• 대한한방내과학회지
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• 제29권2호
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• pp.413-420
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• 2008

Objective : To investigate the therapeutic effect of scalp acupuncture on dysarthria after stroke. Methods : A-B model in single subject research. The experimental group of 7 members received scalp acupuncture and the control group of 5 nothing for dysarthria itself. Five single vowels were recorded by voice recorder and measured for 1st & 2nd formant. By the formants, a vowel space was made according to each one of the patients. Praat program was used for evaluation. Results : 4 cases in the experimental group showed significant change and just 1 case of the none-operated group got better. Conclusion : In this study, it's proven that acupuncture treatment might have positive efficacy on dysarthria cases. At this moment, more clinical reports are needed for objective oriental medical study.

• 대한후두음성언어의학회지
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.124-131
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• 2002

Speech characteristics of patients with cleft palates are resonance disorders, articulatory disorders and voice disorders. The purpose of this study is to find the acoustic, physiological and articulatory characteristics of cleft palate speakers. Thirteen control groups and 3 cleft palate patients participated in this experiment. Test words were composed of simple vowels and consonants imbedded in low vowel /a/, /p 'ap'i/ and /sasi/ according to the evaluation experiments. CSL, Video fluoroscopy, Fiberscope and Nasometer were used to analyze VOT, vowel formants, profiles of articulator, VP port images and nasalance. The results are as follows : (1) The nasalance of cleft palate patients in the high vowel /i/, stop sounds and fricative sounds were 60%, 34.8% and 44.1%, respectively. These values were higher than those of the control group. (2) Posterior articulatory movements /k'a/ in patients with cleft palates showed backward movement in comparison with the control group on Video Fluoroscopic images and palatograms. These results suggested that patients with cleft palate have the compensatory oral sounds to close the VP port. (3) The VOT in patients with cleft palates was longer than that of the control group.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.201-207
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• 2013

This study is a follow-up study of Han and Kang (2013) and Kang and Han (2013) which examined cross-generational changes in the Korean vowels /o/ and /u/ using acoustic analyses of the vowel formants of these two vowels, their Euclidean distances and the overlap fraction values generated in SOAM 2D (Wassink, 2006). Their results showed an on-going approximation of /o/ and /u/, more evident in female speakers and non-initial vowels. However, these studies employed non-words in a frame sentence. To see the extent to which these two vowels are merged in real words in spontaneous speech, we conducted an acoustic analysis of the formants of /o/ and /u/ produced by two age groups of female speakers while reading a letter sample. The results demonstrate that 1) the younger speakers employed mostly F2 but not F1 differences in the production of /o/ and /u/; 2) the Euclidean distance of these two vowels was shorter in non-initial than initial position, but there was no difference in Euclidean distance between the two age groups (20's vs. 40-50's); 3) overall, /o/ and /u/ were more overlapped in non-initial than initial position, but in non-initial position, younger speakers showed more congested distribution of the vowels than in older speakers.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.193-206
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• 2002

The aim of this study is to find out how the labiovelar onglide /w/ in English kwV sequences that have minimal pairs with kV sequences is pronounced differently among Korean EFL learners based on acoustic evidence. This study tries to identify /w/ sound in English kwV sequences through spectrograms and to examine the duration ratios of each segment in kwV words to compare the patterns of an English native speaker with those of Korean speakers of English. In spectrographic analyses, the complete deletion of /w/ and partial pronunciation of /w/ dubbed [$k^{w}$] were identified as well as the targetappropriate production of /w/. The general production patterns with respect to the duration ratios in English [kw] sequence words showed that the subjects who produced /w/ had similar ratio patterns that the native speaker had in that the vowel duration ratio in kwV sequences was shorter than that in kV sequences. By contrast, the subjects who deleted [w] had a long ratio of the onset [$k^{h}$] while the speaker with a partial pronunciation of /w/ had a long ratio of the following vowel.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제3권2호
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• pp.53-61
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• 2011

The present work is a follow-up study to that of Han, Choi, Lim and Lee (2011), where an asymmetry in the source segments eliciting the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) was found such that the vowels which did not match any vowel of the Korean language were likely to elicit more ISIB than matched vowels. In order to identify the source of the stronger ISIB in non-matched vowels, acoustic analyses of the stimuli were performed. Two pairs of English front vowels [i] vs. [I], and $[{\varepsilon}]$ vs. $[{\ae}]$ were recorded by English native talkers and two groups of Korean learners according to their English proficiency, and then their vowel duration and the frequencies of the first two formants (F1, F2) were measured. The results demonstrated that the non-matched vowels such as [I], and $[{\ae}]$ produced by Korean talkers seemed to show more deviated acoustic characteristics from those of the natives, with longer duration and with closer formant values to the matched vowels, [i] and $[{\varepsilon}]$, than those of the English natives. Combining the results of acoustic measurements in the present study and those of word identification in Han et al. (2011), we suggest that relatively better performance in word identification by Korean talkers/listeners than the native English talkers/listeners is associated with the shared interlanguage of Korean talkers and listeners.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제5권3호
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• pp.39-46
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• 2013

