• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to scientifically examine Kuhl's (2011), originally Johnson and Newport's (1989) critical period graph, from a perspective of auditory perception and linguistic discrimination. This study utilizes two types of experiments (auditory perception and linguistic phoneme discrimination) with five different age groups (5 years, 6-8 years, 9-13 years, 15-17 years, and 20-26 years) of Korean English learners. Auditory perception is examined via ultrasonic sounds that are commonly used in the medical field. In addition, each group is measured in terms of their ability to discriminate minimal pairs in Chinese. Since almost all Korean students already have some amount of English exposure, the researchers selected phonemes in Chinese, an unexposed foreign language for all of the subject groups. The results are almost completely in accordance with Kuhl's critical period graph for auditory perception and linguistic discrimination; a sensitive age is found at 8. The results show that the auditory capability of kindergarten children is significantly better than that of other students, measured by their ability to perceive ultrasonic sounds and to distinguish ten minimal pairs in Chinese. This finding strongly implies that human auditory ability is a key factor for the sensitive period of language acquisition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.7-15
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• 2017

The purpose of this study was to investigate the different aspects of word-initial liquid sounds in Korean according to generations. Five women in their 50s and seven in their 20s participated in the experiment. We examined FL (formant of liquids) and voice sustained time by using Praat software. Three English native speakers were asked to judge the Korean speakers' recorded speech samples for marking [l] or [r] using evaluation sheet. The results of the two experiments revealed three important aspects. First, there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in the FL of the words 'racket' and 'ruby.' Second, we found statistically significant differences in 'rhythm', 'ruby' and 'litter' from the measurement of the duration of the acoustic data. Third, there was no difference in pronunciation between the two groups according to the phonemes of the original language. The results of this study showed that it is difficult to say that the duration of word-initial liquids and the phoneme difference of the original language are indicators to distinguish the word-initial liquids between generations. Also, it was seen that the pronunciation of Korean word-initial liquid sounds varied across generations.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2021

The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. 'uhuh') and a word (e.g. 'well') to sounds (e.g. 'um er') and words, namely phrase ('sort of') and clause (e.g. 'you know'). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. 'and um', 'yes er um', 'sort of erm'). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, 'er' and 'um' are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause ('you know'), word ('yeah') and sound ('erm'). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.19-36
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• 2013

This study examined concept development in children in terms of sound propagation. The subjects consisted of 240 five-, seven-, and ten-year-old children from three kindergartens and two primary schools respectively. The instrument used for the purposes of this study was the examination instrument on sound as developed by the SPACE Project in the UK. The concepts related to sound were classified into five stages including : no recognition, egocentric concept, initial mental models, synthetic mental models, and scientific mental models. The results revealed the existence of significant differences in terms of the types of concept that children were aware of, according to age and context. Most five-, seven-, and ten-year-old children revealed egocentric concepts related to every sounds, drum, rubber band context, however, most five-, seven-, and ten-year-old children revealed their recognition of the synthetic models of sound propagation when using the string telephone context. These results have implications for the contents of science education for children when it comes to the development of concepts related to sound propagation.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.31-36
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• 2004

Background and Objectives : It has been shown that the epilaryngeal tube in the human airway is responsible for vocal ring, or the singer's formant. In previous study, authors showed that in trained tenors, besides the conventional singer's formant in the region of ,5500Hz, another energy peak was observed in the region of 8,000Hz. This peak was interpreted as the second resonance of the epilarynx tube. Singers in other voice categories who produce vocal ring are assumed to have the same peak, but no measurements have as yet been made. Materials and Methods : Fifteen tenors, fourteen baritones, seven sopranos and five mezzo sopranos attending the music college, department of vocal music who could reliably produce the head and chest registers were chosen for this study. Each subject was asked to produce an/ah/sound for at least three seconds for the head register sound(tenors ; G4, barions ; E4 sopranos ; F5 and mezzosopranos ; C5) and for the chest register sound (tenors ; C3, baritones ; D3, sopranos ; D4 and Mezzosoprano ; A3). The sound data was analyzed using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based power spectrum, Long term average(LTA) power spectrum using the FFT algorithm of the Computerized Speech Lab (CSL, Kay elemetrics, Model 4300B, USA). Statistical analysis was performed using the Mann-Whitney test of the Statistical Package for Social sciences(SPSS). Results : For head register sounds, a significant increase was seen in the 2,200-3,400Hz region(p<0.05) and the Similar to the head register sounds, there was a significant increase in energy in the four trained singer group compared with the untrained group in the 2,200-3,100Hz region(p<0.05), the 7,800-8,400Hz region(p<0.05) for the chest register sounds. Conclusions : When good vocal production was made for the head and chest registers, an energy peak was observed near 2,500Hz, a frequency already known as the "singer's formant', in all subjects in the study group. Another region of increased energy was observed around 8,000Hz that had not been noticed previously. The authors believe this region to be the second singer's formant.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.673-680
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• 2010

