• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.297-307
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• 2007

This study investigated relationships between engagement in joint attention and the early language development in infancy. Subjects were 12 infants and their mothers. At 20 and 25 months of age, each child's spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her caregiver was videotaped for about 30 minutes. The EJA(Episodes of joint attention) focus between mother and child were identified and coded by Tomasello and Todd's(1983) and Bakeman and Adamson's(1984) including person engagement, object engagement, looking engagement, passive joint attention, coordinated joint attention. Results showed that a significant difference in infant's language development between within and outside EJA at 20 and 25 months of age; that is, during periods of EJA children talked more inside than outside EJA.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.48-58
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• 2024

This paper presents the development of language tutoring systems for nonnative speakers by leveraging advanced end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) and proficiency evaluation. Given the frequent errors in non-native speech, high-performance spontaneous speech recognition must be applied. Our systems accurately evaluate pronunciation and speaking fluency and provide feedback on errors by relying on precise transcriptions. End-to-end ASR is implemented and enhanced by using diverse non-native speaker speech data for model training. For performance enhancement, we combine semisupervised and transfer learning techniques using labeled and unlabeled speech data. Automatic proficiency evaluation is performed by a model trained to maximize the statistical correlation between the fluency score manually determined by a human expert and a calculated fluency score. We developed an English tutoring system for Korean elementary students called EBS AI Peng-Talk and a Korean tutoring system for foreigners called KSI Korean AI Tutor. Both systems were deployed by South Korean government agencies.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.7 no.4 s.17
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• pp.49-60
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• 1998

The first aim of this paper is to investigate and analyze Alan Colquhoun's architectural hermeneutics of tradition, 'conceptual displacement of the past.' The second aim is to overcome the limit of it, and to suggest new architectural hermeneutics of tradition, 'the reactivation of the past.' The architectural work is reduced by Colquhoun to typology or arbitrary language because he believes that without arbitrary language natural language is not able to work effectively. However, he ignores that two languages cannot be separable. When they are separated the key to natural language is understood to be an unverifiable similarity between a sense perception and its correspondence in the architectural object, while the key to arbitrary language becomes mere artificial agreement on the value and function of the linguistic sign. Therefore, natural language is appropriate only when it permits spontaneous combinations of sensory data within complex structures which emerge from, and support, complex human interaction and communication(the shining of the world and of the possibility of creative being in each individual thing). Only when architecture is translated into this kind of language, can it reactivate the world's past, and become poetic.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.65-77
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• 2003

This study was aimed at clarifying the effects of sibling-involved .language intervention in children with language disorders. Ten subjects were selected and assigned into two groups (language intervention group with sibling-involvement, and language intervention without sibling-involvement). Group 1 consisted of 5 children with language disorders. Group 2 consisted of 5 children with language disorders without sibling-involvement. To investigate the language and communication ability, Picture Vocabulary Test and the subjects's spontaneous speech sample were analyzed. To compare pre-treatment with post-treatment between two the groups, repeated-measures ANOVA and t-test were used. The results were as follows; First, the language intervention with sibling-involvement was not effective compared to without sibling-involvement in improving the picture vocabulary ability of children with language disorders. There was a significant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the picture vocabulary ability of the two .groups. However, there was no significant difference in the post-treatment between the two groups. Second, the language intervention with sibling-involvement was more effective compared to without sibling-involvement in improving the semantic aspects of language of children with language disorders. There was a significant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the number of semantic relations between the two groups in that group 1 showed a higher improvement than group 2. Third, the language intervention with sibling involvement was more effective in improving pragmatic aspects of language of children with language disorders. There was a significant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the number of communicative intentions of the two groups. And there was a significant difference in the post-treatment between the groups in that group 1 showed a higher improvement than group 2.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.31-37
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• 2021

The fundamental frequency, or f0, is an important acoustic measure in the prosody of human speech. The current study examined the f0 distribution of a corpus of spontaneous speech in order to provide normative data for Korean speakers. The corpus consists of 40 speakers talking freely about their daily activities and their personal views. Praat scripts were created to collect f0 values, and a majority of obvious errors were corrected manually by watching and listening to the f0 contour on a narrow-band spectrogram. Statistical analyses of the f0 distribution were conducted using R. The results showed that the f0 values of all the Korean speakers were right-skewed, with a pointy distribution. The speakers produced spontaneous speech within a frequency range of 274 Hz (from 65 Hz to 339 Hz), excluding statistical outliers. The mode of the total f0 data was 102 Hz. The female f0 range, with a bimodal distribution, appeared wider than that of the male group. Regression analyses based on age and f0 values yielded negligible R-squared values. As the mode of an individual speaker could be predicted from the median, either the median or mode could serve as a good reference for the individual f0 range. Finally, an analysis of the continuous f0 points of intonational phrases revealed that the initial and final segments of the phrases yielded several f0 measurement errors. From these results, we conclude that an examination of a spontaneous speech corpus can provide linguists with useful measures to generalize acoustic properties of f0 variability in a language by an individual or groups. Further studies would be desirable of the use of statistical measures to secure reliable f0 values of individual speakers.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.179-188
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• 2007

