• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-91
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of prosody of utterance of ambiguous sentences in patients with neurogenic communication disorders. Ambiguous words on which prosody may have an impact were used to investigate this matter. The characteristics of tone duration, pitch and intensity were analyzed to examine the characteristics of prosody in patients with lesions in the left or right hemisphere and normal controls. The whole process was recorded using a Praat 4.3.14 and for statistical analyses, two-way Anova and multiple comparative analyses were carried out using SPSS10.0 for Windows. The conclusions of this study are as follows: The length of vowel in homograph in Korean was different depending on the meaning and the duration of vowel was the longest in patients with lesions in the left hemisphere. There was agreed that they had problem of timing of prosody(Danly & Shapiro, 1982). On the other hand, there found that patients with lesions in the right hemisphere had deficiency of changeability in pitch. Among various acoustic parameters, this study focused on the duration which are closely related to suprasegmental characteristics of prosody. More acoustic parameters should be taken into account in future studies.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.41-47
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• 2000

This paper concerns an effective text-prompted speaker verification method to increase the performance of speaker verification. While various speaker verification methods have already been developed, their effectiveness has not yet been formally proven in terms of achieving an acceptable performance level. It is also noted that the traditional methods were focused primarily on single, prompted utterance for verification. This paper, instead, proposes sequential decision method using variable threshold focused at handling two utterances for text-prompted speaker verification. Experimental results show that the proposed speaker verification method outperforms that of the speaker verification scheme without using the sequential decision by a factor of up to 3 times. From these results, we show that the proposed method is highly effective and achieves a reliable performance suitable for practical applications.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.81-99
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• 2011

The role of corrective feedback (CF) has long been discussed in the field of second language acquisition. It has been claimed that CF enables learners to notice the problems in their second language (L2) production. However, it should not be assumed that learners always adequately interpret teachers' responses to their problematic utterance as correction. Especially when feedback is provided in an implicit way, the possibility that CF goes unnoticed should not be excluded. In this regard, the study aims to investigate how learners perceive teachers' corrective feedback in English classrooms in Korea. The study focuses particularly on examining the relationship between type of feedback and target linguistic content with learner interpretation of teacher corrective intention. Nine classrooms were observed and videotaped. Forty-five students and nine teachers participated in stimulated recall interviews. Their comments were analyzed to document the learners' perception and the teachers' intention of feedback. It was found that learner perception of teacher corrective intention was at its greatest when feedback was provided explicitly and was focused on morphological errors.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.3E
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• pp.19-23
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• 1997

The goal of postprocessing in automatic speech recognition is to improve recognition performance by utterance verification at the output of recognition stage. It is focused on the effective rejection of out-of vocabulary words based on the confidence score of hypothesized candidate word. We present two methods for computing confidence scores. Both methods are based on the distance between each observation vector and the representative code vector, which is defined by the most likely code vector at each state. While the first method employs simple time normalization, the second one uses a normalization technique based on the concept of on-line garbage mode[1]. According to the speaker independent isolated words recognition experiment with discrete density HMM, the second method outperforms both the first one and conventional likelihood ratio scoring method[2].

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.41-47
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to examine how speakers use VOT and f0 to distinguish tense, lax, and aspirated stops in isolated sentence reading and paragraph readings. To do so, a total of 20 males between the ages of 20-25 years old were asked to read (1) isolated sentences, (2) information-oriented text and (3) emotional expressive texts in which the stop pronunciation's VOT value and f0 were measured thereafter. The main results are as follows. In the isolate sentence reading, lax stops, and aspirated stops were distinguished by both VOT and f0, but for the Korean men that read reading texts, VOT is not a cue to distinguish between lax and aspirated stops. In general, the VOT differences between lax stops and aspirated stops were smaller for information-oriented texts and emotional expressive texts than that of the isolate sentence reading. In the paragraph reading that induces a natural utterance, the f0 dependence is greater for the distinction between lax and aspirated stops.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.85-96
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• 2008

Automatic speech recognition has severe performance degradation under noisy environments. To cope with the noise problem, many methods have been proposed. Most of them focused on noise-robust features or model adaptation. However, researchers have overlooked utterance verification (UV) under noisy environments. In this paper we discuss UV problems based on the normalized confidence measure. First, we show that UV performance is also degraded in noisy environments with the experiments of an isolated word recognition. Then we observe how the degradation of UV performances is suffered. Based on the UV experiments we propose a modeling method of the statistics of phone confidences using sigmoid functions. For obtaining the parameters of the sigmoidal models, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is adopted. The proposed method improves 20% rejection performance. Our experimental results show that the PSO-NCM can apply noise speech recognition successfully.

