• Korean Journal of Audiology
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.91-98
• /
• 2020

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to compare functional hearing with the use of a personal sound amplification product (PSAP) or a basic hearing aid (HA) among sensorineural hearing impaired listeners. Subjects and Methods: Nineteen participants with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) (26-55 dB HL; pure-tone average, 0.5-4 kHz) were prospectively included. No participants had prior experience with HAs or PSAPs. Audiograms, speech intelligibility in both quiet and noisy environments, speech quality, and preference were assessed in three different listening conditions: unaided, with the HA, and with the PSAP. Results: The use of PSAP was associated with significant improvement in pure-tone thresholds at 1, 2, and 4 kHz compared to the unaided condition (all p<0.01). In the quiet environment, speech intelligibility was significantly improved after wearing a PSAP compared to the unaided condition (p<0.001), and this improvement was better than the result obtained with the HA. The PSAP also demonstrated similar improvement in the most comfortable levels compared to those obtained with the HA (p<0.05). However, there was no significant improvement of speech intelligibility in a noisy environment when wearing the PSAP (p=0.160). There was no significant difference in the reported speech quality produced by either device or in participant preference for the PSAP or HA. Conclusions: The current result suggests that PSAPs provide considerable benefits to speech intelligibility in a quiet environment and can be a good alternative to compensate for mild-to-moderate SNHL.

• Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• /
• v.14 no.1_2
• /
• pp.22-39
• /
• 1992

The purpose of this study was to evaluate hypernasality, nasal air emission, glottal stop, articulation disorder in patients with velopharyngeal incompetency(V.P.I.) and to analyze speech improvement after pharyngoplasty. In this study 61 patients with velopharyngeal incompetency were tested, and in patents with pharyngoplasty speech problems before pharyngoplasty were compared with those after pharyngoplasty. The results obtained are as follows : 1. There are few speech problems in pronouncing the vowel sounds. 2. There are many speech problems in pronouncing the pressure sounds and few speech problems in non-pressure sounds. 3. Speech problems in patients with cleft palate are influenced not by anatomical defect but by severity of velopharyngeal incompetence after palatorrhaphy. 4. Operation methods which decrease the velopharygeal incompetence must be considered for reducing the speech problems. 5. Among the 61 cases with V.P.I. 19 cases(31%) showed nasal air emission and 24 cases(39%) showed glottal stop. 6. Pharyngoplasty is of benefit to primary precipitating components such as hypernasality, nasal air emission but of no benefit to secondary compensating component such as glottal stop. 7. There as no significant difference in speech improvement between pre-and post-pharyngoplasty(p<0.05).

• MALSORI
• /
• no.47
• /
• pp.121-129
• /
• 2003

This paper describes the use of pitch information for speaker identification. The recognition system is a GMM based one with 4 connected Korean digits speech database. The mean of the pitch period in voiced sections of speech are shown to be ,useful at discriminating between speakers. Utilizing this feature with Gaussian mixture model in the speaker identification system gave a marked improvement, maximum 6% improvement comparing to the baseline Gaussian mixture model.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.247-254
• /
• 2005

This study aimed at clarifing clinical effects of eight-step continuum treatment in a patient who showed apraxia of speech after stroke. The eight-step continuum treatment consisted of 8 steps and its clinical efficacy has been proven with American apraxic patients. However, it has not been clinically proven to be effective in Korean patients with apraxia of speech as of yet. Therefore, this study was conducted in an effort to provide preliminary clinical evidence regarding its effectiveness regardless of the linguistic differences between Korean and English. The therapy took place twice a week for 6 months, a total of 48 times. The results showed that the patient's receptive language was improved from 83% to 89% and 37% in accuracy, and expressive language from 15% to 37%. It seemed that spontaneous recovery did not playa role in his improvement since the study was conducted 2 years after the stroke. In addition, the improvement of expressive language was much greater(22%) than that of receptive language(6%), which implied that the therapy was effective in apraxia of speech because apraxia of speech is relatively confined to expressive ability, more specifically motor programming and sequencing.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.16 no.11
• /
• pp.335-340
• /
• 2018

Commercialized speech recognition systems that have an accuracy recognition rates are used a learning model from a type of speaker dependent isolated data. However, it has a problem that shows a decrease in the speech recognition performance according to the quantity of data in noise environments. In this paper, we proposed the vector quantization based speech recognition performance improvement using maximum log likelihood in Gaussian distribution. The proposed method is the best learning model configuration method for increasing the accuracy of speech recognition for similar speech using the vector quantization and Maximum Log Likelihood with speech characteristic extraction method. It is used a method of extracting a speech feature based on the hidden markov model. It can improve the accuracy of inaccurate speech model for speech models been produced at the existing system with the use of the proposed system may constitute a robust model for speech recognition. The proposed method shows the improved recognition accuracy in a speech recognition system.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2008

