• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제9권1호
• /
• pp.19-26
• /
• 2017

The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of utterance internal pause in English speaking evaluation. To avoid possible confusion with other errors caused by segmental and prosodic inaccuracy, stem utterances with two different length obtained from a native speaker were manipulated to make a set of stimuli tokens through insertion of pauses whose length and position vary. After a total of 90 participants classified into three proficiency groups rated the stimuli, the scored data set was statistically analyzed in terms of the mixed effects model. It was confirmed that predictors such as pause length, pause position and utterance length significantly influence raters' evaluation scores. Especially, a dominating effect was found in such a way that raters gradually deducted scores in accordance with the increase of pause duration. In another experiment, a tree-based statistical learning technique was utilized to check which of the significant predictors played a more influential role than others. The findings in this paper are expected to be practically informative for both the test takers who are preparing for an English speaking test and the raters who desire to develop more objective rubric of speaking evaluation.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
• /
• 제67호
• /
• pp.61-77
• /
• 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.

• 음성과학
• /
• 제9권4호
• /
• pp.143-148
• /
• 2002

This study examined the foreign accent of Korean speakers of English concerning vowel length and utterance position. It then attempts to explain the foreign accent of Koreans when they speak English. The method was to measure the sentence-initial and sentence-final vowels as spoken by Koreans. I chose these two positions, sentence-initial and sentence-final, in order to know if Korean speakers of English, compared with native English speakers, show a difference in sentence stress. I chose English diphthongs, because most Koreans have difficulty pronouncing these sounds. I found that Korean speakers of English as a second language do not know English sentence stress patterns and show a foreign accent, especially when using diphthongs.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제9권2호
• /
• pp.85-94
• /
• 2017

Conventional speaker verification systems using time delay neural network, identity vector and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (TDNN-Ivector-PLDA) are known to be very effective for verifying long-duration speech utterances. However, when test utterances are of short duration, duration mismatch between enrollment and test utterances significantly degrades the performance of TDNN-Ivector-PLDA systems. To compensate for the I-vector mismatch between long and short utterances, this paper proposes to use probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) model adaptation with augmented data. A PLDA model is trained on vast amount of speech data, most of which have long duration. Then, the PLDA model is adapted with the I-vectors obtained from short-utterance data which are augmented by using vocal tract length perturbation (VTLP). In computer experiments using the NIST SRE 2008 database, the proposed method is shown to achieve significantly better performance than the conventional TDNN-Ivector-PLDA systems when there exists duration mismatch between enrollment and test utterances.

• 대한후두음성언어의학회지
• /
• 제16권2호
• /
• pp.158-164
• /
• 2005

Melody intonation therepy (MIT) is to improve the linguistic aspects of the verbal utterance for aphasic patients utilizing the intact right brain. It is applied to the aphasic patients with good comprehension, poor fluency, and little available speech are thought to be ideal candidates. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of Korean Melody intonation therapy (kMIT) in patients with non-fluent aphasia. Five male non-fluent aphasic patients were participated in this study. Average ages were 49.9 years old. Each therapy took 45-50minutes once a week for six months. Aphasic Screen lest (RISS) was used to assess language parameter such as Auditory comprehension, oral expression, reading, writing and calculation ability before and after kMIT. Mean of Length Utterance, verbal intelligibility and articulation disorder were assessed also. Computerized Speech Lab was used to assess the acoustic characteristics of aphasic patients before and after kMIT. The results are as follows : 1) Auditory comprehension, oral expression, reading, writing and calculation ability of the subjects increased after UH'. However, only oral expression showed significant difference (p<0.05). 2) Mean of Length Utterance of five patients generally increased after Un. 3) After kMIT, verbal intelligibility increased and showed significant difference (p<0.05). 4) Misarticulation rate generally decreased after m. 5) Voice Onset Time of the alveolar lenis /t/ and velar lenis /k/ gradually decreased after kMIT. 6) However, intonation pattern were increased gradually in yes'no question after kMIT.

