• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.33-37
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• 2018

Korean students with much exposure to the relatively slow and clear speech used in most English classes in Korea can be expected to have difficulty understanding the casual style that is common in the everyday speech of English speakers. This research attempted to investigate an effective way to utilize casual speech in English education, by exploring the way different speech styles (clear vs. casual) affect Korean learners' comprehension of spoken English. Twenty Korean university students and two native speakers of English participated in a listening session. The English utterances were produced in different speech styles (clear slow, casual slow, clear fast, and casual fast). The Korean students were divided into two groups by English proficiency level. The results showed that the Korean students achieved 69.4% comprehension accuracy, while the native speakers of English demonstrated almost perfect results. The Korean students (especially the low-proficiency group) had more problems perceiving function words than they did perceiving content words. Responding to the different speech styles, the high-proficiency group had more difficulty listening to utterances with phonological variation than they did listening to utterances produced at a faster speed. The low-proficiency group, however, struggled with utterances produced at a faster speed more than they did with utterances with phonological variation. The pedagogical implications of the results are discussed in the concluding section.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.146-153
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• 2014

This study investigates the effects of seat-design elements such as seating arrangement, shape, and height on speech privacy in high-speed trains. For the evaluation of speech privacy, acoustic simulation software was used to reproduce room acoustical conditions in passenger cars on the basis of in-situ measurement data. The influences of speech source directivity and source height on privacy distance ($r_P$) were investigated, and it was found that $r_P$ determined using an omni-directional source was relatively shorter than that determined using a directional source. It was also found that $r_P$ decreased when the source height was lower than the height of the seat-back because the seat-back blocked the propagation of speech from the sound source. The effect of seating arrangement was not significant when comparing the vis-a-vis seating and one-side seating arrangements. In addition, among the alternative seat-designs, the seats that block the space between the seats and cover the space near the ear were found to show significantly enhanced speech privacy in high-speed train passenger cars.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.39-54
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• 2022

This study aims to clarify the prosodic differences in speech types by examining the Korean read speech and spontaneous speech in the Korean part of the L2 Korean Speech Corpus (speech corpus for Korean as a foreign language). To this end, the articulation length, articulation speed, pause length and frequency, and the average fundamental frequency values of sentences were set as variables and analyzed via statistical methodologies (t-test, correlation analysis, and regression analysis). The results found that read speech and spontaneous speech were structurally different in the form of prosodic phrases constituting each sentence and that the prosodic elements differentiating each speech type were articulation length, pause length, and pause frequency. The statistical results show that the correlation between articulation speed and articulation length was highest in read speech, explaining that the longer a given sentence is, the faster the speaker speaks. In spontaneous speech, however, the relationship between the articulation length and the pause frequency in a sentence was high. Overall, spontaneous speech produces more pauses because short intonation phrases are continuously built to make a sentence, and as a result, the sentence gets lengthened.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.510-515
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• 2001

Generally, there are (1)Words for conversation (2)Tone (3)Pitch (4)Formant frequency (5)Speech speed, etc as the element for emotional recognition from speech signal. For human being, it is natural that the tone, vice quality, speed words are easier elements rather than frequency to perceive other s feeling. Therefore, the former things are important elements fro classifying feelings. And, previous methods have mainly used the former thins but using formant is good for implementing as machine. Thus. our final goal of this research is to implement an emotional recognition system based on pitch, formant, speech speed, etc. from speech signal. In this paper, as first stage we foun specific features of feeling angry from his words when a man got angry.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.98-105
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• 2012

This paper describes a new method for a speech playback speed control with high quality. The proposed method provides an adaptive threshold filtering solution for detecting active regions of a speech signal that are followed by playback speed. For a given playback speed, threshold value is adaptively determined with the statistics(:mean and standard deviation) of each frame in speech, and is used to select only active blocks within the current frame. To minimize quality degradation(i.e., pitch degradation) caused due to high-speed playback, the threshold filtering priorly eliminates relatively low-activity blocks including voice and unvoice. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a playback speed control solution with higher quality than SOLA(Synchonized OverLap Add) method using the pitch extraction of speech.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.32B no.5
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• pp.788-797
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• 1995

