• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.273-284
• /
• 2000

The purpose of this study was to investigate speech rate and fluency in stuttering adults. It was suggested that a measurement guideline of speech rate and fluency for collecting clinically meaningful data be used. Subjects included 10 adults who stutter (mean age=25;8). Syllables were used as the unit of measurement for analyzing the duration of speech. The mean rate was 241 SPM (syllables per minute) for reading, and 196 SPM for spontaneous speaking. Fluency was also measured in both cases. The correlation between rate of speech and fluency was high (r=0.92). A strong positive correlation was found between different investigators in measuring speech rates and fluencies.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.115-122
• /
• 2016

This study investigates the acoustic-phonetic features and speech intelligibility of Lombard speech in children with intellectual disability, by examining the effect of Lombard speech at 3 levels of non-noise, 55dB, and 65dB. Eight children with intellectual disability read sentences and played speaking games, and their speech were analyzed in terms of intensity, pitch, vowel space of /a/, /i/, and /u/, VAI(3), articulation rate and speech intelligibility. Results showed, first, that intensity and pitch increased as noise level increased; second, that VAI(3) increased as the noise level increased; third, that articulation rate decreased as noise intensity increased; finally, that speech intelligibility increased as noise intensity increased. The Lombard speech changed the VAI(3), vowel space, articulation rate, speech intelligibility of the children with intellectual disability as well. This study suggests that the Lombard speech will be clinically useful for the persons who have intellectual disability and difficulties in self-control.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.2930-2936
• /
• 2014

The purposes of this study were to investigate the characteristics of speech rate and pause in patients with flaccid dysarthria. For this purpose, 15 patients with flaccid dysarthria and 15 normal speakers matched in gender and age participated as subjects. The overall speech rate, the articulation rate, the inter-sentence and the intra-sentence pause duration and pause frequency were measured during reading the standardized passage "Autumn"(Kim, 1996). As a result, the overall speech rate and articulation rate of patients with flaccid dysarthria were significantly slower than normal speakers and intra-sentence pause duration and frequency of patients with flaccid dysarthria were significantly higher than normal speakers, but those of inter-sentence weren't. The results from this study provides the speech rate index of flaccid dysarthria and indicates that to control the speech rate of flaccid dysarthria have regard to not only the overall speech rate and the articulation rate but also the intra-sentence pause duration and the frequency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.91-98
• /
• 2011

In this paper, a multi-channel speech enhancement method using the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) algorithm and a variable learning rate control is proposed. To control the learning rate for adaptive filters of the LCMV algorithm, the direction of arrival (DOA) is measured for each short-time input signal and the likelihood function of the target speech presence is estimated to control the filter learning rate. Using the likelihood measure, the learning rate is increased during the pure noise interval and decreased during the target speech interval. To optimize the parameter of the mapping function between the likelihood value and the corresponding learning rate, an exhaustive search is performed using the Bark's scale distortion (BSD) as the performance index. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional LCMV with fixed learning rate in the BSD by around 1.5 dB.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.95-103
• /
• 2020

The current study aimed to identify the characteristics of speech rate and pause in children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP) and their relationships with speech intelligibility. In all, 26 children with CP, 4 with no speech motor involvement and age-appropriate language ability (NSMI-LCT), 6 with no speech motor involvement and impaired language ability (NSMI-LCI), 6 with speech motor involvement and age-appropriate language ability (SMI- LCT), and 10 with speech motor involvement and impaired language ability (SMI-LCI) participated in the study. Speech samples for the speech rate and pause analysis were extracted using a sentence repetition task. Acoustic analysis were made in Praat. First, it was found that regardless of the presence of language impairment, significant group differences between the NSMI and SMI groups were found in speech rate and articulation rate. Second, the SMI groups showed a higher ratio of pause time to sentence production time, more frequent pauses, and longer durations of pauses than the NSMI groups. Lastly, there were significant correlations among speech rate, articulation rate, and intelligibility. These findings suggest that slow speech rate is the main feature in SMI groups, and that both speech rate and articulation rate play important roles in the intelligibility of children with spastic CP.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.17-29
• /
• 2000

