• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.109-112
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• 2006

This study investigated the acoustical characteristics of phonatory offset-onset mechanisms. And this study shows the comparative results between non-stutterers (N=3) and a stutterer (N=1). Phonatory offset-onset means a laryngeal articulatory in the connected speech. In the phonetic context V_V), pattern 0(there is no changes) appeared in all subjects, and pattern 4(this indicate the trace of glottal fry and closure in spectrogram)was only in a Stutterer. In high vowels(/i/, /u/), pattern 3 and 4 appeared only in a stutterer. Although there is no common pattern among the non-stutterers, individual's preference pattern was founded. This study offers the key to an understanding of physiological movement on a block of stutter.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.338-349
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• 2000

Pronunciation teaching is once again coming into the foreground of ELT. Japan is, however, lagging far behind many countries in the development of pronunciation curricula and in the actual speech performance of the Japanese learners of English. The reasons for this can be found in the prevalence of communicative methodologies unfavorable for pronunciation teaching, in the lack of trained professionals, and in the large numbers of students in Japanese foreign language classes. This paper offers a way to promote foreign language pronunciation teaching in Japan and other countries by means of employing computer and internet facilities. The paper outlines the major directions of using modem speech technologies in pronunciation classes, like EVF (electronic visual feedback) training at segmental and prosodic levels; automated error detection, testing, grading and fluency assessment. The author discusses the applicability of some specific software packages (CSLU, SUGIspeech, Multispeech, Wavesurfer, etc.) for the needs of pronunciation teaching. Finally, the author talks about the globalization of pronunciation education via internet resources, such as computer corpora and speech and pronunciation training related web pages.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.761-772
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• 2020

This paper presents an automatic proficiency assessment method for a non-native Korean read utterance using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM)-based acoustic models (AMs) and speech data augmentation techniques. Specifically, the proposed method considers two scenarios, with and without prompted text. The proposed method with the prompted text performs (a) a speech feature extraction step, (b) a forced-alignment step using a native AM and non-native AM, and (c) a linear regression-based proficiency scoring step for the five proficiency scores. Meanwhile, the proposed method without the prompted text additionally performs Korean speech recognition and a subword un-segmentation for the missing text. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method with prompted text improves the performance for all scores when compared to a method employing conventional AMs. In addition, the proposed method without the prompted text has a fluency score performance comparable to that of the method with prompted text.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.29-41
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.26-33
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• 2012

The animal naming test (ANT) is known to be influenced not only by age, gender, and education but only by ethnicity, culture, and language. Thus, population-specific norm considering these variables needs to be developed for Korean-speaking elderly. We evaluated 185 healthy elderly people with five measures. Education was the single statistically independent correlate of the total number of words ($R^2$ = .312, p = .038). After adjusting for education, there was slightly significant negative correlation (r = -.215, p = .049) between age and total number of words. Mean number of words produced was $13.71{\pm}3.09$. The production frequency was negatively correlated with the typicality rating (r = -0.41, p < .05). The concrete and exact scoring rule could be set up in the comparison of naming performance between a normal and patient with neuro-linguistic disorder and its data could be utilized in a differential diagnosis for patients with neurological disorders.

• MALSORI
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• no.67
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• pp.61-77
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to blow the characteristics of disfluency in childhood. The subjects were 144 normal children at the age of between 3 to 8 years who lived in Seoul. All the subjects provided spontaneous conversational speech samples during free-play interactions with their friends. We investigated the patterns and the frequency of disfluency and its relevance with subject's age, speaking rate and MLU(mean length of utterance). The results of this study can be summarized as follows. (1) There was no difference in the frequency of disfluency with the speaker's age or speaking rate. (2) Interjection was the most frequently occurring pattern of disfluency. (3) Prolongation, revision, interjection increased with age while part-word repetition, single-syllable word repetition, multi-syllable word repetition decreased gradually. (4) A significant effect of MLU on the frequency of disfluencies were demonstrated. The regression analysis has shown that more disfluencies occurred in utterances of children whose MLU is longer.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.167-172
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of computer based cognitive rehabilitation program on the generative naming. Twenty - one patients were assigned to the CoTras program and eight were treated with traditional face - to - face language rehabilitation such as paper and table activities. The experimental group and the control group performed sequential language recall memory training, association memory recall training, language categorization memory training, and language integrated memory training for 12 weeks. The Welch's robust ANCOVA showed significant differences in mean fluency and MMSE-K changes (p<0.05). On the other hand, phonemic fluency increased significantly after 12 weeks of treatment compared to baseline in both experimental and control groups, but there was no statistically significant difference between treatment groups. The results of this study suggest that the computer based cognitive rehabilitation program may be more effective in improving the semantic fluency than the conventional cognitive-linguistic rehabilitation.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2003.10d
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• pp.241-245
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• 2003

