• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.4 no.3
• /
• pp.161-169
• /
• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of speech intelligibility of spontaneous speech and the vowel space parameters in patients with Parkinson's disease. Ten PD patients (M=5, F=5) and a corresponding control group of ten normal adults participated in this study. Firstly, subjects were asked to tell a story about their hometown and youth in order to analyze speech intelligibility. Secondly, the subjects were also asked to repeat four vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/) five times in order to compare their vowel spaces. The results were as follows: (1) the speech intelligibility of the PD group was lower than that of the control group. (2) Four parameters including vowel area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, F2i/F1u ratio were significantly different in each group. For instance, vowel area and F2 ratio were wider and higher, respectively. As a result, a decrease in speech intelligibility of patients with PD is likely to show different types of errors from the normal group. The results of this research are meaningful in a sense that they could provide the objective standard of speech intelligibility and vowel space parameters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.4
• /
• pp.185-192
• /
• 2010

The acoustic vowel space has been used as an acoustic parameter in dysarthric speech. The aim of this work was to examine mathematical formulae for acoustic vowel space and to apply these to Korean speakers with idiopathic Parkinson's disease(IPD). Five acoustic parameters were chosen from earlier works and one new parameter was proposed, the pentagonal vowel space. The six parameters included triangular vowel space (3 area), irregular quadrilateral vowel space (4 area), irregular pentagonal vowel space (5 area), vowel articulatory index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and F2i/F1u ratio (F2 ratio). An experimental group of 32 IPD patients(male:female=16:16) and a control group of twenty healthy people (male:female=8:12) participated in the study and repeated vowels (/a-i-u-e-o/) three times. A correlation analysis was performed among the six parameters, 2-way ANOVA was done with gender and groups as independent factors, and an independent sample t-test was conducted between the male and the female group as post hoc comparison. All parameters were highly correlated with each other and only the FCR showed a high negative correlation with the others. The results of ANOVA showed a significant difference in F2 ratio, 3 area, 4 area and 5 area between gender and in 4 area and 5 area between groups. For the male members of the two groups, significant statistical differences were found in all parameters whereas no such differences were found for the female members. These findings indicated that the vowel space of the female group was wider than the vowel space of the male group. These differences may have been caused by gender-specific speech styles rather than by patho-physiological mechanisms. We also claim that the pentagonal vowel space is better than the other vowel spaces at representing the disordered speech in natural speech situations.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.85-96
• /
• 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of articulatory intervention using visual phonics to improve the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing. The subjects of the study were five hearing impaired children. As per the results of the UTAP articulation tests, five phonemes with the most frequent errors were selected for each child and a total of 10 sessions were provided. The methodology involved analyzing vowel space and related measures (vowel space area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, and F2i/F2u ratio) before and after the visual phonics intervention. After the articulation intervention, every child's speech intelligibility improved, their vowel space area was widened, the FCR value decreased, and the F2ratio value increased. These results show that the use of visual phonics through symbolic images and hand clues has a positive effect in terms of improving the speech intelligibility of children with impaired hearing.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.35_36
• /
• pp.121-129
• /
• 1998

In this paper, articulatory simulator 'Artsim' is used as a tool for the experiments to examine the articulatory characteristics of 6 different vowels. Each vowels are defined by some articulatory points from their vocal tract area functions and shapes of tongues. Each points are varied systematically to synthesize vowels and the synthesized sound is evaluated by human listners. Finally distributions of each vowels within vowel space is obtained. From the experimental results it is verified that our articulatory simulator can be used effectively to investigate the articulatory characteristics of speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.19-27
• /
• 2019

Lateral approximants are well known as having complex articulatory characteristics, which vary cross-linguistically, across speakers, and across utterances. However, less attention has been paid to the articulation of Korean laterals, which do not contrast with a rhotic and may thus exhibit greater-than-normal variability. The focus of this study is to investigate the general articulatory characteristics of the Korean lateral [l] as well as the articulatory variation using novel 3D ultrasound imaging methods. The results of this study revealed significant between-speaker variation and some vowel-dependent variation with regard to the articulation of the Korean lateral [l], which has not been reported previously. Even though all participants in this study showed an anterior occlusion, the place of articulation and the size of the occlusion varied greatly across speakers. The data also revealed that left-right asymmetry is present in the articulation of the Korean lateral. The individual variation of the Korean lateral [l] suggests that it has a large articulatory-acoustic space for variation, since it has no contrasting sound that causes perceptual confusion.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.69-87
• /
• 2006

