• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2018

The vowel /o/ in Seoul Korean has been undergoing a sound change by altering the acoustic weighting of F2 and F1. Studies documented that this on-going change redefined the nature of a /o/-/u/ contrast as F2 differences rather than as F1 differences. The current study examined two cognitive factors namely executive function capacity (EF) and autistic traits, in terms of their roles in explaining who in speech community would adapt new acoustic forms of the target vowels, and who would retain the old forms. The participants, 55 college students speaking Seoul Korean, produced /o/ and /u/ vowels in isolated words; and completed three EF tasks (Digit N-Back, Stroop, and Trail-Making Task), and an Autism screening questionnaire. The relationships between speakers' cognitive task scores and their utilizations of F1 and F2 were analyzed using a series of correlation tests. Results yielded a meaningful relationship in participants' EF scores interacting with gender. Among the females, speakers with higher EF scores were better at retaining F1, which is a less informative cue for females since they utilized F2 more than they did F1 in realizing /o/ and /u/. In contrast, better EF control among male speakers was associated with more use of the new cue (F2) where males still utilized F1 as much as F2 in the production of /o/ and /u/ vowels. Taken together, individual differences in acoustic realization can be explained by individuals' cognitive abilities, and their progress in the sound change further predicts that cognitive ability influences the utilization of acoustic information which is non-primary to the speaker.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.25-32
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• 2017

Besides their effect on the f0 contour of the following vowel, Korean stops are undergoing a sound change in which a partial or complete consonantal merger on voice onset time (VOT) is taking place between aspirated and lax stops. Many previous studies on sound change have mainly focused on group-normative effects, that is, effects that are representative of the population as a whole. Few systematic quantitative studies of change in adult individuals have been carried out. The current study examines whether the sound change holds for individual speakers. It focuses on inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability on sound change in contemporary Korean. Speech data were collected for thirteen Seoul Korean speakers studying abroad in America. In order to minimize the possible effects of speech production, socio-phonetic factors such as age, gender, dialect, speech rate, and L2 exposure period were controlled when recruiting participants. The results showed that, for nine out of thirteen speakers, the consonantal merger is taking place between the aspirated and lax stop in terms of VOT. There were also intra-speaker variations on the merger in three aspects: First, is the consonantal (VOT) merger between the two stops is in progress or not? Second, are VOTs for aspirated stops getting shorter or not (i.e., the aspirated-shortening process)? Third, are VOTs for lax stops getting longer or not (i.e., the lax-lengthening process)? The results of remarkable inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability indicate a synchronous speech sound change of the stop system in contemporary Korean. Some speakers are early adopters or active propagators of sound change whereas others are not. Further study is necessary to see whether the inter-speaker differences exceed intra-speaker differences in sound change.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.410-415
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• 2005

Recently, most of the speaker verification systems are based on the pattern recognition approach method. And performance of the pattern-classifier depends on how to classify a variety of speakers' feature parameters. In order to classify feature parameters efficiently and effectively, it is of great importance to enlarge variations between speakers and effectively measure distances between feature parameters. Therefore, this paper would suggest the positively mixed model scheme that can enlarge inter-speaker variation by searching the individual model with world model at the same time. During decision procedure, we can maximize inter-speaker variation by using the proposed mixed model scheme. We also make use of a symbol probability weighting function in this system so as to reduce vector quantization errors by measuring symbol probability derived from the distance rate of between the world codebook and individual codebook. As the result of our experiment using this method, we could halve the Detection Cost Function (DCF) of the system from $2.37\%\;to\;1.16\%$.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.91-99
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• 2018

Korean stops are currently undergoing a tonogenetic sound change, as found in the Seoul dialect in which a merged VOT of aspirated and lax stops induces F0 to be the primary cue for distinguishing the two stops and the lax stops have lower F0 than the aspirated stops. In tonal languages, low tone is produced with a breathy voice. This study investigated whether there are changes in voice quality with respect to the tonogenetic sound change of Korean stops. Two age groups speaking the Seoul dialect participated in this study: five females and six males born in the 1940s and 1950s and nine females and eight males born in the 1980s and 1990s. This study replicated previous findings of VOT and F0 and further examined H1-H2, H1-A1, and H1-A2 to see how they correlate with the sound change. In the older and younger generations, H1-H2, H1-A1, and H1-A2 were significantly lower after the tense stops than after the aspirated and lax stops, but they were not significantly different after the aspirated and lax stops. However, the younger females exhibited some different results for H1-H2 and H1-A2 than the older generation. In the younger females, the H1-H2 mean was higher after the aspirated stops than it was after the lax stops at the vowel onset, and the H1-H2 difference increased at the vowel midpoint. Although there was an inter-speaker variation in the results of H1-H2 and H1-A1, analyses of individual speakers showed that the H1-H2 and H1-A1 were higher after the lax stops than after the aspirated stops in the younger female speakers. These results indicate that lax stops tend to be breathier than aspirated stops in the younger female speakers. They also indicate that changes in voice quality are on Korean stops with tonal sound change, but are still developing.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.131-142
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• 2004

