The vowel /o/ in Seoul Korean has been undergoing a sound change by altering the acoustic weighting of F2 and F1. Studies documented that this on-going change redefined the nature of a /o/-/u/ contrast as F2 differences rather than as F1 differences. The current study examined two cognitive factors namely executive function capacity (EF) and autistic traits, in terms of their roles in explaining who in speech community would adapt new acoustic forms of the target vowels, and who would retain the old forms. The participants, 55 college students speaking Seoul Korean, produced /o/ and /u/ vowels in isolated words; and completed three EF tasks (Digit N-Back, Stroop, and Trail-Making Task), and an Autism screening questionnaire. The relationships between speakers' cognitive task scores and their utilizations of F1 and F2 were analyzed using a series of correlation tests. Results yielded a meaningful relationship in participants' EF scores interacting with gender. Among the females, speakers with higher EF scores were better at retaining F1, which is a less informative cue for females since they utilized F2 more than they did F1 in realizing /o/ and /u/. In contrast, better EF control among male speakers was associated with more use of the new cue (F2) where males still utilized F1 as much as F2 in the production of /o/ and /u/ vowels. Taken together, individual differences in acoustic realization can be explained by individuals' cognitive abilities, and their progress in the sound change further predicts that cognitive ability influences the utilization of acoustic information which is non-primary to the speaker.

This paper presents an acoustic and phonological study of the alveolar flaps in American English. Based on the Buckeye Corpus, the flapping tokens produced by twenty men are analyzed at both lexical and post-lexical levels. The data, analyzed with Pratt speech analysis, include duration, F2 and F3 in voicing during the flap, as well as duration, F1, F2, F3, and f0 in the adjacent vowels. The results provide evidence on two issues: (1) The different ways in which voiced and voiceless alveolar stops give rise to neutralized flapping stops by following lexical and post-lexical levels, (2) The extent to which the vowel features (height, frontness, and tenseness) affect flapping sounds. The results show that flaps are affected by pre-consonantal vowel features at the lexical as well as post-lexical levels. Unlike previous studies, this study uses the Praat method to distinguish flapped from unflapped tokens in the Buckeye Corpus and examines connections between the lexical and post-lexical levels.

We propose to use independent component analysis (ICA) and deep neural network (DNN) to detect music sections in broadcast drama contents. Drama contents mainly comprise silence, noise, speech, music, and mixed (speech+music) sections. The silence section is detected by signal activity detection. To detect the music section, we train noise, speech, music, and mixed models with DNN. In computer experiments, we used the MUSAN corpus for training the acoustic model, and conducted an experiment using 3 hours' worth of Korean drama contents. As the mixed section includes music signals, it was regarded as a music section. The segmentation error rate (SER) of music section detection was observed to be 19.0%. In addition, when stereo mixed signals were separated into music signals using ICA, the SER was reduced to 11.8%.

This paper aims to present a taxonomy of non-standard words (NSW) for developing a French text normalization system and to propose a method for evaluating this system based on a corpus. The proposed taxonomy of French NSWs consists of 13 categories, including 2 types of letter-based categories and 9 types of number-based categories. In order to evaluate the text normalization system, a representative test set including NSWs from various text domains, such as news, literature, non-fiction, social-networking services (SNSs), and transcriptions, is constructed, and an evaluation equation is proposed reflecting the distribution of the NSW categories of the target domain to which the system is applied. The error rate of the test set is 1.64%, while the error rate of the whole corpus is 2.08%, reflecting the NSW distribution in the corpus. The results show that the literature and SNS domains are assessed as having higher error rates compared to the test set.

This study examined the acoustic characteristics of Korean alveolar fricatives of normal children. Developing children aged 3 and 7, typically produced 2 types of nonsense syllables containing alveolar fricative /sV/ and /VsV/ sequences where V was any one of three corner vowels (/i, a, and u/). Stimuli containing the speech materials used in a production experiment were presented randomly to 12 speech language pathologists (SLPs) for a perception test. The SLPs responded by selecting one of seven alternative sounds. Acoustic measures such as duration of frication noise, normalized intensity, skewness, and center of gravity were examined. There was significant difference in acoustic measures when comparing vowels. Comparison of syllable structures indicated statistically significant differences in duration of frication noise and normalized intensity. Acoustic parameters could account for the perceptual data. Relating the acoustic and perception data by means of logistic regression suggests that duration of frication noise and normalized intensity are the primary cues to perceiving Korean fricatives.

The purpose of this study was to investigate vocal hygiene habits and Korean Voice-Related Quality of Life (K-VRQOL) among classical singers. A total of 128 classical singers filled an online voice and K-VRQOL questionnaire, and the results were analyzed. In order to investigate the characteristics of K-VRQOL according to age groups, and the presence or absence of a history of voice problems, we conducted a two-way ANOVA. The results are as follows. Of the 128 classical singers, 28 (21.9%) with a history of voice problems said that excessive conversation, singing practice, and yelling were the causes of their voice problems. The symptoms of voice problems were fatigue, loss of range, hoarseness, and breathiness. In addition, classical singers were less likely to smoke, or to drink alcohol or caffeine. The K-VRQOL was highly correlated with all sub-domains. There was a statistically significant difference according to age groups (p<.05) and history of voice problems (p<.01). There was no correlation between age groups and history of voice problems. Voice management is important because classical singers can ruin their voice by speaking, and the risk of voice disorder is high. Voice problems affect quality of life. In future studies, it is necessary to obtain information on the subjective voice characteristics of classical singers by examining the relationship between their voice hygiene habits and VHI, SVHI, and K-VRQOL.