This study aimed at investigating the validity and reliability of the Daegu Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (DDAE). The DDAE has been developed to assess aphasics' receptive and expressive language ability. One hundred and forty eight aphasics (96 males and 52 females) diagnosed as aphasics participated in this study. Reliability coefficients showed that the DDAE was highly consistent and accurate (Cronbach's a = .76$\sim$.82). For its' content-validity, a 5-point scale was administered. Four speech and language pathologists served as evaluator. The receptive language mean score was 4.29, the expressive language mean score was 4.09, and the right-hemisphere function mean score was 4.00. For construct validity, the correlation total scores were calculated. The results showed a significant correlation.

Tremor is a main factor of parkinsonism. Voice tremor may be the first, later or the only symptom of a neurological disease and its frequency, amplitude, and regularity may differ among the diseases of different neural subsystems. Differential diagnosis between idiopathic Parkinson's disease (IPD) and multiple system atrophy (MSA) has been difficult. This study included three groups: (1) 6 IPD patients; (2) 6 MSA patients; and (3) 20 ageand sex-matched normal controls. The MDVP (Multidimensional Voice Program) was used to analyze the sustained /a/phonation. The results were as follows: (1) frequency perturbation parameters (jitter, sPPQ, Vf0) and FTRI of tremor parameter of two patient groups were statistically different from those of the controls (p < .01); (2) measures were higher in short-term and long-term f0 and amplitude perturbation in MSA than IPD; (3) however, any acoustic parameters between IPD and MSA were not statistically different; except for the rate of frequency tremor, 4$\sim$5 Hz in IPD, 5$\sim$11 Hz in MSA and (4) the pattern of regularity for voice tremor through histogram indicated that amplitude of IPD was irregular while both f0 and amplitude of MSA were irregular. In conclusion, F0, rate of frequency tremor, and pattern of f0 regularity may be predictors for differential diagnosis. These findings might signify that voice tremor of parkinsonism was resulted from modulation of f0.

This study was to examine the relationship between maternal interactive behaviors and stuttering behaviors in preschool children who stutter. Participants were twenty-four children who stutter and their mothers. For the purpose of the current study, 5$\sim$10 minutes of 50 minutes videotaped scenes originally collected to develop fluency assessment instrument were re-videotaped. They included mother-child interactions during playing with toys and reading book situations. Mothers-children interactive behaviors were assessed with Maternal Behavior Rating Sroles(MBRS) and Child Behavior Rating Scales (CBRS). And children's stuttering were assessed with Paradise-Fluency Assessment(P-FA). The results were as follows: 1) the maternal interactive behavior did not significantly differ depending on situations, but scores of maternal responsive factor were higher in the play situation than in the reading situation. 2) Maternal responsiveness might influence on promoting the children's pivotal behavior with children who stutter. And 3) the level of maternal responsiveness was the predictor of children's stuttering behaviors. The therapeutic implication of the results were discussed.

The purpose of the this study was to establish preliminary data on the characteristic of dysfluency in monologue. The subjects were 30 normal speaking adults(15 males and 15 females), aged from 18 to 30 and 30 normal speaking children, aged from 8 to 10. This study attempted to sample 1-minute portion of talking about the daily routine. Videotapes were made to analyze his/her speech sample in terms of the patterns and the frequency of dysfluency. The result of the present study were a follows: (1) The children had total dysfluency type ratios of 12.48%, dysfluency type ratios of 2.83%. Interjection was the most frequently occuring, followed by revision, incomplete phrase. (2) The adults had total dysfluency type ratios of 8.51%, dysfluency type ratios of 0.59%. Interjection was the most frequently occuring, followed by revision, syllable repetition. (3) In adults, both total dysfluency type ratios and dysfluency type ratios differed significantly by the gender. (4) Both total dysfluency type ratios and dysfluency type ratios differed significantly between adults and children.

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the phonemic characteristics influence on the disfluencies of children and adults who stutter. The participants were 10 children(9 boys and 1 girl) and 10 male adults. After having the participants to read out the Paradise-Fluency Assessment(Sim, Shin & Lee, 2004) passages, each of the productions were divided into syllables and words, and then the frequencies and the ratios of their disfluenceis were analyzed according to the specified phonemic features. In terms of the frequency of the disfluency, the participants stuttered more in the words which start with consonant than vowel. But they showed more disfluencies in the words initiated with vowel than consonant when the ratio of each phoneme's presences were considered. There found different tendencies among the phonemic features related with their disfluencies occuring with ralatively high frequency or ratio. It was difficult to find out the exact relationships among the order of the sound acquisition, phonemic complexity, and the disfluencies. To study the exact influence of the phonemic features upon the disfluencies, it comes important to consider the frequency of the stuttering itself together with the ratio of the disfluencies in which the opportunity of the specific sound's presence was considered. To compare the results of the different studies which has similar purposes, it seems important to consider the tasks and the methodologies in depth.

