• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.29-38
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• 2015

This study explores reading fluency among elementary school students considering language level and family income(low SES). Forty eight students from 1st to 3rd grades participated in two paragraph reading tasks. Half of the children were from low income family and half of the children had low lexical knowledge. Reading fluency as in the number of correctly read syllables per minute, the total error frequency and error types were used to compare group differences. There were significant differences in the number of correctly read syllables per minute between two income groups and two language groups. There was a significant difference between low income group and non-low income group in total number of errors only when children's lexical knowledge were low. There were no group differences in error types of repetition and omission. Substitution and insertion error seemed to reflect the total error pattern. These results imply the importance of early screening and early involvement for children with low lexical knowledge from low income family. Monitoring and early intervention will support these children's reading development.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.52-64
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• 1993

This paper aims to explore the rhythmic phenomena of standard Korean by an experimental phonetic method. A total of 16 informants taking part in this experiment were divided into four groups : old males(OM) and old females(OF) in their fifties and young males(YM) and young females(YF) in their twenties. The informants were asked to read speech data consisting of two rhythmic units, each of which began with a stressed syllable with a long wowel. Starting with the frame / 'ma:1 'ma:nta /, the first rhythmic unit was expanded up to five syllables in all while keeping the second rhythmic unit constant with a view to investigate the pattern of increase in the interstress time interval. The results of this study are as follows: 1. There is a considerable difference between yen and old generations with respect to the duration of interstress interval . The young generation tends to speak faster than the old generation. This observation is supported by difference in the interstress intervals as exhibited by OM(389.66), OF(473), YM(275.55), YF(285.83) in the test frame '말 많다' ['ma:1 'ma:nta]. 2. Young and old generations showed a different tendency in the increase rate of duration between mono-syllables and polysyllables. In other words, the rhythm of young generation shows the tendency of syllable-timed language whereas that of old generation clearly leans towards the stressed-timed language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.123-131
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the comprehension and production of various tense markings in Korean-speaking children with and without language delay. Thirty children with language delay(LD) and 30 typically developing(TD) children participated in the study. In each group, half were at the age of 4-years and the other half at 7-years. In both the comprehension and production task, 28 verbs containing four types of tense markings were used: past tense '-et ta', two present progressives '-ko itta', '-enta', and future tense '-elyeko hanta'. In the comprehension task, the children were presented with three printed still-scenes of video recording of a verb action, each representing future, present progressive, and past tense of the verb, respectively. Then they listened to the action verb with one of the 4 tense markings and had to pick the scene that matched the verb tense. In the production task, the children were given one of the three scenes and asked to produce the verb with appropriate tense marking. In both tasks, the LD children performed significantly worse than the TD children, and the older children performed significantly better than the younger children. Interestingly, the pattern of performances across different types of tense markings at the two language-age levels were closely similar in LD children and TD children. This similarity of groups seemed stronger in the comprehension task than the production task.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.55-81
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• 1997

In the present paper, V-to-V coarticulation in Korean VCV sequences is discussed, focusing on links between consonantal production and degree of V-to-V coarticulation. Temporal and spatial differences between three types of Korean alveolar stops (lax /t/. aspirated /$t^h$/ and thense /t'/) are examined from VCV sequences involving all possible combinations of three Korean unrounded vowels /a, i,/ based on spectrographic and electrographic data(two male speakers and one female speaker and one female speaker respectively). Closure duration and voice onset time (VOT) were measured from acoustic data. 'Total duration', which is defined as the sum of the closure duration and the VOT, was also calculated in order to see the temporal distance between two vowels in a VCV sequence. Differences in lingual-palatal contact pattern at the maximum contact (MC) point between the three types of stop were observed from EPG data. V-to-V coarticulation was investigated by measuring the offset or onset of the second formant (F2) of the target vowels from spectrograms. Two different dimensions of articulation, temporal and spatial, seem to playa role in determining the degree of V-to-V coarticulation. The degree of V-to-V anticipatory coarticulation is influenced by the spatial characteristics of the intervening consonant while the degree of carryover coarticulation is influenced by the temporal characteristics of the consonant.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.1-12
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• 1998

This study aims to investigate the prosodic characteristics of Korean discourse sentences, especially focusing the initial and final part of a sentence. 50 disourse sentences were read in two different styles; one, sentence by sentence, the other, continuous of all 50's. First, we tried to get two kinds of ratios from the acoustic results: first, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in first word in a sentence; second, ratio of the final syllable to the initial syllable in last word in a sentence. We, then, calculated statistical values of the ratios including mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and p-values in t-test. With respect to duration, there were little difference between two different styles. If any, we could see tiny unharmonious durational aspect in the initial of continuous reading. More concisely, there could be observed some deviation from standard. In case of F0, there was prominent statistical difference between ratios of last words in two styles. This difference might play a role as a prosodic feature. Energy seems to show similar pattern with that of F0. The results showed that final syllable in last word was pronounced with about 85 % of initial syllable in the same context and the last words in continuous speech were strongly articulated compared with those of sentence by sentence reading.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.647-652
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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.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.127-136
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• 2024

The Korean language has written (formal) and spoken (phonetic) forms that differ in their application, which can lead to confusion, especially when dealing with numbers and embedded Western words and phrases. This fact makes it difficult to automate Korean speech recognition models due to the need for a complete transcription training dataset. Because such datasets are frequently constructed using broadcast audio and their accompanying transcriptions, they do not follow a discrete rule-based matching pattern. Furthermore, these mismatches are exacerbated over time due to changing tacit policies. To mitigate this problem, we introduce a data-driven Korean spoken-to-written transcription conversion technique that enhances the automatic conversion of numbers and Western phrases to improve automatic translation model performance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.567-575
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• 2001

This paper suggests new method to get fixed size parameter from different length of voice signals. The efficiency of speech recognizer is determined by how to compare the similarity(distance of each pattern) of the parameter from voice signal. But the variation of voice signal and the difference of speech speed make it difficult to extract the fixed size parameter from the voice signal. The method suggested in this paper is to normalize the parameter at fixed size by using the 2 dimension DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform) after representing the parameter by spectrogram. To prove validity of the suggested method, parameter extracted from 32 auditory filter-bank(it estimates auditory nerve firing probabilities) is used for the input of neural network after being processed by 2 dimension DCT. And to compare with conventional methods, we used one of conventional methods which solve time alignment problem. The result shows more efficient performance and faster recognition speed in the speaker dependent and independent isolated word recognition than conventional method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.66-76
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• 1990

In this work, the effect of noise and distortion of a telephone channel on the speech recognition is studied, and methods to improve the recognition rate are proposed. Computer simulation is done using the 100-word test data whichwere made by pronouncing ten times 100-phonetically balanced Korean isolated words in a speaker dependent mode. First, a spectral subtraction method is suggested to improve the noisy speech recognition. Then, the effect of bandwidth limiting and channel distortion is studied. It has been found that bandwidth limiting and amplitude distortion lower the recognition rate significantly, but phase distortion affects little. To reduce the channel effect, we modify the reference pattern according to some training data. When both channel noise and distortion exist, the recognition rate without the proposed method is merely 7.7~26.4%, but the recognition rate with the proposed method is drastically increased to 76.2~92.3%.