• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.59-73
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• 2012

This study attempts to investigate the contribution of prosody to the foreign accent in Chinese speakers' English production by examining the synthesized speech of crossing native and non-native talkers' prosody and segments. For the stimuli of the foreign accent ratings, we transplanted gender-matched native speakers' prosody onto non-native talkers' segments and vice versa, utilizing the TD-PSOLA algorithm. Eight English native listeners participated in judging foreign accent and comprehensibility of the transplanted stimuli. Results showed that the synthesized stimuli were perceived as stronger foreign accent regardless of speakers' proficiency when English speakers' prosody was crossed with Chinese speakers' segments. This suggests that segments contribute more than prosody to native listeners' evaluation of foreign accent. When transplanted with English speakers' segments, Chinese speakers' prosody showed a difference in duration rather than pitch between high and low proficiency such that stronger foreign accent was detected when low proficient Chinese speakers' duration was crossed with English speakers' segments. This indicated that prosody, more specifically duration, plays a role though the prosodic role is not overall as significant as segments. According to the post acoustic analysis, the temporal features contributing to making the duration parameter prominent as opposed to pitch were found out to be speaking rate, pause duration and pause frequency. Finally, foreign accent and comprehensibility showed no significant correlation such that native listeners had no difficulty listening to highly foreign accented speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2018

Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.1183-1190
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• 2002

An experimental study is performed to investigate the characteristics of near wake behind a circular cylinder with serrated fins using the constant temperature anemometer and through flow visualization. Previous report(Boo et al., 2001) shows that there are three different modes in vortex shedding behavior. This paper is focused on the identification of the physical reasons why the difference iss occured in vortex shedding. The through flow velocity crossing fins decreases as increasing fin height and decreasing fin pitch mainly due to the flow resistence. Vortex shedding is affected strongly by velocity distribution around fin tube, especially by the velocity gradient. The velocity distribution at X/d=0.0 has lower gradient with increasing freestream velocity and fin height and decreasing fin pitch. Those differences in velocity gradients generate different vortex shedding mechanism.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.134-139
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• 2018

One of the most common problems with pedicle screw system is pullout of the screw. This study was performed to evaluate the pullout strength and driving torque of newly designed pedicle screws. The design of three type screws were standard pedicle screw, which had single lead threaded and single pitched design (Type A), single pitched and dual lead threaded pedicle screw (Type B), dual pitched and dual lead threaded pedicle screw (Type C), respectively. The tests were performed in accordance with the ASTM standards using polyurethane (PU) foam blocks. There was no significant difference in pullout strength among three types of screw. Type B and Type C exhibited higher insertion torque and removal torque than Type A, respectively (p<0.05). Pedicle screws newly developed with dual pitched and dual lead threaded design showed higher driving torque without decrease in pullout strength compared to the standard pedicle screw and could be inserted more rapidly with the same number of revolutions.

• Fibers and Polymers
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.85-87
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• 2006

The tensile-recoil compressional behavior of the carbon nanotube reinforced mesophase pitch (MP)-based composite carbon fibers (CNT-re-MP CFs) was investigated by using Instron and SEM. The CNT-re-MP CFs exhibited improved, or at least equivalent, compressive strength as compared with commercial MP-based carbon fibers. Particularly, when CNT of 0.1 wt% was reinforced, the ratios of recoil compressive strengths to tensile strength of CNT-re-MPCFs were much higher (the difference is at least 10 % or higher) than those for the commercial counterparts and even than those for PAN-based commercial carbon fibers. FESEM micrographs showed somewhat different fractography from that of a typical shear failure as the CNT content increased.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.107-116
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• 2015

The present experiment investigated the effect of word length on the length of f0 intervals for North Kyungsang children. In order to find out the lengths of the f0 intervals, the f0 values at the midpoints of vowels in words were measured. F0 estimates were computed as intervals consistent with the logarithmic scale corresponding to the number of syllables in the words. The results indicated that the mean f0 intervals in words of different lengths showed a significant difference for the HH in HH vs. HHL and the LH in LH vs. LLH for North Kyungsang children. Adult speakers from the North Kyungsang region significantly differed only within the HH in HH vs. HHL. Adult speakers made a noticeable contribution in this characteristic from the children. The result of the adult study was presented to confirm whether the children used a North Kyungsang dialect. With respect to individual speaker differences, the North Kyungsang children showed more or less consistent patterns in quantile-quantile plots for the HH vs. HHL, but for the HL vs. LHL and LH vs. LLH, there were more variations than for the HH vs. HHL. The individual speakers' variation was the largest for the HL vs. LHL and the smallest for HH vs. HHL. Considering these results, the effect of word length on f0 intervals tended to show pitch accent-type-specific characteristics in the process of prosodic acquisition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.81-89
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• 2014

