• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.181-187
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• 2014

The present study was performed to investigate the characteristics of breath groups while reading paragraph in normal adults and adult patients with voice disorders. 10 normal females(avr. 20.6 yrs.), 10 young voice disorder females(avr. 33.5 yrs., P1 group), and 10 old voice disorder females(avr. 56.3 yrs., P2 group) read a paragraph of 210 syllables. By using the 'Running Speech' program of the Phonatory Aerodynamic System(PAS), total duration, numbers of breath groups, duration per breath group, and numbers of syllables per breath group were measured, and their correlations with aerodynamic measurement results of reading were analyzed. As a result, in total duration, numbers of breath groups, normals scored highest and P2 group speakers, lowest. Normals showed the longest duration per breath group which was not significant. P2 group speakers showed the highest numbers of syllables per breath group. Correlation analysis showed significantly high correlation scores of total duration and expiratory airflow; numbers of breath groups and inspiratory volume.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.41-47
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to examine how speakers use VOT and f0 to distinguish tense, lax, and aspirated stops in isolated sentence reading and paragraph readings. To do so, a total of 20 males between the ages of 20-25 years old were asked to read (1) isolated sentences, (2) information-oriented text and (3) emotional expressive texts in which the stop pronunciation's VOT value and f0 were measured thereafter. The main results are as follows. In the isolate sentence reading, lax stops, and aspirated stops were distinguished by both VOT and f0, but for the Korean men that read reading texts, VOT is not a cue to distinguish between lax and aspirated stops. In general, the VOT differences between lax stops and aspirated stops were smaller for information-oriented texts and emotional expressive texts than that of the isolate sentence reading. In the paragraph reading that induces a natural utterance, the f0 dependence is greater for the distinction between lax and aspirated stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.57-62
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• 2014

The present study was performed to investigate and discuss the aerodynamic characteristics of whispered and normal speech during reading paragraph tasks. 39 normal females(18-23 yrs.) read 'Autumn' paragraph with whispered and normal phonation. Their readings were recorded and analyzed by 'Running Speech' in Phonatory Aerodynamic System(PAS) instrument. As results, during whispered speech, the total duration was longer and the numbers of inspiration were more frequently shown than normal speech. The Peak expiratory and inspiratory rate were higher in normal speech, but the expiratory and inspiratory volume were higher in whispered speech. By correlation analysis, both whispered and normal speech showed significantly high correlation between total duration and expiratory/inspiratory airflow duration; numbers of inspiration and inspiratory airflow duration; expiratory and inspiratory volume. These results show that whispered speech needs more respiratory effort but shows poorer aerodynamic efficacy during phonation than normal speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.135-142
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• 2001

The present study was performed to investigate adequate levels of utterances which can give essential as well as useful information about the patients' voice, by examining the degrees of correlation between the levels of utterances (vowels, words, and phrase paragraph reading) and the entire utterance including all of the levels. For this purpose, a total of 10 individual utterance samples (5 vowels, 3 words, 1 phrase, 1 paragraph reading) were collected from each of the 30 subjects with voice disorder patients, and four experienced voice therapists evaluated them using GRBAS. The results showed that four therapists highly agreed upon on 'G' parameter. The coefficient of the correlation between each level of utterance and entire utterance tended to be above 0.70. Judgements of the vowel /$\varepsilon$/ as well as /o/ highly correlated with the judgement of the entire utterance. Regardless of severity, the judgement of the entire utterance highly correlated with the judgements of the vowel /u/ and the paragraph reading. These results suggest that experienced voice therapists can precisely evaluate patients' voice quality with only one sustained vowel in the clinic field, as is done with the entire utterance evaluation.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.487-515
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the individual differences in cognitive processes on paragraph comprehension. To do so, the lexical decision task and the pattern comparison task were used to measure the low-level cognitive processes. Digit span task was used to test the phonological loop capacity. The individual differences of the central executive processing capacity were measured by operational span task. Reading span task was used to test the working memory capacity related with the sentence processing. Reading times and accuracies of the logically valid inferences and logically void inferences were tested to measure the high-level cognitive processes. Reading times and accuracies for the target sentences with and without prior explicit causal sentence were measured to test individuals' paragraph comprehension abilities. The results showed that the speed of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the speed of the high-level cognitive processes. Also, the accuracy of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the accuracy of the high-level cognitive processes while there was no significant correlation between the speed and the accuracy in any measures of the cognitive processes. Working memory capacity was related with the accuracy of the cognitive processes while it was not significantly correlated with the speed of the cognitive processes. Most importantly, the speed of low-level cognitive processes significantly affected the speed of the paragraph comprehension while the working memory capacity and the high-level cognitive processes had influences on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension. The speed of the paragraph comprehension had no influence on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.11 no.10
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• pp.89-96
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• 2022

