The purpose of this paper is to research the correlation between frequency and the deletion of /w, (equation omitted)/ in Korean. For this purpose, I select 11 words from the frequency data, then, analyze the speech of 20 speakers of standard Korean. As a result, I can find that there is correlation between the frequency and the deletion rate of segment. The rate of deletion is higher in high frequency words, while the rate of realization is higher in low frequency words. Although there is correlation between the frequency and the deletion rate of segment, the feature of segment, prosodic environments are more important in segment deletion.

When intonation in French is analysed in terms of a multi-dimentional and hierarchical structure, each of the prosodic units such as accent phrases(having different combinations of the basic tonemes L and H), pre-sentencial and post-sentencial long pauses, intonation phrases(containing boundary intonation), as well as intermediate phrases can be considered being realized on a separate tier. Unlike on the tiers where accent phrases and intonation phrases occur, an intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is realised on that of intermediate phrases. This intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is one of the significant factors that lead a basic French metrical rhythm. This paper first shows the types of combinations of the basic tonemes L and H found in French accent phrases. Secondly, this paper examines the roles intermediate phrases and plateaus play in French. Finally, this paper argues that intermediate phrases are the metrical units actually adopted as real utterance units in French.

This paper investigates phonation types of Malay plosives and compares Malay plosives with Korean ones in terms of VOT, F0, duration of closure, and durations of the preceding and following vowels. This study is significant in that it specifies phonetic characteristics of phonation types of the two languages and provides phonetic bases for teaching and learning either of the two languages. The results showed that Malay voiceless plosives are greater than voiced ones in VOT, F0, duration of closure, but the other way in durations of the preceding and following vowels. Comparison of the two languages, particularly in terms of the distribution of VOT, indicates that Malay voiceless plosives are close to Korean fortis plosives.

The purpose of this paper is to design Speech Database for Korean pronunciation education. For this purpose, I investigated types of speech errors of Korean-learners, made texts for recording, which involves all types of speech errors, and showed how to gather speech data and how to tag their informations. It's natural that speech data should include Korean-learners' speech and Korean people's speech, because Speech DB that I try to develop is for teaching Korean pronunciation to foreigners. So this DB should have informations about speakers and phonetic informations, which are about phonetic value of segments and intonation of sentences. The intonation of sentence varies with the type of sentence, the structure of prosodic units, the length of a prosodic unit and so on. For this reason, Speech DB must involve tags about these informations.

This study investigates differences in intensity across the three different Korean obstruent types in terms of the RMS amplitude of both the entire section and the first 512 samples of the immediately following vowel in two positions. The results showed that for the utterance initial position the RMS amplitude of both the entire section and the first 512 samples of the vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for aspirated ones, and weakest for lenis ones, with a significant difference between each pair of them. For the intervocalic position, in contrast, the intensity of the entire vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for lenis ones, and weakest for aspirated ones, with no significant difference between the last two groups, whereas the intensity of the first 512 samples of the vowel was greatest for fortis obstruents, intermediate for lenis ones, and weakest for aspirated ones, with a significant difference between each pair of the three groups. This means that the intensity of the earlier part of the vowel functions as a discriminator of Korean obstruents. The positional difference is due to the different behavior of the lenis obstruents in the intervocalic position, such that the intensity build-up is already on its way with voice lead.

It is difficult to implement sound field effect on real time using linear convolution in time domain because linear convolution needs much multiply operations. In this paper three ways is introduced to reduce multiplication operations. Firstly, linear convolution in time domain is replaced with circular convolution in frequency domain. It means that it operates multiplication in place of convolution. Secondly, one frame will be divided into several frames. It will reduce the multiplication operation in processing that transforms time domain into frequency domain. Finally, QFT will be used in place of FFT. Three ways result much reduction in multiplication operations. The reduction of the multiplication operation makes the real time implementation possible.

Speaker change detection is to detect automatically a point of time at which speaker was replaced. Since feature parameters used for speaker change detection depend not only on speaker characteristics but also on phonetic characteristics, spoken contents included in the feature parameters inevitably causes performance degradation of speaker change detection. In this paper, to alleviate this problem, a method to normalize phonetic variations in speech feature parameters is proposed for emphasizing changes due to speaker characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the performance of speaker change detection.

This paper presents about the activities of speech database standardization in ETRI. Recently, with the support of government, ETRI and SiTEC have been gathering the large speech corpus for the domestic speech related companies. First, due to the lack of sharing the knowledge of speech database specification, the distributed speech database has a different format. Hence it seems to be needed to have the same format as soon as possible. ETRI and SiTEC are trying to find the better representation format of speech database. Second, we introduce a new description method of the annotation information of speech database. As one of the structured description method, XML based description will be applied to represent the metadata of the speech database. It will be continuously revised through the speech technology standard forum during this year.

This paper describes the use of pitch information for speaker identification. The recognition system is a GMM based one with 4 connected Korean digits speech database. The mean of the pitch period in voiced sections of speech are shown to be ,useful at discriminating between speakers. Utilizing this feature with Gaussian mixture model in the speaker identification system gave a marked improvement, maximum 6% improvement comparing to the baseline Gaussian mixture model.

We propose a new method of generating client models for HMM based text-dependent speaker verification system with only a small amount of training data. To make a client model, statistical methods such as segmental K-means algorithm are widely used, but they do not guarantee the quality or reliability of a model when only limited data are avaliable. In this paper, we propose a blind speech segmentation based on level building DTW algorithm as an alternative method to make a client model with limited data. In addition, considering the fact that voiced sounds have much more speaker-specific information than unvoiced sounds and energy of the former is higher than that of the latter, we also propose a new score evaluation method using the observation probability raised to the power of weighting factor estimated from the normalized log energy. Our experiment shows that the proposed methods are superior to conventional HMM based speaker verification system.

The speech intelligibility of congenitally deafened children shows the change after cochlear implantation. The predicting factors of change in speech intelligibility are the age of implantation, the duration of implant use, and communication mode etc.. Among these factors, the age of implantation seems to be one of the most important predictors. But those factors including age of implantation can explain only some parts of the variance. Therefore, the further study to find the factors which affect the speech intelligibility should be done.