• 한국보육지원학회지
• /
• 제10권6호
• /
• pp.43-56
• /
• 2014

본 연구에서는 자발적인 발화를 통해 유아의 구어 발화 특성을 분석하기 위해 놀이상황 유형별 구어 발화 자료를 수집하고, 구어 발화의 특성을 어절, 단어, 형태소 단위 평균발화길이와 어휘다양도로 구분하여 분석하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 본 연구에서는 5세 유아 32명을 대상으로 또래와의 친숙한 놀이상황 및 낯선 놀이상황에서의 대화를 수집하였다. 수집된 언어자료는 CSB(2014) 프로그램에 의해 전사 및 분석되었다. 본 연구의 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 친숙한 놀이상황에서 여아의 어절, 단어, 형태소 단위 평균발화길이는 남아보다 더 긴 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 유아의 단어 단위 평균발화길이는 친숙한 놀이상황보다 낯선 놀이상황에서 더 긴 것으로 나타났으며, 어휘다양도도 친숙한 놀이상황보다 낯선 놀이상황에서 더 높은 것으로 나타났다. 이와 같은 연구결과에 기초하여 유아의 자발적 발화 수집, 전사 및 분석프로그램의 중요성에 대해 논의한 후 향후 과제와 제언을 제시하였다.

• 비교문화연구
• /
• 제22권
• /
• pp.303-327
• /
• 2011

This study aims to uncover the learner's language proficiency shown in the writing data of Chinese elementary/intermediate level learners. Language proficiency of the learners acquired by error analysis provides only partial information, and thus this study analyses the interlanguage of Korean learners in terms of 'Mean Length of Utterance, MLU' to discover the overall aspect of learner's language proficiency more symmetrically. The analysis of vocabulary area is to be enforced after generally studying the learner's language development aspect in accordance with MLU-m(orpheme) and MLU-(w)ord found in compositions by Chinese speaking Korean language learners. In terms of MLU, it has been slightly increased as the level of proficiency between elementary level and intermediate level learners; however, the morpheme seemed to be difficult to use, since the difference between Chinese learners and Korean university students has been notably shown. Vocabulary diversity, using aspect for each word class, and using aspect of the predicate are studied for vocabulary area; more various and numerous vocabulary tend to be used as the level of proficiency increases. In terms of predicate use, Chinese learners use less numerous vocabulary types.

• 한국컴퓨터정보학회논문지
• /
• 제13권7호
• /
• pp.59-66
• /
• 2008

본 논문에서는 인스턴트 메시징(Instant Messaging), 채팅과 같은 텍스트 기반의 대화에서 현재 발화를 기준으로 대화의 주제를 파악하고, 대화 주제 전환 여부를 판단하는 기법에 대해 기술한다. 대화는 다른 종류의 글과 다르게 길이가 매우 짧아 적은 수의 단어를 사용하고, 두 사람 이상이 참여를 하며, 대화의 이력(History)이 현재의 발화에 영향을 미친다. 이러한 특성에 따라 본 논문에서는 사용자 발화 뿐 아니라 대화 상대자의 발화에서 추출한 키워드 기반으로 주제 탐지를 하며, 대화의 이력도 고려하여 대화 주제 탐지의 정확도를 높힌 연구 결과를 기술한다. 대화주제 전환 탐지는 이전 발화와 현재 발화에서 탐지된 주제의 유사성을 계산하여, 유사성이 낮은 경우에 전환 탐지가 이루어졌다고 판단하였다. 본 논문의 실험에서 대화 주제 탐지는 88.20%. 대화 주제 전환 탐지는 87.36%의 정확도를 얻었다.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• 제24권4E호
• /
• pp.144-151
• /
• 2005

We evaluate the performance of emotion recognition via speech signals when a plain speaker talks to an entertainment robot. For each frame of a speech utterance, we extract the frame-based features: pitch, energy, formant, band energies, mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and velocity/acceleration of pitch and MFCCs. For discriminative classifiers, a fixed-length utterance-based feature vector is computed from the statistics of the frame-based features. Using a speaker-independent database, we evaluate the performance of two promising classifiers: support vector machine (SVM) and hidden Markov model (HMM). For angry/bored/happy/neutral/sad emotion classification, the SVM and HMM classifiers yield $42.3\%\;and\;40.8\%$ accuracy, respectively. We show that the accuracy is significant compared to the performance by foreign human listeners.

• 아동학회지
• /
• 제29권5호
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 2008

This study investigated the development of complex sentences in the early utterances of Korean-Chinese children. The subjects were 47(20 2-year-old, 15 3-year-old, and 12 4-year-old) Korean-Chinese children living in China. Each child's spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her caregiver was videotaped for about 30 minutes and analyzed for Korean complex sentences using Kim's(2000) categories and Korean Computerized Language Analysis 2.0(2000). Results showed that older children were higher in Mean Length of Utterance and in number and frequency of word types than younger children. The language development of bilingual children was delayed compared with monolingual children but the developmental sequence between bilingual and monolingual children was similar.