• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.55-62
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• 2015

It is widely accepted that Parkinson's disease(PD) is the most common cause of hypokinetic dysarthria, and its characteristics of 'short rushes of speech' have become more evident along with the severity of motor disorders. Speech alternate motion rates (AMRs) are particularly useful for observing not only rate abnormalities but also deviant speech. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics of 'short rushes of speech' in terms of AMRs of PD except for the perceptual characteristics. The purpose of this study was to examine which acoustic features of 'short rushes of speech' in terms of AMRs are a robust indicator of Parkinsonian speech. Numbers of syllabic repetitions (/pə/, /tə/, /kə/) in AMR tasks were analyzed through acoustic methods observing a spectrogram of the Computerized Speech Lab in 9 patients with PD. Acoustically, we found three characteristics of 'short rushes of speech': 1) Vocalized consonants without closure duration(VC) 76.3%; 2) No consonant segmentation(NC) 18.6%; 3) No vowel formant frequency(NV) 5.1%. Based on these results, 'short rushes of speech' may affect the failure to reach and maintain the phonatory targets. In order to best achieve the therapeutic goals, and to make the treatment most efficacious, it is important to incorporate training methods which are based on both phonation and articulation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.47-55
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• 2015

This study examined whether speech acceptability was changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations. Both speech rate and voice loudness reportedly are associated with acceptability and intelligibility. Speech samples by twelve speakers with mild dysarthria were recorded. Speech rate and loudness changes were made by digitally manipulating habitual sentences. 3 different loudness levels (70, 75, & 80dB) and 4 different speech rates (normal, 20% rapidly, 20% slowly, & 40% slowly) were presented to 12 SLPs (speech language pathologists). SLPs evaluated sentence acceptability by 7-point Likert scale. Repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant change in speech acceptability. A faster speech rate (20% rapidly) rather than habitual and slower rates (20%, 40% slowly) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.001). An increased vocal loudness (up to 80dB) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.05). Speech rate and loudness changes in the prosodic properties of speech may contribute to improved acceptability.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.19-29
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• 2018

The present study investigated whether there are differences in articulation rate by gender, age, and individual speakers in a spontaneous speech corpus produced by 40 Seoul Korean speakers. This study measured their articulation rates using a second-per-syllable metric and a syllable-per-second metric. The findings are as follows. First, in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech, there was a gender difference in articulation rates only in age group 10-19, among whom men tended to speak faster than women. Second, individual speakers showed variability in their rates of articulation. The tendency for some speakers to speak faster than others was variable. Finally, there were metric differences in articulation rate. That is, regarding the coefficients of variation, the values of the second-per-syllable metric were much higher than those for the syllable-per-second metric. The articulation rate for the syllable-per-second metric tended to be more distinct among individual speakers. The present results imply that data gathered in a corpus of Seoul Korean spontaneous speech may reflect speaker-specific differences in articulatory movements.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.32B no.5
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• pp.788-797
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• 1995

In this paper, a variable time-scale modification using SOLA(Synchronized OverLap and Add) is proposed, which takes into consideration the different time-scaled characteristics of voiced and unvoiced speech, Generally, voiced speech is subject to higher variations in length during time-scale modification than unvoiced speech, but the conventional method performs time-scale modification at a uniform rate for all speech. For this purpose, voiced and unvoiced speech duration at various talking speeds were statistically analyzed. The sentences were then spoken at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5 and 1.8 times normal speed. A clipping autocorrelation function was applied to each analysis frame to determine voiced and unvoiced speech to obtain respective variation rates. The results were used to perform variable time-scale modification to produce sentences at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5, 1.8 times normal speed. To evaluate performance, a MOS test was conducted to compare the proposed voiced/unvoiced variable time-scale modification and the uniform SOLA method. Results indicate that the proposed method produces sentence quality superior to that of the conventional method.

• MALSORI
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• no.50
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• pp.99-110
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• 2004

The normal transmission characteristics of sound are hardly obtained due to the various noises and structural factors in a running car environment. It is due to the channel distortion of the original source sound recorded by microphones, and it seriously degrades the performance of the speech recognition in real driving environments. In this paper we analyze the degree of intelligibility under the various sound distortion environments by channels according to driving speed with respect to speech transmission index(STI) and compare the STI with rates of speech recognition. We examine the correlation between measures of intelligibility depending on sound pick-up patterns and performance in speech recognition. Thereby we consider the optimal location of a microphone in single channel environment. In experimentation we find that high correlation is obtained between STI and rates of speech recognition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.3E
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• pp.85-90
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• 2004

This paper presents two kinds of new approaches, one of which is concerned with recognition of emotional speech such as anger, happiness, normal, sadness, or surprise. The other is concerned with emotion recognition in speech. For the proposed speech recognition system handling human speech with emotional states, total nine kinds of prosodic features were first extracted and then given to prosodic identifier. In evaluation, the recognition results on emotional speech showed that the rates using proposed method increased more greatly than the existing speech recognizer. For recognition of emotion, on the other hands, four kinds of prosodic parameters such as pitch, energy, and their derivatives were proposed, that were then trained by discrete duration continuous hidden Markov models(DDCHMM) for recognition. In this approach, the emotional models were adapted by specific speaker's speech, using maximum a posteriori(MAP) estimation. In evaluation, the recognition results on emotional states showed that the rates on the vocal emotions gradually increased with an increase of adaptation sample number.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.63
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• pp.103-132
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• 2014

