• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.61-76
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• 2005

This paper aims to analyze the acoustic effects of vowels produced in a distant-talking environment. The analysis was performed using a statistical method. The influence of gender and speakers on the variation was also examined. The speech data used in this study consist of 500 distant-talking words and 500 normal words of 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females). Acoustic features selected for the analysis were the duration, the formants (Fl and F2), the fundamental frequency and the total energy. The results showed that the duration, F0, F1 and the total energy increased in the distant-talking speech compared to normal speech; female speakers showed higher increase in all features except for the total energy and the fundamental frequency. In addition, speaker differences were observed.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.50 no.12
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• pp.590-596
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• 2001

The pre-emphasis is an essential process for speech signal processing. Widely used two methods are the typical method using a fixed value near unity and te optimal method using the autocorrelation ratio of the signal. This study proposes a new pre-emphasis method using the short-term energy difference of speech signal, which can effectively compensate the glottal source characteristics and lip radiation characteristics. Using the proposed pre-emphasis, speech analysis, such as spectrum estimation, formant detection, is performed and the results are compared with those of the conventional two pre-emphasis methods. The speech analysis with 5 single vowels showed that the proposed method enhanced the spectral shapes and gave nearly constant formant frequencies and could escape the overlapping of adjacent two formants. comparison with FFT spectra had verified the above results and showed the accuracy of the proposed method. The computational complexity of the proposed method reduced to about 50% of the optimal method.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.125-127
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• 2003

The aim of the paper is to analyze prosodic characteristics in apraxia of speech and establish the fundamental sources in diagnosis of motor speech disorders. The sentences consist of two different types (declarative and interrogative) with different numbers of constituents which are one to three. The stimuli were constructed to assess apraxics speech with articulation and humming skills. The features of speech patterns were examined such as utterance duration, boundary tones, and etc. The results of the analysis are as follow: 1) In the interrogative sentences, the rising boundary tones appeared only in the humming tasks 2) the utterance duration is relatively shorter in the humming tasks than the speech with articulation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.21-24
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• 2005

This paper presents durational characteristics of Korean Lombard speech using data, which consist of 500 Lombard utterances and 500 normal utterances of 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females). Each file was segmented and labeled manually and the duration of each segment and each word was extracted. The durational change of Lombard effect in comparison with normal speech was analyzed using a statistical method. The results show that the duration of words with Lombard effect is increased in comparison with normal style, and that the average unvoiced consonantal duration is reduced while the average vocalic duration is increased. Female speakers show a stronger tendency towards lengthening the duration in Lombard speech, but without statistical significance. Finally, this study also shows that the speakers of Lombard speech could be classified according to their different duration rate.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.151-165
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• 1999

This paper describes a series of researches to diagnose vocal diseases using the statistical method and the acoustic signal analysis method. Speech materials are collected at the hospital. Using the pathological database, the basic parameters for the diagnosis are obtained. Based on the statistical characteristics of the parameters, valid parameters are chosen and those are used to diagnose the pathological speech signal. Cepstrum is used to extract parameters which represents characteristics of pathological speech. 3 layered neural network is used to train and classify pathological speech into normal, benign and malignant case.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.63-80
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• 1999

In this paper, an adaptive method of dividing a speech signal into an initial, a medial and a final sound of the form of utterance utilized by evaluating extreme limits of short term energy and autocorrelation functions. By applying this method into speech signal composed of a consonant, a vowel and a consonant, it was divided into an initial, a medial and a final sound and its feature analysis of sample by LPC were carried out. As a result of spectrum analysis in each period, it was observed that there existed spectrum features of a consonant and a vowel in the initial and medial periods respectively and features of both in a final sound. Also, when all kinds of words were adaptively divided into 3 periods by using the proposed method, it was found that the initial sounds of the same consonant and the medial sounds of the same vowels have the same spectrum characteristics respectively, but the final sound showed different spectrum characteristics even if it had the same consonant as the initial sound.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.101-104
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• 2006

The present study examined two acoustic characteristics(duration and intensity) of vowels produced by 4 cerebral palsic adults and 4 nondisabled adults in conversational and clear speech. In this study, clear speech means: (1) slow one's speech rate just a little, (2) articulate all phonemes accurately and increase vocal volume. Speech material included 10 bisyllabic real words in the frame sentences. Temporal-acoustic analysis showed that vowels produced by two speaker groups in clear speech(in this case, more accurate and louder speech) were significantly longer than vowels in conversational speech. In addition, intensity of vowels produced by cerebral palsic speakers in clear speech(in this case, more accurate and louder speech) was higher than in conversational speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.167-176
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• 1998

Conventional time-scale modification methods have the problem that as the modification rate gets higher the time-scale modified speech signal becomes less intelligible, because they ignore the effect of articulation rate on speech characteristics. Results of research on speech perception show that the timing information of transient portions of a speech signal plays an important role in discriminating among different speech sounds. Inspired by this fact, we propose a novel scheme for modifying the time-scale of speech. In the proposed scheme, the timing information of the transient portions of speech is preserved, while the steady portions of speech are compressed or expanded somewhat excessively for maintaining overall time-scale change. In order to identify the transient and steady portions of a speech signal, we employ a simple method using LPC cepstral distance between neighboring frames. The result of the subjective preference test indicates that the proposed method produces performance superior to that of the conventional SOLA method, especially for very fast playback case.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.97-105
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• 2008

Nowadays an HMM-based text-to-speech system (HTS) has been very widely studied because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for embedded systems in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech one. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics and the speaking rate of the synthetic speech can be converted easily by modifying HMM parameters appropriately. We implemented an HMM-based Korean text-to-speech system using a small size Korean speech DB and proposes a method to increase the naturalness of the synthetic speech by controlling duration model parameters in the HMM-based Korean text-to speech system. We performed a paired comparison test to verify that theses techniques are effective. The test result with the preference scores of 73.8% has shown the improvement of the naturalness of the synthetic speech through controlling the duration model parameters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.67-74
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• 2017

An increase in speech intelligibility has been found in Clear Speech compared to conversational speech. Clear Speech is defined by decreased articulation rates and increased frequency and length of pauses. The objective of the present study was to investigate improvement in immediate speech intelligibility in 10 patients with Parkinson's disease (age range: 46 to 75 years) using Clear Speech. This experiment has been performed using the Phonatory Aerodynamic System 6600 after the participants read the first sentence of a Sanchaek passage and the "List for Adults 1" in the Sentence Recognition Test (SRT) using casual speech and Clear Speech. Acoustic and aerodynamic parameters that affect speech intelligibility were measured, including mean F0, F0 range, intensity, speaking rate, mean airflow rate, and respiratory rate. In the Sanchaek passage, use of Clear Speech resulted in significant differences in mean F0, F0 range, speaking rate, and respiratory rate, compared with the use of casual speech. In the SRT list, significant differences were seen in mean F0, F0 range, and speaking rate. Based on these findings, it is claimed that speech intelligibility can be affected by adjusting breathing and tone in Clear Speech. Future studies should identify the benefits of Clear Speech through auditory-perceptual studies and evaluate programs that use Clear Speech to increase intelligibility.