• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1991.10a
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• pp.196-208
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• 1991

This study focused on the role of prefabricated speech (routines and patterns) in the L2 acquisition process. The data for this study consisted of spontaneous speech samples and various observational records of three Korean children learning English as L2 in a nursery school. The specific questions addressed here were: (1) What routines, patterns, and creative constructions did the children use? (2) What was the general trend in the three children's use of routines, patterns, and creative constructions over time? The data were collected over a period of one school year by observing the children in their school. The findings were discussed from the perspective of human information processing. This study found that prefabricated speech played a significant role in the three children's L2 acquisition. The automatic processing of prefabricated speech appeared to enable the children to reduce the burden on their information processing systems, which allowed the saved resources available for other language development activities. Also, the children's language development was evident in their increase in the use of patterns. The children were moving from heavy dependence on wholly unanalyzed routines to increased use of partly unanalyzed patterns. This increased control was the result of an increase in procedural knowledge.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.109-117
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• 2021

The auditory-perceptual evaluation of speech-language pathologists (SLP) in patients with voice disorders is often regarded as a touchstone in the multi-dimensional voice evaluation procedures and provides important information not available in other assessment modalities. Therefore, it is necessary for the SLPs to conduct a comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of not only voice but also the overall speech production mechanism, and they often encounter various difficulties in the evaluation process. In addition, SLPs should strive to avoid bias during the evaluation process and to maintain a wide and constant spectrum of severity for each parameter of voice quality. Lastly, it is very important for the SLPs to perform a team approach by documenting and delivering important information pertaining to auditory-perceptual characteristics in an appropriate and efficient way through close communication with the laryngologists.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Cognitive Science Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.42-47
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• 2010

Speech shares acoustic features with other sound-based processing, which makes it difficult to distinguish phonological process from acoustic process in speech processing. In this study, we examined the difference between acoustic process and phonological process during repetition tasks. By contrasting various stimuli in different lengths, we localized neural correlates of acoustic process within bilateral superior temporal gyrus, which was consistent with the previous studies. The activated patterns were widely overlapped between words and pseudowords, i.e., contents-free. In contrast, phonological process showed left-lateralized activation in middle temporal gyrus located at anterior temporal areas. It implies that phonological process is contents-specific as shown in our previous study, and at the same time, more language-specific. Thus, we suggest that phonological process is distinguished from acoustic process in that it is always accompanied with the obligatory access to available phonological codes, which can be an entry of the mental lexicon.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.131-142
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• 2005

A mismatch between the training and the test conditions often causes a drastic decrease in the performance of the speech recognition systems. In this paper, non-linear transformation techniques based on histogram equalization in the acoustic feature space are studied for reducing the mismatched condition. The purpose of histogram equalization(HEQ) is to convert the probability distribution of test speech into the probability distribution of training speech. While conventional histogram equalization methods consider only the probability distribution of a test speech, for noise-corrupted test speech, its probability distribution is also distorted. The transformation function obtained by this distorted probability distribution maybe bring about miss-transformation of feature vectors, and this causes the performance of histogram equalization to decrease. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of calculating noise-removed probability distribution by using assumption that the CDF of noisy speech feature vectors consists of component of speech feature vectors and component of noise feature vectors, and this compensated probability distribution is used in HEQ process. In the AURORA-2 framework, the proposed method reduced the error rate by over $44\%$ in clean training condition compared to the baseline system. For multi training condition, the proposed methods are also better than the baseline system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.9-14
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• 2016

This study investigated the patterns of coda deletion in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. More specifically, the current study focused on three factors in promoting coda deletion, namely, word position, consonant type, and morpheme type. The results revealed that, first, coda deletion frequently occurred when affixes were attached to the ends of words, rather than in affixes in word-internal positions or in roots. Second, alveolar consonants [n] and [l] in the coda positions of high-frequency affixes [nɨn] and [lɨl] were most likely to be deleted. Additionally, regarding affix reduction in the word-final position, all subjects seemed to depend on this articulatory strategy to a similar degree. In sum, the current study found that affixes without primary semantic content in spontaneous speech tend to undergo the process of reduction, favoring the occurrence of specific pronunciation variants.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.11-13
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• 2016

Dysphagia incidence can be up to 90% of patients after CVA disease and most of the patients demonstrate speech problems as well as dysphagia. The term of swallowing includes the entire process of deglutition from the placement of food in the mouth until the food enters to the esophagus through the oral and pharyngeal cavities. Swallowing functions share common anatomic structures and characteristics of physiology with speech in many aspects. Therefore, speech-language pathologists can help people with swallowing disorders. Herein the approaches and rationales for improving speech and swallowing functions in patients with stroke need to be discussed depending on the lesion sites of the brain.

• MALSORI
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• no.51
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• pp.71-84
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose the automatic speech database verification method(or called automatic verification) based on confidence measure for a large speech database. This method verifies the consistency between given transcription and speech using the confidence measure. The automatic verification process consists of two stages : the word-level likelihood computation stage and multi-level likelihood ratio computation stage. In the word-level likelihood computation stage, we calculate the word-level likelihood using the viterbi decoding algorithm and make the segment information. In the multi-level likelihood ratio computation stage, we calculate the word-level and the phone-level likelihood ratio based on confidence measure with anti-phone model. By automatic verification, we have achieved about 61% error reduction. And also we can reduce the verification time from 1 month in manual to 1-2 days in automatic.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.50 no.12
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• pp.590-596
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• 2001

The pre-emphasis is an essential process for speech signal processing. Widely used two methods are the typical method using a fixed value near unity and te optimal method using the autocorrelation ratio of the signal. This study proposes a new pre-emphasis method using the short-term energy difference of speech signal, which can effectively compensate the glottal source characteristics and lip radiation characteristics. Using the proposed pre-emphasis, speech analysis, such as spectrum estimation, formant detection, is performed and the results are compared with those of the conventional two pre-emphasis methods. The speech analysis with 5 single vowels showed that the proposed method enhanced the spectral shapes and gave nearly constant formant frequencies and could escape the overlapping of adjacent two formants. comparison with FFT spectra had verified the above results and showed the accuracy of the proposed method. The computational complexity of the proposed method reduced to about 50% of the optimal method.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.55-63
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• 2005

This paper introduces a 'Hanmal' Korean language diphone database for speech synthesis, which has been publicly available since 1999 in the MBROLA web site and never been properly published in a journal. The diphone database is compatible with the MBROLA programme of high-quality multilingual speech synthesis systems. The usefulness of the diphone database is introduced in the paper. The paper also describes the phonetic and phonological structure of the database, showing the process of creating a text corpus. A machine-readable Korean SAMPA convention for the control data input to the MBROLA application is also suggested. Diphone concatenation and prosody manipulation are performed using the MBR-PSOLA algorithm. A set of segment duration models can be applied to the diphone synthesis of Korean.