This study aims to describe a prosodic pattern on the Korean subjective particles with respect to their discourse function. 4 kinds of Korean subjective particles were mainly investigated with reference to sentential location, grammatical relations that precede or follow the word including subjective particles, and prosodic phrasing. F0 and energy were gradually diminished as the particles moved down to the sentential final position. 'Ga'particle, which has been potentially regarded as having a grammatical focusing function, looks like to show relatively higher F0 in sentential medial in discourse. At sentential medial position, when the words including 'ga, eun, and neun'particles were preceded by adverbials, the acoustic variables of particles tended to be diminished by some ratio in comparison with the mean value. The duration of particles might vary with respect to style variation and especially that it tended to diminish from 150 basic, 50 separate, and finally 50 discourse successively. And there's some specific phenomenon that prosodic phrasing itself was relatively easily taken place after 'eun' and 'neun' particles. Finally, I tried to catch the prosodic characteristics (which would be established as acoustic features) of inter-word position at which specific subjective particles were intervened. These acoustic features can be made up of the duration and F0 fluctuation activated in the successive 3 syllables in which word (or prosodic) boundary was located.

The possibility is investigated of determining the diffuse absorption coefficients of the wall surfaces in a real room by minimizing the errors between the measured energy impulse response of a real room and the predicted energy impulse responses obtained from the ray tracing simulation of the room. In other words, this can possibly serve as a basis for "acoustical system identification" in attempting to determine the "best fit" of modelled absorption coefficients to measured energy response data. Algorithms for attempting this were investigated. The algorithms developed for this purpose proved to be rigorous and efficient. Instead of using the ray tracing model to determine the absorption coefficients, the phase image model was used in order to determine the acoustic impedances of wall surfaces. However, the numerical algorithms could not find the correct impedance values, primarily due to the wide range of the acoustic impedance values of any single acoustic material and very long computation time.

Speaking rate represents how many phonemes in speech signal have in limited time. It is various and changeable depending on the speakers and the characters of each phoneme. The preprocessing to remove the effect of variety of speaking rate is necessary before recognizing the speech in the present speech recognition systems. So if it is possible to estimate the speaking rate in advance, the performance of speech recognition can be higher. However, the conventional speech vocoder decides the transmission rate for analyzing the fixed period no regardless of the variety rate of phoneme but if the speaking rate can be estimated in advance, it is very important information of speech to use in speech coding part as well. It increases the quality of sound in vocoder as well as applies the variable transmission rate. In this paper, we propose the method for presenting the speaking rate as parameter in speech vocoder. To estimate the speaking rate, the variety of phoneme is estimated and the Line Spectrum Pairs is used to estimate it. As a result of comparing the speaking rate performance with the proposed algorithm and passivity method worked by eye, error between two methods is 5.38% about fast utterance and 1.78% about slow utterance and the accuracy between two methods is 98% about slow utterance and 94% about fast utterances in 30 dB SNR and 10 dB SNR respectively.

In angle of arrival estimation, the direction of a signal is usually assumed to be a point. If the direction of a signal is distributed due to some reasons in real surroundings, however, angle of arrival estimation techniques based on the point source assumption may result in poor performance. In this paper, we consider angle of arrival estimation when the signal sources are distributed. A parametric source model is proposed, and the estimation techniques based on the well-known maximum likelihood technique is considered under the model. In addition, Various statistical properties of the estimation errors were obtained.

Finite element model of a cMUT is constructed using the commercial code ANSYS to analyze the cross talk mechanism. Calculation results of the complex load impedance seen by single capacitor cells are presented, and then followed by a calculation of the plane wave real load impedance seen by a parallel combination of many cells that are used to make a transducer. Cross talk between 1-D array elements is found to be due to two main sources: coupling through a Stoneley wave propagating at the transducer-water interface and coupling through Lamb waves propagating in the substrate. To reduce the cross talk level, the effect of various structural variations of the substrate are investigated, which include a change of its thickness and etched trenches or polymer walls between array elements.