The purpose of this study was to investigate the phonological error patterns of korean children with and without specific phonological disorders(SPD). In this study, 29 normally developing children and 10 SPD children were involved. The children were matched the percentage of consonants correct(PCC). 22 picture cards were used to elicit korean consonants in word initial syllable initial, word medial syllable initial, word medial syllable final, word final syllable final positions. The findings were as follows. First, the phonological error patterns of SPD were 1) similar to those of normal children with the same PCC, 2) similar to those of normal children with the lower PCC, or 3) unusual to those of normal children. Second,. korean children showed phonological processes reflecting the korean phonological characteristics: tensification, reduction of the word medial syllable final consonant. This study suggests that both the PCC and error patterns should be considered in assessing phonological abilities of children.

Speech evaluation and treatment planning for the patients with articulation disorders have traditionally been based on perceptual judgement by speech pathologists. Recently, various computerized speech analysis systems have been developed and commonly used in clinical settings to obtain the objective and quantitative data and specific treatment strategies. 10 dysarthric children (6 neurogenic and 4 functional dysarthria) participated in this experiment. Speech evaluation of dysarthria was performed in two ways; first, the acoustic analysis by Visi-Pitch and a Computerized Speech Lab and second, the perceptual scoring of phonetic errors rates in 100 word test. The results of the initial evaluation served as primary guidlines for the indivisualized treatment planning of each patient's speech problems. After mean treatment period of 5 months, the follow-up data of both dysarthric groups showed increased maximum phonation time, increased alternative motion rate and decreased occurrence of articulatory deviation. The changes of acoustic data and therapeutic effects were more prominent in children with dysarthria due to neurologic causes than with functional dysarthria. Three cases including their pre- and post treatment data were illustrated in detail.

This paper describes a test of everyday speech understanding ability, in which a listener's utilization of the context-situational information of speech is assessed, and is compared with the utilization of acoustic-phonetic information. The test items are sentences which are presented in a babble type of noise, and the listener response is the key word in the sentence. The key words are always two-syllabic nouns and the questioning sentences are added to obtain the responding key words. Two types of sentences are used. One is the high-predictable sentences for which the key word is somewhat predictable from the context. The other is the low-predictable sentences for which the key-word cannot be predicted from the context. Both types are included in six 40-item forms of the test, which are balanced for intelligibility, key-word familiarity and predictability, phonetic content, and length. Performance of normally hearing listeners shows significantly different functions for various signal-to-noise ratios. The potential applications of this test, particularly in the assessment of speech understanding ability in the hearing impaired, are discussed.

Twenty normal and 20 severe-to-profound hearing-impaired subjects participated in the present study. The two groups are matched by their chronological age. Each subject made a recording of three vowels of /i/, /a/, and /u/, and nine $VC_{plosive}V$ (hereafter, VCV) disyllables of /epe/, /ep'e/, /$ep^{h}e$/, /ete/, /et'e/, /$et^{h}e$/, /eke/, /ek'e/, and /$ek^{h}e$/, each five times. Formant frequencies of $F_1,\;F_2,\;and\;F_3$ were measured for the three vowels and six measures were made for the nine disyllables. The six measures were (1) the total duration of the disyllable, (2) the duration of the first vowel, (3) the duration of the closed period, (4) the ratio of the first vowel over the first vowel plus the closure period of the consonant, (5) the duration of the aspiration, and (6) the duration of the second vowel. Results shows that the three formants and each of the measures were significantly different between the two groups of subjects.

The present study was performed to find efficient and useful length of voice sample for MDVP analysis, by investigating the correlation between perceptual GRBAS scales and objective MDVP measurements, with the five different lengths of voices of 20 patients with vocal polyp: 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 seconds. The results are following: (1) 1.5-second sample of MDVP showed the highest correlation between the perceptual judgement and objective measurement, and 1.0-second sample showed the lowest. The difference between the two samples was found in the number of the statistically significant correlated pairs of MDVP parameter-GRBAS scale. (2) The two extreme edges of the lengths, 0.5-second and 2.5 second showed no statistically significant difference.

