This paper aims to provide a guideline for modelling speaker identification and speaker verification by comparing voice similarities between brothers. Five pairs of brothers who are believed to have similar voices participated in this experiment. Before conducted in the experiment, perceptual tests were measured if the voices were similar between brothers. The words were measured in both isolation and context, and the subjects were asked to read five times with about three seconds of interval between readings. Recordings were made at natural speed in a quiet room. The data were analyzed in pitch and formant frequencies using CSL (Computerized Speech Lab), PCQuirer and MDVP (Multi -dimensional Voice Program). It was found that data of the initial vowels are much more similar and homogeneous than those of vowels in other position. The acoustic data showed that voice similarities are strikingly high in both pitch and formant frequencies. It was also found that the correlation coefficient was not significant between parameters above.

This study examines the effect of laryngeal consonants of Korean on prosodic domain-initial strengthening. Keating, Cho, Fougeron & Hsu (1999), Fougeron & Keating (1996), and Hsu & Jun (1998) found that consonants at the beginnings of larger phrases are more constricted than consonants at the beginnings of smaller phrases. Korean laryngeal consonants pose a counter-example to the general pattern of domain-initial strengthening since tense and aspirated consonants are longer word-medially than word-initially. Previous work on domain-initial strengthening focused on domain-initial consonants at different prosodic domains. This study shows that acoustic cues that are not domain-edge also function to demarcate prosodic structure when the domain-initial consonant is laryngeal: VOT for an aspirated consonant and duration of V2 for a tense consonant.

Human language activity in the information society has been developing the communication system between humans and machines. The aim of this study was to analyze dialectal speech in Korea. One hundred Kyungsang and one hundred Cholla informants participated in this study. A CSL and Flexible laryngeal fiberscope were used for analysis of the acoustic and glottal gestures of all the vowels and consonants. Test words were made on the picture cards and letter cards which contained each vowel and each consonant, respectively. The dialogue between the examiner and the informants was recorded in a question and answer manner. The acoustic results of two dialects were as follows: Kyungsang and Cholla informants showed neutralization between /e/ and /$\varepsilon$. However, the apertures of Kyungsang vowels /i, w, u, o/ were higher than those of Cholla vowels. The /wi/ and /$\varepsilon$/ of Kyungsang Diphthong vowels were shown as simple vowels /i/ and /$\varepsilon$/ in Cholla dialect. The VOT of Cholla dilaect was longer than that of Kyungsang dialect. The fricative frequence of Kyurlgsang dialect was about 1000Hz higher than that of Cholla dialect. The glottal widths on fiberscopic images showed that the consonant durations of Kyungsang and Cholla dialects were correlated all together with the acoustic duration on the spectrogram.

This study is to classify intonation types of sentence terminal in accordance with sentence form in Korean dialects. Intonation types of sentence terminal in declarative, interrogative (yes-no and wh-sentence), imperative, suggestive of Gyeongnam dialect are low fall, high fall, high fall, low fall, so are not distinctive by intonation, but distinctive by final ending morphemes. But those of Jungbu dialect are low fall, rise-fall and full rise, high level, low rise-fall. Those of Jeonnam dialect are low level, rise-fall and full rise, high level, high level. So those of Jungbu dialect are similar to Jeonnam dialect.

This paper analyzes the prosodic features distinctively associated with Korean topic constructions (marked by nun or its variant un) and subject constructions (marked by ka or its variant i) as a way of explicating the role that prosody plays in differentially constituting their discourse messages. Using both spoken data elicited in controlled settings and spontaneous conversational data, an attempt is made to identify differentiating prosodic features and intonation contours associated with distinct meanings and functions of nun- and ka-constructions evoked in a variety of discourse contexts.