본 논문은 기계번역 시스템의 성능평가를 위한 '핵심어 전달율 측정' 방안에 대해서 기술한다. 기계번역 시스템의 성능평가는 두 가지 측면으로 고려될 수 있다. 첫 번째는 객관적인 평가로 IBM에서 주창한 BLEU score 측정이나 NIST의 NIST score 측정이 그 예이다. 객관적인 평가는 평가자의 주관적인 판단이나 언어적인 특성을 배제한 방법으로 프로그램을 통해 자동으로 fluency와 adequacy를 측정하여 성능을 평가한다. 다음은 주관적인 평가이다. 주관적인 평가는 평가자의 평가를 통해 번역의 품질을 평가하는 방법이다. 주관적 평가 방법의 대표적인 것으로는 NESPOLE이나 LDC가 있다. 주관적인 평가는 평가자의 정확한 판단으로 신뢰할만한 성능평가 결과를 도출하지만, 시간과 비용이 많이 들고, 재사용할 수 없다는 단점이 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해, 번역대상 문장에서 핵심어를 추출하고, 그 핵심어가 기계번역 시스템의 수행결과에 전달된 정도를 자동으로 측정하는 새로운 평가방법인 '핵심어 전달율 측정' 방안을 제안한다. 이는 성능평가의 비용과 시간을 절약하고, 주관적 평가와 유사한 신뢰성 있는 평가결과를 얻을 수 있는 좋은 지표가 될 수 있을 것으로 기대한다.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.141-149
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• 1999

Parental speaking rates reduction is frequently recommended by speech-language pathologists as a way to facilitate the fluency of preschool children who stutter. However, this clinical notion is in need of empirical support. For this reason, Sim & Zebrowski (1995) examined the ability of young children imitating different speaking rates. However, Sim & Zebrwoski's study was not made in a natural context but in the laboratory, so the findings are limited to apply to the clinical situation. The current study aimed to examine the ability of three different speaking rates(baseline, 10% slower, and 24% slower) in a natural situation both with instruction and without instruction. The results show that (1) all children were able to imitate the stimulus speaking rates adequately, (2) instruction about speaking rates for each child influenced the ability to imitate slower speaking rates. These clinical implications of findings in this study are that 4-5 year-old children are able to imitate different speaking rates with instruction and can be candidates for the parental speaking rates reduction program in the stutter therapy.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.55-66
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• 2021

Proper prosody in reading allows the reader to naturally convey the meaning, which manifests as changes in pitch, loudness, and speech rate. Children with reading disability face difficulty in delivering information due to poor prosody. This study identified the difference in prosodic features between children with reading disabilities and nondisabled children through means of reading tasks. Reading tasks, according to sentence types (short sentences, assumptions/conditions, intentions, relative-clause), were recorded by 15 children studying in the 3rd to 6th grade in elementary school. Children with reading disability had a statistically significant wider range of pitch, slower speech rate, more frequent usage of pauses, longer total pause duration, and steeper pitch slope than nondisabled one in sentence-final and -medial words. Children with reading disability, therefore, exhibited a less natural and expressive reading than nondisabled children. Through this study, the characteristics of prosody observed in children with reading disability were identified and the need for an approach for effective intervention was also suggested.