This study examined the perception of two Korean vowels using F1/F2 manipulated synthetic vowels. Previous studies indicated that there is an overlap between the acoustic spaces of Korean /o/ and /u/ in terms of the first two formants. A continuum of eleven synthetic vowels were used as stimuli. The experiment consisted of three tasks: an /o/ identification task (Yes-no), an /u/ identification task (Yes-no), and a forced choice identification task (/o/-/u/). ROC(Receiver Operating Characteristic) analysis and logistic regression were performed to calculate the boundary criterion of the two vowels along the stimulus continuum, and to predict the perceptual judgment on F1 and F2. The result indicated that the location between stimulus no.5 (F1 = 342Hz, F2 = 691Hz) and no.6 (F1 = 336Hz, F2 = 700Hz) was estimated as a perceptual boundary region between /o/ and /u/, while stimulus no.0 (F1=405Hz, F2=666Hz) and no.10 (F1=321Hz, F2=743Hz) were at opposite ends of the continuum. The influence of F2 was predominant over F1 on the perception of the vowel categories.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권3호
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• pp.109-119
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• 2014

This article represents a first step in a large study aimed at elucidating the relationship between production and perception involved in sound change of /o/ in (Seoul) Korean. In this paper we present the results of a production study and a perception experiment. For the production study we examined vowel production data of 20 young adult speakers, measuring the first and second formants, then conducted a discriminant analysis based on those values. In terms of their F1-F2 values, the distribution of /o/ and /u/ were close, and even overlapping in some circumstances, which is consistent with the literature. This tendency was more apparent among the female speakers than the males. Moreover, with the females' distributions, /o/ was frequently categorized as /u/, suggesting that the direction of the sound change is indeed increasing from /o/ to /u/. Next, to investigate the effects of this proximity on perception, we used the production data of five randomly selected speakers from the production study as stimuli for a perception experiment in which 21 young adult native speakers of (Seoul) Korean performed a vowel identification task and provided a Goodness rating on a 5-point scale. We found that while rates of correctness were high, when these correctness scores were weighted by the Goodness rating, these "weighted correctness" scores were lower in some cases, indicating a degree of confusion in distinguishing between the two vowels.

• 음성과학
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.25-47
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• 2002

Human language activity in the information society has been developing the communication system between humans and machines. The aim of this study was to analyze dialectal speech in Korea. One hundred Kyungsang and one hundred Cholla informants participated in this study. A CSL and Flexible laryngeal fiberscope were used for analysis of the acoustic and glottal gestures of all the vowels and consonants. Test words were made on the picture cards and letter cards which contained each vowel and each consonant, respectively. The dialogue between the examiner and the informants was recorded in a question and answer manner. The acoustic results of two dialects were as follows: Kyungsang and Cholla informants showed neutralization between /e/ and /$\varepsilon$. However, the apertures of Kyungsang vowels /i, w, u, o/ were higher than those of Cholla vowels. The /wi/ and /$\varepsilon$/ of Kyungsang Diphthong vowels were shown as simple vowels /i/ and /$\varepsilon$/ in Cholla dialect. The VOT of Cholla dilaect was longer than that of Kyungsang dialect. The fricative frequence of Kyurlgsang dialect was about 1000Hz higher than that of Cholla dialect. The glottal widths on fiberscopic images showed that the consonant durations of Kyungsang and Cholla dialects were correlated all together with the acoustic duration on the spectrogram.

• 한국산학기술학회논문지
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.333-342
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• 2012

이 논문에서는 인간 청각 시스템에 기반한 모음 개시 지점 (VOP) 탐지 방법을 제시하였다. 이 방법을 통해 '지각의' 주파수 범위, 즉 선형 음향 주파수에서의 Mel Scale을 보여준 후 일련의 삼각 Mel-weighted Filter Bank를 만들어 인간의 청각 시스템에서 대역 필터링 기능을 시뮬레이션하였다. 이러한 비선형 임계 대역 Filter Bank는 데이터 차원수를 크게 감소시키고 비선형적으로 간격을 둔 Mel 스펙트럼에서 더욱 효과적으로 포먼트를 생성하기 위해 조파들의 영향을 제거해준다. Mel 스펙트럼의 첨두 에너지 합은 각 프레임의 특징으로 추출하고 에너지 진폭이 급격히 상승하기 시작할 때의 특성은 Gabor 윈도우를 사용하여 VOP로 탐지한다. 실험 결과를 통해서 다른 종류의 자음들과 연결된 12개의 모음들을 포함하는 한 단어 데이터베이스에 대한 제안된 방법의 평균 정확도는 단시간 에너지와 zero-crossing 비율에 기반을 둔 다른 모음 탐지 방법들보다 높은 72.73% 이상임을 확인하였다.