• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.117-127
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• 2012

This research reports the prosodic characteristics (including articulation speech rate, pause characteristics, duration) of children with cochlear implants with reference to those of children with normal hearing. Subjects are 8-to 10-year-old children, balancing each number of gender as 24. Dialogue speech data are comprised of four types of sentence patterns. Results show that 1) there's a statistically meaningful difference on articulation speech rate between the two groups. 2) On pauses, they are not observed in exclamatory and declarative sentences in normal children. While imperative sentences show no statistical difference on the number of pauses between the two groups, interrogative sentences do. 3) Declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences reveal statistical difference between the two groups in terms of the sentence's final two-syllable word duration, showing no difference on imperative sentences. 4) When it comes to the RFP (duration ratio of sentence final syllable to penultimate syllable), we no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups in all types of sentences exists. 5) Lastly, RWS (the ratio of sentence final two syllable word duration to that of whole sentence duration) shows statistical difference between two groups in imperative sentences, but not in all the rest types.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.694-702
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• 2007

The adaptation effect originating from the chemical synapse between auditory nerve and inner hair cell gives advantage in accurate representation of temporal cues of incoming speech such as speech onset. Thus it is expected that the modification of conventional speech processing strategies of cochlear implant(CI) by incorporating the adaptation effect will result in considerable improvement of speech perception performance such as consonant perception score. Our purpose in this paper was to evaluate our new CI speech processing strategy incorporating the adaptation effect by the observation of auditory nerve responses. By classifying the presence or absence of speech from the auditory nerve responses, i. e. spike trains, we could quantitatively compare speech onset detection performances of conventional and improved strategies. We could verify the effectiveness of the adaptation effect in improving the speech onset representation characteristics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.115-121
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• 2014

This paper investigates the relationship between acoustic characteristics and voice handicap index for 29 males with esophageal speakers. Acoustic characteristics were measured by using a sustained vowel /a/ three times. The stable vocalization for 2 seconds was analyzed by MDVP program. Specifically, relationships between four VHI scores (total, functional, physical, and emotional) and three acoustic characteristics (jitter, shimmer, and NHR) were investigated using the Pearson correlation coefficient. As results, we found no relationship between NHR and VHI scores. However, both jitter and shimmer had statistically significant correlations with all four VHI scores. This research will contribute to establishing a baseline related to speech characteristics in voice rehabilitation with esophageal speakers. Further research could be done to examine the overall quality of life survey, which is widely used as a subjective measure about voice for patients with esophageal speakers.

• Proceedings of the KSLP Conference
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• 2006.12a
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• pp.152-152
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• 2006

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.87-99
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• 2022

A review regarding indicators used in Korean research is needed to develop a diagnostic marker system for Korean children with speech sound disorders (SSD). This literature review examined the research conducted to reveal the characteristics of children with SSD of unknown origin in Korea. The researchers in Korea used diverse variables as indicators to identify the natures of children with SSD. These included indicators related to external characteristics of speech sound and comorbid features other than external aspects of speech sound. The attention has been focused on specific indicators so far. This result implies that some indicators may still require closer study in various aspects due to their influence, and some may require more attention due to the limited number of research. This article argues that more research is necessary to comprehensively describe the unique characteristics of children with SSD of unknown origin and suggests a direction for future research regarding diagnostic markers and subtype classification of SSD. It also proposes potential diagnostic markers and a set of assessments for the subtype classification of SSD.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.189-194
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• 2014

Objective: This study aims to investigate the speech rate, the length of a pause, habitual pitch, and voice intensity of motherese. Subjects and Methods: The research participants comprised 20 mothers (mean age 33 years). Speech data were collected and analyzed using the Real-time Pitch software (KayPENTAX(R)). Results: The average speech rate was 5.33 syllables per second without their infant present and 4.26 syllables per second with their infant present. The average pause length was 1.09 s without their infant present and 1.56 s with their infant present. The average habitual pitch was 199.79 Hz without their infant present and 227.15 Hz with their infant present. The average voice loudness was 61.09 dB without their infant present and 64.49 dB with their infant present. Conclusion: This study presented clinical information for efficiently managing the speech therapy issues of infants and children. This includes proper acoustic and phonological information to recommend to main caregivers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2024

This study investigated the variation in the intonation of Seoul Korean interjection ani across different meanings ("no" and "really?") and speech levels (Intimate and Polite) using data from Korean Intonation Corpus (KICo). The investigation was conducted in two stages. First, IP-final tones in the dataset were categorized according to the K-ToBI convention (Jun, 2000). While significant relationships were observed between the meaning of ani and its IP-final tones, substantial overlap between groups was notable. Second, the F0 characteristics of the final syllable of ani were analyzed to elucidate the apparent many-to-many relationships between intonation and meaning/speech level. Results indicated that these seemingly overlapping relationships could be significantly distinguished. Overall, this study advocates for a deeper analysis of phonetic intonation beyond ToBI-based categorical labels. By examining the F0 characteristics of the IP-final syllable, previously unclear connections between meaning/speech level and intonation become more comprehensible. Although ToBI remains a valuable tool and framework for studying intonation, it is imperative to explore beyond these categories to grasp the "distinctiveness" of intonation, thereby enriching our understanding of prosody.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.10-16
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• 1999

In this paper, we propose a concatenation-based speech synthesizer using CVC(consonant-vowel-consonant) speech segments extracted from an undesigned continuous speech corpus. Natural synthetic speech can be generated by a proper modelling of coarticulation effects between phonemes and the use of natural prosodic variations. In general, CVC synthesis unit shows smaller acoustic degradation of speech quality since concatenation points are located in the consonant region and it can properly model the coarticulation of vowels that are effected by surrounding consonants. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics and the number of required synthesis units of 4 types of speech synthesis methods that use CVC synthesis units. Furthermore, we compare the speech quality of the 4 types and propose a new synthesis method based on the most promising type in terms of speech quality and implementability. Then we implement the method using the speech corpus and synthesize various examples. The CVC speech segments that are not in the speech corpus are substituted by demonstrate speech segments. Experiments demonstrate that CVC speech segments extracted from about 100 Mbytes continuous speech corpus can produce high quality synthetic speech.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.632-642
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a DNN based speech detection system using acoustic characteristics and context information of media audio. The speech detection for discriminating between speech and non-speech included in the media audio is a necessary preprocessing technique for effective speech processing. However, since the media audio signal includes various types of sound sources, it has been difficult to achieve high performance with the conventional signal processing techniques. The proposed method improves the speech detection performance by separating the harmonic and percussive components of the media audio and constructing the DNN input vector reflecting the acoustic characteristics and context information of the media audio. In order to verify the performance of the proposed system, a data set for speech detection was made using more than 20 hours of drama, and an 8-hour Hollywood movie data set, which was publicly available, was further acquired and used for experiments. In the experiment, it is shown that the proposed system provides better performance than the conventional method through the cross validation for two data sets.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.5495-5501
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• 2014

Individuals with a left frontal brain injury show significant impairments in their speech ability. The aims of the present study were (1) to assess and compare the ability of speech acts comprehension and executive function between individuals with a left frontal brain injury and normal individuals, and (2) to investigate the correlation of speech act comprehension ability factors. The study's subjects were 18 individuals with a left frontal brain injury and 18 normal control adults of the same age, gender, and educational age. The following results were obtained. First, the group of individuals with a left frontal brain injury had lower speech act comprehension, executive function than the normal control group. Second, the speech act comprehension ability of the individuals with a left frontal brain injury showed a high correlation with the executive function.