• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.57-67
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• 2019

This study aimed to investigate regional differences in the development of speech production in Korean children. A total of 619 children aged 2 to 7 years from the Jeolla, Seoul/Gyeonggi, Chungcheong, and Gyeongsang areas were included in this study. The subjects were assessed with the UTAP2 word-level test. In PWC, PMLU, and PWP, the performance was significantly lower in Gyeongsang at 2 years 11 months and in Jeolla and Chungcheong at 3 years 5 months than in Seoul/Gyeonggi. The total PCC of Gyeongsang and Chungcheong and UTAP PCC of Chungcheong were significantly lower at 2 years 11 months compared with those of Seoul/Gyeonggi, while Jeolla and Chungcheong showed significantly lower total PCC and UTAP PCC than Seoul/Gyeonggi at 3 years 5 months. However, no regional difference was observed in any indicators after the age of 3 years 6 months. These results suggest that there are regional differences in the ability to produce speech sounds at a very young age, and that the differences can be explained by the differences between Seoul/Gyeonggi and the other provinces rather than by the individual characteristics of specific regions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.85-96
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of articulatory intervention using visual phonics to improve the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing. The subjects of the study were five hearing impaired children. As per the results of the UTAP articulation tests, five phonemes with the most frequent errors were selected for each child and a total of 10 sessions were provided. The methodology involved analyzing vowel space and related measures (vowel space area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, and F2i/F2u ratio) before and after the visual phonics intervention. After the articulation intervention, every child's speech intelligibility improved, their vowel space area was widened, the FCR value decreased, and the F2ratio value increased. These results show that the use of visual phonics through symbolic images and hand clues has a positive effect in terms of improving the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.85-95
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• 2020

Sentence repetition is a way of evaluating speech sound production to improve the limitation of word tests and spontaneous speech analysis. Speech sounds produced by children can be evaluated using several indicators. This study examined the progression of the percentage of correct consonants-revised (PCC-R) and phonological whole-word measure in different age and gender groups after setting consonants in various vowel contexts and implementing sentence repetition tasks that were designed to give all phonemes the chance to appear at least three times. For this study, 11 sentence repetition tasks were applied to 535 children aged 3 to 7 across the country, after which the resulting PCC-R and whole-word measure were analyzed. The study results showed that all the indicators improved in older age groups and there were significant differences depending on age, however, no significant differences dependent on gender were found. The sentence repetition conditions data used in this study were collected from across the country, and the age difference between each age group was six months. This study is noteworthy because it collected a sufficient amount of data from each group, highlighted the limitation of the word naming and the spontaneous speech analysis, and suggests new criteria of evaluation through the analysis of each whole-word measure in sentence repetition, which was not applied in previous studies.