• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.71-80
• /
• 2016

The phonemic awareness tasks (phonemic synthesis, phonemic elision, phonemic segmentation) by auditory presentation and visual presentation were conducted to 40 children who are 5 and 6 years old. The scores and error types in the sub-tasks by two presentations were compared to each other. Also, the correlation between the performances of phonemic awareness sub-tasks in two presentation conditions were examined. As a result, 6-year-old group showed significantly higher phonemic awareness scores than 5-year-old group. Both group showed significantly higher scores in visual presentation than auditory presentation. While the performance under the visual presentation was significantly lower especially in the segmentation than the other two tasks, there was no significant difference among sub-tasks under the auditory presentation. 5-year-old group showed significantly more 'no response' errors than 6-year-old group and 6-year-old group showed significantly more 'phoneme substitution' and 'phoneme omission' errors than 5-year-old group. Significantly more 'phoneme omission' errors were observed in the segmentation than the elision task, and significantly more 'phoneme addition' errors were observed in elision than the synthesis task. Lastly, there are positive correlations in auditory and visual synthesis tasks, auditory and visual elision tasks, and auditory and visual segmentation tasks. Summarizing the results, children tend to depend on orthographic knowledge when acquiring the initial phonemic awareness. Therefore, the result of this research would support the position that the orthographic knowledge affects the improvement of phonemic awareness.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.59-77
• /
• 2005

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the phonemic characteristics influence on the disfluencies of children and adults who stutter. The participants were 10 children(9 boys and 1 girl) and 10 male adults. After having the participants to read out the Paradise-Fluency Assessment(Sim, Shin & Lee, 2004) passages, each of the productions were divided into syllables and words, and then the frequencies and the ratios of their disfluenceis were analyzed according to the specified phonemic features. In terms of the frequency of the disfluency, the participants stuttered more in the words which start with consonant than vowel. But they showed more disfluencies in the words initiated with vowel than consonant when the ratio of each phoneme's presences were considered. There found different tendencies among the phonemic features related with their disfluencies occuring with ralatively high frequency or ratio. It was difficult to find out the exact relationships among the order of the sound acquisition, phonemic complexity, and the disfluencies. To study the exact influence of the phonemic features upon the disfluencies, it comes important to consider the frequency of the stuttering itself together with the ratio of the disfluencies in which the opportunity of the specific sound's presence was considered. To compare the results of the different studies which has similar purposes, it seems important to consider the tasks and the methodologies in depth.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.59
• /
• pp.1-11
• /
• 2006

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between intelligibility and phonemic contrasts, and acoustic features in terms of speech development. A total of 212 Putonghua speaking children was participated in the experiment. There were phonemic contrasts significantly related with speech intelligibility: aspirated vs. fricative, retroflex vs. unretroflex, and front vs. back nasal vowel contrast. A regression analysis showed that 88% of the speech intelligibility could be predicted by these phonemic contrasts. Acoustic values were significantly related to the intelligibility of the Putonghua-speaking children's speech: voice onset time of unaspirated stops, and the duration of frication noise in fricatives.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.37-44
• /
• 2023

This study investigates perceptual confusions of English fricatives among 121 Korean elementary school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with shorter periods of learning English. The objective is to examine how they perceive English fricative consonants and to provide educational guidelines. Two sets of English fricative identification tasks-voiceless fricatives and voiced fricatives-were administered to participants in a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) setting. Their phonemic awareness of the fricatives was visualized in perceptual confusion maps via multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings are explored in terms of the impacts of Korean EFL learners' L1 linguistic aspects and a comparison with L1 learners. Learners' phonemic awareness patterns are then compared with their relative importance in speech intelligibility based on a functional load hierarchy. The results indicated that Korean elementary EFL learners recognized English fricatives in a manner largely akin to L1 learners, suggesting their ongoing acquisition progress. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the young EFL learners possess sufficient phonemic awareness for most high functional load segments but encounter some difficulties with one high and one low functional pair. The findings of this study offer suggestions for diagnosing language learners' phonemic awareness abilities, thereby aiding in the development of practical guidelines for language instructional design and helping educators make informed decisions regarding teaching priority in L2 classes.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.23 no.4E
• /
• pp.134-139
• /
• 2004

It is generally known that accurate segmentation is very necessary for both an individual word and continuous utterances in speech recognition. It is also commonly known that techniques are now being developed to classify the voiced and the unvoiced, also classifying the plosives and the fricatives. The method for accurate recognition of the phonemes isn't yet scientifically established. Therefore, in this study we analyze the Korean language, using the classification of 'Hunminjeongeum' and contemporary phonetics, with the frequency band, Mel band and Mel Cepstrum, we extract notable features of the phonemes from Korean speech and segment speech by the unit of the phonemes to normalize them. Finally, through the analysis and verification, we intend to set up Phonemic Segmentation System that will make us able to adapt it to both an individual word and continuous utterances.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.13 no.6
• /
• pp.60-65
• /
• 1994