Speaker identification system basically functions by comparing spectral energy of an individual production model with that of an input signal. This study aimed to develop a new speaker identification system from two parameters from the spectral energy of numeric sounds: difference sum and correlation coefficient. A narrow-band spectrogram yielded more stable spectral energy across time than a wide-band one. In this paper, we collected empirical data from four male speakers and tested the speaker identification system. The subjects produced 18 combinations of three-digit numeric. sounds !en times each. Five productions of each three-digit number were statistically averaged to make a model for each speaker. Then, the remaining five productions were tested on the system. Results showed that when the threshold for the absolute difference sum was set to 1200, all the speakers could not pass the system while everybody could pass if set to 2800. The minimum correlation coefficient to allow all to pass was 0.82 while the coefficient of 0.95 rejected all. Thus, both threshold levels can be adjusted to the need of speaker identification system, which is desirable for further study.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.129-143
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• 2003

Fundamental frequency (Fo), jitter, shimmer, and harmonics-to-noise ratio (NHR) have been measured to see their interactions between the parameters using Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP). 100 Korean normal adults (50 males and 50 females) ranging from their early 20's to their early 30's produced the eight sustained vowels including /a/, /i/, /u/, /c/, /e/,/$\varepsilon$/, /i/, and /e/. The subjects were asked to read the above vowels five times in isolation with the interval of five seconds, respectively. Male voices, on the average, showed 130.7 Hz in Fo, 0.6696% in jitter, 1.8151% in shimmer, and 0.12 in NHR, while female voices showed 232.8 Hz in Fo, 0.9222% in jitter, 1.9199% in shimmer, and 0.1098 in NHR. As to the correlation coefficient, it was found that for male speakers jitter vs. shimmer, shimmer vs. NHR, Fo vs. shimmer, and Fo vs. NHR are statistically significant. It was found that for female subjects jitter vs. shimmer and Fo vs. shimmer are statistically significant. However, it is concluded that the correlation coefficient in females are not meaningful in a practical way though they are all statistically significant.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.235-241
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• 2016

Recently our country was entering a high-tech society with social and economic development. However, the individual's ability to respond to disasters is lowered by the increase in complexity society. Accurate situation assessment and disaster response by a margin of personal information that can identify when a disaster has been difficult. Until now, by leveraging Standard speaker was the emergency alert broadcast. However, it was difficult to have regular speakers reverberation, a distinct attenuation of sound by listening to the sound, etc. due to the reflection of sound. By using a directional speaker that is characteristic of the sound attenuation of sound is straight to solve this problem and obtain feedback on measures that can effectively provide the oocytes to a valid information on a disaster situation and the evacuation.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.123-159
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• 2012

This study investigates relationships between TOPIK ratings and measures of grammaticality judgement competence in the acquisition of Korean as a second language. Data were collected on the linguistic abilities of learners' at 3 to 6 on the TOPIK scale, focusing on perception in grammar-mostly morphology and syntax, some lexis, and a few of collocation. The results show that (i) proficiency and grammaticality judgement competence show high correlation, (ii) individual accuracy scores correlate strongly with levels on the TOPIK proficiency scale on most linguistic features in the test, and (iii) Japanese speakers outperform Chinese speakers at the same levels of proficiency on most linguistic features. The findings indicate that global proficiency scales like the TOPIK can be deconstructed using grammaticality judgement test that provides detailed measures of learners' control of linguistic features.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.269-275
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• 2007

Pervasive Multi-channel audio systems are being realized due to advances in digital technology. This paper proposes an efficient system that serially connects individual speakers with bidirectional digital communication capability by means of SoC design. In particular, each speaker can identify the bit stream assigned to the speaker and convert it into analog audio. Furthermore, the speaker can self-diagnose the speaker functionality by utilizing the designed capability to measure frequencies of various square wave test signals. The proposed system running on 200MHz clock yielded restoration of analog output signal with latency of only $500{\mu}s$ compared to directly driving the speakers in a traditional way.