• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1993 no.11
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• pp.171-174
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• 1993

We propose the vocal tract area function as the feature vector of speech recognition. Vocal tract area function is directly related to speech production. The vocal tract area function is not only showing mechanism of speech production but also can be used as an effective feature vector in speech, recognition in this study.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.345-352
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• 1995

The LPC cepstrum coefficients, which are an acoustic features of speech signal, have been widely used as the feature parameter for various speech recognition systems and showed good performance. The vocal tract area function is a kind of articulatory feature, which is related with the physiological mechanism of speech production. This paper proposes the vocal tract area function as an alternative feature parameter for speech recognition. The linear predictive analysis using Burg algorithm and the vector quantization are performed. Then, recognition experiments for 5 Korean vowels and 10 digits are executed using the conventional LPC cepstrum coefficients and the vocal tract area function. The recognitions using the area function showed the slightly better results than those using the conventional LPC cepstrum coefficients.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.375-380
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• 2005

Furlow palatoplasty has been favored by many plastic surgeons as the primary treatment for the velopharyngeal insufficiency associated with submucous cleft palate. The purpose of this article is to introduce an efficacy of Furlow palatoplasty and speech therapy performed on patients who were diagnosed belatedly as having submucous cleft palates. From 2002 to 2004, four submucous cleft palate patients over 5 years of age with velopharyngeal insufficiency received Furlow palatoplasty. The patients were evaluated through the preoperative perceptual speech assessment, nasometry, and videonasopharyngoscopy. Postoperatively, two patients achieved competent velopharyngeal function in running speech. One of the remaining two could achieve competent velopharyngeal function with visual biofeedback speech therapy and the other could not use her new velopharyngeal function in running speech because of her age. Speech therapy can correct the articulation errors and thus improve the velopharyngeal function to a certain extent by eliminating some compensatory articulations that might have an adverse influence on velopharyngeal function. This study shows that Furlow palatoplasty can successfully correct the velopharyngeal insufficiency in submucous cleft palate patients and speech therapy has a role in reinforcing surgical result. But age is still a restrictive factor even though surgery was well done.

• The Journal of Korean Physical Therapy
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.29-34
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• 2012

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the difference between respiratory function and speech production, according to the seat surface inclination while in the sitting position. Methods: Respiratory function (FVC, FEV1) and speech production (inspiratory frequency, unit reading time, paragraph reading time) were measured in 3 sitting conditions: horizontal seat surface, seat surface tilted forward 15 degrees, and seat surface tilted backward 15 degrees. Results: We found that the mean values of FVC and FEV1 were statistically significant different according to three types of sitting positions (p<0.05). The following result was observed: forward tilted sitting > horizontal sitting > backward tilted sitting. There was no significant difference in speech production between the different positions. Respiratory function and speech production had a significantly negative correlation in the forward tilted condition and the backward tilted condition. Conclusion: This finding suggests that the seat surface inclination have an effect on respiratory function. Especially, forward tilted sitting may be an effective posture that may help increases the respiratory function.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1793-1801
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• 2016

Speech enhancement is a challenging problem due to the diversity of noise sources and their effects in different applications. The goal of speech enhancement is to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech by reducing noise. Many research works in speech enhancement have been accomplished in English and other European Languages. There has been limited or no such works or efforts in the past in the context of Tamil speech enhancement in the literature. The aim of the proposed method is to reduce the background noise present in the Tamil speech signal by using wavelets. New modified thresholding function is introduced. The proposed method is evaluated on several speakers and under various noise conditions including White Gaussian noise, Babble noise and Car noise. The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) results show that the proposed thresholding function improves the speech enhancement compared to the conventional hard and soft thresholding methods.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.81-89
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• 1998

This paper investigates the phatic function of intonation in Russian by recording and analysing 11 female native speakers of standard Moscow Russian. This paper shows that differences in intonation pattern of a sentence are associated with differences in degree of listener's involvement in the speech. Intonation pattern of an utterance having phatic function appears to be determined by 1) the speaker's readiness to talk to evoke the listener's attention ; 2) the speaker's intention to continue the communication. Some emphasis is placed on the relationship between intonation pattern of an utterance and speaker-listener interaction.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.153-163
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• 2015

This study investigated the trends of mobile applications which were developed for prompting speech and language skills for children with disabilities, and analyzed the function and contents of these applications as a tool of speech and language therapy. For this analysis, twenty applications among 71 ones were selected according to the exclusion criteria. These applications were classified by the 8 using types of contents and analyzed the function of mobile applications by the revised mobile contents evaluation standard (ease of use, value of education, interest level, and interactivity). As a results, applications for augmentative and alternative communication were developed much more than any other types. And the ease of use got the highest score whereas the interest level got the lowest score in whole evaluation analysis. The result of this study would suggest way to evaluate applications for speech language therapy and to contribute to developing the contents and function of mobile applications aims to help children with disabilities improving their speech and language skills.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.82-94
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• 2021

In this work, six voiced/unvoiced speech classifiers based on the autocorrelation function (ACF), average magnitude difference function (AMDF), cepstrum, weighted ACF (WACF), zero crossing rate and energy of the signal (ZCR-E), and neural networks (NNs) have been simulated and implemented in real time using the TMS320C6713 DSP starter kit. These speech classifiers have been integrated into a linear-predictive-coding-based speech analysis-synthesis system and their performance has been compared in terms of the percentage of the voiced/unvoiced classification accuracy, speech quality, and computation time. The results of the percentage of the voiced/unvoiced classification accuracy and speech quality show that the NN-based speech classifier performs better than the ACF-, AMDF-, cepstrum-, WACF- and ZCR-E-based speech classifiers for both clean and noisy environments. The computation time results show that the AMDF-based speech classifier is computationally simple, and thus its computation time is less than that of other speech classifiers, while that of the NN-based speech classifier is greater compared with other classifiers.

• Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.483-488
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• 2006

Velopharyngeal function refers to the combined activity of the soft palate and pharynx in closing and opening the velopharyngeal port to the required degree. In normal speech, various muscles of palate & pharynx function as sphincter and occlude the oropharynx from the nasopharynx during the production of oral consonant sounds. Inadequate velopharyngeal function caused by neurologic disorder - cerebral apoplexy, regressive diseases - disseminated sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, congenital deformity - cleft palate, cerebral palsy and etc. may result in abnormal speech characterized by hypernasality, nasal emission and decreased intelligibility of speech due to weak consonant production. In our study, we constructed speech aids prosthesis - Speech bulb in the incomplete cleft palate VPI patient with hypernasality and assessed velopharyngeal function with nasometer which can evaluate the speech characteristics objectively.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.425-434
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• 2016

A novel average magnitude difference function (AMDF)-based pitch detection scheme (PDS) is proposed to achieve better performance in speech quality. A performance evaluation of the proposed PDS is carried out through both a simulation and a real-time implementation of a speech analysis-synthesis system. The parameters used to compare the performance of the proposed PDS with that of PDSs that are based on either a cepstrum, an autocorrelation function (ACF), an AMDF, or circular AMDF (CAMDF) methods are as follows: percentage gross pitch error (%GPE); a subjective listening test; an objective speech quality assessment; a speech intelligibility test; a synthesized speech waveform; computation time; and memory consumption. The proposed PDS results in lower %GPE and better synthesized speech quality and intelligibility for different speech signals as compared to the cepstrum-, ACF-, AMDF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. The computational time of the proposed PDS is also less than that for the cepstrum-, ACF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. Moreover, the total memory consumed by the proposed PDS is less than that for the ACF- and cepstrum-based PDSs.