• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.52-59
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• 2012

Children develop their language skill rapidly between age 3 and 5. To meet the child's language development through a variety of experiences, it is necessary to develop age-appropriate contents. So it needs to develop various contents using speech interface for children, but there is no speech database of korean children. In this paper, we develop speech database of 3 to 5 years old children in korean. For collecting accurate children's speech, child education experts examine in the speech database development process. The words for database are selected from MCDI-K in two stage and children speak a word three times. Such collected speech are tokenized by child and word and stored in database. This speech database will be transferred through web and, hopefully, be the foundation of development of children-oriented contents.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.89-93
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• 2003

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of inflected words of Korean based on the analysis of 3 to 8 year-old children's spontaneous speech. For this purpose, the authors transcribe the spontaneous speech of 10 Korean children for each age and classified inflected word. The result of the analysis is as follows : $\circled1$ In the verbs simple words are occupied 62％, derivative words 18％ and complex words 20％. In the adjectives simple words are 82％, derivative words 7％ and complex words 11％. $\circled2$ The children's getting older, derivative and complex words are increased, in spite of simple words are reduced. $\circled3$ 4 year-old children get to start the ability of word formation and then since the children become 8 year-old, the children complete that ability almost all we think.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.163-178
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• 2004

The hypothesis was tested that children whose families differ in socioeconomic status(SES) and educational level differ in their rates of productive language development because they have different language-learning experiences. Naturalistic interaction between mothers and their children was video taped. Transcripts of these interactions provided the basis for estimating the growth in children's productive vocabularies and properties of maternal speech. The sixty children from age 1 to 3 were selected in Yanji, China. The results show that the high educated mothers' children grew more than the low educated mothers' children in their mean length of utterances. Properties of maternal speech that differed as a function of mother's educational level fully accounted for this difference. Implications of these findings for mechanisms of environmental influence on child development are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2022

Previous studies have provided important findings on children's speech production development. They have revealed that essentially all aspects of children's speech shift toward adult-like characteristics over time. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the perceptual aspects of children's speech tokens, as perceived by naive adult listeners. To fill the gap between children's production and adults' perception, we conducted cross-sectional perceptual studies of monosyllabic words produced by children aged two to six years. Monosyllabic words in the consonant-vowel-consonant form were extracted from children's speech samples and presented aurally to five listener groups (20 listeners in total). Generally, the agreement rate between children's production of target words and adult listeners' responses increases with age. The perceptual responses to tokens produced by two-year old children induced the largest discrepancies and the responses to words produced by six years olds agreed the most. Further analyses were conducted to identify the sources of disagreement, including the types of segments and syllable structure. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development and perception of children's speech across age groups.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

This paper proposes a new feature extraction algorithm to improve children's speech recognition in Korean. The proposed feature extraction algorithm combines three methods. The first method is on the vocal tract length normalization to compensate acoustic features because the vocal tract length in children is shorter than in adults. The second method is to use the uniform bandwidth because children's voice is centered on high spectral regions. Finally, the proposed algorithm uses a smoothing filter for a robust speech recognizer in real environments. This paper shows the new feature extraction algorithm improves the children's speech recognition performance.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.117-122
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• 2009

A variety of cross-linguistic studies has documented that the acoustic properties of speech addressed to young children include exaggeration of pitch contours and acoustically salient features of phonetic units. It has been suggested that phonetic modifications of child-directed speech facilitate young children's learning of speech sounds by providing detailed phonetic information about the target word. While there are several studies reporting vowel modifications in speech to infants (i.e., hyper-articulated vowels), there has been little research about consonant modifications in speech to young children (except for VOT). The present study examines acoustic properties of Korean stops in Korean mothers' speech to their children (seven children aged 27 to 38 months). Korean tense, lax, and aspirated stops are all voiceless in word-initial position, and are perceptually differentiated by several acoustic parameters including VOT, $f_0$ of the following vowel, and the amplitude difference of the first and second harmonics at the voice onset of the following vowel. This study compares values of these parameters in Korean child-directed speech to those in adult-directed speech from same speakers. Conclusions focus on the acoustic properties of Korean stops in child-directed speech and how they are modified to help Korean young children learn the three-way phonetic contrast.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.647-654
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• 2022

