• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.1-17
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• 2003

Among the types of dysarthria, spastic and flaccid types are the most prominent manifestations. The objectives of the present research are (1) to discover the phonetic contrasts that differentiate spastic dysarthria from flaccid dysarthria, (2) to analyze the degrees of predictability of each phonetic contrast for intelligibility in spastic and flaccid dysarthrias and to compare them. The 'phonemic contrast word intelligibility pairs' for dysarthric speakers were tested and proved to be useful for clinical assessment of and research on dysarthria. In the group of spastic type, it showed that initial fricative vs. affricate and front vs. back vowel contrasts are transmitted relatively less effectively than flaccid type. In the group of flaccid type, initial glottal vs null contrast is transmitted less effectively than spastic type. The overall intelligibility of spastic dysarthria was predicted by multiple regression analysis with 88% accuracy by three phonetic contrasts(initial fricative vs. affricate; front vs. back vowels; initial consonant correlates). And the intelligibility of flaccid dysarthria was predicted by two phonetic contrasts(initial nasal vs. stop, front vs. back vowels) with 60% accuracy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1E
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• pp.28-33
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• 2005

This study was designed to suggest an assessment tool for analyzing the characteristics of Korean phonetic contrast intelligibility among dysarthric individuals. The intelligibility deficit factors of phonetic contrast in Korean dysarthric patients were analyzed through stepwise regression analysis. The 19 acoustic-phonetic contrasts proposed by Kent et al. (1999) have been claimed to be useful for clinical assessment and research on dysarthria. However, the test cannot be directly applied to Korean patients due to linguistic differences between English and Korean. Thus, it is necessary to devise a Korean word intelligibility test that reflects the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. To identify the speech error characteristics of a Korean dysarthric group, a Korean word list was audio-recorded by 3 spastic, 4 flaccid, and 5 mixed type of dysarthric patients. The word list consisted of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) real word pairs. Stimulus words included 41 phonemic contrast pairs and six triplets. The results showed that the percentage of errors in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.39-46
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• 2013

This study examined the effects of phonetic complexity and articulatory severity on Percentage of Correct Consonant (PCC) and speech intelligibility in adults with dysarthria. Speech samples of thirty-two words from APAC (Assessment of Phonology and Articulation of Children) were collected from 38 dysarthric speakers with one of two different levels of articulatory severities (mild or mild-moderate). A PCC and speech intelligibility score was calculated by the 4 levels of phonetic complexity. Two-way mixed ANOVA analysis revealed: (1) the group with mild severity showed significantly higher PCC and speech intelligibility scores than the mild-moderate articulatory severity group, (2) PCC at the phonetic complexity level 4 was significantly lower than those at the other levels and (3) an interaction effect of articulatory severity and phonetic complexity was observed only on the PCC. Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated the degree of correlation between PCC and speech intelligibility varied depending on the level of articulatory severity and phonetic complexity. The clinical implications of the findings were discussed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.4E
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• pp.3-16
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• 2001

An ASCII encoding of Korean has been developed for extended phonetic transcription of the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA). SAMPA is a machine-readable phonetic alphabet used for multilingual computing. It has been developed since 1987 and extended to more than twenty languages. The motivating factor for creating Korean SAMPA (K-SAMPA) is to label Korean speech for a multilingual corpus or to transcribe native language (Ll) interfered pronunciation of a second language learner for bilingual education. Korean SAMPA represents each Korean allophone with a particular SAMPA symbol. Sounds that closely resemble it are represented by the same symbol, regardless of the language they are uttered in. Each of its symbols represents a speech sound that is spectrally and temporally so distinct as to be perceptually different when the components are heard in isolation. Each type of sound has a separate IPA-like designation. Korean SAMPA is superior to other transcription systems with similar objectives. It describes better the cross-linguistic sound quality of Korean than the official Romanization system, proclaimed by the Korean government in July 2000, because it uses an internationally shared phonetic alphabet. It is also phonetically more accurate than the official Romanization in that it dispenses with orthographic adjustments. It is also more convenient for computing than the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) because it consists of the symbols on a standard keyboard. This paper demonstrates how the Korean SAMPA can express allophonic details and prosodic features by adopting the transcription conventions of the extended SAMPA (X-SAMPA) and the prosodic SAMPA(SAMPROSA).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.259-280
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• 2003