In this paper, the H1*-H2* measure is introduced and exact procedures for obtaining the H1*-H2* value are fully specified, The H1*-H2* measure (a corrected difference in dB between the first and second harmonics) has been devised to provide an acoustic correlate of the phonation mode of a vowel following a consonant. With this measure, we can investigate the phonation mode of a vowel that is free from the F1 amplitude perturbation effect caused by the preceding consonant, which is especially salient at the voicing onset position of the vowel. For identical research purposes, on the other hand, the H1-H2 measure (the observed difference in dB between the first and second harmonic) has been employed in many previous studies. This paper compares these two measures by illustrating experimental results of exploring post-release phonation modes of vowels following the different manner classes of stop consonants in Korean $\square$i.e., the tense, lenis, and aspirated stops.

This study examines how both English native speakers and Korean speakers realize the intonational tunes of English sentences when a sentence has two different meanings, through comparison of the utterances of the two groups of speakers. The results indicate that the English native speakers realize the difference in the meanings of given sentences in terms of differences in the boundary tones, as predicted in Pierrehumbert(1980) and Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg(l990), according to whom intonation is composed of a series of pitch accents, phrase tones, and boundary tones, and the meaning of a given sentence is delivered by the composition of the individual meanings of each component. The Korean speakers, however, fail to realize the difference in meaning with its boundary tones. Rather, they realize it by the number or positions of pitch accents and paralinguistic cues such as emotions and gestures. The Korean speakers, unlike the Americans, emphasize subject in sentences.

A comparative phonetic analysis of Yodel singing and Belcanto singing by the electroglottographic(EGG) measurement was done in three singers. One professional tenor singer(SDI) who is also well trained in Yodel singing, another yodler(KWS) who is not so trained in Belcanto singing, and the other training tenor singer(CSK) who is not well trained both yodel and Belcanto singing. Closed quotient(CQ), speed quotient(SQ) and fundamental frequency (F0) at the initial modal part(I) , middle falsetto part(M), and final modal part(F) of the same phrase were measured by EGG machine and program(Kay model 4338). In the middle part, not only CQ but also SQ of the Yodel singing were much smaller than that of Belcanto singing in all three singers. However, accuracy of parameters in Belcanto singing of the yodler(KWS) and both Yodel singing and Belcanto singing of the training singer(CSK) were inferior to that of trained tenor singer(SDI). Possible advantages of utilizing Yodel singing training under the guidance of feedback control by the EGG for hyperfunctional voice disorders such as vocal nodules were discussed.

This paper presents a macro script to analyze numeric sounds by a speech analysis shareware, Praat, and analyzes those sounds produced by three students who were born and raised in Pusan. Recording was done in a quiet office. To make a meaningful comparison, dynamic time points in relation to the total duration of voicing segments were determined to measure acoustical values. Results showed that a strong correlation coefficient was found between the repetitive production of numeric sounds within and across the speakers. Very high coefficients among diphthongal numbers (0 and 6) which usually show wide formant variation were noticed. This supports that each speaker produced numbers quite coherently. Also, the frequency differences between the three subjects were within a perceptually similar range. To identify a speaker among others may require to find subtle individual differences within this range. Perceptual experiments by synthesized numeric sounds may lead to resolve the issue.

The aim of this research is to investigate acoustic characteristics of three different types of Korean Stops-plain, tensed, and aspirated-, and employ these as a base to determine which one(s) can be used as perceptual cues. In this paper, we have examined acoustic characteristics of Korean Stops, especially voice onset time(VOT), closure duration(CD), degree of pitch of following vowels and differences in the intensity of the Stops build-up after the onset of voicing. From the above characteristics, differences can be made between word-initial and word-medial positions. That is to say, in word-initial position, the three Korean Stops are distinguished by VOT and pitch, whereas in word-medial by CD, VOT and pitch. However, the acoustic characteristics do not have the same value as perceptual cues. In both word-initial, and medial positions, the immediately following vowels play the most important role in perceiving Korean Stops. And in case of word'-medial positions,. CD and VOT also play important perceptual roles. In order to have a more fine-grained distinction among Korean Stops, we think future research should be done to investigate which factor(s) of the following vowels is/are the most determinative perceptual cue(s). However, based on our investigation, we may conclude that it is highly plausible that pitch can be one of the most important perceptual cues when distinguishing the three Korean Stops.