Acoustic feedback between microphone and receiver can be effectively cancelled adaptive feedback cancellation algorithm. Although many speech sounds have non-Gaussian distribution, most algorithms were tested with speech like sounds whose distribution were Guassian type. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive feedback cancellation algorithm based on independent component analysis (ICA) for digital hearing aid. The algorithm was tested with not only Gaussian distribution but also Laplacian distribution. We verified that the proposed algorithm has better acoustic feedback cancelling performance than conventional normalized root mean square (NLMS) algorithm, especially speech like sounds with Laplacian distribution.

This study investigated to the effects of a mental image drawing in RHD patients with left neglect. Three subjects participated in this study. All subjects were right handed and native speaker of korean. In task 1, the patients were presented with visual stimulus card directly above the response sheet and were asked to draw the picture. In task 2, they were presented with items auditorily and asked to draw the picture(mental image drawing). In all experimental conditions, there was no response time limit. The results showed that the subjects showed left neglect leaving some space on the left side in task 1. And the picture was drawn the left side from the right in direction. However, the neglect disappeared in task 2. And the picture was drawn the right side from the left in direction. The results of the present study suggested that a mental image drawing technique can be effective in treating individuals who exhibit left neglect. Also, the picture direction showed that the korean normality was same.

It was verified that a speaker verification system improved its performances of EER by regularizing log likelihood ratio, using background speaker models. Recently the wireless mobile phones are becoming more dominant communication terminals than wired phones. So the need for building a speaker verification system on mobile phone is increasing abruptly. Therefore in this paper, we had some experiments to examine the performance of speaker verification based on mobile phone's voices. Especially we are focused on the performance variations in EER(Equal Error Rate) according to several background speaker's characteristics, such as selecting methods(MSC, MIX), number of background speakers, aging factor of speech database. For this, we constructed a speaker verification system that uses GMM(Gaussin Mixture Model) and found that the MIX method is generally superior to another method by about 1.0% EER. In aspect of number of background speakers, EER is decreasing in proportion to the background speakers populations. As the number is increasing as 6, 10 and 16, the EERs are recorded as 13.0%, 12.2%, and 11.6%. An unexpected results are happened in aging effects of the speech database on the performance. EERs are measured as 4%, 12% and 19% for each seasonally recorded databases from session 1 to session 3, respectively, where duration gap between sessions is set by 3 months. Although seasons speech database has 10 speakers and 10 sentences per each, which gives less statistical confidence to results, we confirmed that enrolled speaker models in speaker verification system should be regularly updated using the ongoing claimant's utterances.

We investigated on the submission of multiple candidates in speaker-independent speech recognition by VQ/HMM. Submission of fixed number of multiple candidates has first been examined. As the number of candidates increases by two, three, and four, the recognition error rates were found to decrease by 41%, 58%, and 65%, respectively compared to that of a single candidate. We tried another approach that the candidates within a range of Viterbi scores are submitted. The number of candidates showed geometric increase as the admitted range becomes large. For a practical application, a combination of the above two methods was also studied. We chose the candidates within some range of Viterbi scores and limited the maximum number of candidates submitted to five. Experimental results showed that recognition error rates of less than 10% could be achieved with average number of candidates of 3.2 by this method.

Automatic speech recognition is much more difficult in real world. Speech recognition according to SIR (Signal to Interface Ratio) is difficult in situations in which noise of surrounding environment and multi-speaker exists. Therefore, study on main speaker's voice extractions a very important field in speech signal processing in binaural sound. In this paper, we used directional filter and harmonic filter among other existing methods to extract the main speaker's information in binaural sound. The main speaker's voice was extracted using directional filter, and other remaining speaker's information was removed using harmonic filter through main speaker's pitch detection. As a result, voice of the main speaker was enhanced.