The effects of different auditory warnings on response time and accuracy were studied in a laboratory ship-bridge work environment. Subjective preference on the type of auditory warnings was also of a primary concern. Twenty five subjects were asked to select an appropriate button for the warning sound presented with three types of auditory warning (abstract sound, auditory icon, and voice alarm) and five levels of warning situation (fire, steering failure, collision, engine failure, and low power). Results showed that the response time and accuracy was significantly affected by the types of auditory warning. The voice alarm resulted in a higher accuracy and subjective preference, as compared to the auditory icon and abstract sound. Regarding the response time, auditory icons and voice alarms were equivalent and superior to abstract sounds. Actual or potential applications of this research include guidelines for the design of integrated ship bridge systems.

• Korean Journal of Adult Nursing
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.627-634
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• 2012

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify registered nurses learning needs about physical assessment. Specifically, what are the perceived competency, frequency of skill use and the unmet training needs. Methods: The study was an exploratory survey study. The sample was 104 registered nurses. Data were collected through three instruments: The Perceived Competency in Physical Assessment Scale, the Frequency of Physical Assessment Scale, and the Training Needs of Physical Assessment Scale which incorporated 30 core Physical Assessment skills. Descriptive statistics, t-test, and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used to analyze the data. Results: Auscultation of heart and lung sounds and inspection of the spine were rated by the subjects as physical assessment skills they feel least competent and also were less frequently performed. The most competent area for physical assessment was neurological system. The respiratory and abdominal system was identified as two systems that more education would be needed. Nurses with less than one year of working experience reported needing more training. Nurses with more than five years of clinical work experience performed physical assessment more frequently than nurses with less than five year of work experience. The perceived competency was positively related to the frequency of physical assessment. Conclusion: Continuing education is necessary to further train registered nurses regarding physical assessment skills and the program needs to be focused on the area which nurses are less competent for and have high training need.

• 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.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.31 no.12
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• pp.1039-1050
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• 2022

Forests are valuable natural resources for people living around the mountains. In particular, the comfortable feeling or healing is one of the most important benefits obtained from forests. This healing can be possible by many aspects of forests, including the landscape, natural sounds, anions, and pleasant aromas. We focused on the volatile organics from forest causing pleasant aromas, phytoncides. Twenty phytoncides were monitored from February to September in a national tree garden (BaekDoDaeGan SooMokWon). Five sites were monitored two times per month and 20 phytoncides were detected. Borneol showed the highest annual average concentration and the order of concentration was borneol > mycene > sabinene > limonene > α-pinene. The average phytoncide concentration was relatively high in spring and summer season when the trees were physiologically active. Daily monitoring showed that the afternoon hours had higher concentrations of phytoncides than the morning hours, which may be due to the stabilized atmospheric conditions at the sites. Among the five sites, coniferous forests gave higher phytoncide emissions than broadleaf tree forests. The current study showed that forests produce several phytoncides that cause a healing effect and a forest bath may be beneficial to the health of visitors to forests.

• Journal of Physiology & Pathology in Korean Medicine
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.28-38
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• 2004

The Hun-Min-Jeong-Eum(訓民正音) has been created under the political purpose that is to unite politics and cultures through a philosophical harmony of the confucianism as well as the Buddhism under the periodical circumstance that includes the change of a dynasty and a revolution in culture. The creating work has been greatly affected by the theoretical divination, that is the confucian ideas of North-Song dynasty which has been highly elaborated in those days. The shape of the characters of the Hun-Min-Jeong-Eum(訓民正音) has been influenced by the ancient letters existing at the time (especially Ga-Rim-To 加臨多), it has been throughly readjusted and recreated based on the philosophy. The consonant uses the Three-Pillars(三才)(ㅇ, ㅁ, △) in the style of the five elements and each velar-lingual-labial-dental-guttural sounds (牙舌脣齒喉音) is applicable to five elements also a 'ㅇ' is equivalent to the heaven, a 'ㅁ' to the earth. a '△' to the man. The vowel uses the five elements of ㅗ(water). ㅏ(wood), ㅜ(fire), ㅓ(metal), ㆍ(five-soil), ─(ten-soil) in the style of the Three-Pillars(三才) of ㆍ, ㅡ, ㅣ and the first created letters(初出字), and the secondary created letters(再出字) each can be attached to the eight trigrams(八卦). The consonant has 17 letters and the vowel has 11 letters, therefore the total number of the letters is 28. and those are equivalent to the 28 constellation(二十八宿) of the astronomy. Contrary to the underlying principle that has been applied during the time of the creation of the letters, when the consonant and the vowel are used, the consonant refers to the heaven (天), and the vowel refers to the earth(地). a consonant take a part in making a point on the starting place of the pronounce, a vowel take a part in the keeping the energy to the end.