• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.115-128
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• 2007

The purposes of this paper were to develop an automatic script to collect such acoustic parameters as duration, intensity, pitch and the first two formant values of English words produced by two native Canadian speakers either alone or in a two-word phrase at a normal speed and to compare those values by the position in the phrases. A Praat script was proposed to obtain the comparable parameters at evenly divided time point of the target word. Results showed that the total duration of the word in the phrase was shorter than that of the word produced alone. That was attributed to the pronunciation style of the native speakers generally placing the primary word stress in the first word position. Also, the reduction ratio of the male speaker depended on the word position in the phrase while the female speaker didn't. Moreover, there were different contours of intensity and pitch by the position of the target word in the phrase while almost the same formant patterns were observed. Further studies would be desirable to examine those parameters of the words in the authentic speech materials.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2016

This study examined how native Korean speakers realize the acoustic characteristics of /d, t/ flaps in American English. Fourteen subjects, who had lived in foreign countries for less than one year, read words containing the alveolar stops in flapping environments. /d/ (91%) became flaps more frequently than /t/ (42%). The closure durations for /d/ flaps were significantly longer than /t/ flaps, and the durations of the preceding vowels were not significantly different between /d/ and /t/ flaps. Female learners demonstrated a higher percentage of /t/ flapping than their male counterparts. Differences in flap patterns were observed among individual learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.7-14
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• 2018

The paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of voicing in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2,342 different sentences, and comprises more than five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender, voicing, and place of articulation as independent factors. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that acoustic signals interact in a complex way to signal the gender, place, and voicing of fricatives. Classification experiments using a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) revealed that 78.7% of fricatives are correctly classified. The majority of errors stem from the misclassification of /θ/ as [f] and /ʒ/ as [z]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 78.7%. Most errors result from the classification of female speakers as male speakers. The paper contributes to the understanding of the effects of voicing and gender on fricatives in a large-scale speech corpus.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.1503-1512
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• 1988

As the basic analysis to solve the within-and cross-speaker variability in phoneme based speech recognition, changes in pitch and formant frequencies of 8 Korean vowels with age and sex of speaker has been investigated by analyzing a large number fo samples. Conclusions obtained are as follows: 1) Changes in pitch frequency with age and sex of speaker for children are hard to distinguish and the difference of before and after the voice change is analyzed approximately 0.2 oct. for female an 0.9 oct. for male. 2) While most of the formants of vowel considerably change with the age of speaker, the change becomes smaller as the age becomes older. 3) While there is an indirect correlation between pitch and formant with change in age, it is hard to see a direct correlation. 4) When the objects of the recognition experiment by pitch and formants are various speakers in each age and sex, pitch also works as an efficient recognition parameter.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• Journal of Korean Public Health Nursing
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.518-531
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was conducted in order to develop and test a measurement for assessment of stress of female marriage immigrants in Korea. Methods: Forty four preliminary items were initially developed based on literature review and focus group interviews. Those items were evaluated by experts for content validity, resulting in six factors and 26 items. The 26 items were translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, and English by professional translators and were reviewed by native speakers of each language who are fluent in Korean. For testing validity and reliability, data were collected from 323 female marriage immigrants residing in five regions in Korea. Results: As a result of item analysis, 25 items were selected. Factor analysis yielded 21 items in four factors, including 1) household economic 2) parenting and discrimination 3) cultural and 4) emotional stressors, explaining 61.3% of the total variance of stress of female marriage immigrants in Korea. The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient was .903 for the overall instrument and .692-.892 for four factors. Conclusion: Measurement of stress for female marriage immigrants in Korea has high validity and reliability. Therefore, this measurement may be utilized for systematic assessment of stress and for identification of areas of support for female marriage immigrants in Korea.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.39-47
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• 2016

While acoustic studies in the past decade documented a raised /o/ by showing their lowered first formants (F1) almost overlapped with those of high back vowel /u/, no consensus has been made in terms of how this /o/-raising affects the vowels as a system in Seoul Korean. The current study aimed to investigate the age- and gender-related differences of the relative distance among the vowels to better understand the influence of this on-going sound change on the vowel system. We measured the static and dynamic spectral characteristics (F1 and F2) of the seven Korean monophthong vowels /e a ʌ o u ɨ i/ in the spontaneous speech of Seoul Corpus, and depicted the patterns of 30 individual speakers (10 speakers in each group of teens, 20s and 40s) as a function of age and gender. The static spectral examination showed low F1 values of /o/ in the spontaneous speech corpus confirming the vowel /o/ raising, and also revealed greater F2 values of /u, ɨ/ suggesting their anterior articulations. The tendencies were stronger when the speakers were younger and female. The spectral trajectories further showed that the F1 and F2 between /o/ and /u/ were differentiated throughout the vowel mid-point although the trajectories gradually merged near the vowel mid point in the older male speakers' productions. The acoustic evidence of contrast among /o, u, ɨ/ supports that the raised /o/ is not indicative of a merger with /u/ but rather implying a chain-like vowel shift in the Seoul Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.81-89
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• 1998

This paper investigates the phatic function of intonation in Russian by recording and analysing 11 female native speakers of standard Moscow Russian. This paper shows that differences in intonation pattern of a sentence are associated with differences in degree of listener's involvement in the speech. Intonation pattern of an utterance having phatic function appears to be determined by 1) the speaker's readiness to talk to evoke the listener's attention ; 2) the speaker's intention to continue the communication. Some emphasis is placed on the relationship between intonation pattern of an utterance and speaker-listener interaction.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.55-58
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• 2007

This study was investigated the effect of speech tasks on habitual pitch. Seven male and female young adult speakers participated in this study. The experiment consisted of seven different speech tasks: counting, reading, sustained phonation /a/, prolonged /i:/, answering /ne/. Data was analyzed via Visi-pitch IV. The results showed that there was no significant F0 difference among speech tasks.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.243-246
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• 2007

This paper aims to propose an intonation labeling method using Momel and to present results of analyzing a speech corpus consisting of 80 passages pronounced by 4 speakers (2 male and 2 female) using the proposed method. The results show that Momel works well enough to derive meaningful pitch targets, which could be labeled with H and L tones. On the other hand, the results of the analysis of Korean speech corpus correspond to earlier work.