• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.95-102
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of the phonological discrimination ability and phonological working memory of 10 typically developing children aged 4, and 10 other children with Specific Language Impairments whose language age is similar. In orders to compare their phonological discrimination ability among phonological awareness, discrimination tasks were conducted at the syllable and phoneme levels. Also, in order to compare their phonological working memory, the subjects repeated nonsense syllables. The research results may be summarized as follows: First, the children with Specific Language Impairments demonstrated a lower performance than the typically developing children in phonological discrimination ability at both syllable and phoneme levels, and the difference between the groups was statistically significant. Second, the children with Specific Language Impairments exhibited a lower phonological working memory performance in all syllables compared with normal children. Although there was no significant difference in 2 and 3 syllables, a significant difference appeared as the length of the syllables became longer from 4 to 6 syllables. It is deemed necessary to conduct research into qualitative and quantitative differences through an formal assessment of the phonological awareness and phonological working memory of children with Specific Language Impairments.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.24-30
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• 2001

This article is concerned with automatic segmentation for Korean speech signals. All kinds of transition cases of phonetic units are classified into 3 types and different strategies for each type are applied. The type 1 is the discrimination of silence, voiced-speech and unvoiced-speech. The histogram analysis of each indicators which consists of wavelet coefficients and SVF (Spectral Variation Function) in wavelet coefficients are used for type 1 segmentation. The type 2 is the discrimination of adjacent vowels. The vowel transition cases can be characterized by spectrogram. Given phonetic transcription and transition pattern spectrogram, the speech signal, having consecutive vowels, are automatically segmented by the template matching. The type 3 is the discrimination of vowel and voiced-consonants. The smoothed short-time RMS energy of Wavelet low pass component and SVF in cepstral coefficients are adopted for type 3 segmentation. The experiment is performed for 342 words utterance set. The speech data are gathered from 6 speakers. The result shows the validity of the method.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.1255-1258
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• 1998

Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is the most widely used method in speech recognition. In general, HMM parameters are trained to have maximum likelihood (ML) for training data. This method doesn't take account of discrimination to other words. To complement this problem, this paper proposes a word verification method by re-recognition of the recognized word and its similar word using the discriminative function between two words. The similar word is selected by calculating the probability of other words to each HMM. The recognizer haveing discrimination to each word is realized using the weighting to each state and the weighting is calculated by genetic algorithm.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2004

In this paper we examined the effect of normalization on discriminating the pathological voice into normal and abnormal classes using artificial neural network. Average values per each parameter were used to normalize each set of parameter values. Artificial neural networks were used as classifiers. And the effect of normalization was evaluated by comparing the discrimination results between original and normalized parameter sets.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.177-184
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• 2005

In this paper, we proposed a new hearing aid algorithm to improve SNR(signal to noise ratio) of noisy speech signal and speech perception. The proposed hearing aid algorithm is a multi-band loudness compensation based independent component analysis (ICA). The proposed algorithm was compared with a conventional spectral subtraction algorithm on behind-the-ear type hearing aid. The proposed algorithm successfully separated a target speech signal from background noise and from a mixture of the speech signals. The algorithms were compared each other by means of SNR. The average improvement of SNR by ICA based algorithm was 16.64dB, whereas spectral subtraction algorithm was 8.67dB. From the clinical tests, we concluded that our proposed algorithm would help hearing aid user to hear clearly a target speech in noisy conditions.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.25-39
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• 1998

This paper deals with fuzzy correlation dimension for an appropriate speech recognition. The proposed fuzzy correlation dimension has absorbed time variation value of strange attractor as utilizing fuzzy membership function at calculation of integral correlation when the results of proposed dimension are applied to speech recognition fuzzed correlation dimension is superior to speech recognition, and correlation dimension is superior to speaker discrimination.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to scientifically examine Kuhl's (2011), originally Johnson and Newport's (1989) critical period graph, from a perspective of auditory perception and linguistic discrimination. This study utilizes two types of experiments (auditory perception and linguistic phoneme discrimination) with five different age groups (5 years, 6-8 years, 9-13 years, 15-17 years, and 20-26 years) of Korean English learners. Auditory perception is examined via ultrasonic sounds that are commonly used in the medical field. In addition, each group is measured in terms of their ability to discriminate minimal pairs in Chinese. Since almost all Korean students already have some amount of English exposure, the researchers selected phonemes in Chinese, an unexposed foreign language for all of the subject groups. The results are almost completely in accordance with Kuhl's critical period graph for auditory perception and linguistic discrimination; a sensitive age is found at 8. The results show that the auditory capability of kindergarten children is significantly better than that of other students, measured by their ability to perceive ultrasonic sounds and to distinguish ten minimal pairs in Chinese. This finding strongly implies that human auditory ability is a key factor for the sensitive period of language acquisition.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.169-178
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• 2009

In this study, we suggest Korean nonlinear fitting formula (KNFF) to maximize speech intelligibility for digital hearing aids based on NAL-NL1 (NAL-nonlinear, version 1). KNFF was derived from the same procedure which is used for deriving NAL-NL1. KNFF consider the long-term average speech spectrum of Korean instead of English because the frequency characteristic of Korean is different from that of English. New insertion gains of KNFF were derived using the SII (speech intelligibility index) program provided by ANSI. In addition, the insertion gains were modified to maximize the intelligibility of high frequency words. To verify effect of the new fitting gain, we performed speech discrimination test (SDT) and preference test using the hearing loss simulator from NOISH. In the SDT, a word set as test material consists of 50 1-syllable word generally used in hearing clinic. As a result of the test, in case of moderate hearing loss with severe loss on high frequency, the SDT scores of KNFF was more improved about 3.2% than NAL-NLl and about 6% in case of the sever hearing loss. Finally we have obtained the result that it was the effective way to increase gain of mid-high frequency bands and to decrease gain of low frequency bands in order to maximize speech intelligibility of Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.285-293
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• 1997

This paper was constructed to investigate strange attractor in considering speech which is regarded as chaos in that the random signal appears in the deterministic raising system. This paper searches for the delay time from AR model power spectrum for constructing fit attractor for speech signal. As a result of applying Taken's embedding theory to the delay time, an exact correlation dimension solution is obtained. As a result of this consideration of speech, it is found that it has more speaker recognition characteristic parameter, and gains a large speaker discrimination recognition rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

We explored Dutch listeners' perception of Korean three-way contrast of fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. The three Korean stops are all voiceless word-initially, whereas Dutch distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, so Korean voiceless stops were expected to be difficult for the Dutch listeners. Among the three Korean stops, fortis stops are phonetically most similar to Dutch voiceless stops, thus they were expected to be the easiest to distinguish for the Dutch listeners. Dutch and Korean listeners carried out a discrimination task using three crucial comparisons, i.e., fortis-lenis, fortis-aspirated, and lenis-aspirated stops. Results showed that discrimination between lenis and aspirated stops was the most difficult among the three comparisons for both Dutch and Korean listeners. As expected, Dutch listeners discriminated fortis from the other stops relatively accurately. It seems likely that Dutch listeners relied heavily on VOT but less on F0 when discriminating between the three Korean stops.