• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.25-39
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• 2007

The present study investigated some perceptual phonetic attributes of two Korean stop types, aspirated and lax, in medial position of an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables (Jun, 1993) is argued to depend on the type of stop (aspirated vs. lax) only in the initial position of an accentual phrase. In Kang & Dilley (2007), we showed that significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in medial position of an accentual phrase exist in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. In the present perception experiment, we investigated whether these phonetic attributes contribute to the perception of these two types of stops: The closure durations and/or F0's of post-stop vowels on accentual-phrase medial words were altered and twenty native Korean speakers then judged these words as beginning with an aspirated or lax stop. Both closure duration and F0 significantly affected judgments of stop identity. These results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues that distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops in production also plays a role in perception. To account for these results we suggest some phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.67-74
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• 2017

An increase in speech intelligibility has been found in Clear Speech compared to conversational speech. Clear Speech is defined by decreased articulation rates and increased frequency and length of pauses. The objective of the present study was to investigate improvement in immediate speech intelligibility in 10 patients with Parkinson's disease (age range: 46 to 75 years) using Clear Speech. This experiment has been performed using the Phonatory Aerodynamic System 6600 after the participants read the first sentence of a Sanchaek passage and the "List for Adults 1" in the Sentence Recognition Test (SRT) using casual speech and Clear Speech. Acoustic and aerodynamic parameters that affect speech intelligibility were measured, including mean F0, F0 range, intensity, speaking rate, mean airflow rate, and respiratory rate. In the Sanchaek passage, use of Clear Speech resulted in significant differences in mean F0, F0 range, speaking rate, and respiratory rate, compared with the use of casual speech. In the SRT list, significant differences were seen in mean F0, F0 range, and speaking rate. Based on these findings, it is claimed that speech intelligibility can be affected by adjusting breathing and tone in Clear Speech. Future studies should identify the benefits of Clear Speech through auditory-perceptual studies and evaluate programs that use Clear Speech to increase intelligibility.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.253-263
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• 2003

The purposes of this study were to find out an evaluation scale that could predict wear comfort and to investigate the effect of the skin-contacting fiber type on the subjective sensation and microclimate. Sensorial evaluation was basically followed by the Human Perception Analysis (HPA) interviewing 144 consumers. Sixteen female subjects were participated in the sleeve wear test with and without wearing vapor permeable water repellent outerwear. Experimental sleeves were constructed using the same double knit by turning inside out to control other material effects except the skin-contacting fiber type, hence each different side of double knit, cotton side and the cotton/polypropylene blend side, was next to skin in each trial of the experiment. As results, it was noted that the term representing a combined feeling of thermal and wetness sensation, and muggy appeared to be a powerful language to measure perceptual responses of human subject among five dimensions of evaluation. although the ordinary users did not use the term very often. As for the comfort properties of double knits, it seemed that subjects slightly more preferred polypropylene/cotton blend to cotton as the skin-contacting fiber type when they wore outerwear and their skin were covered with sweat, although the result was rot statistically significant and need to be confirmed under higher work load.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.51-58
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• 2010

English vowels play an important role in the daily communication between Korean students and international visitors. However, many Korean students still have difficulty producing them distinctively. Vowels vary according to shapes of oral and pharyngeal cavities, which are mainly determined by the degree of jaw opening and tongue position. Yang (2008a) proposed a simplified chart of English and Korean vowels for an educational purpose. He also suggested to use wooden chopsticks to secure distinguishable jaw openings. The purpose of this study is to tap whether wooden chopsticks can be applicable to a method for correcting English vowel pronunciation. Twelve male and female students participated in the recordings of eight /hVd/ words followed by additional recordings with wooden chopsticks between upper and lower teeth. The first and second formant trajectories of both natural and controlled vowel productions were obtained and compared at six equidistant measurement points using Praat. Results showed that the formant values of natural vowel productions were comparable to those of controlled productions. Vowels with similar formant trajectories of male students were separated with the aid of chopsticks. The width of each chopstick could be controlled similarly in the experiment. The author concludes that wooden chopsticks can be useful to correct vowel pronunciation. Further studies are desirable for native speakers to make perceptual evaluations of controlled vowel productions by nonnative speakers.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.94-102
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• 2021

This study addresses a method for 3D reconstruction using acoustic data with heterogeneous sonar devices: Forward-Looking Multibeam Sonar (FLMS) and Profiling Sonar (PS). The challenges in sonar image processing are perceptual ambiguity, the loss of elevation information, and low signal to noise ratio, which are caused by the ranging and intensity-based image generation mechanism of sonars. The conventional approaches utilize additional constraints such as Lambertian reflection and redundant data at various positions, but they are vulnerable to environmental conditions. Our approach is to use two sonars that have a complementary data type. Typically, the sonars provide reliable information in the horizontal but, the loss of elevation information degrades the quality of data in the vertical. To overcome the characteristic of sonar devices, we adopt the crossed installation in such a way that the PS is laid down on its side and mounted on the top of FLMS. From the installation, FLMS scans horizontal information and PS obtains a vertical profile of the front area of AUV. For the fusion of the two sonar data, we propose the probabilistic approach. A likelihood map using geometric constraints between two sonar devices is built and a monte-carlo experiment using a derived model is conducted to extract 3D points. To verify the proposed method, we conducted a simulation and field test. As a result, a consistent seabed map was obtained. This method can be utilized for 3D seabed mapping with an AUV.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.2547-2567
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• 2021