An open domain machine reading comprehension is a model that adds a function to search paragraphs as there are no paragraphs related to a given question. Document searches have an issue of lower performance with a lot of documents despite abundant research with word frequency based TF-IDF. Paragraph selections also have an issue of not extracting paragraph contexts, including sentence characteristics accurately despite a lot of research with word-based embedding. Document reading comprehension has an issue of slow learning due to the growing number of parameters despite a lot of research on BERT. Trying to solve these three issues, this study used BM25 which considered even sentence length and InferSent to get sentence contexts, and proposed an open domain machine reading comprehension with ALBERT to reduce the number of parameters. An experiment was conducted with SQuAD1.1 datasets. BM25 recorded a higher performance of document research than TF-IDF by 3.2%. InferSent showed a higher performance in paragraph selection than Transformer by 0.9%. Finally, as the number of paragraphs increased in document comprehension, ALBERT was 0.4% higher in EM and 0.2% higher in F1.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.77-87
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• 2019

The study aimed to develop Speech Range Profile (SRP) and to examine and validate its clinical application. Forty-five participants without voice disorders aged 18-29 years were compared using SRP and Voice Range Profile (VRP). The authors developed the "Fire!" paragraph as a SRP task compromising 14 sentences including all Korean spoken phonemes and sentence types. To compare SRP and VRP results, the participants read the paragraph (reading) and counted from 21 to 30 (counting) as a part of SRP tasks, and produced a vowel /a/ from low to high frequencies (gliding) and a shortened form of the VRP as a part of VRP tasks. $F0_{max}$, $F0_{min}$, $F0_{range}$, $I_{max}$, $I_{min}$, and $I_{range}$ for each task were measured and compared, showing that $F0_{max}$, $F0_{min}$, $F0_{range}$, $I_{max}$, and $I_{range}$ were not different between reading and gliding. $I_{min}$, had the lowest value in counting. It is concluded that the newly developed SRP task, reading the "Fire" paragraph, can yield a maximum phonation range similar to that found by VRP. Therefore, it is expected that voice evaluation can be effectively performed in a relatively short time by applying SRP with the "Fire" paragraph, a functional utterance task, in place of VRP, which may be difficult to measure long term or in cases of severe voice disorders.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.504-505
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• 2017

Existing morpheme analyzers classify the words used in writing documents. A system for extracting sentences and paragraphs based on a morpheme analyzer is being developed. However, there are very few systems that compress documents and extract important paragraphs. The algorithm proposed in this paper calculates the weights of the keyword written in the document and extracts the paragraphs containing the keyword. Users can reduce the time to understand the document by reading the paragraphs containing the keyword without reading the entire document. In addition, since the number of extracted paragraphs differs according to the number of keyword used in the search, the user can search various patterns compared to the existing system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.109-116
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• 2019

This study was conducted to identify the characteristics of pauses and breath groups made by normal adults and patients with voice disorders while reading a paragraph. Forty normal female adults and forty female patients with a functional voice disorder (18-45 yrs.) read the "Gaeul" paragraph with the "Running Speech" protocol of the Phonatory Aerodynamic System (PAS), by which the pauses with or without inspiration and between or within syntactic words and breath groups were analyzed. The number of pauses with inspiration was found to be higher in the patient group, but the number of pauses without inspiration was higher in the normal group. The rate of syntactic word boundaries with pauses with inspiration was higher in the patient group, while the number of syllables per breath group was higher in the normal group. As these results can be explained by patients' poor breath support due to glottal insufficiency, the question of whether voice disorder patients use their pauses and breath groups properly should be considered carefully in evaluation and intervention.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.29-38
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• 2015

This study explores reading fluency among elementary school students considering language level and family income(low SES). Forty eight students from 1st to 3rd grades participated in two paragraph reading tasks. Half of the children were from low income family and half of the children had low lexical knowledge. Reading fluency as in the number of correctly read syllables per minute, the total error frequency and error types were used to compare group differences. There were significant differences in the number of correctly read syllables per minute between two income groups and two language groups. There was a significant difference between low income group and non-low income group in total number of errors only when children's lexical knowledge were low. There were no group differences in error types of repetition and omission. Substitution and insertion error seemed to reflect the total error pattern. These results imply the importance of early screening and early involvement for children with low lexical knowledge from low income family. Monitoring and early intervention will support these children's reading development.