• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.125-135
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• 2017

The current study examines PCC (percentage of correct consonant), speech intelligibility, and oral motor function between the group of typically developing children and the group of children with Down's syndrome. To 15 children with Down's syndrome (mean CA: 9;7) and 15 typically developing children on receptive language age, the following tests were administered: K-WPPSI (2001), Picture Vocabulary Test (Kim et al., 1995), Oral and Speech Motor Control Protocol for total oral functional score (Robbins et al., 1987), DDK and Assessment of Phonology and Articulation for Children (APAC, Kim et al., 2007) for PCC and speech intelligibility. Pearson correlation coefficients were computed for the total oral functional score, PCC and DDK of each group. The statistical analysis showed that there is no significant difference in total functional score and DDK when IQ was controlled. There was a significant correlation between total oral functional score and PCC in the Down's syndrome group and a significant correlation between total oral functional score and intelligibility in the Down's syndrome group whether IQ was controlled or not. The findings suggest that both cognitive ability and overall oral motor function need to be considered for the intervention to enhance PCC or speech intelligibility of children with Down's syndrome.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.171-178
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• 2010

This study examined the relationship between speech intelligibility and comprehensibility for hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. Speech intelligibility was measured by orthographic transcription method for acoustic signal at the level of words and sentences. Comprehensibility was evaluated by examining listener's ability to answer questions about the contents of a narrative. Speech samples were collected from 12 speakers(age of 6~15 years) with cochlear implants. For each speaker, 4 different listeners(total of 48 listeners) completed 2 tasks: One task involved making orthographic transcriptions and the other task involved answering comprehension questions. The results of the study were as follows: (1) Speech intelligibility and comprehensibility scores tended to be increased by decreasing of severity. (2) Across all speakers, the relationship was significant between speech intelligibility and comprehensibility scores without considering severity. However, within severity groups, there was the significant relationship between comprehensibility and speech intelligibility only for moderate-severe group. These results suggest that speech intelligibility scores measured by orthographic transcription may not accurately reflect how well listener comprehend speech of children with cochlear implants and therefore, measures of both speech intelligibility and listener comprehension should be considered in evaluating speech ability and information-bearing capability in speakers with cochlear implants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations between phonetic differences among Korean learners' production of English front vowels, pronunciation intelligibility and speaking proficiency test score. To do so, thirty Korean university students were asked (1) to read English text book paragraphs and (2) describe a picture. Two English native raters and one Korean rater evaluated Korean subjects' English pronunciation intelligibility and speaking. In addition, subjects' English vowel productions were acoustically analyzed(F0, F1, F2, vowel duration, intensity). The results of the study show that the vowel quality and pitch of the unstressed vowels and lax vowel are related to the pronunciation intelligibility. In addition, the scores of pronunciation intelligibility and speaking are highly related.

• 재활복지
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.67-82
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• 2016

The purpose of this study was to investigate relation and effect of PCC(Percentage of Correct Consonant) and nasalance score on the speech intelligibility and acceptability in adults with dysarthria by reading task of standardized passage. Ten adults with dysarthria and sixteen normal adults were participated in this study. PCC and nasalance score were measured through reading task of standardized passage. And, speech intelligibility and acceptability were examined using visual analogue criteria. The result of the study was as follows. First, the nasalance score of adults with dysarthria group is significantly higher than normal adults group in reading sample by standardized passage. Second, the PCC, speech intelligibility and acceptability shows significant correlation. However, the nasalance score doesn't show significant corelation with speech intelligibility and acceptability. These results suggest that PCC is closely related to speech intelligibility and speech acceptability, but nasalance score is not related to speech intelligibility and speech acceptability.

• MALSORI
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• no.43
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• pp.25-44
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• 2002

The intelligibility of a spoken message is influenced by a number of factors. Intelligibility is a joint product of a speaker and a listener. In addition, intelligibility varies with the nature of the language context and the context of communication. Thus a single intelligibility score can not be ascribed to a given individual apart from listener and listening situation. But there is a clinical and research need to develop assessment measures of intelligibility that are quantitative and analytic. Before developing the index of intelligibility, the crucial factors need to be examined. Among them, the most significant in intelligibility is the speech factors of speakers. The following section reviews the literature dealing with the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental factors in speech intelligibility regarding the hearing impaired, alaryngeal, and motor disorders.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.26-30
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• 2019

