• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2004

The aim of this study is to reveal the order and the age of mastery of phonemic contrast in vowel sounds of Korean. For this purpose, we made an observation of the correspondences between the sounds produced by children of 12-35 months and the target sounds produced by adults. The provisional order and the age of contrast acquisition shown from the results of this study are as follows. First, the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the body of the tongue precedes the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the lip rounding. Second, as for the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the body of the tongue, the contrast between the low vowels and the others is accomplished first, and the contrast between the high and low vowels and the contrast between the front and the back vowels are established around the age of 24 months. Third, as for the differential production of vowels by the feature relating to the lip rounding, the contrast between the rounded and the unrounded vowel is not accomplished until 36 months. Finally, we observed, prior to the completion of the differential production of phonemes, children use a specific phoneme excessively. This passing phrase could be interpreted as a result of over-application of a distinctive feature in the course of acquisition of it.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.60-67
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• 1987

In this paper, a phoneme classification method for Korean speech recognition has been proposed and its performance has been studied. The phoneme classification has been done based on the phonemic features extracted by the prewindowed recursive least-square (PRLS) algorithm that is a kind of adaptive filter algorithms. Applying the PRLS algorithm to input speech signal, precise detection of phoneme boundaries has been made, Reference patterns of Korean phonemes have been generated by the ordinery vector quantization (VQ) of feature vectors obtained manualy from prototype regions of each phoneme. In order to obtain the performance of the proposed phoneme classification method, the method has been tested using spoken names of seven Korean cities which have eleven different consonants and eight different vowels. In the speaker-dependent phoneme classification, the accuracy is about $85\%$ considering simple phonemic rules of Korean language, while the accuracy of the speaker-independent case is far less than that of the speaker-dependent case.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.5-14
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• 1994

This paper is about an experiment of speaker-independent automatic Korean spoken words recognition using Multi-Layered Perceptron and Error Back-propagation algorithm. The object words are 50 citynames of D.D.D local numbers. 43 of those are 2 syllables and the rest 7 are 3 syllables. The words were not segmented into syllables or phonemes, and some feature components extracted from the words in equal gap were applied to the neural network. That led independent result on the speech duration, and the PARCOR coefficients calculated from the frames using linear predictive analysis were employed as feature components. This paper tried to find out the optimum conditions through 4 differerent experiments which are comparison between total and pre-classified training, dependency of recognition rate on the number of frames and PAROCR order, recognition change due to the number of neurons in the hidden layer, and the comparison of the output pattern composition method of output neurons. As a result, the recognition rate of $89.6\%$ is obtaimed through the research.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.61-70
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• 1995

In this paper, the PLP cepstrum which is close to human perceptual characteristics was extracted through the spread time area to get the temperal feature. Phonemes were recognized by artificial neural network similar to the learning method of human. The phoneme strings were matched by Markov models which well suited for sequence. Phoneme recognition for the continuous Korean speech had been done using speech blocks in which speech frames were gathered with unequal numbers. We parameterized the blocks using 7th order PLPs, PTP, zero crossing rate and energy, which neural network used as inputs. The 100 data composed of 10 Korean sentences which were taken from the speech two men pronounced five times for each sentence were used for the the recognition. As a result, maximum recognition rate of 94.4% was obtained. The sentence was recognized using Markov models generated by the phoneme strings recognized from earlier results the recognition for the 200 data which two men sounded 10 times for each sentence had been carried out. The sentence recognition rate of 92.5% was obtained.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.337-340
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• 2004

The exactly reproduced prosody of a TTS system is one of the key factors that affect the naturalness of synthesized speech. In general, rules about prosody had been gathered either from linguistic knowledge or by analyzing the prosodic information from natural speech. But these could not be perfect and some of them could be incorrect. So we proposed artificial neural network(ANN)s that can be trained to team the prosody of natural speech and generate it. In learning phase, let ANNs learn the pitch and energy contour of center phoneme by applying a string of phonemes in a sentence to ANNs and comparing the output pattern with target pattern and making adjustment in weighting values to get the least mean square error between them. In test phase, the estimation rates were computed. We saw that ANNs could generate the prosody of a sentence.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.424-433
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• 2015