It has been widely acknowledged that occlusion impairments adversely distress many face recognition algorithms' performance. Therefore, it is crucial to solving the problem of face image occlusion in face recognition. To solve the image occlusion problem in face recognition, this paper aims to automatically de-occlude the human face majority or discriminative regions to improve face recognition performance. To achieve this, we decompose the generative process into two key stages and employ a separate generative adversarial network (GAN)-based network in both stages. The first stage generates an initial coarse face image without an occlusion mask. The second stage refines the result from the first stage by forcing it closer to real face images or ground truth. To increase the performance and minimize the artifacts in the generated result, a new refine loss (e.g., reconstruction loss, perceptual loss, and adversarial loss) is used to determine all differences between the generated de-occluded face image and ground truth. Furthermore, we build occluded face images and corresponding occlusion-free face images dataset. We trained our model on this new dataset and later tested it on real-world face images. The experiment results (qualitative and quantitative) and the comparative study confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed work in removing challenging occlusion masks with various structures, sizes, shapes, types, and positions.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.831-840
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a hearing impairment simulator considering reduced frequency selectivity and asymmetrical auditory filter of the hearing impaired, and we verified the reduced frequency selectivity and asymmetrical auditory filter affected in speech perception through experiments. The reduced frequency selectivity has made embodied by spectral smearing using LPC(linear prediction coding). The shapes of auditory filter are asymmetrical different with each center frequency. Hearing impaired person which has hearing loss was differently changed with that of normal hearing people and it has different value for speech of quality through auditory filter. The experiments confirmed subjective test and objective test. The subjective experiments are composed of 4 kinds of tests: pure tone test, SRT(speech reception threshold) test, and WRS(word recognition score) test without spectral smearing, and WRS test with spectral smearing. The experiment of the hearing impairment simulator was performed from 9 subjects who have normal ears. The amount of spectral smearing was controlled by LPC order. The asymmetrical auditory filter of proposed hearing impairment simulator was simulated and then some tests to estimate the filter's performance objectively were performed. The objective experiment as simulated auditory filter's performance evaluation method used PESQ(perceptual evaluation of speech quality) and LLR(log likelihood ratio) for speech through auditory filter. The processed speech was evaluated objective speech quality and distortion using PESQ and LLR value. When hearing loss processed, PESQ and LLR value have big difference according to asymmetrical auditory filter in hearing impairment simulator.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.3-10
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• 2014

This study investigated whether Korean vowels, /ɨ/ and /u/, are distinctively perceived after a labial consonant given the fact that native and Sino-Korean nouns showed only vowel /u/ after a labial consonant while this pattern was massively broken by the recent introduction of loanwords. For this purpose, a perception experiment was conducted with $V_1C_1V_2$ sequences in which different vowels /a, i, u/ and consonants /p, t, k/ occurred in $V_1$ and $C_1$ before the target $V_2$, /ɨ/ and /u/. The data was produced by six speakers each from two different age groups, Age20 and Age40/50 in the read speech style. The results showed that consonant /p/ attracted significantly more responses of /u/ from /VCɨ/ sequences and significantly less responses of /u/ from /VCu/ sequence than the other consonants did in both age groups. Furthermore, Age20 group showed significantly less percentage of /u/ responses than Age40 group when the preceding consonant was /p/ regardless of the target vowel. We suggest therefore that unlike the traditional belief of labial assimilation, there is neutralization after a labial consonant in which vowels /ɨ/ and /u/ are often realized as any sound between two vowels, /ɨ/ and /u/. That is, this vowel change is not categorial but it rather produces an ambiguous stimulus which attracts different responses from different listeners. Ambiguous stimulus was produced due to coarticulatory efforts in speech production and perceptual compensation. We also argue that there is generational difference such that Age40/50 group speakers showed stronger tendency to produce /u/ after a labial consonant regardless of whether the target vowel was /ɨ/ or /u/.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.9-21
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• 2002

Four experiments were conducted to examine whether maintaining the same conceptual context across study and test would affect performance on a perceptual implicit memory task. The sense-specific theory of priming (Lewandowsky et al., 1989) predicts greater priming from a match in conceptual context across study and test compared with a condition in which the conceptual context is mismatched, whereas the transfer-appropriate-processing view (e.g., Blaxton, 1989) predicts no difference. In experiment 1 and 2, little or no effect of varying context was observed on a implicit task. In experiment 3 and 4, a process-dissociation procedure (proposed by Jacoby, 1991) was used to separate automatic influences from consciously controlled influence in implicit memory, which was measured by Korean word completion task. The results showed that conceptual context effect was observed in consciously controlled parts of implicit memory. These results suggest that only consciously controlled processing parts of implicit memory is sensitive to conceptual context.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.45-54
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• 2009

Categorization in a vital means for dealing with the multitudes of entities in the world surrounding people. Among others, the perceptual and the evaluative similarities factors strongly affect categorization. The conventional SD-type procedure are insufficient in this regard, since it requires an individual subject to make isolated judgments about each stimulus to identify categorization in terms of a group tendency. It disregards the individual categorization in which the similarities are of great importance. Thus in this study the phased emotional evaluation method is suggested based on the intuitive categorization of stimuli and on the similarity judgement of representative/ non-representative case in each category. To verify the effectiveness of the suggested evaluation method the scanned jewelry images are selected as test stimuli for emotional evaluation experiment. As a result of the evaluation experiment, the conventional SD-type procedure is complemented by the emotional evaluation method in phases of the task of intuitive categorization, the selection of the representative images and the setup of the evaluation score of the representative images to internally supplied anchors of evaluating non-representative images.