This paper proposes a new voice activity detection (VAD) method which is based on SNR and non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation. In the conventional SNR-based VAD methods, voice activity probability is obtained by estimating frame-wise SNR at each spectral component. However these methods lack performance in various noisy environments. We devise a hybrid VAD method that uses non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation as well as SNR estimation, where the speech intelligibility score is estimated based on deep neural network. In order to train model parameters of deep neural network, we use MFCC vector and the intrusive speech intelligibility score, STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligent Measure), as input and output, respectively. We developed speech presence measure to classify each noisy frame as voice or non-voice by calculating the weighted average of the estimated STOI value and the conventional SNR-based VAD value at each frame. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional VAD method in various noisy environments, especially when the SNR is very low.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.173-179
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• 2011

The present study was performed to investigate the intelligibility of voice disorder patients by providing the various background noise levels. Four sets of 12-sentence-stimuli produced by 11 voice disorder patients were prepared, and 5 minute-news from radio broadcasting studio were used as a background noise. 30 listeners assigned intelligibility score of each sentence with visual analog scale. Each set of sentences was provided with 20dB, 10dB, 0dB noise (same intensity with stimuli), and, finally, with no noise. As results, as background noise level increased, intelligibility scores were lowered with statistical significance. Even though in the same severity, more loud background noise showed much lower scores than less loud noise. When 10dB noise was provided, intelligibility scores showed the biggest difference among the degree of severity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.129-136
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• 2017

This study investigates the effect of voice quality on speech intelligibility and the relationship between voice quality and intelligibility for children with spastic CP. We recruited 36 children with spastic CP (mean age 10.43 year, 17 girls, 19 boys, spastic type 34, mixed 2) from a special school and a rehabilitation hospital. Voice samples for the perceptual analysis of voice quality were extracted from a sustained vowel /a/ and were rated on the GRBAS scales by two experienced speech language pathologists. Ten adult subjects with no hearing problems evaluated speech intelligibility for the 37 words listed in the Assessment of Phonology and Articulation for Children on a 7-point interval scale. The children with spastic CP were divided into three groups according to the rated G scores on the GRBAS scales (G1(n)=10, G2(n)=13, G3(n)=13). Analyses of ANCOVA and Pearson correlation showed that there was a significant difference in speech intelligibility among three groups. There was also a significant correlation in G scale (grade), A scale (asthenia), B scale (breathy) score, and speech intelligibility. These findings suggest that poor speech intelligibility of spastic CP might be related to asthenia and breathiness. Vocal intensity should be increased and vocal functioning should be improved for speech therapy to improve speech intelligibility of the children with spastic CP.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.140-148
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• 1999

The use of obturator is the prosthetic rehabilitation approach for restoration of the defected maxillary shape and function for the patients with palatal defect. The obturator can change the shape of vocal tract and nasality, but few reports on the effects of the change were presented. So, the authors performed the experimental study to compare the difference between the sizes of vowel triangles produced by maxillectomized patients before and after obturator-wearing and to consider how much improvement in speech intelligibility can be expected by obturator wearing. The 8 patients who were totally maxillectomized due to palatal cancer were participated as subjects. They produced 5 vowels(/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/) before and after obturator-wearing. The formants of the vowels were analyzed by the spectrogram of CSL, and their speech intelligibility were judged by normal 8 listeners. As results, the frequency of the first and the second formant showed no significant difference between the articulation before and after wearing, but the comparison of the sizes of vowel triangles, related with the speech intelligibility, showed significant difference. The vowel triangle of the articulation after wearing was larger than that of the articulation before wearing. /i/ showed the lowest speech intelligibility score among the vowel articulation before wearing. After wearing obturators, their scores increased on the whole, especially, in /a/, but the intelligibility of /u/ decreased after wearing.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.220-225
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• 2020

This paper investigates the non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation method in noise environments when the bottleneck feature of autoencoder is used as an input to a neural network. The bottleneck feature-based method has the problem of severe performance degradation when the noise environment is changed. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation method that adds the noise environment information along with bottleneck feature to the input of long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network whose output is a short-time objective intelligence (STOI) score that is a standard tool for measuring intrusive speech intelligibility with reference speech signals. From the experiments in various noise environments, the proposed method showed improved performance when the noise environment is same. In particular, the performance was significant improved compared to that of the conventional methods in different environments. Therefore, we can conclude that the method proposed in this paper can be successfully used for estimating non-intrusive speech intelligibility in various noise environments.