• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.103-125
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• 2005

We present a new method of measuring the volume and cross-sectional area of the vocal tract from magnetic resonance images. The vocal tract was divided by the 2 constriction points on the horizontal and vertical planes. The ratios of the volumes of the segment vocal tracts to that of the entire vocal tract play a crucial role in discriminating Korean monophthongs in that vowels were successfully discriminated by the ratios. The discriminant analysis also demonstrated that the acoustic parameters F1 and F2, in addition to the segment volumes, serve as significant parameters in discriminating Korean monophthongs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.19-27
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• 2019

Lateral approximants are well known as having complex articulatory characteristics, which vary cross-linguistically, across speakers, and across utterances. However, less attention has been paid to the articulation of Korean laterals, which do not contrast with a rhotic and may thus exhibit greater-than-normal variability. The focus of this study is to investigate the general articulatory characteristics of the Korean lateral [l] as well as the articulatory variation using novel 3D ultrasound imaging methods. The results of this study revealed significant between-speaker variation and some vowel-dependent variation with regard to the articulation of the Korean lateral [l], which has not been reported previously. Even though all participants in this study showed an anterior occlusion, the place of articulation and the size of the occlusion varied greatly across speakers. The data also revealed that left-right asymmetry is present in the articulation of the Korean lateral. The individual variation of the Korean lateral [l] suggests that it has a large articulatory-acoustic space for variation, since it has no contrasting sound that causes perceptual confusion.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.634-642
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• 2018

People with spinocerebellar ataxia, a hereditary and progressive neurogenic disorder, suffer from ataxic dysarthria due to cerebellar dystrophy. This study was designed to examine if intensive motor speech treatment yields improvement in progressive ataxic dysarthria and if then, to investigate magnitude of therapeutic effect. SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ was provided to a 55-year old female diagnosed with SCA for improving motor speech functions. Magnitude of therapeutic effect was large in changes of MPT and vocal intensity across speech tasks. Small effect size was found in changes of fundamental frequency, however, large therapeutic effect was observed in changes of frequency range. In addition, improvement of vocal quality based on jitter, shimmer, and HNR was observed with large therapeutic effect size and vowel space was expanded, particularly, due to F1. Lastly, VHI scores were decreased. Intensive motor speech treatment, called as SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ was effective enough to observe improvement in vocal intensity, frequency range, and vocal quality, expanding vowel space and lowering VHI scores. Based on the results of this case study, further efficacy evaluation of SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ for improving progressive ataxic dysarthria in people with SCA is required.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.2219-2228
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• 2015

The proposed RDT(Reversed Double T) girder bridge is suitable to eco corridor, because of its cross section which resembles Korean alphabet vowel "ㅛ". The total height and cost of bridge would be reduced for its inner space containing some of plant soil. In this study, the performance of the RDT girder was assessed by comparing results of static test with those of nonlinear analysis. The cracking load of the RDT girder was evaluated more than two times of design load.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.133-144
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• 2009

Pharyngeal flap surgery changes the space and shape of the oral cavity and vocal tract, and these changing conditions bring resonance change. The purpose of this study was to determine the most reliable and valuable parameters for evaluating hypernasality to distinguish two patients before and after pharyngeal flap surgery. Each patient was asked to clearly speak the vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/ for voice recording. There were nine parameters: Formant (F1, F2, F3), Bandwidth (BW1, BW2, BW3), LPC energy slope ($\Delta$ |A2-A1/F2-F1|), and Band Energy (0-500 Hz, 500-1000 Hz) by each vowel. From the results of discrimination analyses on acoustic parameters, the vowels /a/, /e/ appeared to be insignificant but vowels /i/, /u/, /o/ appeared to be efficient in the separation. A 95%, 100%, and 100% recognition score could be reached when vowels /i/, /u/, and /o/ were analyzed. The results showed that F2, BW3, and LPC slope are more important parameters than the others. Finally, there is a relation between perceptual evaluation score and LPC energy slope of acoustic parameters by least square slope.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.43-50
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• 2010

English vowels can be divided into monophthongs and diphthongs depending on the number of vocal tract shapes. Diphthongs are usually produced with more than one shape. This study attempts to collect acoustical data of English diphthongs published by Hillenbrand et al.(1995) online and to examine acoustic features of the diphthongs for phoneticians and English teachers. Sixty three American males and females were chosen after excluding those subjects with different target vowels or ambiguous formant tracks. The author used Praat to obtain the acoustical data systematically at eleven equidistant timepoints over the diphthongal segment. Obvious errors were corrected based on the spectrographic display of each diphthong. Results show that the formant trajectories of the diphthongs produced by the American males and females appeared quite similar. When the female formant values were uniformly normalized to those of the males, almost a perfect collapse occurred. Secondly, the diphthongal movements on the vowel space appeared not linear due to the coarticulatory gesture for the following consonant. Thirdly, the average duration of the diphthongs produced by the females was 1.156 times longer than that of the males while the pitch ratio between the two groups turned out to be 1.746 with a similar contour over measurement points. The author concludes that English diphthongs produced by various groups can be compared systematically when the acoustical values are obtained at proportional timepoints. Further studies will be desirable on the comparison of English diphthongs produced by native and nonnative speakers.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.51-57
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• 2018

