according to three speaking conditions. Some subjects showed that speech intelligibility increased greatly if asked to speak 'louder and more accurately'. and the others showed no difference of intelligibility according to the speaking conditions. This study suggested that it would be useful clinically to find out the best instruction to improve intelligibility suitable for each speaker with cerebral palsy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.131-138
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• 2016

This study analyzes the characteristics of good impression using speech manipulation scripts and investigates the characteristics of preferred speech voice. Fourty male and female college students participated in this study. They have been exposed to the Gyeongsang dialect spoken by their friends and family for more than 15 years. Two sample voices(1 male and 1 female), considered as giving good impression, were subject to voice analysis. Two students were asked to read the sample paragraph of 'Walking' and their voice samples were analyzed through Praat. The collected speech data were manipulated into 4 different sets by changing pitch level, degree of loudness and speech rate. First, both men and women received good impression more from pitch-lowered sound than from the original one. Second, men tended to receive good impression more from slightly louder voice than from the natural-pitched one. Third, it was shown that men often felt more drowned to a voice at slightly faster speech rate than at the original speech rate. Overall, both male and female listeners favored lower pitch over the original pitch. Men tended to prefer louder voice sound while women preferred less loud one. Men received better impression at a lower speech rate but women at a faster speech rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.79-90
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• 2014

An intonation curve stylization was used for an acoustical analysis of English speech. For the analysis, acoustical feature values were extracted from 1,848 utterances produced with normal and fast speech rate by 28 (12 women and 16 men) native speakers of English. Men are found to speak faster than women at normal speech rate but no difference is found between genders at fast speech rate. Analysis of pitch point features has it that fast speech has greater Pt (pitch point movement time), Pr (pitch point pitch range), and Pd (pitch point distance) but smaller Ps (pitch point slope) than normal speech. Men show greater Pt, Pr, and Pd than women. Analysis of sentence level features reveals that fast speech has smaller Sr (sentence level pitch range), Sd (sentence duration), and Max (maximum pitch) but greater Ss (sentence slope) than normal speech. Women show greater Sr, Ss, Sp (pitch difference between the first pitch point and the last), Sd, MaxNr (normalized Max), and MinNr (normalized Min) than men. As speech rate increases, women speak with greater Ss and Sr than men.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.205-209
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• 1994

This paper presents a variable rate speech coding method with phonetic segmentation, called for PSVXC. Multiple access techniques that require efficient encoding of speech to achieve capacity improvements are currently emerging in the cellular telephone system. The variable rate speech coder have the reduced average data rate required to transmit conversational speech. Each frame of active speech is classified into one of four phonetic classes. A distinct coding configuration and bit-rate is applied to each category. And also a split vector quantization is used to accurately quantize the LPC information using LSP parameters.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2002.07a
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• pp.727-729
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• 2002

In this paper, we proposed quad variable rates ADPCM coding method and its implementation on C6000 DSP, which is modified from the standard ADPCM of ITU G.726 for speech quality improvement considering the environmental noise Four coding rates, 16Kbps, 24Kbps, 32Kbps and 40Kbps are used for speech window samples and the rate decision threshold is decided by the environmental noise level. The object of the proposed method is to reduce the coding rate while retaining the speech quality and the speech quality is considerably close to 40Kbps single rate coder with the coding rate close to 16Kbps single rate coder under the environmental noise. The environmental noise level affects the coding rate and the noise level is calculated per every speech window samples. At high noise level, more samples are coded at higher rates to enhance the quality, but at low noise level, only the big speech signals are coded at higher rates and more speech samples are coded at lower coding rates to reduce the coding rates. The influence of the noise on tile speech signal is considerably high for small signals and the small signal has the higher ZCR (zero crossing rate). The method is simulated in PC and to be implemented on C6000 floating point DSP board in real time operations.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.61-66
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to examine the speaking rate(overall speaking rate and articulatory rate) of Parkinson's disease patients with palilalia(PDP). Palilalia is traditionally characterized by not only compulsive repetitions of words and phrases, but also by increased rate of speech based on auditory perception. Since Souques(1908) first characterized palilalia as fast speech rate from the perspective of auditory perception, few studies have evaluated PDP speech using acoustic methods. To compare the speech rate between PDP and normal subjects, we included five PDP and eight control subjects(age over 55), as well as the date acquired under reading tasks(standardized Korean paragraph). The difference in median of the overall speaking rate was not statically significant between the PDP group(median 5.25, IQR 1.30) and normal group(median 4.76, IQR 0.71). The PDP, however, had a significantly higher syllables per second on the articulatory rate(median 6.60, IQR 1.04) than normal subjects(median 5.60, IQR 0.52). Results indicated no differences in pause over 250msec and disfluency duration between the two groups. To provide useful insight into PDP speech, multiple levels of analysis should be employed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.1E
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• pp.10-13
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• 1998

We propose a robust non-speech rejection algorithm using the three types of pitch-related parameters. The robust non-speech rejection algorithm utilizes three kinds of pitch parameters : (1) pitch range, (2) difference of the successive pitch range, and (3) the number of successive pitches satisfying constraints related with the previous two parameters. The acceptance rate of the speech commands was 95% for -2.8dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) speech database that consisted of 2440 utterances. The rejection rate of the non-speech sounds was 100% while the acceptance rate of the speech commands was 97% in an office environment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.159-168
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to assess the speech rate, fluency and the type of dysfluencies of normal adults in order to provide a basic data of normal speaking. The number of subjects of this study were 30(14 females and 16 males), and their ages ranged 17 to 36. The rate was measured as syllables per minute (SPM). The speech rates in reading ranged 273-426 with a mean of 348 SPM and in speaking ranges 118-409 (mean=265). The average of their fluencies was 99.1% in reading and 96.9% in speaking. The rater reliability of speech rate in the data assessed by video was very high (r=0.98) and the rater reliability of speech fluency was moderately high (r=0.67). The disfluency types were also analysed from 150 disfluency episodes. Syllable repetition and word interjection were the most common disfluent types.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.33-40
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• 2014

The purpose of the study was to examine alternating motion rate and its variability in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) compared to typically developing children. Six children with CAS aged 9-12 years old and 10 children who were age-matched participated in the study. This study measured tokens per second and variabilities of the rates during the production of /$p^*$ a/, /$t^*$ a/, and /$k^*$ a/. For variability measures of the rates, each participant was asked to repeat speech tasks three times and the average value of the rates and its standard deviation were obtained. The results revealed that the CAS group showed slower rate only at /$k^*$ a/ than the control group. The CAS group exhibited greater variability of AMR at all the tasks than the control group. The results suggested that variability of AMR might be a more distinctive speech feature to children with CAS than the rate of the speech task.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.157-165
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• 2011

This study investigated speech rate and intonation slope (least square method; F0, quarter-tone) in normal and CI children's utterances. Each group consisted of 12 people and were divided into groups of children with CI operation (before 3;00), children with CI operation (after 3;00), and normal children. Materials are composed of four kinds of grammatical dialogue sentences which are lacking in respect. Given three groups as independent variables and both speech rate and intonation slope as dependent variables, a one-way ANOVA showed that normal children had faster speech rates and steeper intonation slopes than those of the CI group. More specifically, there was a statistically significant speech rate difference between normal and CI children in all of the sentential patterns but imperative form (p<.01). Additionally, F0 and qtone slope observed in sentential final word showed a significant statistical difference between normal and CI children in imperative form (f0: p<.01; q-tone: p<.05).