This study aims at setting the hierarchy of difficulty of the 7 Korean monophthongs for Mongolian learners of Korean according to Prator's theory based on the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. In addition to that, it will be shown that the difficulties and errors for Mongolian learners of Korean as a second or foreign language proceed directly from this hierarchy of difficulty. This study began by looking at the speeches of 60 Mongolians for Mongolian monophthongs; data were investigated and analyzed into formant frequencies F1 and F2 of each vowel. Then, the 7 Korean monophthongs were compared with the resultant Mongolian formant values and are assigned to 3 levels, 'same', 'similar' or 'different sound'. The findings in assessing the differences of the 8 nearest equivalents of Korean and Mongolian vowels are as follows: First, Korean /a/ and /$\wedge$/ turned out as a 'same sound' with their counterparts, Mongolian /a/ and /ɔ/. Second, Korean /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/ turned out as a 'similar sound' with each their Mongolian counterparts /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/. Third, Korean /ɨ/ which is nearest to Mongolian /i/ in terms of phonetic features seriously differs from it and is thus assigned to 'different sound'. And lastly, Mongolian /$\mho$/ turned out as a 'different sound' with its nearest counterpart, Korean /u/. Based on these findings the hierarchy of difficulty was constructed. Firstly, 4 Korean monophthongs /a/, /$\wedge$/, /i/, /e/ would be Level 0(Transfer); they would be transferred positively from their Mongolian counterparts when Mongolians learn Korean. Secondly, Korean /o/, /u/ would be Level 5(Split); they would require the Mongolian learner to make a new distinction and cause interference in learning the Korean language because Mongolian /o/, /u/ each have 2 similar counterpart sounds; Korean /o, u/, /u, o/. Thirdly, Korean /ɨ/ which is not in the Mongolian vowel system will be Level 4(Overdifferentiation); the new vowel /ɨ/ which bears little similarity to Mongolian /i/, must be learned entirely anew and will cause much difficulty for Mongolian learners in speaking and writing Korean. And lastly, Mongolian /$\mho$/ will be Level 2(Underdifferentiation); it is absent in the Korean language and doesn‘t cause interference in learning Korean as long as Mongolian learners avoid using it.

This study explores whether Koreans exploit their native coda-neutralization process when recognizing words in Korean continuous speech. According to the phonological rules in Korean, coda-neutralization process must come before the liaison process, as long as the latter(i.e. liaison process) occurs between 'words', which results in liaison-consonants being coda-neutralized ones such as /b/, /d/, or /g/, rather than non-neutralized ones like /p/, /t/, /k/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, or /s/. Consequently, if Korean listeners use their native coda-neutralization rules when processing speech input, word recognition will be hampered when non-neutralized consonants precede vowel-initial targets. Word-spotting and word-monitoring tasks were conducted in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. In both experiments, listeners recognized words faster and more accurately when vowel-initial target words were preceded by coda-neutralized consonants than when preceded by coda non-neutralized ones. The results show that Korean listeners exploit the coda-neutralization process when processing their native spoken language.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the features of Korean infants' vocalizations according to the stages models. A total 88 infants, whose ages range from 1 to 18 months, participated in this study. This age is a critical period for vocal development. However, the study of infants' vocalizations has typically focused on children over the age of two. Because of restrictions related to the study of younger infants, from birth to the age of two, it is usually difficult to investigate what are the major features of their vocal development. Therefore, this study provides documentation and analysis of the features of infant vocalization and their vocal development stages. The results shows that the stages model of Oller & Lynch (1992) might be adapted for Korean infants' vocal development. Furthermore, the features of the infants' vocalization are not linearly appeared one stage to the next stage, but are overlapped (Koopmans-van Beinum & van der Stelt, 1986; Nathani et al., 2006; Oller, 1980; Stark, 1980; Vihman, 1996).

The purpose of this study is to first discriminate and assess those infants who appear healthy in appearance but who could face possible risk factors in the future and, secondly, to identify those infants who may have difficulties in their developmental stages. The subjects of this study consisted of 35 full-term infants (39-40 weeks) and 33 pre-term infants (34-35 weeks). The infants' voices were recorded for three minutes, for which EDIROL by Roland and a stand-type microphone made by SONY were used. This was done to discern the value of the Breath unit (B-unit) and the fundamental frequencies ($F_0$). It was found that there were significant differences in terms of F0 since the pre-term infants had higher F0 than the full-term infants, showing a result of 436.4 Hz for the full-term infants and 460 Hz for the pre-term infants (p<.05) There was an average rate of 4.01 for the full-term infants and 4.02 (SD=1.69) for the pre-term infants in shimmer. For NHR, it was observed .44 for the full-term infants and .50 for the pre-term infants, thus revealing no significant differences in these observations. This study shows that the crying of newborn babies is related to their physical conditions and it is a sensatory response to these conditions. Furthermore, this study could be helpful for the early detection and measurement of newborn babies who look clinically healthy but could be at risk through acoustic and physiological analyses.