In this paper, a MSS-NOVO method that combines the HMM composition method with a noise reduction method is proposed for speech recognition in noisy environments. This combined method starts with noise reduction with modified spectral subtraction (MSS) to enhance the input noisy speech, then the noise and voice composition (NOVO) method is applied for making noise adapted models by using the noise in the non-utterance regions of the enhanced noisy speech. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we compare MSS-NOVO method with other methods, i.e., SS-NOVO, MWF-NOVO. To set up the noisy speech for test, we add White noise to KLE 452 database with different SNRs range from 0dB to 15dB, at 5dB intervals. From the tests, MSS-NOVO method shows average improvement of 66.5% and 13.6% compared with the existing SS-NOVO method and MWF-NOVO method, respectively. Especially our proposed MSS-NOVO method shows a big improvement at low SNRs.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.89-97
• /
• 2004

In this paper, an improved network echo canceller is proposed. The proposed echo canceller is based on the LTJ(lattice transversal joint) adaptive filter which uses informations from the speech decoder. In the proposed implementation method of the network echo canceller, the filer coefficients of the transversal filter part in the LTJ adaptive filter is updated every other sample instead of every sample. So its complexity can be lower than that of the transversal filter. And the echo cancellation rate can be improved by residual echo cancellation using the lattice predictor whose order is less than 10. Computational complexity of the proposed echo canceller is lower than that of the transversal filter but the convergence speed is faster than that of the transversal filter. The performance improvement of the proposed echo canceller was verified by the experiments using the real speech signal and speech coder.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
• /
• v.33 no.3
• /
• pp.308-312
• /
• 2006

Time to time, we face patients who missed the proper time for primary palatal repair. Although we do not have enough available documents, it is important to establish efficacy of palatal repair in patients more than 4 years old. From May 1995 to March 2005, we selected 14 patients who underwent palatal repair in more than 4 years old patients and they are able to tolerate speech articulation tests. Out of 14 patients 5 males an 9 females in sex, aged form 4 to 50 years old. 6 patients with incomplete cleft palate and 8 patients with submucous cleft palate. Double reversing Z-plasty(n=5), pushback palatoplasty(n=4), two flap palatoplasty(n=2), von Langenbeck palatoplasty(n=2), and intravelar veloplasty(n=1) were performed. Preoperative and postoperative speech articulation test, "Simple method of speech evaluation in Korean patients with cleft palate", were conducted. Satisfaction rate was sorted into 5 levels. There is no significant statistical correlation in the speech improvement, satisfaction rate, patients sex, cleft type and operative method. But there is significant statistical correlation between the speech improvement and patienet's age. There were better result in younger patient group than aged patients group.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.41 no.10
• /
• pp.1183-1185
• /
• 2016

Low bit-rate speech coder in digital speech communications synthesizes speech using vocal tract model parameters. In this case, the spectra of the synthesized speech can be much distorted since the allocated bits for the parameters are considerably limited, which results in the degradation of speech intelligibility. In this paper, we propose a speech intelligibility improvement method using stochastic spectral equalizer. This method stochastically obtains the weight vector of each speech coder using spectral ratios between original and synthesized speech, then applies this weight vector to synthesized speech. From the experiments of objective speech intelligibility tests, we found that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of the conventional method.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.144-148
• /
• 2006

The velopharyngeal dysfunction usually occurs in patients with previous operation of the cleft palate or with submucosal cleft palate. In case of velopharyngeal dysfunction without cleft palate, no study has been made when it comes to operative method and postoperative results. Here, we would like to present the operative methods and the postoperative results with the cases we've experienced. This study is based on seven cases of velopharyngeal dysfunction without cleft palate from 1999 to 2004. Analysis of age, sex, etiology, operative methods, satisfaction rate and speech evaluation was done. The patients were 3 males and 4 females, with an age ranged from 10 to 28 at the time of surgery. The follow-up period was more than six months. One case had bifid uvula, another had atypical anomaly in palate, and five cases had no anatomical abnormality. The palatal lengthening was done on one patient, the levator muscle repositioning on another patient and to the rest of them, the superiorly based posterior pharyngeal flap was done. It was difficult to determine the etiology of the velopharyngeal dysfunction without cleft palate. The speech improvement and the satisfaction rate of the patients and parents were diverse. Although the authors had a problem with statistical analysis between the operative age and the speech improvement, it was reasonable to perform a surgical operation because postoperative speech improvement was observed in most cases regardless of age. There is little statistical correlation, but significantly higher outcomes were observed in palatal lengthening and levator muscle repositioning than in pharyngeal flap.