The STC(Sinusoidal Transform Coding) is a vocoding technique that uses a sinusoidal speech model to obtain high- quality speech at low data rate. It models and synthesizes the speech signal with fundamental frequency and its harmonic elements in frequency domain. To reduce the data rate, it is necessary to represent the sinusoidal amplitudes and phases with as small number of peaks as possible while maintaining the speech quality. As a basic research to develop a low-rate speech coding algorithm using the sinusoidal model, in this paper, we investigate the speech quality depending on the number of sinusoids. By varying the number of spectral peaks from 5 to 40 speech signals are reconstructed, and then their qualities are evaluated using spectral envelope distortion measure and MOS(Mean Opinion Score). Two approaches are used to obtain the spectral peaks: one is a conventional STFT (Short-Time Fourier Transform), and the other is a multiresolutional analysis method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.4
• /
• pp.173-184
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate the speech rate characteristics (whole speech rate, articulation speech rate, and articulation percentage) and the pause characteristics (pause duration, pause frequency, and pause percentage) of Korean-speaking patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (referred to as IPD hereafter). The study aims first to examine the differences between the patient group with IPD and the other group without IPD concerning those measurements, and secondly to investigate the relevant measurements of the two groups following the sentence length changes. There were two groups of subjects in this study. The first group consisted of 7 subjects between the ages of 50 and 60 who were diagnosed as IPD with mild severity, and the second group consisted of 13 subjects without IPD who matched the age and gender of those in the first group. Those two groups were asked to read 8 different sentences in length at habitual speed. Speech rate and pause characteristics of the two groups were measured and compared each other. The followings results were observed. First, in a study of speech rate characteristics, the whole speech rate and the articulation speech rate of the patient group scored within the normal range, which is same as the group without IPD. On the other hand, with regard to the pause characteristics, differences between two groups were shown; the patient group had shorter pause duration, lower pause frequency, lower pause percentage, and higher articulation percentage. Secondly, in a study of relevant measurements following the sentence length, both groups showed a tendency for whole speech rate and articulation rate to increase as the length of the sentence increased, but the result of pause characteristics showed a difference between two groups. While the group without IPD showed a longer pause duration, higher pause frequency, and higher pause percentage as the length of sentences increases, no differences were shown among the patient group concerning the length of sentences. This study suggests a result that the patients with IPD of mild severity retained a normal speech rate and examined pause characteristics of the patient group which showed a different result from the group without IPD in terms of quality. Future studies on the speech rate and pause characteristics of Korean-speaking patients with IPD in various severities.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 2000.11d
• /
• pp.199-202
• /
• 2000

Speaking Rate has variety depends on the situation and habit of speakers. It has been many studied about speaking rate In speaker recognition. The study of speaking rate in speech recognition is one of considerable matter when It is recognized the speakers and it is measured by many speech data base and complicate estimation for accuracy. In this paper, conventional vocoder process the speech signal when encoding and transmitting without regard to speaking rate so in order to apply the speaking rate for vocoder It should be considered the simpler algorithm and less computation amount than the conventional method of speaking rate used In speech recognition. We proposed the speaking rate algorithm which is used the simple parameter with Line Spectrum Pair (LSP). The proposed peaking rate method is measured by the information of LSP in speech. We measured the variety rate of phenomenon about utterances which have different velocity, respectively. As a result, It has distinct variation rate of phenomenon between utterances uttered fast and slow and the rate is 42.8% higher in case of uttered fast than in case of uttered slow.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.47-54
• /
• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.27-37
• /
• 2015

This study was mainly aimed at investigating on the effects of background noises (i.e., white noise, multi-speaker conversational babble) on stuttering rate and other speech-related measures (i.e., articulation rate, speech effort). Nine Korean-speaking adults who stutter participated in the study. Each of the participants was asked to read a series of passages under each of four experimental conditions (i.e., typical solo reading (TR), choral reading (CR), reading under white noise presented (WR), reading with multi-speaker conversational babble presented (BR). Stuttering rate was computed based on a percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS) and articulation rate was also assessed as another speech-related measure under each of the experimental conditions. To examine the amount of physical effort needed to read, the speech effort was measured by using the 9-point Speech Effort Self Rating Scale originally employed by Ingham et al. (2006). Study results showed that there were no significant differences among each of the passage reading conditions in terms of stuttering rate, articulation rate, and speech effort. In conclusion, it can be argued that the two different types of background noises (i.e., white noise and multi-speaker conversational babble) are not different in the extent to which each of them enhances fluency of adults who stutter. Self ratings of speech effort may be also useful in measuring speech-related variables associated with vocal changes induced under each of the fluency enhancing conditions.