• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.71-79
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• 2013

This study provided longitudinal examination of the Chinese learners' acquisition of the Korean vowels. Specifically the author examined whether Korean monophthongs are acquired rapidly in early stages of learning (Flege, Munro and Skelton, 1992; Munro and Derwing, 2008) or they develop rather gradually in proportion to the learners' experience (Byee, 2001; Ellis, 2006). This study collected the Korean vowel production by 23 Chinese learners for a year, and then analysed F1 and F2 of each Korean vowel. The results showed that 1) Most of the second language (L2) vowels were rapidly improved during the first six or nine months of Korean learning before reaching the constant stage; and 2) The exact acquisition trajectories varied across the seven vowels. Specifically the vowels which were acquired in the early stage of learning were /i, e, ɨ/ for F1 and /ʌ, e, o, u/ for F2. Thus this study supports the hypothesis of Flege et al. (1992) and Munro and Derwing (2008) except the fact that each vowel showed the different learning route.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.30B no.2
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• pp.51-58
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• 1993

This paper describes the development of a speaker-dependent isolated word recognizer as applied to voice dialing in a car noise environment. for this purpose, several methods to improve performance under such condition are evaluated using database collected in a small car moving at 100km/h The main features of the recognizer are as follow: The endpoint detection error can be reduced by using the magnitude of the signal which is inverse filtered by the AR model of the background noise, and it can be compensated by using variants of the DTW algorithm. To remove the noise, an autocorrelation subtraction method is used with the constraint that residual energy obtainable by linear predictive analysis should be positive. By using the noise rubust distance measure, distortion of the feature vector is minimized. The speech recognizer is implemented using the Motorola DSP56001(24-bit general purpose digital signal processor). The recognition database is composed of 50 Korean names spoken by 3 male speakers. The recognition error rate of the system is reduced to 4.3% using a single reference pattern for each word and 1.5% using 2 reference patterns for each word.

• MALSORI
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• no.67
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• pp.61-77
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to blow the characteristics of disfluency in childhood. The subjects were 144 normal children at the age of between 3 to 8 years who lived in Seoul. All the subjects provided spontaneous conversational speech samples during free-play interactions with their friends. We investigated the patterns and the frequency of disfluency and its relevance with subject's age, speaking rate and MLU(mean length of utterance). The results of this study can be summarized as follows. (1) There was no difference in the frequency of disfluency with the speaker's age or speaking rate. (2) Interjection was the most frequently occurring pattern of disfluency. (3) Prolongation, revision, interjection increased with age while part-word repetition, single-syllable word repetition, multi-syllable word repetition decreased gradually. (4) A significant effect of MLU on the frequency of disfluencies were demonstrated. The regression analysis has shown that more disfluencies occurred in utterances of children whose MLU is longer.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.274-277
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is 1) to describe the phoneme inventories of cochlear implant(CI) children and 2) to describe their utterances using narrow phonetic transcription method. All the subjects had more than 2 year-experience with CI and showed more than 87% open-set sentence perception abilities. Average consonant accuracy was 81.36% and it was improved up to 87.41% when distortion errors were not counted. They showed different error patterns from hearing aid users. The prominent error pattern was weakening of consonants.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.666-670
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• 2006

This paper presents the novel feature selection method for Emotion Recognition, which may include a lot of original features. Specially, the emotion recognition in this paper treated speech signal with emotion. The feature selection has some benefits on the pattern recognition performance and 'the curse of dimension'. Thus, We implemented a simulator called 'IFS' and those result was applied to a emotion recognition system(ERS), which was also implemented for this research. Our novel feature selection method was basically affected by Reinforcement Learning and since it needs responses from human user, it is called 'Interactive feature Selection'. From performing the IFS, we could get 3 best features and applied to ERS. Comparing those results with randomly selected feature set, The 3 best features were better than the randomly selected feature set.

• MALSORI
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• no.45
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• pp.15-22
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• 2003

This study is a kind of a preliminary study to develop naturalness of dialog TTS system. In this study, as major characteristics of politeness in Korean, temporal(total duration of utterances, speech rate and duration of utterance final syllables) and F0(mean F0, boundary tone pattern, F0 range) features were discussed through acoustic analysis of recorded data of semantically neutral sentences, which were spoken by ten professional voice actors under two conditions of utterance type - namely, normal and polite type. The results show that temporal characteristics were significantly different according to the utterance type but F0 characteristics were not.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.89-97
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• 2008

There is a number of clinical conditions that affect directly or indirectly the physical properties of the vocal folds and thereby the pressure waveforms of elicited sounds. If the relationships between the clinical conditions and the voice quality are sufficiently reliable, it should be possible to detect these diseases or disorders. The focus of this paper is to determine the set of features and their values that would characterize the speaker's state of vocal folds. To the extent that these features can capture the anatomical, physiological, and neurological aspects of the speaker they can be potentially used to mediate an unobtrusive approach to diagnosis. We will show a new approach to this problem supported with results obtained from two disordered voice corpora.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.51-57
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• 2017

The current study compared the acoustic features of the two phonation types for Korean fricatives (plain: /s/, fortis : /s'/) and the three types for affricates (aspirated : /$ts^h$/, lenis : /ts/, and fortis : /ts'/) in order to determine the phonetic status of the plain fricative /s/. Considering the different manners of articulation between fricatives and affricates, we examined four acoustic parameters (rise time, intensity, fundamental frequency, and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) values) of the 20 Korean native speakers' productions. The results showed that unlike Korean affricates, F0 cannot distinguish two fricatives, and voice quality (CPP values) only distinguishes phonation types of Korean fricatives and affricates by grouping non-fortis sibilants together. Therefore, based on the similarity found in /$ts^h$/ and /ts/ and the idiosyncratic pattern found in /s/, this research concludes that non-fortis fricative /s/ cannot be categorized as belonging to either phonation type.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.89-104
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• 2004

This paper investigates previous theories on English focus realization and attempts to find out the overall acoustic characteristics of English focus. It has been argued in previous studies that English focus can be defined as a new information that is not recoverable from the context (Halliday 1967), a complementary element of presupposition (Jackendoff 1972), and what is predicated about the topic in a sentence (Sgall 1973, Gundel 1974). The phonetic realization of English focus in an utterance has been said to be either L+H*/H*, or falling accent. Yet it is a more or less simplified pattern not based on real data obtained from native speakers of English, and it does not consider the various pragmatic and contextual situations. In our experiments we found that native speakers uttered English focus sentences in different ways according to the different focus structure. Another notable result is that Korean speakers, when provided with the same experimental material, are neither able to distinguish different focus types nor deaccent the elements that are not focused in an utterance.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.95-108
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• 1997

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate prosodic characteristics of English as spoken by Koreans. Test materials were four English words, a sentence, and a paragraph. Six female Korean speakers and five native English speakers participated in acoustic and perceptual experiments. Pitch and duration of word syllables were measured from signals and spectrograms made by the Signalize 3.04 software program for Power Mac 7200. In the perceptual experiment, accent position, intonation patterns, rhythm patterns and phrasing were evaluated by the five native English speakers. Preliminary results from this limited study show that prosodic characteristics of Koreans include (1) pitch on the first part of a word and sentence is lower than that of English speakers, but the pitch on the last part is the opposite; (2) word prosody is quite similar to that of an English speaker, but sentence prosody is quite different; (3) the weakest point of sentence prosody spoken by Koreans is in the rhythmic pattern.