• MALSORI
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• no.61
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• pp.49-62
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• 2007

This study focused on the improvement of prosody transplantation technology to be used for effective prosody education. Issues making the technology a less acceptable tool for prosody education were addressed. Instead of merely copying the target pitch onto a learner's utterances, the target pitch was resealed in semitone before the transplantation. In so doing, distortion of a signal was minimized and the transplanted utterance could have the quality of sound not different from the learner's utterances. Instead of manual transplantation, an automatic procedure was proposed to increase the reliability and the consistency of the outcome and enable real time processing. The perceptual performance of the automatic transplantation was evaluated by the perception experiment showing the automatic ransplantation was as good as the manual process.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.65
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• pp.211-236
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• 2014

The aim of this study is to investigate categorical characteristics of 'mak' and their discourse functions through analyzed the prosodic features of 'mak'. The previous studies of 'mak' focused on grammatical or semantic characteristics, but this study focuses on the prosodic features of 'mak' based on speech data. As a result, adverb 'mak' and discourse marker 'mak' are distinguished from prosodic boundary, duration, pause and sort of number tonal patterns. Functions of discourse marker 'mak' is as follows: Maintenance of utterance, Attention, Delay, Expression negative manner. These functions have salient prosodic features related to their functions. Consequently prosodic features are important to analyze categorical characteristics and to establish functions of 'mak'.

• 기호학연구
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• no.57
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• pp.121-153
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• 2018

In terms of the story told, we see that Oh! Soojung(Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors) is a film of the ideololgy of masculinity. However, from the point of view of the manner of presenting story, Oh! Soojung is a film that aims to devalue this ideology. How will it be possible? This is the principle of the irony that the speaker, by saying P, wants to make Q listen that devalues and contradicts P. Our study is tempted to explain the process of interpreting the irony in the film. The ideology of the film occurs when the presupposed contents have become the subject. For example Cendrion who tells a story of a girl married to a prince presupposes that the girl, Cendrion, is obedient. The subject of this story is that the presupposition: /the girls who want to be happy must be obedient/, which represents the ideology of masculinity. Presupposed content thus imposes on the public a collective and conservative value, as its enunciator belongs to the collective voice. Since ironisation occurs when the utterance itself is annulled, one must also deny or cancel the story told of Oh! Soojng: /Jeahun who is rich and Soojung who is obedient and virgin have become lovers/. Since there is no semantic mark within the utterance, irony is a voice that comes from without; this is how we understand irony in a purely pragmatic way. The outer voices are two things: the way to build the story: question of focusing, ocularization and auricularization, and the way to present the story: question the order, the frequency or the plot. Our study is focused on the question of frequency at Oh! Soojung which has a repetition structure in which the memory of Jeahun and that of Soojung are represented one after the other. Since the memories of two characters are not identical, the repetition is accompanied by differences. The differences at first allow the public to build their own story from the di?g?se of the film and then make the audience fall into confusion where we can not be certain of what we see and know in the di?g?se of the film, and finally make their knowledge questionable. About repetition, so that it can have validity in terms of the informativeness of the utterance, it must deny the existence of the previous repetition. This is how repetition cancels itself and consequently the utterance. We see that the irony of Oh! Soojung occurs by repetition with differences that cancels the story of the film.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.450-462
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• 2012

Gestures are a common phenomenon of human communication. There exists little research concerned with the gestures in science education, and most researches of gestures have focused on individual gestures. However, learning occurs through sociocultural interactions with friends, family, teachers, and others in society. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate and identify the types and features of gestures which were made by elementary students to communicate with peers in science discourse. A group of six fourth-graders was observed in eight science discourses where they talked about ideas related to thermal concepts. The data was collected through interviews and questionnaires. The analysis of the data showed that students' gestures in science discourses could be classified into seven types: signal iconic gesture, illustrative iconic gesture, personal deictic gesture, object deictic gesture, beat gesture, emotional metaphoric gesture, and content metaphoric gesture. It was also found that these gestures had functions of repeating, supplementing, and replacing utterance to communicate with others. Students frequently expressed scientific terms metaphorically as everyday terms through their gestures. Gestures were shared, imitated, and transferred in the communication process, and students' gestures also made influence on other students' ideas through these processes.