This study compares various speech rates of Korean learners with those of native Korean. Speech data were collected from 34 native Koreans and 33 Korean learners (19 Chinese and 14 Japanese). Each participant recorded a 9 syllabled Korean sentence at three different speech rate types. A total of 603 speech samples were analyzed by speech rate types (normal, slow, and fast), native languages (Korean, Chinese, Japanese), and learners' proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced). We found that learners' L1 background plays a role in categorizing different speech rates in the L2 (Korean), and also that the leaners' proficiency correlates with the increase of speaking rate regardless of speech rate categories. More importantly, faster speech rate values found in the advanced level of learners do not necessarily match to the native speakers' speech rate categories. This means that learning speech rate categories can be more complex than we think of proficiency or fluency. That is, speech rate categories may not be acquired automatically during the course of second language learning, and implicit or explicit exposures to various rate types are necessary for second language learners to acquire a high level of communicative skills including speech rate variation. This paper discusses several pedagogical implications in terms of teaching pronunciation to second language learners.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.141-149
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• 1999

Parental speaking rates reduction is frequently recommended by speech-language pathologists as a way to facilitate the fluency of preschool children who stutter. However, this clinical notion is in need of empirical support. For this reason, Sim & Zebrowski (1995) examined the ability of young children imitating different speaking rates. However, Sim & Zebrwoski's study was not made in a natural context but in the laboratory, so the findings are limited to apply to the clinical situation. The current study aimed to examine the ability of three different speaking rates(baseline, 10% slower, and 24% slower) in a natural situation both with instruction and without instruction. The results show that (1) all children were able to imitate the stimulus speaking rates adequately, (2) instruction about speaking rates for each child influenced the ability to imitate slower speaking rates. These clinical implications of findings in this study are that 4-5 year-old children are able to imitate different speaking rates with instruction and can be candidates for the parental speaking rates reduction program in the stutter therapy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.91-101
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• 2021

This study aimed to investigate speech motor control in adults who stutter (AWS) by testing whether articulation rate changes with practice and linguistic complexity. Eleven AWS and 11 adults who do not stutter (AWNS) repeated four sentences of different lengths and syntactic complexity [simple-short (SS), simple-long (SL), complex-long (CL), and faulty-long (FL) sentences]. Overall articulation rates of each sentence were measured and compared between groups. Practice effects were evaluated by comparing the articulation rates of the first three, middle four, and last three productions. Overall, the AWS had significantly slower articulation rates than AWNS across the four sentences. The longer sentences showed significantly slower articulation rates than the baseline sentence (SS). The articulation rates of the middle four and the last three productions were significantly faster than those of the first three productions of each sentence in both groups. The articulation rates of the SS, SL, and CL sentences indicated a consistent practice effect. The slower articulation rates of the AWS are consistent with a speech motor limitation. There was no interaction with linguistic complexity or practice, so a slower articulation rate may be a general feature of the speech of AWS. Both AWS and AWNS showed practice effects with faster articulation rates which may reflect a degree of adaptation to the stimuli.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.37-42
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• 1996

This study aims to see some prosodic features of English spoken by Japanese learners of English. It focuses on speech rates, pauses, and intonation when the learners read an English passage. Three Japanese learners of English, who are all male university students, were asked to read the speech material, an English passage of 110 word length, at their normal reading speed. Then a native speaker of English, a male American English teacher. was asked to read the same passage. The Japanese speakers were also asked to read a Japanese passage of 286 letters (Japanese Kana) to compare the reading of English with that of japanese. Their speech was analyzed on a computerized system (KAY Computerized Speech Lab). Wave forms, spectrograms, and F0 contours were shown on the screen to measure the duration of pauses, phrases and sentences and to observe intonation contours. One finding of the experiment was that the movement of the low speakers' speech rates showed a similar tendency in their reading of the English passage. Reading of the Japanese passage by the three learners also had a similar tendency in the movement of speech rates. Another finding was that the frequency of pauses in the learners speech was greater than that in the speech of the native speaker, but that the ration of the total pause length to the whole utterance length was about tile same in both the learners' and the native speaker's speech. A similar tendency was observed about the learners' reading of the Japanese passage except that they used shorter pauses in the mid-sentence position. As to intonation contours, we found that the learners used a narrower pitch range than the native speaker in their reading of the English passage while they used a wider pitch range as they read the Japanese passage. It was found that the learners tended to use falling intonation before pauses whereas the native speaker used different intonation patterns. These findings are applicable to the teaching of English pronunciation at the passage level in the sense that they can show the learners. Japanese here, what their problems are and how they could be solved.