English vowels can be divided into monophthongs and diphthongs depending on the number of vocal tract shapes. Diphthongs are usually produced with more than one shape. This study attempts to collect acoustical data of English diphthongs published by Hillenbrand et al.(1995) online and to examine acoustic features of the diphthongs for phoneticians and English teachers. Sixty three American males and females were chosen after excluding those subjects with different target vowels or ambiguous formant tracks. The author used Praat to obtain the acoustical data systematically at eleven equidistant timepoints over the diphthongal segment. Obvious errors were corrected based on the spectrographic display of each diphthong. Results show that the formant trajectories of the diphthongs produced by the American males and females appeared quite similar. When the female formant values were uniformly normalized to those of the males, almost a perfect collapse occurred. Secondly, the diphthongal movements on the vowel space appeared not linear due to the coarticulatory gesture for the following consonant. Thirdly, the average duration of the diphthongs produced by the females was 1.156 times longer than that of the males while the pitch ratio between the two groups turned out to be 1.746 with a similar contour over measurement points. The author concludes that English diphthongs produced by various groups can be compared systematically when the acoustical values are obtained at proportional timepoints. Further studies will be desirable on the comparison of English diphthongs produced by native and nonnative speakers.

This study is to examine how Korean speakers realize English stress on the homographic words. Experiments were performed by Korean speakers three times, before stress instruction, immediately after instruction, and six weeks after instruction. First, duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the vowel in a stressed syllable of three homographic words produced by Korean speakers were compared with those of native speakers of English. The result shows that when the words were used as nouns, before instruction Korean speakers had shorter duration and lower fundamental frequency in the stressed vowel than the native speakers, which indicates that Korean speakers did not assign the primary stress on the first syllable of the nouns. After instruction, the values of duration and fundamental frequency were increased and the differences between two groups were decreased. Next, the values of these stress features measured three times were analyzed in order to find out how they changed through instruction. The analysis shows that after instruction the values of three features were increased compared to the ones before instruction, and that the biggest change was in duration of the vowel and the next was fundamental frequency. Six weeks after instruction, the values of duration and intensity were decreased than those immediately after instruction. This means that instruction is helpful for Korean speakers to assign the stress for the English homographic words, and that instruction and practice are needed repeatedly.

A new version of sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) which has been investigated in utterance-length control is proposed to obtain uniform response results in speaker verification (SV). Although SPRTs can obtain fast responses in SV tests, differences in the performance may occur depending on the compositions of consonants and vowels in the sentences used. In this paper, a fast sequential probability ratio test (FSPRT) method that shows consistent performances at all times regardless of the compositions of vocalized sentences for SV will be proposed. In generating frames, the FSPRT will first conduct SV test processes with only generated frames without any overlapping and if the results do not satisfy discrimination criteria, the FSPRT will sequentially use frames applied with overlapping. With the progress of processes as such, the test will not be affected by the compositions of sentences for SV and thus fast response outcomes and even consistent performances can be obtained. Experimental results show that the FSPRT has better performance to the SPRT method while requiring less complexity with equal error rates (EER).

We propose an automatic pronunciation diagnosis system to evaluate the pronunciation of a foreign language without the uttered text. We recorded English utterances spoken by native and Korean speakers, and utterances spoken by Koreans are evaluated by native speakers based on three criteria: fluency, accuracy of phones and intonation. The system evaluates the utterances of test Korean speakers based on the differences of log-likelihood given two models: one is trained by English speech uttered by native speakers, and the other is trained by English speech uttered by Korean speakers. We also applied purification algorithm to increase class differentiability. The purification can detect and eliminate the non-speech frames such as short pauses, occlusive silences that do not help to discriminate between utterances. As the results, our proposed system has higher correlation with the human scores than the baseline system.

As bolus enters the pharynx during the swallow, laryngeal closure takes place by approximating the epiglottis to the arytenoid Laryngeal Closure Duration(LCD) is the duration of contact between the arytenoids and the epiglottis from the first contact to the last(Logemann et al, 2000). Epiglottic inversion continues pharyngeal swallow stage is completed in order to protect the airway. The purpose of this study is to measure layrngeal closure duration (LCD) in three groups of subjects: a) 10 stroke patients who aspirate before and during the swallow(aspirators), b) 10 stroke patients who do not aspirate during the swallow c)10 normal control subjects. Means and standard deviation of LCD was analyzed in both 5ml and 10 ml thin liquids using 100msec timer in videoflouroscopic swallowing examination. The mean for each group was 0.15 seconds shorter from aspirators to control group. There was a significant difference between aspirators and normal subjects for laryngeal closure duration during the swallow. Laryngeal closure duration after a stroke lead to aspiration. However, only one of this temporal problem may not be enough to aspiration.