This study tried to investigate the differences between auditory preferences for a discrimination study of minimal pairs with the different onset and the same nucleus of a syllable on the basis of articulator-distance in case of Korean infants and toddlers. As a result we found a main effect for articulator-distance and age but not an effect according to the types of phonation especially in terms of tense. Former results are line with the previous studies having reported the order of consonants acquisition based on the places of articulation suggesting that more sensitive responses for the contiguous and different phonemes may lead earlier acquisition for the same place of articulation of the speech sounds. Specifically, bilabial soudns are followed by alveolar and palatal sounds in order. The latter results also showed that tense consonants got a high rate of recognition beside lax consonants according to the age and sex.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.567-572
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• 2014

In recent years, computing and networking technologies have been developed, and the communication equipments have become smaller and the mobility has increased. In addition, the demand for easily-operated speech recognition has increased. This paper proposes method of recognizing the Korean phoneme 'ㅏ'. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound, and it plays a significant role in speech recognition. However, the precise recognition of the phonemes has many obstacles since it has many variations in its pronunciation. This paper proposes a simple and efficient method that can be used to recognize a Korean vowel 'ㅏ'. The proposed method is based on the common features that are extracted from the 'ㅏ' waveform sequences, and this is simpler than when using the previous complex methods. The experimental results indicate that this method has a more than 90 percent accuracy in recognizing 'ㅏ'.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.186-192
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a new procedure for improvement of the linear predictive coding. To reduce the error power incurred by the coding, we interchanged the order of the two procedures of windowing on the signal and linear prediction. This scheme corresponds to LPC extraction with windowed autocorrelation. The proposed method requires more calculational time because it necessitates matrix inversion on more parameters than the conventional technique where an efficient Levinson-Durbin recursive procedure is applicable with smaller parameters. Experimental test over various speech phonemes showed, however, that our procedure yields about 5 % less power distortion compared to the conventional technique. Consequently, the proposed method in this paper is thought to be preferable to the conventional technique as far as the fidelity is concerned. In a separate study of speaker-dependent speech recognition test for 50 isolated words pronounced by 40 people, our approach yielded better performance too.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.37 no.8
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• pp.579-587
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• 1988

Conventional methods of automatic recognition of Korean characters consist of the thinning processing, the segmentation of connected fundamental phonemes and the recognition of each fundamental character. These methods, however require the thinning processing which is complex and time consuming. Also several noise components make worse effects on the recognition of characters than in the case of no thinning. This paper describes the extraction method of the feature components of Korean fundamental characters of the Gothic Korean letter without the thinning. We regard line-components of the contour which describes the character's external boundary as the feature-components. The line-component includes the directional code, the length and the start point in the image. Each fundamental character is represented by the string of directional codes. Therefore the recognition process is only the string pattern matching. We use the Gothic-hangul in the experiment. The ecognition rate is 92%.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.8
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• pp.583-589
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• 2004

Proposed is a speaker normalization method based on vector quantizer for continuous speech recognition (CSR) system in which no acoustic information is made use of. The proposed method, which is an improvement of the previously reported speaker normalization scheme for a simple digit recognizer, builds up a canonical codebook by iteratively training the codebook while the size of codebook is increased after each iteration from a relatively small initial size. Once the codebook established, the warp factors of speakers are estimated by comparing exhaustively the warped versions of each speaker's utterance with the codebook. Two sets of phones are used to estimate the warp factors: one, a set of vowels only. and the other, a set composed of all the Phonemes. A Piecewise linear warping function which corresponds to the estimated warp factor is adopted to warp the power spectrum of the utterance. Then the warped feature vectors are extracted to be used to train and to test the speech recognizer. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated by a set of recognition experiments using the TIMIT corpus and HTK speech recognition tool kit. The experimental results showed comparable recognition rate improvement with the formant based warping method.