Previous studies have shown that Korean students have difficulty identifying some English consonants which are not in the Korean sound inventory. The aim of this study was to examine the accuracy rate of English consonants correctly identified by 130 college students in order to find out which English consonants were difficult for the students to perceive. The subject's task was to identify one of the minimal pairs played in a quiet laboratory classroom. 100 minimal pairs consisted of syllables with various onsets or codas: stops, fricatives, affricates, liquids and nasals. Results were as follows: First, the average score of the English major group was significantly higher than that of the non-English major group. Second, there was a similar distribution in the rank order of minimal pairs sorted by the accuracy rate between the two groups. Third, the accuracy rate systematically decreased as each score range decreased. Fourth, the students showed higher accuracy in the perception of liquids than that of the stop-fricative contrast. Fifth, the accuracy score in onset position was higher than in coda position. Finally, the students still had problem telling voiced consonants from voiceless ones, especially in coda position. It would be desirable to extend the present research to middle or high school students to fundamentally resolve those listening problems.

Two identical experiments are conducted at a six month interval in order to examine the VOT and its effect on the whole syllable duration or the rest portion of the syllable in Busan Korean. Just like the general characteristics of VOT, the aspirated stops consistently exhibit the longest VOT while tense stops have the shortest VOT. However, alveolar stops exhibit shorter VOT than labial stops, and it is contrary to the previous studies which claim that VOT values of labial stops are shorter than VOT values of alveolar stops. Moreover, there is a relationship between VOT and syllable/VC duration across stops. While VOT and syllable/VC duration have symmetric relationship for the aspirated velar and bilabial stops, other lax and tense stops exhibit the inverse relationship between the VOT and syllable/VC duration.

This paper investigates the influence of the Korean phonology on the production of English words including a stop plus nasal sequence through production experiments with a beginner and an advanced group of Korean English learners. The results of the production experiments show that both the beginner and the advanced group of Korean English learners were under the influence of the Korean phonological rule realizing a stop as a nasal before a nasal when they pronounced a stop plus nasal sequences in English words. The extent of L1 interference was greater in the beginner group than in the advanced group.

In this study, realization of strong and weak syllables in English by Korean leaners with low English proficiency was examined through experiment. The aspects of three acoustic characteristics-duration, pitch, amplitude-were measured and compared with native speakers of English. It was assumed that production of duration, pitch and amplitude of strong and weak syllable by Korean learners would be different from that of English native speakers. According to the production experiments, English native speakers produced strong syllable longer, higher and louder than weak syllable. However, Korean leaners produced strong syllable higher and louder than weak syllable, but not longer enough. Specifically, weak syllable by Korean leaners was longer and strong syllable shorter than native speakers. Furthermore, the difference in duration of syllables between Korean leaners and English native speakers is more significant than pitch and amplitude. As a result, the duration was more important cue for the realization of stress than pitch and amplitude. However, Korean leaners did not produce duration of stressed syllables as English native speakers did, even though they produce the pitch and amplitude of stressed syllable in a similar way to native speakers. The reasons for those were considered, too.

The objective of this study is to examine acoustic cues in spoken French for the assessment of pronunciation which is necessary to realization of the multimedia system. The corpus is composed of simple expressions which consist of the French phonological system include all phonemes. This experiment was made on 4 male and female French native speakers and on 20 Korean speakers, university students who had learned the French language more than two years. We analyzed the recorded data by using spectrograph and measured comparative features by the numerical values. First of all, we found the mean and the deviation of all phonemes, and then chose features which had high error frequency and great differences between French and Korean pronunciations. The selected data were simplified and compared among them. After we judged whether the problems of pronunciation in each Korean speaker were either the utterance mistake or the interference of mother tongue, in terms of articulatory and auditory aspects, we tried to find acoustic features as simplified as possible. From this experiment, we could extract acoustic cues for the construction of the French pronunciation training system.

This study was investigated developmental temporal features in Putonghua-speaking children. The total of 212 children between the ages 2;6 and 6;5 participated in Shanghai. Speech materials were constructed according to aspiration feature in stop sounds of Putonghua. Six words were selected in this study. A voice onset time was measured. Non-parametric procedures were employed for all the analyses. The VOT value across bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops was significantly differed between aspirated and unaspirated stops for each age group. Effect of age is. significant for unaspirated stops. It is clear that each of Putonghua stops showed decreasing mean and standard deviation. The overshoot phenomenon of VOT was apparent from the age of 2;6-2;11 to 4;6-4;11. There was high variability in the production of lag time for aspirated stops.