Although the fields in which is utilized children's speech recognition is on the rise, the lack of quality data is an obstacle to improving children's speech recognition performance. This paper proposes a new method for improving children's speech recognition performance by additionally using adult speech data. The proposed method is a transformer based domain adversarial training using dynamically weighted loss to effectively address the data imbalance gap between age that grows as the amount of adult training data increases. Specifically, the degree of class imbalance in the mini-batch during training was quantified, and the loss function was defined and used so that the smaller the data, the greater the weight. Experiments validate the utility of proposed domain adversarial training following asymmetry between adults and children training data. Experiments show that the proposed method has higher children's speech recognition performance than traditional domain adversarial training method under all conditions in which asymmetry between age occurs in the training data.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1991.10a
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• pp.196-208
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• 1991

This study focused on the role of prefabricated speech (routines and patterns) in the L2 acquisition process. The data for this study consisted of spontaneous speech samples and various observational records of three Korean children learning English as L2 in a nursery school. The specific questions addressed here were: (1) What routines, patterns, and creative constructions did the children use? (2) What was the general trend in the three children's use of routines, patterns, and creative constructions over time? The data were collected over a period of one school year by observing the children in their school. The findings were discussed from the perspective of human information processing. This study found that prefabricated speech played a significant role in the three children's L2 acquisition. The automatic processing of prefabricated speech appeared to enable the children to reduce the burden on their information processing systems, which allowed the saved resources available for other language development activities. Also, the children's language development was evident in their increase in the use of patterns. The children were moving from heavy dependence on wholly unanalyzed routines to increased use of partly unanalyzed patterns. This increased control was the result of an increase in procedural knowledge.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.57-65
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• 2017

The current study explored how Korean-speaking children processed the multiple acoustic cues (VOT and f0) for the stop laryngeal contrast (/t'/, /t/, and /$t^h$/) and examined whether individual perceptual strategies could be related to a general cognitive ability performing executive functions (EF). 15 children (aged from 7 to 8) participated in the speech perception task identifying the three Korean laryngeal stops (3AFC) on listening to the auditory stimuli of C-/a/ with synthetically varying VOT and f0. They completed a series of EF tasks to measure working memory, inhibition, and cognitive shifting ability. The findings showed that children used the two cues in a highly correlated manner. While children utilized VOT consistently for the three laryngeal categories, their use of f0 was either reduced or enhanced depending on the phonetic categories. Importantly, the children's processing strategies of a f0 suppression for a tense-aspirated contrast were meaningfully associated with children's better cognitive abilities such as working memory, inhibition, and attentional shifting. As a preliminary experimental investigation, the current research demonstrated that listeners with inefficient processing strategies were poor at the EF skills, suggesting that cognitive skills might be responsible for developmental variations of processing sub-phonemic information for the linguistic contrast.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.542-550
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• 2020

Background This study aimed to identify the initial diagnostic characteristics and treatment status of children with submucous cleft palate (SMCP) and to examine the relationship between the timing of surgical correction and the degree of articulation and resonance improvement. Methods This retrospective study included 72 children diagnosed with SMCP between 2008 and 2016. The evaluation criteria were the age of the initial visit, total number of visits, age at the end of treatment, speech problems, resonance problems, and speech therapy. Results Children with SMCP first visited the hospital at an average age of 34.32 months, and speech problems were identified at an average age of 48.53 months. Out of 72 children, 46 underwent surgery at an average age of 49.74 months. Four of these children required secondary surgery at an average age of 83.5 months. Among the children who underwent surgery before 3 years of age, 70% exhibited articulation improvements, with mild-to-moderate hypernasality. Articulation improvements showed no statistically significant differences according to age at the time of surgery. However, children who underwent surgery before 4 years had a better hypernasality rating than those who underwent surgery after 4 years of age. Conclusions Children with SMCP tend to undergo delayed treatment because the anatomical symptoms in some children with SMCP are unclear, and surgical interventions are considered only after speech problems are clarified. Starting interventions as early as possible reduces the likelihood of receiving secondary surgery and speech therapy, while increasing expectations for positive speech function at the end.