• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.64-66
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to compare and analyze some acoustic parameters of the cochlear implanted children(N=20, aged 3-10) and to suggest a basic data on speech rehabilitaion for the cochlear implanted children. Acoustic analyses of seven Korean monophthongs produced by 4 contexts(V, CV, VC, CVC) were conducted for the cochler implanted children and normal hearing children(N=20, aged 3-10). Subjects were asked to pronounce a list of vowel repeating three times. The results of this study are the same as follows: First, in the case of the cochlear implanted group, there were no significant differences in F1 and F2. Second, in the case of the normal hearing group, there were significant differences in F2 /ㅜ/ between V and CVC, between VC and CVC. Third, there were significant differences in F1, F2 between CI group and normal hearing group.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.146-148
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• 2007

Studies of cry characteristics in the newborn infant were aimed to determine if cry analysis could be succesful in the early detection of the infant at risk for developmental difficulties. Crying presupposes functioning of the respiratory, laryngeal and supralaryngeal muscles. The nervous system controls the capacity, stability, and co-ordination of the movements in these muscles. Hence, the cry provides information about how the Nervous System is functioning. 3 patients(down syndrome, cornelia de lange syndrome, Patent ductus arteriosus) were assessed through a Computerized Speech Lab (CSL). Tests had been chosen to assess Fundamental frequency(mean, maximum, minimum values), Melody contour, NHR, Energy. We compared the data from patients and healthy volunteer. Variations in cry characteristics were documented in a number of medical abnormalities.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.281-284
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• 2007

This experimental study aims to find out the correlation between semantic predictability and pitch-accent realization. For the experiment, we classified the predictability into three degrees: unpredictable, implicitly predictable, and explicitly predictable. And then each degree divided into to two subcatergories: one is adverbs/adverbial phrases of time or place and the other one is not time or place adverbs/adverbial phrases. The materials used in the experiment were 9 sentences for the each subcategory. One male and one female English native speakers participated in this experiment. Their reading speeches were recorded on Digital Audio Tape. Their speech data were analyzed by using Pitchworks program. The results of this experiment show pitch accented ratio is somewhat in inverse proportion to the degree of predictability.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.17-20
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the actual pronunciation of the words of foreign origin on TV news programs, and to review the regulations related to it. To investigate the actual pronunciation of the foreign words, the frequency data of the National Korean Language Institute is used as the subject of investigation. There is a big gap between the actual pronunciation and the orthography of the words of foreign origin. And received pronunciation of foreign words is need to teach or learn Korean efficiently. I suggest the pronunciation of foreign words is marked on Korean dictionary instead of revising the related regulations.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.224-228
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• 1996

This paper is intended as a study on how an utterance is divided into rhythmic units in Standard Korean with respect to its syntactic structure. With respect to the data in this study I used 150 sentences which contained similar number of words and various syntactic structures. Those sentences were read by 7 speakers of Seoul dialect in a conversation style. Each sentence was read twice in a normal speed and twice in a fast speed. As a total, 4200 sentences were recorded. Then listening to them, the author marked the sentences with two kinds of boundaries i.e. strong and weak. To explore the relationship between rhythmic units and syntactic structure I devised a framework of grammatical symbols. Each symbol is designed to have both syntactic and morphological information at the same time. So I assigned those grammatical symbols to the sentences. Having sentences marked with grammatical symbols on the one hand, and with the rhythmic boundaries on the other hand, 1 could show the relationship between rhythmic units and syntactic structure; which syntactic structures are likely to be pronounced as one rhythmic unit, and which are on the rhythmic boundaries.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.25-36
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• 2001

Stress assignment has been much discussed in the literature on English compound nouns. The general view of the stress pattern of English compound nouns is that a main stress falls on the first element and a secondary stress on the second element; however, a stress pattern is often employed that provides counterevidence to the traditional pedagogical approach. A new idea is suggested by Ladd(1984) that 'compound stress represents the deaccenting of the head of the compound.' Recent studies show that initial stressing does not indicate compounds and syntactic phrases are not always characterized by final stressing. In his pilot test Pennanen comments on the frequent variation of stress patterns on individual items, on the basis of which Bauer confirms Pennanen's results with different informants. This paper is an attempt to justify Bauer's analysis with the same data as Bauer's and different subjects. It turns out that the competences of native-speaker informants do not rovide clear-cut answers. Some factors should be taken into account in assigning appropirate stress to compound nouns.

• MALSORI
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• no.45
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• pp.15-22
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• 2003

This study is a kind of a preliminary study to develop naturalness of dialog TTS system. In this study, as major characteristics of politeness in Korean, temporal(total duration of utterances, speech rate and duration of utterance final syllables) and F0(mean F0, boundary tone pattern, F0 range) features were discussed through acoustic analysis of recorded data of semantically neutral sentences, which were spoken by ten professional voice actors under two conditions of utterance type - namely, normal and polite type. The results show that temporal characteristics were significantly different according to the utterance type but F0 characteristics were not.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.89-104
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• 2004

This paper investigates previous theories on English focus realization and attempts to find out the overall acoustic characteristics of English focus. It has been argued in previous studies that English focus can be defined as a new information that is not recoverable from the context (Halliday 1967), a complementary element of presupposition (Jackendoff 1972), and what is predicated about the topic in a sentence (Sgall 1973, Gundel 1974). The phonetic realization of English focus in an utterance has been said to be either L+H*/H*, or falling accent. Yet it is a more or less simplified pattern not based on real data obtained from native speakers of English, and it does not consider the various pragmatic and contextual situations. In our experiments we found that native speakers uttered English focus sentences in different ways according to the different focus structure. Another notable result is that Korean speakers, when provided with the same experimental material, are neither able to distinguish different focus types nor deaccent the elements that are not focused in an utterance.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.263-277
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• 2003

One of major problems in speech recognition is performance degradation due to the mismatch between the training and test environments. Recently, Stereo-based Piecewise LInear Compensation for Environments (SPLICE), which is frame-based bias removal algorithm for cepstral enhancement using stereo training data and noisy speech model as a mixture of Gaussians, was proposed and showed good performance in noisy environments. In this paper, we propose several methods to improve the conventional SPLICE. First we apply Cepstral Mean Subtraction (CMS) as a preprocessor to SPLICE, instead of applying it as a postprocessor. Secondly, to compensate residual distortion after SPLICE processing, two-stage SPLICE is proposed. Thirdly we employ phonetic information for training SPLICE model. According to experiments on the Aurora 2 database, proposed method outperformed the conventional SPLICE and we achieved a 50% decrease in word error rate over the Aurora baseline system.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.43-60
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• 2008

Instrumental studies (e.g., aerodynamic, EPG, and EMMA) have shown that the first of two stops in sequence can be articulatorily reduced in time and space sometimes; either gradient or categorical. The current EMMA study aims to examine possible factors_linguistic (e.g., speech rate, word boundary, and prosodic boundary) and paralinguistic (e.g., natural context and repetition)_to induce gradient reduction of $C_1$ in /pk/ cluster sequences. EMMA data are collected from five Seoul-Korean speakers. The results show that gradient reduction of lip aperture seldom occurs, being quite restricted both in speaker frequency and in token frequency. The results also suggest that the place assimilation is not a lexical process, implying that speakers have not fully developed this process to be phonologized in the abstract level.