The paper discusses the way in which speech sounds are being evaluated and transcribed in various fields of speech sciences, and suggests ways for a more accurate transcription. The academic fields explored are of phonetics, speech processing, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The discussion centers on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), most commonly used in these fields, and other less widely-accepted transcription conventions such as the TOnes and Break Indices (ToBI), the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), an extension of the official Korean Romanization (KORBET), and the American-English transcription system in the TIMIT database (TIMITBET). These transcription conventions are dealt with Korean, English, and Korean-accented English. The paper demonstrates that each transcription can exclusively be recommended for a specific need from different academic fields. Due to its publicity, the IPA is best suited for phonetic evaluation in the fields of phonetics, speech pathology, and foreign language education. The rest of the transcriptions are useful for keyboard-inputting the phonetically evaluated data from all these fields as well as for sound transcription in speech engineering, because they use convenient letter symbols for typing, searching, and programming. Several practical suggestions are made to maintain the transcriptional efficiency and consistency to accommodate the intra-and inter-transcriber variability.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.37-40
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• 2005

Recently due to the rapid development of speech synthesis based on the corpora, the performance of TTS systems, which convert text into speech through synthesis, has enhanced, and they are applied in various fields. However, the procedure for objective assessment of the performance of systems is not well established in Korea. The establishment of the procedure for objective assessment of the performance of systems is essential for the assessment of development systems for the developers and as the standard for choosing the suitable systems for the users. In this paper we will report on the results of the basic research for the establishment of the systematic standard for the procedure of objective assessment of the performance of Korean TTS systems with reference to the various attempts for this project in Korea and other countries.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.67-88
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• 1997

The aim of this study is to develop an assessment program of speech rehabilitation for children having some language and speech disorders. Patients of dysarthria, tonsillectomy, tonsilhypertrophy, and nasal obstruction were selected for this experimental clinical phonetic study. Formant variations ($F_1\;&\;F_2$) show pre- and post-operation differences in tonsillectomy and cleft palate patients. Nasal formants ($NF_1\;&\;NF_2$) show pre- and post-operation differences in nasal obstruction. The articulation reaction time (ART) as a parameter was used to assess Voice Onset Time(VOT). It was shown longer duration for hypokinetic dysarthria and shorter for atoxic dysarthria.. The diadochokinetic rate was measured by Visi-pitch. Lower diadochokinetic rate appeared to spastic and dysarthria in comparison with the control group. It was shown that the nasalance of tonsilhypertrophy, nasal obstruction, and cleft palate patients was seen to increase after operation. In addition, the assessment of nasality can be measured only by simple vowels such as /a/ and /i/.

• Korean Journal of Cleft Lip And Palate
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.7-20
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• 2009

Orthodontic treatment planning of cleft lip and palate requires consideration of the characteristic features, growth pattern and functional disorders related to cleft lip and palate patients. Tissue deficiencies and constriction of the scar tissue in surgically treated cleft lip and palate results in disturbance of maxillary growth and deficiency of midfacial region with anterior and posterior crossbite. These patients often present congenital missing of teeth, supernumerary teeth, malformed teeth, or ectopic position of teeth, which should be treated by orthodontic treatment by expanding upper arch followed by fixed appliance. Proper use of retainer and continuous follow-up is needed to prevent relapse after orthodontic treatment has finished. Also we have to pay attention to correct speech disorder which is caused by the velopharyngeal insufficiency.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.37-50
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• 2000

This paper describes a test of everyday speech understanding ability, in which a listener's utilization of the context-situational information of speech is assessed, and is compared with the utilization of acoustic-phonetic information. The test items are sentences which are presented in a babble type of noise, and the listener response is the key word in the sentence. The key words are always two-syllabic nouns and the questioning sentences are added to obtain the responding key words. Two types of sentences are used. One is the high-predictable sentences for which the key word is somewhat predictable from the context. The other is the low-predictable sentences for which the key-word cannot be predicted from the context. Both types are included in six 40-item forms of the test, which are balanced for intelligibility, key-word familiarity and predictability, phonetic content, and length. Performance of normally hearing listeners shows significantly different functions for various signal-to-noise ratios. The potential applications of this test, particularly in the assessment of speech understanding ability in the hearing impaired, are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.103-113
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• 2016

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.