A study on phonemic feature changes is accomplished by human perception of the discrimination of the phonemic feature of Korean edited speech waveform which is partially elimination or exchange. We found that speech waveforms has tarnsitional, stationary. equivalent and critical phonemic parts.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.173-184
• /
• 2004

This study aims to discuss the test methodologies that evaluate the speech intelligibility of hearing-impaired adults using various contexts. Seven adults with severe hearing loss participated in the experiment. The context of the speech intelligibility consists of 77 pairs of one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts, 30 two-syllable words and the list of each 12 and 10 sentences. The speech intelligibility of various contexts had significant correlation, and both one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts and the sentence 1 had higher correlation than other tests. The one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts took longer to test than others, and it demanded more effort to select the pair of words. However, from the point of view of the identification of segmental difficulties, the one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts that reflected segmental factors contributing to the intelligibility was useful.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.167-173
• /
• 2020

Background and Objectives: Top-down restoration of distorted speech, tapped as phonemic restoration of speech in noise, maybe a useful tool to understand robustness of perception in adverse listening situations. However, the relationship between phonemic restoration and speech perception in noise is not empirically clear. Subjects and Methods: 20 adults (40-55 years) with normal audiometric findings were part of the study. Sentence perception in noise performance was studied with various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) to estimate the SNR with 50% score. Performance was also measured for sentences interrupted with silence and for those interrupted by speech noise at -10, -5, 0, and 5 dB SNRs. The performance score in the noise interruption condition was subtracted by quiet interruption condition to determine the phonemic restoration magnitude. Results: Fairly robust improvements in speech intelligibility was found when the sentences were interrupted with speech noise instead of silence. Improvement with increasing noise levels was non-monotonic and reached a maximum at -10 dB SNR. Significant correlation between speech perception in noise performance and phonemic restoration of sentences interrupted with -10 dB SNR speech noise was found. Conclusions: It is possible that perception of speech in noise is associated with top-down processing of speech, tapped as phonemic restoration of interrupted speech. More research with a larger sample size is indicated since the restoration is affected by the type of speech material and noise used, age, working memory, and linguistic proficiency, and has a large individual variability.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.167-173
• /
• 2020

Background and Objectives: Top-down restoration of distorted speech, tapped as phonemic restoration of speech in noise, maybe a useful tool to understand robustness of perception in adverse listening situations. However, the relationship between phonemic restoration and speech perception in noise is not empirically clear. Subjects and Methods: 20 adults (40-55 years) with normal audiometric findings were part of the study. Sentence perception in noise performance was studied with various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) to estimate the SNR with 50% score. Performance was also measured for sentences interrupted with silence and for those interrupted by speech noise at -10, -5, 0, and 5 dB SNRs. The performance score in the noise interruption condition was subtracted by quiet interruption condition to determine the phonemic restoration magnitude. Results: Fairly robust improvements in speech intelligibility was found when the sentences were interrupted with speech noise instead of silence. Improvement with increasing noise levels was non-monotonic and reached a maximum at -10 dB SNR. Significant correlation between speech perception in noise performance and phonemic restoration of sentences interrupted with -10 dB SNR speech noise was found. Conclusions: It is possible that perception of speech in noise is associated with top-down processing of speech, tapped as phonemic restoration of interrupted speech. More research with a larger sample size is indicated since the restoration is affected by the type of speech material and noise used, age, working memory, and linguistic proficiency, and has a large individual variability.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2002.11a
• /
• pp.81-85
• /
• 2002

We present a statistical analysis of Korean phonological variations using automatic generation of phonetic transcription. We have constructed the automatic generation system of Korean pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes. These rules are derived from knowledge-based morphophonological analysis and government standard pronunciation rules. This system is optimized for continuous speech recognition by generating phonetic transcriptions for training and constructing a pronunciation dictionary for recognition. In this paper, we describe Korean phonological variations by analyzing the statistics of phonemic change rule applications for the 60,000 sentences in the Samsung PBS(Phonetic Balanced Sentence) Speech DB. Our results show that the most frequently happening obligatory phonemic variations are in the order of liaison, tensification, aspirationalization, and nasalization of obstruent, and that the most frequently happening optional phonemic variations are in the order of initial consonant h-deletion, insertion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants, and deletion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants. These statistics can be used for improving the performance of speech recognition systems.