In this paper, a variable time-scale modification using SOLA(Synchronized OverLap and Add) is proposed, which takes into consideration the different time-scaled characteristics of voiced and unvoiced speech, Generally, voiced speech is subject to higher variations in length during time-scale modification than unvoiced speech, but the conventional method performs time-scale modification at a uniform rate for all speech. For this purpose, voiced and unvoiced speech duration at various talking speeds were statistically analyzed. The sentences were then spoken at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5 and 1.8 times normal speed. A clipping autocorrelation function was applied to each analysis frame to determine voiced and unvoiced speech to obtain respective variation rates. The results were used to perform variable time-scale modification to produce sentences at rates of 0.7, 1.3, 1.5, 1.8 times normal speed. To evaluate performance, a MOS test was conducted to compare the proposed voiced/unvoiced variable time-scale modification and the uniform SOLA method. Results indicate that the proposed method produces sentence quality superior to that of the conventional method.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.38-51
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• 1993

Korean phonology has not recognised metrical foot as a phonological unit to account for certain phonological processes. This paper, however, suggests that an optional h-deletion process in Korean should require the notion of metrical foot as an independent phonological domain. The previous analyses rely on the notion of speech speed to explain optional h-deletion : i. e. an intervocalic h is deleted in fast speech, but in slow speech it remains. This paper claims that the notion of speech speed should be reinterpreted in terms of metrical foot : i.e. foot-internal t is deleted, but foot-initial h remains. Such analysis provides evidence that metrical foot constitutes a phonological unit in Korean phonology. With the notion of metrical foot, it enables us to achieve more detailed and accurate analysis of the optional h-deletion process in Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.43-51
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• 2023

In this paper, we propose an approach for dialect classification based on the speed and pause of speech utterances as well as the age and gender of the speakers. Dialect classification is one of the important techniques for speech analysis. For example, an accurate dialect classification model can potentially improve the performance of speaker or speech recognition. According to previous studies, research based on deep learning using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features has been the dominant approach. We focus on the acoustic differences between regions and conduct dialect classification based on the extracted features derived from the differences. In this paper, we propose an approach of extracting underexplored additional features, namely the speed and the pauses of speech utterances along with the metadata including the age and the gender of the speakers. Experimental results show that our proposed approach results in higher accuracy, especially with the speech rate feature, compared to the method only using the MFCC features. The accuracy improved from 91.02% to 97.02% compared to the previous method that only used MFCC features, by incorporating all the proposed features in this paper.

• Proceedings of the KSLP Conference
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• 1998.11a
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• pp.208-209
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• 1998

It is generally known that many cases of pathological rough voice are characterized not by simple random perturbations but by quasi-periodic perturbations in the speech wave. However, there are few studies on the characteristics of perturbations in vocal fold vibrations associated with this type of voice. We have been conducting studies of pathological vocal fold vibration using a high-speed digital image recording system developed by our institute, Compared to the ordinary high-speed-motion picture system, the present system is compact and simple to operate and thus, it suited for pathological data collection. (omitted)

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.241-247
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• 2013

This paper presents the design of a System on Programmable Chip (SoPC) based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for speech recognition in which Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) for speech feature extraction and Vector Quantization for recognition are used. The implementing process of the speech recognition system undergoes the following steps: feature extraction, training codebook, recognition. In the first step of feature extraction, the input voice data will be transformed into spectral components and extracted to get the main features by using MFCC algorithm. In the recognition step, the obtained spectral features from the first step will be processed and compared with the trained components. The Vector Quantization (VQ) is applied in this step. In our experiment, Altera's DE2 board with Cyclone II FPGA is used to implement the recognition system which can recognize 64 words. The execution speed of the blocks in the speech recognition system is surveyed by calculating the number of clock cycles while executing each block. The recognition accuracies are also measured in different parameters of the system. These results in execution speed and recognition accuracy could help the designer to choose the best configurations in speech recognition on SoPC.