• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.63-72
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• 2008

Various acoustic features were extracted and analyzed to estimate the inter- and intra-speaker variability of emotional speech. Tokens of vowel /a/ from sentences spoken with different modes of emotion (sadness, neutral, happiness, fear and anger) were analyzed. All of the acoustic features (fundamental frequency, spectral slope, HNR, H1-A1 and formant frequency) indicated greater contribution to inter- than intra-speaker variability across all emotions. Each acoustic feature of speech signal showed a different degree of contribution to speaker discrimination in different emotional modes. Sadness and neutral indicated greater speaker discrimination than other emotional modes (happiness, fear, anger in descending order of F-ratio). In other words, the speaker specificity was better represented in sadness and neutral than in happiness, fear and anger with any of the acoustic features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.25-32
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• 2017

Besides their effect on the f0 contour of the following vowel, Korean stops are undergoing a sound change in which a partial or complete consonantal merger on voice onset time (VOT) is taking place between aspirated and lax stops. Many previous studies on sound change have mainly focused on group-normative effects, that is, effects that are representative of the population as a whole. Few systematic quantitative studies of change in adult individuals have been carried out. The current study examines whether the sound change holds for individual speakers. It focuses on inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability on sound change in contemporary Korean. Speech data were collected for thirteen Seoul Korean speakers studying abroad in America. In order to minimize the possible effects of speech production, socio-phonetic factors such as age, gender, dialect, speech rate, and L2 exposure period were controlled when recruiting participants. The results showed that, for nine out of thirteen speakers, the consonantal merger is taking place between the aspirated and lax stop in terms of VOT. There were also intra-speaker variations on the merger in three aspects: First, is the consonantal (VOT) merger between the two stops is in progress or not? Second, are VOTs for aspirated stops getting shorter or not (i.e., the aspirated-shortening process)? Third, are VOTs for lax stops getting longer or not (i.e., the lax-lengthening process)? The results of remarkable inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability indicate a synchronous speech sound change of the stop system in contemporary Korean. Some speakers are early adopters or active propagators of sound change whereas others are not. Further study is necessary to see whether the inter-speaker differences exceed intra-speaker differences in sound change.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.119-130
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• 2005

The aim of this paper is to investigate some acoustical characteristics of the voice quality features from the emotional speech database. Six different parameters are measured and compared for 6 different emotions (normal, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, boredom) and from 6 different speakers. Inter-speaker variability and intra-speaker variability are measured. Some intra-speaker consistency of the parameter change across the emotions are observed, but inter-speaker consistency are not observed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.20-26
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• 2000

In speaker verification system the HMM(hidden Markov model) parameter updating using small amount of data and the priori threshold decision are crucial factor for dealing with long-term variability in people voices. In the paper we present the speaker model updating technique which can be adaptable to the session-to-intra speaker variability and the priori threshold determining technique. The proposed technique decreases verification error rates which the session-to-session intra-speaker variability can bring by adapting new speech data to speaker model parameter through Baum Welch re-estimation. And in this study the proposed priori threshold determining technique is decided by a hybrid score measurement which combines the world model based technique and the cohen model based technique together. The results show that the proposed technique can lead a better performance and the difference of performance is small between the posteriori threshold decision based approach and the proposed priori threshold decision based approach.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.195-198
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• 2003

The accuracy of automatic speech recognition system depends on the presence of background noise and speaker variability such as sex, intonation of speech, and speaking rate. Specially, the speaking rate of both inter-speaker and intra-speaker is a serious cause of mis-recognition. In this paper, we propose the compensation method of the speaking rate by the ratio of each vowel's length in a phrase. First the number of feature vectors in a phrase is estimated by the information of speaking rate. Second, the estimated number of feature vectors is assigned to each syllable of the phrase according to the ratio of its vowel length. Finally, the process of feature vector extraction is operated by the number that assigned to each syllable in the phrase. As a result the accuracy of automatic speech recognition was improved using the proposed compensation method of the speaking rate.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.26-37
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• 1998

The Connected Speech Test (CST) was developed to test hearing aid performance using realistic stimuli (Connected speech) presented in a background of noise with a visible speaker. The CST has not been investigated as a measure of speech reading ability using the visual portion of the CST only. Thirty subjects were administered the 48 test lists of the CST using visual presentation mode only. Statistically significant differences were found between the 48 test lists and between the 12 passages of the CST (48 passages divided into 12 groups of 4 lists which were averaged.). No significant differences were found between male and female subjects; however, in all but one case, females scored better than males. No significant differences were found between students in communication disorders and students in other departments. Intra- and inter-subject variability across test lists and passages was high. Suggestions for further research include changing the scoring of the CST to be more contextually based and changing the speaker for the CST.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.153-200
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• 1997

In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.