• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제10권2호
• /
• pp.25-31
• /
• 2018

This paper investigated the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the pronounced words present in the Buckeye Corpus and compared the frequency distribution of these processes by sex and age groups to provide a clearer understanding of spoken English to linguists and phoneticians. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus using R. Next, the phonological processes of monophthongs and diphthongs in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated using R scripts, and a frequency distribution by vowel process types, as well as sex and age groups, was created. The results revealed that 95% of the orthographic words contained the same number of syllables, whereas 5% had different numbers of vowels, thereby proving that speakers tend to preserve vowels in spontaneous speech. In addition, deletion processes were preferred in natural speech. Most vowel deletions occurred with an unstressed syllable. Chi-square tests were performed to calculate dependence in the distribution of phonological process types for male and female groups and young and old groups. The results showed a very strong correlation. This finding indicates that vowel processes occurred in approximately the same pattern in natural and spontaneous speech data regardless of sex and age, as well as whether or not the vowel processes were identical. Based on these results, the author concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can greatly enhance practical understanding of spoken English.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제42호
• /
• pp.37-46
• /
• 2001

Recently speech technologies have shown notable advancements and they now play major roles in computer-aided language learning systems. In the current paper, use of speech recognition technologies is viewed with our system for teaching English pronunciation to Japanese speakers.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
• /
• 제13권3호
• /
• pp.267-277
• /
• 2014

In this paper, we propose an educational system that involves a business game simulator and related curriculum. To develop these two elements, we examined the decision-making process related to business management and identified some significant skills thereby. In addition, we created an original simulator, named BizLator (http://bizlator.com), to help students develop these skills efficiently. Next, we developed a curriculum suitable for the simulator. We confirmed the effectiveness of the simulator and curriculum in a business-game-based class at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. On the basis of this, we compared our education system with a conventional system. This allowed us to identify advantages of and issues with our proposed system. Furthermore, we proposed a speech recognition support system named BizVoice in order to provide the teachers with more meaningful feedback, such as level of students' understanding. Concretely, BizVocie fetches students' speech of discussion during the game and converts the voice data to text data with speech recognition technology. Finally, teachers can grasp students' parameters of understanding, and thereby, the students also can take more effective class using BizLator. We also confirmed the effectiveness of the system in the class of Aoyama Gakuin Universiry.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권3호
• /
• pp.87-98
• /
• 2000

Timing in speech is determined by many factors. In this paper, we introduce and discuss some factors that have generally been regarded as important in speech timing. They include stress, syllable structure, consonant insertion or deletion, tempo, lengthening at clause, phrase and word boundaries, preconsonantal vowel shortening, and compensation between segments or within phonological units (e.g., word, foot), compression due to the increase of syllables in word or foot level, etc. and each of them may playa crucial role in the structuring of speech timing in a language. But some of these timing factors must interact with each other rather than be independent and the effects of each factor on speech timing will vary from language to language. On the other hand, there could well be many other factors unknown so far. Finding out and investigating new timing factors and reinterpreting the already-known timing factors should enhance our understanding of timing structures in a given language or languages.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제8권1호
• /
• pp.67-76
• /
• 2001

This study is targeted at introducing the three aspects of speech timing (articulatory, acoustic and auditory) and discussing their strong and weak points in describing speech timing. Traditional (extrinsic) articulatory timing theories exclude timing representation in the speaker's articulatory plan for his utterance, while the (intrinsic) articulatory timing theories headed by Fowler incorporate time into the plan for an utterance. As compared with articulatory timing studies with crucial constraints in data collection, acoustic timing studies can deal with even several hours of speech relatively easily. This enables us to perform suprasegmental timing studies as well as segmental timing studies. On the other hand, perception of speech timing is related to psychology rather than physiology and physics. Therefore, auditory timing studies contribute to enhancing our understanding of speech timing from the psychological point of view. Traditionally, some theories of speech timing (e.g. typology of speech rhythm: stress-timing; syllable-timing or mora-timing) have been based on our perception. However, it is problematic that auditory timing can be subjective despite some validity. Many questions as to speech timing are expected to be answered more objectively. Acoustic and articulatory description of timing will be the method of solving such problems of auditory timing.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제1권1호
• /
• pp.9-22
• /
• 2009

This paper first presents the author's personal view on the importance of modeling in scientific research in general, and then describes two of his works toward modeling certain aspects of human speech communication. The first work is concerned with the physiological and physical mechanisms of controlling the voice fundamental frequency of speech, which is an important parameter for expressing information on tone, accent, and intonation. The second work is concerned with the cognitive processes involved in a discrimination test of speech stimuli, which gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called categorical perception. They are meant to illustrate the power of models based on deep understanding and precise formulation of the functions of the mechanisms/processes that underlie observed phenomena. Finally, it also presents the author's view on some models that are yet to be developed.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권4호
• /
• pp.219-234
• /
• 2000

The study of boundary tones in connected speech or dialogues is one of the most underdeveloped areas of Korean prosody. This. paper concerns the boundary tones of intonational phrase-final morphemes which are shown in the speech corpus of dialogues. Results of phonetic analysis show that different kinds of boundary tones are realized, depending on the positions of the intonational phrase-final morphemes in the sentences.. This study has also shown that boundary tone patterning is somewhat related to the sentence structure, and for better speech recognition and speech synthesis, it presents a simple model of boundary tones based on the fundamental frequency contour. The results of this study will contribute to our understanding of the prosodic pattern of Korean connected speech or dialogues.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제18권1E호
• /
• pp.27-31
• /
• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제10권2호
• /
• pp.33-37
• /
• 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.

• 대한전기학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 대한전기학회 1988년도 전기.전자공학 학술대회 논문집
• /
• pp.620-623
• /
• 1988

A vowel is based on the recognition of a phoneme. Thus it is necessary for the programming of an algorithm to achieve the speech recognition in that case. In this paper, cepstrum is used for a voiced-unvoiced decision and speech parameters are extracted by linear prediction coding. Using these parameters, a speech understanding algorithm has been developed.