• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.29-41
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• 2005

This paper is to show the diphthong system of Jeju dialect speakers in their 70s or more on the basis of the acoustic analysis of their phonetic data. It is revealed through the analysis of their phonetic data that they clearly distinguish such diphthongs as [we], [w$\epsilon$], [yc] and [yo]. However, this paper shows that they are phonetically insensitive to the separation between [ye] and [y$\epsilon$] and they seldom make a precise pronunciation of diphthong [iy], which male speakers tend to pronounce to be [i] and female speakers to be [i].

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.173-179
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• 2004

Due to the insufficiency of training data in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, similar context dependent phones can be clustered by decision trees to share the data. When the decision trees are built and used to predict unseen triphones, a phonetic question set is required. The phonetic question set, which contains categories of the phones with similar co-articulation effects, is usually generated by phonetic or linguistic experts. This knowledge-based approach for generating phonetic question set, however, may reduce the homogeneity of the clusters. Moreover, the experts must adjust the question sets whenever the language or the PLU (phone-like unit) of a recognition system is changed. Therefore, we propose a data-driven method to automatically generate phonetic question set. Since the proposed method generates the phone categories using speech data distribution, it is not dependent on the language or the PLU, and may enhance the homogeneity of the clusters. In large vocabulary speech recognition experiments, the proposed algorithm has been found to reduce the error rate by 14.3%.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.143-169
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• 2000

This chapter presents an overview of Korean intonational structure and proposes a revised version of K -ToBI (Korean TOnes and Break Indices), a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. In the new version of K-ToBI, a tone tier is separated into two tiers: a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels tones marking the prosodic structure of an utterance, and a phonetic tone tier labels individual tones of an AP and an IP conforming to the surface pitch contour. Labelling surface tonal patterns will provide us data to test the underlying tonal patterns and to build phonetic implementation rules.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.1-14
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• 2005

Sasang Constitution, one branch of oriental medicine, claims that people can be classified into four different 'constitutions:' Taeyang, Taeum, Soyang, and Soeum. This study investigates whether the classification of the constitutions could be accurately made solely based on people's voice by analyzing the data from 46 different voices whose constitutions were already determined. Seven source-related parameters and four filter-related parameters were phonetically analyzed and the GMM(Gaussian mixture model) was tried on the data. Both the results from phonetic analyses and GMM showed that all the parameters (except one) failed to distinguish the constitutions of the people successfully. And even the single exception, B2 (the bandwidth of the second formant) did not provide us with sufficient reasons to be the source of distinction. This result seems to suggest one of the two conclusions: either the Sasang Constitutions cannot be substantiated with phonetic characteristics of peoples' voices with reliable accuracy, or we need to find yet some other parameters which haven't been conventionally proposed.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.63-66
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• 2005

Sasang Constitution, one branch of oriental medicine, claims that people can be classified into four different 'constitutions:' Taeyang, Taeum, Soyang, and Soeum. This study investigates whether the classification of the 'constitutions' could be accurately made solely based on people's voice by analyzing the data from 46 different voices whose constitutions were already determined. Seven source-related parameters and four filter-related parameters were phonetically analyzed and the GMM(gaussian mixture model) was tried with the data. Both the results from phonetic analyses and GMM showed that all the parameters (except one)failed to distinguish the constitutions of the people successfully. And even the single exception, the bandwidth of F2, did not provide us with sufficient reasons to be the source of distinction. This result seems to suggest one of the two conclusions: either the Sasang Constitutions cannot be substantiated with phonetic characteristics of peoples' voices with reliable accuracy, or we need to find yet some other parameters which haven't been conventionally proposed.

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.51-72
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to design Speech Database for Korean pronunciation education. For this purpose, I investigated types of speech errors of Korean-learners, made texts for recording, which involves all types of speech errors, and showed how to gather speech data and how to tag their informations. It's natural that speech data should include Korean-learners' speech and Korean people's speech, because Speech DB that I try to develop is for teaching Korean pronunciation to foreigners. So this DB should have informations about speakers and phonetic informations, which are about phonetic value of segments and intonation of sentences. The intonation of sentence varies with the type of sentence, the structure of prosodic units, the length of a prosodic unit and so on. For this reason, Speech DB must involve tags about these informations.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.37-40
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a VQ codebook design of speech recognition feature parameters in order to improve the performance of a distributed speech recognition system. For the context-dependent HMMs, a VQ codebook should be correlated with phonetic distributions in the training data for HMMs. Thus, we focus on a selection method of training data based on phonetic distribution instead of using all the training data for an efficient VQ codebook design. From the speech recognition experiments using the Aurora 4 database, the distributed speech recognition system employing a VQ codebook designed by the proposed method reduced the word error rate (WER) by 10% when compared with that using a VQ codebook trained with the whole training data.

• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.105-124
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• 2008

This paper presents the effects of different phone-like-unit (PLU) sets in order to propose an optimal PLU set for the performance improvement of Korean automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The examination of 9 currently used PLU sets indicates that most of them include a selection of allophones without any sufficient phonetic base. In this paper, a total of 34 PLU sets are designed based on Korean phonetic characteristics arid the effects of each PLU set are evaluated through experiments. The results show that the accuracy rate of each phone is influenced by different phonetic constraint(s) which determine(s) the PLU sets, and that an optimal PLU set can be anticipated through the phonetic analysis of the given speech data.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.205-209
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• 1994

This paper presents a variable rate speech coding method with phonetic segmentation, called for PSVXC. Multiple access techniques that require efficient encoding of speech to achieve capacity improvements are currently emerging in the cellular telephone system. The variable rate speech coder have the reduced average data rate required to transmit conversational speech. Each frame of active speech is classified into one of four phonetic classes. A distinct coding configuration and bit-rate is applied to each category. And also a split vector quantization is used to accurately quantize the LPC information using LSP parameters.