In this paper, we studied about the extraction of the parameter and implementation of speechreading system to recognize the Korean 8 vowel. Face features are detected by amplifying, reducing the image value and making a comparison between the image value which is represented for various value in various color space. The eyes position, the nose position, the inner boundary of lip, the outer boundary of upper lip and the outer line of the tooth is found to the feature and using the analysis the area of inner lip, the hight and width of inner lip, the outer line length of the tooth rate about a inner mouth area and the distance between the nose and outer boundary of upper lip are used for the parameter. 2400 data are gathered and analyzed. Based on this analysis, the neural net is constructed and the recognition experiments are performed. In the experiment, 5 normal persons were sampled. The observational error between samples was corrected using normalization method. The experiment show very encouraging result about the usefulness of the parameter.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.92-98
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• 2017

Data clustering determines a group of patterns using similarity measure in a dataset and is one of the most important and difficult technique in data mining. Clustering can be formally considered as a particular kind of NP-hard grouping problem. K-means algorithm which is popular and efficient, is sensitive for initialization and has the possibility to be stuck in local optimum because of hill climbing clustering method. This method is also not computationally feasible in practice, especially for large datasets and large number of clusters. Therefore, we need a robust and efficient clustering algorithm to find the global optimum (not local optimum) especially when much data is collected from many IoT (Internet of Things) devices in these days. The objective of this paper is to propose new Hybrid Simulated Annealing (HSA) which is combined simulated annealing with K-means for non-hierarchical clustering of big data. Simulated annealing (SA) is useful for diversified search in large search space and K-means is useful for converged search in predetermined search space. Our proposed method can balance the intensification and diversification to find the global optimal solution in big data clustering. The performance of HSA is validated using Iris, Wine, Glass, and Vowel UCI machine learning repository datasets comparing to previous studies by experiment and analysis. Our proposed KSAK (K-means+SA+K-means) and SAK (SA+K-means) are better than KSA(K-means+SA), SA, and K-means in our simulations. Our method has significantly improved accuracy and efficiency to find the global optimal data clustering solution for complex, real time, and costly data mining process.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.721-728
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• 2004

Velopharyngeal closure is a sphincter mechanism between the activities of the soft palate, lateral pharyngeal wall and the posterior pharyngeal wall, which divides the oral and nasal cavity. It participates in physiological activities such as swallowing, breathing and speech. It is called a velopharyngeal dysfunction when this mechanism malfunctions. The causes of this dysfunction are defects in (1) length, function, posture of the soft palate, (2) depth and width of the nasopharynx and (3) activity of the posterior and lateral pharyngeal wall. The purposes of this study are to analyze the nasopharynx of cleft palate patients using cephalometry and to evaluate the degree of hypernasality using nasometry to find its relationship with velopharyngeal dysfunction. The following results were obtained : 1. In cephalometry, there were significant differences in soft palate length, soft palate thickness, nasopharyngeal depth, nasopharyngeal area, and adequate ratio between two groups. 2. In nasometry, there were significant differences between two groups in vowel /o/ and sentences including oral consonants. 3. In cleft palate patients, though no general correlation was found between Anatomic VPI and nasalance scores, vowel /i/ and sentences including oral consonants were slightly correlated. In conclusion, cephalometry and nasometer results were significantly different between the two groups. Though in the cleft palate group, Anatomic VPI and nasalance scores, which are indices for velopharyngeal closure, excluding the vowel /i/ and sentences including oral consonants show generally no significance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.1-14
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• 2020

Previous studies have confirmed that /o/ and /u/ in Seoul Korean are undergoing a merger in the F1/F2 space, especially for female speakers. As a substitute parameter for formants, it is reported that female speakers use phonation (H1-H2) differences to distinguish /o/ from /u/. This study aimed to explore whether H1-H2 values are being used as perceptual cues for /o/-/u/. A perception test was conducted with 35 college students using /o/ and /u/ spoken by 41 females, which overlap considerably in the vowel space. An acoustic analysis of 182 stimuli was also conducted to see if there is any correspondence between production and perception. The identification rate was 89% on average, 86% for /o/, and 91% for /u/. The results confirmed that when /o/ and /u/ cannot be distinguished in the F1/F2 space because they are too close, H1-H2 differences contribute significantly to the separation of the two vowels. However, in perception, this was not the case. H1-H2 values were not significantly involved in the identification process, and the formants (especially F2) were still dominant cues. The study also showed that even though H1-H2 differences are apparent in females' production, males do not use H1-H2 in their production, and both females and males do not use H1-H2 in their perception. It is presumed that H1-H2 has not yet been developed as a perceptual cue for /o/ and /u/.