The purpose of this study was to know the differences in perceptual judgement for speech intelligibility in monosyllables by inexperienced listeners and vowel space area according to different dysarthric severity. Three dysarthric speakers with different severity(mild, moderate and severe) screened by 3 clinicians' screening tests before the experiment were conducted. Corner vowels (i, u, ae, a) in monosyllable level (CVC, 'p_p') and carrier phrases ('종이에_써') were chosen and analyzed for vowel space. Inexperience listeners (n=20) performed the intelligibility test for spoken syllables and carrier phrases by dysarthric speakers. The results show that there is a significant differences in both F1 and F2 values among 4 corner vowels. Vowel space area in the data of mildly impaired speakers was significantly higher than two others. In the scores of speech intelligibility judged by inexperienced listeners, the scores by a moderately impaired speaker were more higher than two other speakers. The discrepancy between perceptual judgement by inexperienced listeners and vowel space area will be discussed in this area.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences of feeding ability and articulatory function in the children with spastic cerebral palsy and typically developing children according to feeding subtypes. The feeding subtypes were limited by chewing, cup drinking and spoon feeding. 14 children with spastic cerebral palsy and 14 typically developing children were participated in this study. The results were following as; First, there were significant differences in overall articulatory function between two groups Second, all scores of articulators' function according to feeding subtypes in children with cerebral palsy was significantly higher than typically developing children Third, chewing mode in feeding subtypes was highly correlated with lip and tongue movement. compared to another Finally, the correlation between spoon feeding and mobility of lip and tongue was high in both groups. These results suggested that These results suggest that the effort to find out the differences feeding ability and appliances for articulatory function in CP children are meaningful in catching their speech ability indirectly. Moreover, the more organized feeding skills should be discussed in the relationship with verbal and nonverbal development.

An inhaled salbutamol and salmeterol for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD) and asthma have been used worldwidely. But there has been few study about the voice change evoked from the post-medicine effect. To evaluate the voice influenced of short-acting and long-acting ${\beta}_2$-agonists, two experiments were carried out: one was salbutamol experiment 1 with eight patients, the other was salmeterol experiment 2 with six patients. Experiment 1 was made of two stages: premedication & postmedication. Experiment 2 was four stages: stageI was premedication, stageII was postmedication & pregaggling, stageIII was postmedication & postgaggling(100 ml with water), and stageIV was postmedication & 30 minutes later. Measured parameters were F0, F0_SD, Jitter_rap, Shimmer_apq11, HNR, BW(1, 2, 3), Intensity, and H1-H2. The mean data collected from 3 repetitions each was statistically analyzed by Wilcoxon signed rank test for experiment 1 and repeated measures ANOVA for experiment 2. In experiment 1, significant differences were found in the Jitter_rap(Z= -2.10, p=0.036). The findings indicated that the postmedicated voice was worse than premedicated voice. In experiment 2, there wasn't significant difference, but values of parameters related to voice quality(Jitter_rap, Shimmer_apq11, HNR, and H1-H2) showed changes toward stageⅣ, that is, the voice quality was worse under medication.

In this paper, we investigate a signal typing on the basis of visual impression of distinctive spectrogram. Pathological voices are classified into signal type 1, 2, 3, or 4 to estimate perturbation parameters and to mark perceptual rating based on Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V). The results suggest that perturbation analysis can be applied to only type 1 and 2 signals and the perceptual ratings of overall grade increase with each signal type, overall. A good inter-rater reliability is showed among three raters. We recommend that pathological voices should be marked the signal typing and CAPE-V, together, to definitely describe the characteristics of pathological voices.

The This study aimed to evaluate the effects of the voice therapy we operated to the patients with age-related dysphonia. Thirty four participants who were diagnosed as age-related dysphonia in laryngoscopic finding from January, 2009 to December, 2009 completed the study. The participants were aged from 60 to 82 years old with a mean age of 70.6. All participants had received the abdominal breath technique, SKHPIP with laughter, and basic vocal training with description of their problem, the length of which ranged from four sessions to twelve sessions. We executed the videostroboscopy to compare the aspect of voicing change and the perceptual assessment, voice range profile, acoustic and aerodynamic measures to identify change of voice. Participants had glottal gap due to incomplete glottic closure during voicing on the pretest. After they took the voice therapy, the glottic gap became narrow and rough and breathy voice was reduced. There were significant difference in acoustic and aerodynamic measures. Jitter, Shimmer, MFR were reduced and MPT, Psub were increased(p<.05). Participants' pitch range and intensity range were increased on the posttest performance after taking voice therapy. Especially, most of them were showed that pitch range was increased significantly in high frequency area. The results of this investigation indicate that the voice therapy using abdominal breath, SKHPIP, and exercise together is effective for the patients who have age-related dysphonia to improve their voice quality. We recommend to apply this technique to functional voice disorders who are showed glottal gap.

Speech language pathologists depend on their voice for livelihood and are high risk group of voice disorders. But there are few studies on their prevalence of voice symptoms and voice handicap index. This study aimed to evaluate prevalence of voice symptoms and Korean voice handicap index with 86 speech language pathologists and 90 individuals employed in other occupations. We analyzed self-reported voice symptoms and voice handicap index using a questionnaire for this study. The results showed that the prevalence of voice symptoms of speech language pathologists is 60.5% and voice handicap index scores of speech language pathologists group are significantly higher than those of control group in physical and total score. And we found that alcohol history was a risk factor for voice symptoms. These findings indicate that special vocal hygiene program for speech language pathologists and follow up studies for comparisons of prevalence of voice symptoms and voice handicap index with other professional voice users are necessary.