This paper investigates how focus contributes to the phonological and phonetic realization of Japanese intonation. Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988) pointed out that textual prominence results in the H-tone peak raising on the focused item and IP (Intonational Phrase) initiation before the focused item. Similarly Kori (1989) suggested that the F0 peaks on the words after the focused item tend to be suppressed. Although they give a general description of the characteristics of focus phenomena in Japanese intonation, they fail to explain the F0 peak interaction between H phrasal tone and lexically specified pitch accent in more-than-3-mora words whose accent locations varies from early to late. In this paper, we perform the experiment to investigate the following three points. First, we would like to look at the systematic intonational differences between focused and neutral APs; specifically, focused APs, either accented or unaccented, are compared with the neutral counterparts in terms of F0 pattern. Second, we investigate F0 patterns of a focused AP with more than 3 morae, as the accent of the word varies from early to late. Since an AP with a late accent has a H- on the second mora as well as H*+L on its accent mora, it is expected that these peaks will show systematic F0 pattern when it is focused. Our third concern is F0 patterns of a post focus AP with more than 3 morae, that is, whether a post-focus word is dephrased or just downstepped as the word accent location varies from early to late. This paper is significant in that it tries to clarify the F0 peak interaction between H-and lexical pitch accent H*+L in a variety of focus contexts in Japanese intonation.

Deaccentuation' means the phenomenon that the accent on the particular element which deserves to be accented, disappears and loses the property of intonational prominence. Based on some theoretical background, we divided the cases where deaccentuation can be placed into six categories : the first, the case that the words already mentioned are repeated in the context; the second, the case that the element can be recovered anaphorically or situationally; the third, the case that the elements are semantically weightless; the fourth, the case that the meaning of the word is empty; the fifth, the case that the elements are less informative, so that they are easy to predict; the sixth, the case that the elements are located after the focused words. Then we organized the context and the experimental sentences corresponding to each category. The utterances of Korean and English native speakers were recorded and analysed based on the ToBI system and compared to each other, in order to find out that Korean speakers can distinguish the difference within each sentence pair, and produce them with appropriate intonation similar to that of native speakers.

The purpose of this study is to examine the focus realization of [Adjective+Noun] phrases which are used in English classroom situations. In order to examine this, two production and one perception experiments were designed. The noun phrases in the first two production experiments are divided into three patterns according to the location of focus. The difference between the two production experiments is that in the first experiment the focused words are contextually given in the classroom situation, but in the second experiment they are presented in written form. We compare the native English teachers' focus realization of noun phrases with that of Korean teachers from the point of view of intonational phonology. In the perception test, we examine how the uttered sentences are perceived by English native speakers and Korean native speakers. The results from the three experiments show that native English teachers' focus realization is quite consistent with informational structure. Also, there is a significant difference in pitch range of adjectives and nouns when the native speakers give pitch accents on the two content words, and the uttered sentences are mostly perceived as well as the speakers' intentions. As for Korean speakers, however, they usually focus only on the adjective or they focus on both the adjective and the noun, regardless of the relative informativeness of these words. From these findings, we can conclude that focus realization of Korean teachers is rather inconsistent with respect to informational structure when compared to that of native English teachers.

Generally a speaker verification system improves its system recognition ratio by regularizing log likelihood ratio, using a speaker model and its background speaker model that are required to be verified. The speaker-based cohort method is one of the methods that are widely used for selecting background speaker model. Recently, Gaussian-based cohort model has been suggested as a virtually synthesized cohort model, and unlike a speaker-based model, this is the method that chooses only the probability distributions close to basic speaker's probability distribution among the several neighboring speakers' probability distributions and thereby synthesizes a new virtual speaker model. It shows more excellent results than the existing speaker-based method. This study compared the existing speaker-based background speaker models and virtual speaker models and then constructed new virtual background speaker model groups which combined them in a certain ratio. For this, this study constructed a speaker verification system that uses GMM (Gaussin Mixture Model), and found that the suggested method of selecting virtual background speaker model shows more improved performance.

In the area of speech processing, raw signals used to be presented into 2D format. However, such kind of presentation methods have limitation to extract characteristics from the signal because of the presentation method. Generally, not much information can be detected from the 2D signal. Strange attractor in the field of chaos theory provides a 3D presentation method. In the area of recognition problem, signal presentation method is very important because good features can be detected from a good presentation. This paper discusses a new feature extraction method that extracts features from a cycle of the strange attractor. A neural network is used to check whether the method extracts suitable features or not. The result shows very good points that can be applied to some areas of signal processing.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of associative drawing task in a Korean bilingual aphasic. The subject is a 41-year old male and lived and was educated in the United States for over 25 years(from the age of 14 through 39). His former occupation was a psychiatrist. He has had a massive lesion in the occipital lobe. This study focused on improving his spontaneous language performances by associative drawing task. The associative drawing task along with spontaneous speech is to help the subject's cognition. The ten target words in this treatment were familiar words and could be drawn easily. The results were that the associative drawing task was effective on improving the patient's drawing ability-writing ability in English only-and naming performance both in English and Korean. However, the patient's writing ability in Korean did not show any improvement.

Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) is one of the popular surgical procedure for snoring and sleep apnea syndrome. The main principle of this procedure is to reduce abundant velopharyngeal soft tissues resulting in a shortened soft palate, which may cause some alterations in speech sound. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the change of velopharyngeal function after UPPP in the view of aerodynamics. Thirty three patients who received uvulopalatopharyngoplasty for correcting snoring and sleep apnea were included in this study. The airflow, airflow rate and air pressure during the production of oral and nasal consonants were measured before surgery and 4 week and 8 week after surgery. The oral air flows and pressures for oral and nasal consonants were not changed after surgery. However, oral air pressure for nasal consonants were increased significantly after surgery. The nasal air flows for oral consonants were not changed after surgery, but for nasal consonants were decreased at 8 weeks after surgery. The nasal flow rate for oral and nasal consonants were increased at 8 weeks after surgery. The uvulopalatopharyngoplasty may result in affecting the aerodynamic air streams during speech production.

Our present study was performed to investigate acoustically the Korean normal adults' voices, with enough large number of subjects to be reliable. 120 Korean normal adults (60 males and 60 females) of the age of 20 to 39 years produced sustained three vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/ and read a part of 'Taking a Walk' paragraph, and by analyzing them acoustically with MDVP of CSL, we could get the fundamental frequency ($F_{0}$), jitter, shimmer and NHR of sustained vowels: speaking fundamental frequency ($SF_{0}$), highest speaking frequency (SFhi), lowest speaking frequency (SFlo) of continuous speech. As results, on the average, male voices showed 118.1$\sim$122.6 Hz in $F_{0}$, 0.467$\sim$0.659% in jitter, 1.538$\sim$2.674% in shimmer, 0.117$\sim$0.114 in NHR, 120.8 Hz in $SF_{0}$, 183.2 Hz in SFhi, 82.6 Hz in SFlo. And, female voices showed 211.6∼220.3 Hz in F0, 0.678∼0.935% in jitter, 1.478∼2.582% in shimmer, 0.098∼0.114 in NHR, 217.1 Hz in $SF_{0}$, 340.9 Hz in SFhi, 136.0 Hz in SFlo. Among the 7 parameters, every parameters except shimmer showed the significant difference between male and female voices. And, when we compared the three vowels, they showed significant differences one another in shimmer and NHR of both genders, but not in $F_{0}$ of males and jitter of females.

The purpose of this study is to examine the phonological awareness of hearing impaired children. A number of researches indicate that hearing impaired children have articulation disorders due to their impaired auditory feedback. However, in children who have the ability to distinguish certain phonemes, they sometimes show misarticulation of the phonemes. Phonological awareness refers to recognizing the speech-sound units and their forms in spoken language (Hong, 2001). The subjects who participated in the experiment are composed of four hearing impaired children (3 cochlear implanted children and 1 hearing aided child). Phonological Awareness was evaluated by the test battery developed by Paik et al. (2001). The subtests consisted of rhyme matching, onset matching I II, word initial segmentation and matching I II. If the children asked for retelling, it was retold to a maximum of 4 times. Each item score was 1 point. The results were compared to those of Paik et al. (2001). The results of study were that subject 1 showed superior rhyme matching ability, subjects 2 and 3 fair ability, and subject 4 inferior ability. In onset matching I, all subjects showed inferior ability except for subject 3. Interestingly, subjects 1 showed the lowest onset matching I score. In word initial segmentation and matching I, subjects 1 and 4 showed inferior ability and subjects 2 and 3 showed fair ability. In onset matching II, subject 2 showed the perfect score 10 even though she showed very low score. In word initial segmentation and matching II, only subjects 2 and 3 showed appropriate levels of the skill. The results show that the phonological awareness of hearing impaired children is different from that of normal children.