This study aims to describe the vowel system of present-day American English and to discuss some of its phonetic variations due to regional differences. Fifteen speakers of American English from various regions of the United States produced the monophthongs of English. The vowel duration and the frequencies of the first and the second formant were measured. The results indicate that the distinction between the vowels [c] and [a] has been merged in most parts of the U.S. except in some speakers from eastern and southeastern parts of the U.S., resulting in the general loss of phonemic distinction between the vowels. The phonemic merger of the two vowels can be interpreted as the result of the relatively small functional load of the [c]-[a] contrast, and the smaller back vowel space in comparison to the front vowel space. The study also shows that the F2 frequencies of the high back vowel [u] were extremely high in most of the speakers from the eastern region of the U.S., resulting in the overall reduction of their acoustic space for high vowels. From the viewpoint of the Adaptive Dispersion Theory proposed by Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) and Lindblom (1986), the high back vowel [u] appeared to have been fronted in order to satisfy the economy of articulatory gesture to some extent without blurring any contrast between [i] and [u] in the high vowel region.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.3
• /
• pp.51-59
• /
• 2016

The purpose of present study is to examine differences between habitual speech (HS) and clear speech (CS) in individuals with mild dysarthria. Twelve speakers with mild dysarthria and twelve healthy control speakers read sentences in two speaking styles. Formant and intensity related values, triangular area, and center of gravity of /a/, /i/, and /u/ were measured. In addition, formant-ratio variables such as vowel space area(VSA), vowel articulatory index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and F2i/F1u ratio (F2 ratio) were calculated. The results of repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant difference in F2 of vowel /i/ and F2 energy of vowel /a/ between groups. Regarding formant energy, F2 energy of vowel /a/ were observed as meaningful variables between speaking styles. There were significant speaking style-by-group interactions for F2 energy of vowel /a/. These findings indicated that current parameters could discriminate healthy group and mild dysarthria group meaningfully and that speaker with dysarthria had larger clear speech benefit than healthy talkers. We also claim that various acoustic changes of clear speech may contribute to improving vowel intelligibility.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.57-66
• /
• 2021

This study focuses on the issue of automatic severity classification of dysarthric speakers based on speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility is a complex measure that is affected by the features of multiple speech dimensions. However, most previous studies are restricted to using features from a single speech dimension. To effectively capture the characteristics of the speech disorder, we extracted features of multiple speech dimensions: voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation. Voice quality consists of jitter, shimmer, Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR), number of voice breaks, and degree of voice breaks. Prosody includes speech rate (total duration, speech duration, speaking rate, articulation rate), pitch (F0 mean/std/min/max/med/25quartile/75 quartile), and rhythm (%V, deltas, Varcos, rPVIs, nPVIs). Pronunciation contains Percentage of Correct Phonemes (Percentage of Correct Consonants/Vowels/Total phonemes) and degree of vowel distortion (Vowel Space Area, Formant Centralized Ratio, Vowel Articulatory Index, F2-Ratio). Experiments were conducted using various feature combinations. The experimental results indicate that using features from all three speech dimensions gives the best result, with a 80.15 F1-score, compared to using features from just one or two speech dimensions. The result implies voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation features should all be considered in automatic severity classification of dysarthria.

• MALSORI
• /
• v.55
• /
• pp.45-60
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this paper is to represent values of acoustic cues for Korean oral stops in the multi-dimensional space, and to attempt to find possible relationships among acoustic cues through correlation analyses. The acoustic cues used for differentiation of 3 types of Korean stops are closure duration, voice onset time and fundamental frequency of a vowel after a stop. The values of these cues are plotted in the two and three dimensional space to see what the critical cues are for separation of different types of stops. Correlation coefficient analyses show that multi-variate approach to statistical analysis is legitimate, and that there are statistically significant relationships among acoustic cues but Oey are not strong enough to make the conjecture that there is a possible relationship among the articulatory or laryngeal mechanisms employed by the acoustic cues.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2005.04a
• /
• pp.25-28
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this paper is to represent values of acoustic cues for Korean oral stops in the multi-dimensional space, and to attempt to find possible relationships among acoustic cues through correlation coefficient analyses. The acoustic cues used for differentiation of 3 types of Korean stops are closure duration, voice onset time and fundamental frequency of a vowel after a stop. The values of these cues are plotted in the two and three dimensional space and see what the critical cues are for complete separation of different types of stops. Correlation coefficient analyses show that there are statistically significant relationships among acoustic cues but they are not strong enough to make a conjecture that there is a possible articulatory relationship among the mechanisms employed by the acoustic cues.