• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2002.11a
• /
• pp.105-108
• /
• 2002

In the present study, the intelligibility of the synthesized speech sounds was evaluated by using the psycholinguistic and fMRI techniques, In order to see the difference in recognizing words between the natural and synthesized speech sounds, word regularity and word frequency were varied. The results of Experiment1 and Experiment2 showed that the intelligibility difference of the synthesized speech comes from word regularity. There were smaller activation of the auditory areas in brain and slower recognition time for the regular words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.4
• /
• pp.45-52
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to measure the first two vowel formants of the ten young female speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] automatically and then to analyze various potential factors that may affect the formant distribution of the eight peripheral vowels of English. The factors that were analyzed included 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 results indicate that the overall formant patterns of the female speakers were similar to those of earlier works. The effects of the factors on the realization of the two formants were also similar to those from the male speakers with minor differences.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.57-74
• /
• 2023

Having a firm grasp of technical terms is essential for learners of Japanese for Specific Purposes (JSP). This research aims to analyze Japanese nursing care vocabulary based on objective corpus-based frequency and subjectively rated word familiarity. For this purpose, we constructed a text corpus centered on the National Examination for Certified Care Workers to extract nursing care keywords. The Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) was used as the statistical criterion for keyword identification, giving a list of 300 keywords as target words for a further word recognition survey. The survey involved 115 participants of whom 51 were certified care workers (CW group) and 64 were individuals from the general public (GP group). These participants rated the familiarity of the target keywords through crowdsourcing. Given the limited sample size, Bayesian linear mixed models were utilized to determine word familiarity rates. Our study conducted a comparative analysis of word familiarity between the CW group and the GP group, revealing key terms that are crucial for professionals but potentially unfamiliar to the general public. By focusing on these terms, instructors can bridge the knowledge gap more efficiently.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.193-208
• /
• 2000

This paper describes a multi-step method of intonation modeling for corpus-based Korean speech synthesizer. We selected 1833 sentences considering various syntactic structures and built a corresponding speech corpus uttered by a female announcer. We detected the pitch using laryngograph signals and manually marked the prosodic boundaries on recorded speech, and carried out the tagging of part-of-speech and syntactic analysis on the text. The detected pitch was separated into 3 frequency bands of low, mid, high frequency components which correspond to the baseline, the word tone, and the syllable tone. We predicted them using the CART method and the Viterbi search algorithm with a word-tone-dictionary. In the collected spoken sentences, 1500 sentences were trained and 333 sentences were tested. In the layer of word tone modeling, we compared two methods. One is to predict the word tone corresponding to the mid-frequency components directly and the other is to predict it by multiplying the ratio of the word tone to the baseline by the baseline. The former method resulted in a mean error of 12.37 Hz and the latter in one of 12.41 Hz, similar to each other. In the layer of syllable tone modeling, it resulted in a mean error rate less than 8.3% comparing with the mean pitch, 193.56 Hz of the announcer, so its performance was relatively good.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.15B no.6
• /
• pp.595-602
• /
• 2008

The focused word of each sentence is a help in recognizing and understanding spoken Korean. To find the method of focused word spotting at spoken speech signal, we made an analysis of the average and variance of Fundamental Frequency and the average energy extracted from a focused word and the other words in a sentence by experiments with the speech data from 100 spoken sentences. The result showed that focused words have either higher relative average F0 or higher relative variances of F0 than other words. Our findings are to make a contribution to getting prosodic characteristics of spoken Korean and keyword extraction based on natural language processing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.3-20
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a segmentation unit for a Korean noun is a 'syllable' and whether the process of segmenting spoken words occurs at the lexical level. A syllable monitoring task was administered which required participants to detect an auditorily presented target from visually presented words. In Experiment 1, syllable neighborhood density of high frequency words which can be segmented into both CV-CVC and CVC-VC were controlled. The syllable effect and the neighborhood density effect were significant, and the syllable effect emerged differently depending on the syllable neighborhood density. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 2 where low frequency words were used. The significance of word frequency effect on syllable effect was also examined. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that the segmentation unit for a Korean noun is indeed a 'syllable', and this process can occur at the lexical level.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.111-128
• /
• 2004

In English, a focused word with new information receives a pitch accent. This paper examines how English native speakers and Korean speakers produce and perceive focus in English yes-no questions. The production experiments show that native speakers realize an appropriate intonation of yes-no questions, in which a focused word has a low pitch accent followed by a high phrasal accent and a high boundary tone. However, Korean speakers usually give a high tone to a focused word. In a like manner, the perception experiments show that English native speakers judge a word with a low tone to be focused, while Korean speakers have difficulty in comprehending a focused word realized as a low tone. And it is found that Korean speakers tend to perceive low tones on sentence initial and final focused words better than those on sentence medial focused words, and they often perceive a word with a relatively high fundamental frequency or a sharp rise of fundamental frequency as a focused word. This paper shows that Korean speakers have trouble to produce and perceive an appropriate tonal pattern of a focused yes-no question, and that can cause confusion in a conversation with native speakers.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2023

This study investigated the influences of probabilistic accessibility of the word being produced - as determined by its usage frequency and neighborhood density - on native and high-proficiency L2 speakers' realization of six English monophthong vowels. The native group hyperarticulated the vowels over an expanded acoustic space when the vowel occurred in words with low frequency and high density, supporting the claim that vowel forms are modified in accordance with the probabilistic accessibility of words. However, temporal expansion occurred in words with greater accessibility (i.e., with high frequency and low density) as an effect of low phonotactic probability in low-density words, particularly in attended speech. This suggests that temporal modification in the opposite direction may be part of the phonetic characteristics that are enhanced in communicatively driven focus realization. Conversely, none of these spectral and temporal patterns were found in the L2 group, thereby indicating that even the high-proficiency L2 speakers may not have developed experience-based sensitivity to the modulation of sub-categorical phonetic details indexed with word-level probabilistic information. The results are discussed with respect to how phonological representations are shaped in a word-specific manner for the sake of communicatively driven lexical intelligibility, and what factors may contribute to the lack of native-like sensitivity in L2 speech.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.83-90
• /
• 2001

We proposed a probabilistic approach of using syllable bigrams to the word-spacing problem. Syllable bigrams are extracted and the frequencies are calculated for the large corpus of 12 million words. Based on the syllable bigrams, we performed three experiments: (1) automatic word-spacing, (2) detection and correction of word-spacing errors for spelling checker, and (3) automatic insertion of a space at the end of line in the character recognition system. Experimental results show that the accuracy ratios are 97.7 percent, 82.1 percent, and 90.5%, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.371-398
• /
• 2007

This study examined effects of word frequency and semantic transparency on decomposition processes of compound nouns by semantic priming task and repetition priming task. In Experiment 1, it was investigated that decomposition process depended on word frequency of compound noun. Semantic priming effects were found In the compound noun's associate rendition consistently, and repetition priming effects were found in the whole rendition as well as in the part condition irrespective of word frequency and SOA. These results implied that compound noun was processed through decomposition process path and direct access path. In Experiment 2, Effects of semantic transparency on decomposition processes of compound nouns were examined. Semantic priming effects were found when compound nouns' associates were presented as primes irrespective of semantic transparency and SOA, and results were the same as experiment 1b in repetition priming task. Results of experiment 1 and 2 implies that compound nouns are interpreted by interactive activation processes of attributes activated by decomposition path and direct access path.