• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권3호
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제8권4호
• /
• 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.

• 한국산학기술학회논문지
• /
• 제15권5호
• /
• pp.2930-2936
• /
• 2014

본 연구는 이완형 마비말장애군 15명과 정상군 15명을 대상으로 표준화된 문단 읽기 과제인 "가을" (김향희, 1996) 검사를 통해 말속도와 쉼 특성을 측정하여 집단 간 비교 분석하였다. 그 결과, 이완형 마비말장애군의 전체 속도 및 조음속도는 정상군보다 유의미하게 느렸으며, 전체 쉼 시간 및 문장 내 쉼 시간 또한 정상군보다 유의미하게 길었고, 전체 쉼빈도 및 문장 내 쉼 빈도 역시 정상군보다 유의미하게 높았다(p<0.05). 그러나 문장 간 쉼 구간과 쉼 빈도는 두 집단 간 유의한 차이가 없었다. 이러한 결과는 이완형 마비말장애인의 말속도 지표를 제공하고, 말속도를 정상 범주로 조절하기 위해서는 조음 속도를 증가시킬 뿐만 아니라, 문장 내 쉼 구간 및 쉼 빈도를 감소시키는 중재가 함께 이루어져야 한다는 것을 시사한다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제3권3호
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제12권3호
• /
• pp.95-103
• /
• 2020

본 연구의 목적은 경직형 뇌성마비 아동의 하위그룹별로 말속도와 쉼에서 차이가 있는지 살펴보고, 말명료도와의 관련성에 대해서 알아보고자 하였다. 연구대상은 경직형 뇌성마비 아동 26명이 참여하였다. 말문제와 언어문제가 없는 NSMI-LCT 4명, 말문제는 없지만 언어문제가 있는 NSMI-LCI 그룹 6명, 말문제가 있지만 언어문제는 없는 SMI-LCT 6명, 말과 언어문제를 모두 동반하는 SMI-LCI 그룹 10명이 참여하였다. 연구과제는 문장 따라말하기였고, Praat을 통해 말속도, 조음속도, 쉼 시간의 비율, 평균 쉼 횟수, 평균 쉼 시간을 측정하였다. 연구결과, 첫째, 말속도와 조음속도는 언어문제의 유무와 관계없이 NSMI와 SMI 그룹 간에 유의한 차이가 나타났다. 둘째, NSMI에 비해 SMI 그룹에서에서 쉼 시간의 비율은 더 높고, 쉼 횟수는 더 빈번하였으며 쉼 시간은 더 길게 나타났다. 셋째, 말속도와 조음속도는 말명료도와 유의한 상관을 나타내었다. 본 연구의 결과는 느린 말속도가 SMI 그룹의 말산출 과정에서 나타나는 주요한 특성이고, 말명료도에 있어서 조음속도와 말속도가 중요한 역할을 함을 시사한다.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제7권1호
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제2권4호
• /
• 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.

• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 대한전자공학회 2000년도 추계종합학술대회 논문집(4)
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제15권1호
• /
• 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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제7권1호
• /
• 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.