• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.33-38
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• 2007

Background and Objectives: It has been suggested that tonsillectomy possibly causes changes of voice because the morphology of the vocal tract is altered. This may cause serious problems for professional voice users. Materials and Method: Subjects were 26 patients. The oral and nasal sound spectrum of oral vowel /a/, /e/ and /i/ were measured before and after tonsillectomy. The formant frequencies and intensities for oral and nasal spectra were compared. The nasality and fundamental frequencies for oral vowel were measured. Results: The first formant frequencies for oral spectra of all vowels were not changed after surgery, but the second formant frequencies were increased significantly after surgery in the vowel /e/ and /i/. The first and second formant intensities for oral spectra were increased significantly after surgery in the all vowels. The first and second formant frequencies for nasal spectra of all vowels were not changed after surgery, but their intensities for nasal spectra were increased after surgery. The nasalities for oral vowel were not changed after surgery. Conclusion : Tonsillectomy appeared to change the spectral features of oral and nasal components of oral vowel, especially spectral intensities.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.193-198
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• 2019

This study analyzed the changes of vowel formant, voice intensity, and fundamental frequency of vowels for 11 months using acoustochemical spectrogram analysis of women diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The test word was a vowel /a, i, u/ and a diphthong /h + ja + da/, /h + wi + da/, and /h +ɰi+ da/. Speech data were collected through the word reading task presented on the monitor using 'Alvin' program, and the recording environment was set to 5,500 Hz for the nyquist frequency and 11,000 Hz for the sampling rate. The records were analyzed by using spectrograms to vowel formants, voice intensity, and fundamental frequency. As a result of analysis, the fundamental frequency and intensity of the ALS process were decreased and the formant slope of the diphthong was decreased rather than the formant change in the vowel. This result suggests that the vowel distortion of ALS due to disease progression is due to the decrease of tongue and jaw co morbidity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.41-49
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, syllabic stress information, the location in a word, location in utterance, speech rate of three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants. The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The result indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.39-51
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• 2008

Formant measurements are one of the most important factors to objectively test cross-linguistic differences among vowels produced by speakers of any given languages. However, many speech analysis softwares present erroneous estimates and some researchers use them without any verification procedures. The purposes of this paper are to examine formant measurements of complex waves which were synthesized from the average formant values of five Korean vowels using three default methods in Praat and to verify the measured values of the five vowels produced by 20 students using one of the methods. Variances along the time axis are discussed after determining absolute difference sum from the 1/3 vowel duration point. Results show that there were smaller measurement errors by the burg method. Also, greater errors were observed in the sl or lpc methods mostly caused by the inappropriate formant settings. Formant measurement deviations were greater in those vowels produced by the female students than those of the male students, which were mostly attributed to the settings for the vowels /o, u/. Formant settings can best be corrected by changing the number of formants to the number of visible dark bands on the spectrogram. Those results suggest that researchers should check the validity of the estimates from the speech analysis software. Further studies are recommended on the perception test of the original sound with the synthesized sound by the estimated formant values.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.26-32
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• 2014

Mental fatigue is inevitable in the workplace. Since mental fatigue can lead to decreased efficiency and critical accidents, it is important to manage mental fatigue from the viewpoint of accident prevention. An experiment was performed to evaluate mental fatigue using the formant frequency analysis of human voices. The experimental task was to mentally add or subtract two one-digit numbers. After completing the tasks with four different levels of mental fatigue, subjects were asked to read Korean vowels and their voices were recorded. Five vowel sounds of "아", "어", "오", "우", and "이" from the voice recorded were then used to extract formant 1 frequency. Results of separate ANOVAs showed significant main effects of mental fatigue on formant 1 frequencies of all five vowels concerned. However, post-hoc comparisons revealed that formant 1 frequencies of "아" and "어" were most sensitive to mental fatigue level employed in this experiment. Formant 1 frequencies of "아" and "어" significantly decrease as the mental fatigue accumulates. The formant frequency extracted from human voice would be potentially applicable for detecting mental fatigue induced during industrial tasks.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.99-107
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers in order to better instruct pronunciation skills of English vowels for Korean English learners. A Praat script was developed to collect the first and second formant values(F1 and F2) of eight words in each sound file which was recorded from an internet speech archive. Then, the Euclidean distances were measured between the three vowel pairs: [i-ɛ], [i-ɪ], and [ɛ-æ]. The first vowel pair [i-ɛ] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel wih differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Secondly, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-ɪ] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [ɛ-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level. The author concluded that Korean speakers should produce the front high vowels distinctively by securing sufficient relative distance of the formant values. Further studies would be desirable to examine how strong the Korean speakers' English proficiency correlate with the relative distance of target words of comparable productions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.139-145
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• 2014

The paper describes methods of conducting vowel analysis from a large-scale corpus with the aids of forced alignment and optimal formant ceiling methods. 'Read Style Corpus of Standard Korean' is used for building the forced alignment system and a subset of the corpus for the processing and extraction of features for vowel analysis based on optimal formant ceiling. The results of the vowel analysis are reliable and comparable to the results obtained using traditional analytical methods. The findings indicate that the methods adopted for the analysis can be extended and be used for more fine-grained analysis without time-consuming manual labeling without losing accuracy and reliability.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2014

This study investigates twenty four Korean females' production of English front vowels focusing on the distinction in /i/ vs /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vs /${\ae}$/ and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels compared with those of native English speakers. The Korean learners were asked to read a textbook passage which includes ten sentences including target vowels. The major results indicate that: (1) Korean learners have trouble producing a distinct version (tense and lax) of front vowels in the paragraph reading; (2) The vowel space of the stressed vowels in a paragraph is smaller than that of embedded sentences; and (3) The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the Korean learners is similar to that of the native English speakers. The findings from this study can be applied to the pronunciation teaching for the Korean learners of English vowels and realization of English stress.