We propose a multi-strategic concept-spotting approach for robust spoken language understanding of conversational Korean in a hostile recognition environment such as in-car navigation and telebanking services. Our concept-spotting method adopts a partial semantic understanding strategy within a given specific domain since the method tries to directly extract predefined meaning representation slot values from spoken language inputs. In spite of partial understanding, we can efficiently acquire the necessary information to compose interesting applications because the meaning representation slots are properly designed for specific domain-oriented understanding tasks. We also propose a multi-strategic method based on this concept-spotting approach such as a voting method. We present experiments conducted to verify the feasibility of these methods using a variety of spoken Korean data.

• 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.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.75-82
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• 2021

Speech and language functions are highly cognitive and human-specific features. The underlying causes of normal speech and language function are believed to reside in the human brain. Developmental persistent stuttering, a speech and language disorder, has been regarded as the most challenging disorder in determining genetic causes because of the high percentage of spontaneous recovery in stutters. This mysterious characteristic hinders speech pathologists from discriminating recovered stutters from completely normal individuals. Over the last several decades, several genetic approaches have been used to identify the genetic causes of stuttering, and remarkable progress has been made in genome-wide linkage analysis followed by gene sequencing. So far, four genes, namely GNPTAB, GNPTG, NAGPA, and AP4E1, are known to cause stuttering. Furthermore, thegeneration of mouse models of stuttering and morphometry analysis has created new ways for researchers to identify brain regions that participate in human speech function and to understand the neuropathology of stuttering. In this review, we aimed to investigate previous progress, challenges, and future perspectives in understanding the genetics and neuropathology underlying persistent developmental stuttering.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.425-455
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• 2012

Multi-dimensional verbal short-term memory mechanisms are largely divided into the phonological channel and the lexical-semantic channel. The former is called phonological short-term memory and the latter is called semantic short-term memory. Phonological short-term memory is further segmented into the phonological input buffer and the phonological output buffer. In this study, the language performance of each of three patients with similar levels of conduction aphasia was analyzed in terms of multi-dimensional verbal short-term memory. To this end, three patients with conduction aphasia were instructed to perform four different aspects of language tasks that are spontaneous speaking, repetition, spontaneous writing, and dictation in both word and sentence level. Moreover, the patients' phonological memories and semantic short-term memories were evaluated using digit span tests and verbal learning tests. As a result, the three subjects exhibited various types of performances and error responses in the four aspects of language tests, and the short-term memory tests also did not produce identical results. The language performance of three patients with conduction aphasia can be explained according to whether the defects occurred in the semantic short-term memory, phonological input buffer and/or phonological output buffer. In this study, the relations between language and multi-dimensional verbal short-term memory were discussed based on the results of language tests and short-term memory tests in patients with conduction aphasia.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.1
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• pp.129-157
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• 1995

I made a careful study of affective variables in foreign language learning Affective variables have not been adequately investigated in the study of second language acquisition. Egoism and inhibition are two egocentric factors which play important roles in foreign language learning. Three sociocultural variables. cultural factors, introversion / extroversion, and aggression may be keys to understanding the social nature of second language learning. And the emerging of cognition and affect in "cognitive styles", which vary within and among individuals, might account for varying degree of success in learning a second language. In the process of learning English. the students new to foreign language come to face the language barrier. though they express the deep interest and feel excited at the beginning stage. Of course, the several reasons can explain this fact. but more specially they can be explained in terms of such personal affective factors as age, aptitude, personality, and first of all, motivation. Also the socicultural factors between language and culture can be considered to the learner's aptitude toward the language. Affective factors of students are involved in personality. and personality and affective factors affect English learning. Affective variables of students affect the will to take part in English learning, and the rate of participation in English learning affect the fluency. If students feel inconvenience in English class, it is rarely that they run a risk. Students who do not run a risk in English class are short of spontaneous participation Consequently, it may have negative influence on the accuracy and the fluency of English. Therefore, teachers must be more influential in motivating students and specially attentive so that the students may not make the negative and inhibitive language learning attitude.