Korean English learners tend to have difficulty perceiving and producing English vowels. The purpose of this study is to examine a link between perceived and produced vowel spaces of Korean learners of English. Sixteen Korean male and female participants perceived two sets of English synthetic vowels on a computer monitor and rated their naturalness. The same participants produced English vowels in a carrier sentence with high and low pitch variation in a clear speaking mode. The author compared the perceived and produced vowel spaces in terms of the pitch and gender variables. Results showed that the perceived vowel spaces were not significantly different in either variables. Korean learners perceived the vowels similarly. They did not differentiate the tense-lax vowel pairs nor the low vowels. Secondly, the produced vowel spaces of the male and female groups showed a 25% difference which may have come from their physiological differences in the vocal tract length. Thirdly, the comparison of the perceived and produced vowel spaces revealed that although the vowel space patterns of the Korean male and female learners appeared similar, which may lead to a relative link between perception and production, statistical differences existed in some vowels because of the acoustical properties of the synthetic vowels, which may lead to an independent link. The author concluded that any comparison between the perceived and produced vowel space of nonnative speakers should be made cautiously. Further studies would be desirable to examine how Koreans would perceive different sets of synthetic vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.59-67
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• 2017

Regardless of their intention, listeners tend to assess speakers' personalities based on the sounds of the speech they hear. Assessment criteria, however, have not been fully investigated to indicate whether there is any relationship between the acoustic cue of produced speech sounds and perceived personality impression. If properly investigated, the potential relationship between these two will provide crucial insights on the aspects of human communications and further on human-computer interaction. Since human communications have distinctive characteristics of simultaneity and complexity, this investigation would be the identification of minimum essential factors among the sounds of speech and perceived personality impression. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to identify significant associations between the speech sounds and perceived personality impression of speaker by the listeners. Twenty eight subjects participated in the experiment and eight acoustic parameters were extracted by using Praat from the recorded sounds of the speech. The subjects also completed the Neo-five Factor Inventory test so that their personality traits could be measured. The results of the experiment show that four major factors(duration average, pitch difference value, pitch average and intensity average) play crucial roles in defining the significant relationship.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.65-71
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to examine the prosodic pattern of the children with high functioning autism spectrum disorder(HFASD) according to sentence type. The participants were 18 children aged from 7 - 9 years; 9 children with HFASD and 9 typical development children(TD) of the same chronological age with HFASD children. Sentence reading tasks were conducted in this study. Seven interrogative sentences and 7 declarative sentences were presented to the participants and were asked to read the sentences three times. Mean values of F0, F0 range, intensity, speech rate and pitch contour were measured for each sentence. The results showed that for F0 range, significant main effect and interaction effect were observed in the subject group and sentence type. There were significant differences in intensity, mean F0, speech rate, pitch contour across sentence types. The results of this study indicated that HFASD showed no difference in intonation across sentence types. Speakers' intention may have a negative effect on pragmatic aspects. These results suggest that the assessment and intervention of prosody be important for HFASD.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.91-98
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• 2012

The purposes of this paper is to study the characteristics of compared to the speakers voice without depression and speakers with depression, and to propose a objective method for the measurement of the therapeutic effects as well as for diagnostics of depression based on the characteristics. The voice samples obtained from 11 female speakers with depression, aged from 20 to 40, diagnosed as having major depressive disorder by an psychiatrist were compared with those from 12 normal controls with matched sex, age, height, weight, education, smoking, and drinking. The voice samples are taken by a portable digital recorder(TASCAM DR-07, Japan) and analysed using the MDVP(Multi-Dimentional Voice Program) software module from CSL(Computerized Speech Lab, kay elemetrics, co, model 4100). The result of the investigation are as following. First, the average speaking fundamental frequency and loudness range of the speakers with depression group was statistically significantly lower than that of the control group. The pitch range of the control group was rather higher than that of the speakers with depression group, but without statistical significance. Overall speech rates have no statistical difference between two groups. Second, the average speaking fundamental frequency and loudness range have statistically significant negative correlation with Beck Depression Inventory, i. e. more severe depression exhibits lower average speaking fundamental frequency and loudness range. Other vocal parameters such as pitch range and overall speech rate have no statistically meaningful correlations with Beck Depression Inventory.