• 음성과학
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.273-284
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• 2000

The purpose of this study was to investigate speech rate and fluency in stuttering adults. It was suggested that a measurement guideline of speech rate and fluency for collecting clinically meaningful data be used. Subjects included 10 adults who stutter (mean age=25;8). Syllables were used as the unit of measurement for analyzing the duration of speech. The mean rate was 241 SPM (syllables per minute) for reading, and 196 SPM for spontaneous speaking. Fluency was also measured in both cases. The correlation between rate of speech and fluency was high (r=0.92). A strong positive correlation was found between different investigators in measuring speech rates and fluencies.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권3호
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• pp.193-200
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• 2004

This was a preliminary study for standardizing speech rate and fluency of normal adult Korean speakers and comparing speech rate and fluency of normal speakers with those of professional speakers. The purposes of this study were to investigate (a) the speech rates (the overall speech rate and the articulation rate) and the disfluency characteristics of normnal adult speakers and (b) the speech rates (the overall speech rate and the articulation rate) and the disfluency characteristics between normal adult speakers and professional speakers. The results were as follows: The most frequent disfluency type was 'interjection' in story-telling, 'revision' in text reading and announcing of professional speakers. The professional speakers had the fastest speech rates (overall speech rate and articulation rate) among the 3 groups.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권4호
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• pp.137-168
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to prepare the basis for a more objective evaluation of oral fluency by comparing speech patterns of Korean native speakers and L2 Korean learners. For this purpose, the current study focused on the analysis of speech materials of the 21st century Sejong spoken corpus and Korean learner corpus. We compared the oral fluency of Korean native speakers and Korean learners based on speech rate, pause, and discourse markers. The results show that the pattern of Korean learners is different to that of Korean native speakers in all aspects of speech rate, pause, and discourse markers; even though proficiency of Korean leaners show increase, they could not reach the oral fluency level of Korean native speakers. At last, based on these results of the analysis, we added suggestions for setting the evaluation criteria of oral fluency of Korean learners.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.9-20
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose an automatic fluency evaluation algorithm for English speaking tests. In the proposed algorithm, acoustic features are extracted from an input spoken utterance and then fluency score is computed by using support vector regression (SVR). We estimate the parameters of feature modeling and SVR using the speech signals and the corresponding scores by human raters. From the correlation analysis results, it is shown that speech rate, articulation rate, and mean length of runs are best for fluency evaluation. Experimental results show that the correlation between the human score and the SVR score is 0.87 for 3 speaking tests, which suggests the possibility of the proposed algorithm as a secondary fluency evaluation tool.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.159-168
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to assess the speech rate, fluency and the type of dysfluencies of normal adults in order to provide a basic data of normal speaking. The number of subjects of this study were 30(14 females and 16 males), and their ages ranged 17 to 36. The rate was measured as syllables per minute (SPM). The speech rates in reading ranged 273-426 with a mean of 348 SPM and in speaking ranges 118-409 (mean=265). The average of their fluencies was 99.1% in reading and 96.9% in speaking. The rater reliability of speech rate in the data assessed by video was very high (r=0.98) and the rater reliability of speech fluency was moderately high (r=0.67). The disfluency types were also analysed from 150 disfluency episodes. Syllable repetition and word interjection were the most common disfluent types.

• 동의생리병리학회지
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• 제22권6호
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• pp.1585-1588
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical application of oriental medical therapy(OMT) to Speech retardation complained problems of Articulation & Reading fluency. We treated the patient with OMT & others. The recovery of Speech retardation was evaluated by Articulation correction test(ACT) & Reading fluency test(RFT). The applicability of OMT & other therapy has positive effects on the patient with Speech retardation complained problems of Articulation & Reading fluency. The scores of ACT & RFT were increased.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.189-197
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• 2008

In the process of speech therapy, fluency is acquired and speech rate increases in the process when the behavioral modification strategy, inducing speech fluency by making speech rate slower intentionally in an early stage, is applied. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the pause characteristics in slowed speech intentionally of treated stutterer. In this study, 10 developmental stutterers who had well established fluency in speech were involved. We had collected each 200 syllables sample of intentionally much slowed speech and a little slowed one in reading task. To measure the features of pause, total frequency of pauses, total durations of pauses, average duration of pauses and proportions of pause were investigated. The findings were as follows: Both the total durations and total frequency of pauses of much slowed speech were higher than that of a little slowed one. However, both the average duration and proportions of pauses of much slowed speech were not significantly higher than that of a little slowed one.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권4호
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• pp.129-138
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• 2012

Reading fluency is an important variable in reading comprehension. However, a limited number of studies on reading fluency are available in Korea. The purpose of this study is to review the articles about reading fluency during last 10 years and to present a direction for future research. Forty research papers from the Journal of Learning Disabilities and Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools were selected from 2002 to 2012. These papers were analyzed in terms of their subjects and research methods. About 64% of the articles focused on typically developing children and children with dyslexia. About 67% of the research consisted of descriptive studies. Based on these results, suggestions were made for future research on reading fluency.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.149-156
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• 2015

We propose a new method for automatic fluency scoring of English speaking tests spoken by nonnative speakers in a free-talking style. The proposed method is different from the previous methods in that it does not require the transcribed texts for spoken utterances. At first, an input utterance is segmented into a phone sequence by using a phone recognizer trained by using native speech databases. For each utterance, a feature vector with 6 features is extracted by processing the segmentation results of the phone recognizer. Then, fluency score is computed by applying support vector regression (SVR) to the feature vector. The parameters of SVR are learned by using the rater scores for the utterances. In computer experiments with 3 tests taken by 48 Korean adults, we show that speech rate, phonation time ratio, and smoothed unfilled pause rate are best for fluency scoring. The correlation of between the rater score and the SVR score is shown to be 0.84, which is higher than the correlation of 0.78 among raters. Although the correlation is slightly lower than the correlation of 0.90 when the transcribed texts are given, it implies that the proposed method can be used as a preprocessing tool for fluency evaluation of speaking tests.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.45-51
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• 2023

나이가 들면서 발생하는 음성 문제는 사회적, 정서적으로 영향을 미칠 수 있으며, 나아가 고립감과 우울증으로 이어질 수 있다. 이에 본 연구에서는 노화로 인한 음향학적 특성 변화를 음질과 구어 유창성의 변화를 알아보고자 한다. 이를 위해 노년층 남성 20명과 청년층 남성 20명이 산출한 연장발성과 구절 읽기 과제를 녹음하여 분석하였다. 음질 분석 변수로 기본주파수(F0), 주기 변동률(jitter), 진폭 변동률(shimmer), 켑스트럼 정점(cepstral peak prominence, CPP) 값을 분석하였으며 구어 유창성 분석 변수로는 평균 음절 길이(average syllable duration, ASD), 조음 속도(articulation rate, AR), 구어 속도(SR)를 분석하였다. 연구결과, 음질 측정에서 노년층의 경우 F0가 높게 나타났으며 jitter, shimmer, CPP의 결과값을 통해 음질이 저하된 것으로 나타났다. 구어 유창성 분석 결과, 노년층은 ASD, AR, SR의 결과값을 통해 느리게 발화하는 것으로 나타났다. 음질과 구어유창성 간 상관관계 분석 결과, shimmer와 CPP 값과 각각 ASD와 SR에서 높은 상관관계가 나타났다. 본 연구결과를 통해 노화에 따른 음성과 구어 유창성 변화를 조기에 발견하고 이에 대한 적절한 훈련법을 제공할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다.