The aim of this paper was to diagnose Korean college students' listening skills on the TOEFL. The researchers identified which section, among the TOEFL listening Part A, B, and C, is most easily teachable/ improvable during the period of a semester. First, the result of this research shows that Korean students tend to have lower scores in Part A than Part B or Part C. The results indicate that the short informal conversation doesn't give sufficient clues to students, and they don't have enough time to infer the answer. Second, the results revealed that. students showed the lowest progress in Part B after they studied TOEFL listening items and essential idioms for the listening section for 13 weeks. Because students didn't have much experience learning the informal conversation as opposed to the formal one in English, it is harder to achieve an improved grade in Part B, which consists of the informal conversation. But after a semester-long listening course, the average score on TOEFL listening sections increased.

This paper investigates how individual speakers' speech can be distinguished using acoustic parameters such as amplitude, pitch, and formant frequencies. Word samples from fifteen male speakers in their 20's in three different regions were recorded in two different modes (i.e., casual and clear speech) in quiet settings, and were analyzed with a Praat macro scrip. In order to determine individual speakers' acoustical values, the total duration of voicing segments was measured in five different timepoints. Results showed that a high correlation coefficient between $F_1\;and\;F_2$ in formant frequency was found among the speakers although there was little correlation coefficient between amplitude and pitch. Statistical grouping shows that individual speakers' voices were not reflected in regional dialects for both casual and clear speech. In addition, the difference of maximum and minimum in amplitude was about 10 dB which indicates a perceptually audible degree. These acoustic data can give some meaningful guidelines for implementing algorithms of speaker identification and speaker verification.

This paper describes a multi-step method of intonation modeling for corpus-based Korean speech synthesizer. We selected 1833 sentences considering various syntactic structures and built a corresponding speech corpus uttered by a female announcer. We detected the pitch using laryngograph signals and manually marked the prosodic boundaries on recorded speech, and carried out the tagging of part-of-speech and syntactic analysis on the text. The detected pitch was separated into 3 frequency bands of low, mid, high frequency components which correspond to the baseline, the word tone, and the syllable tone. We predicted them using the CART method and the Viterbi search algorithm with a word-tone-dictionary. In the collected spoken sentences, 1500 sentences were trained and 333 sentences were tested. In the layer of word tone modeling, we compared two methods. One is to predict the word tone corresponding to the mid-frequency components directly and the other is to predict it by multiplying the ratio of the word tone to the baseline by the baseline. The former method resulted in a mean error of 12.37 Hz and the latter in one of 12.41 Hz, similar to each other. In the layer of syllable tone modeling, it resulted in a mean error rate less than 8.3% comparing with the mean pitch, 193.56 Hz of the announcer, so its performance was relatively good.

This paper proposes an automatic detection method of intonational and accentual phrases in Korean standard continuous speech. We use the pause over 150 msec for detecting intonational phrases, and extract accentual phrases from the intonational phrases by analyzing syllables and pitch contours. The speech data for the experiment are composed of seven male voices and two female voices which read the texts of the fable 'the ant and the grasshopper' and a newspaper article 'manmulsang' in normal speed and in Korean standard variation. The results of the experiment shows that the detection rate of intonational phrases is 95% on the average and that of accentual phrases is 73%. This detection rate implies that we can segment the continuous speech into smaller units(i.e. prosodic phrases) by using the prosodic information and so the objects of speech recognition can narrow down to words or phrases in continuous speech.

This paper describes the fixed-point DSP implementation of a CELP(Code-excited linear prediction)-based speech coder. The effective realization methodologies to maximize the utilization of the DSP's architectural features, specifically parallel movement and pipelining are also presented together with the implementation results targeted for the ITU-T standard G.723.1 using Motorola DSP56362. The operation of the implemented speech coder is verified using the test vectors offered by the standard as well as using the peripheral interface circuits designed for the coder's real-time operation.

This paper was focused on realizing the text-independent speaker recognizer using the VQ and GMM algorithm and studying the characteristics of the speaker recognizers that adopt these two algorithms. Because it was difficult ascertain the effect two algorithms have on the speaker recognizer theoretically, we performed the recognition experiments using various parameters and, as the result of the experiments, we could show that GMM algorithm had better recognition performance than VQ algorithm as following. The GMM showed better performance with small training data, and it also showed just a little difference of recognition rate as the kind of feature vectors and the length of input data vary. The GMM showed good recognition performance than the VQ on the whole.

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accents and pronunciations in English words spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation, we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation, and perform the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input patterns and reference patterns. Based on these spectral distances, we decide whether to recommend the pronunciation correction or not. Our results show that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with the perceptual measure.