• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.103-111
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• 1997

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the speaking rate on the duration of syllable before boundary. The materials used were four types of syllable-boundary sequences(Go-'Ga' Boundary-Gu) in a paragraph. The duration of 'Ga' syllables before 4 level of boundary was measured, and all of the measurements were taken from signals and spectrograms made by the $Signalyze^{TM}$ 3.04 for Power Mac 7200. Subjects were six female speakers who read the materials at fast, normal, and slow speed five times. The results show that (1) the slower the speaking rate becomes, the longer the duration of syllable before boundary, (2) the duration rank of syllable before each boundary does not correspond to the level of boundary, eg. at fast speed, = < #, + < $ ; at normal speed, +, #, = < $ ; at slow speed, + < =, #, $, and (3) the syllable before sentence boundary is less influenced than syllable before another boundary.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.88-95
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• 2006

In this Paper. a method for improving the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for conversational speech is proposed. which mainly focuses on increasing the robustness against the rapidly speaking utterances. The proposed method doesn't require an additional speech recognition task to represent speaking rate quantitatively. Energy distribution for special bands is employed to detect the vowel regions, the number of vowels Per unit second is then computed as speaking rate. To improve the Performance for fast speech. in the pervious methods. a sequence of the feature vectors is expanded by a given scaling factor, which is computed by a ratio between the standard phoneme duration and the measured one. However, in the method proposed herein. utterances are classified by their speaking rates. and the scaling factor is determined individually for each class. In this procedure, a maximum likelihood criterion is employed. By the results from the ASR experiments devised for the 10-digits mobile phone number. it is confirmed that the overall error rate was reduced by $17.8\%$ when the proposed method is employed

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.67-74
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• 2017

An increase in speech intelligibility has been found in Clear Speech compared to conversational speech. Clear Speech is defined by decreased articulation rates and increased frequency and length of pauses. The objective of the present study was to investigate improvement in immediate speech intelligibility in 10 patients with Parkinson's disease (age range: 46 to 75 years) using Clear Speech. This experiment has been performed using the Phonatory Aerodynamic System 6600 after the participants read the first sentence of a Sanchaek passage and the "List for Adults 1" in the Sentence Recognition Test (SRT) using casual speech and Clear Speech. Acoustic and aerodynamic parameters that affect speech intelligibility were measured, including mean F0, F0 range, intensity, speaking rate, mean airflow rate, and respiratory rate. In the Sanchaek passage, use of Clear Speech resulted in significant differences in mean F0, F0 range, speaking rate, and respiratory rate, compared with the use of casual speech. In the SRT list, significant differences were seen in mean F0, F0 range, and speaking rate. Based on these findings, it is claimed that speech intelligibility can be affected by adjusting breathing and tone in Clear Speech. Future studies should identify the benefits of Clear Speech through auditory-perceptual studies and evaluate programs that use Clear Speech to increase intelligibility.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.111-118
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• 2017

This study compares speech rate, articulatory rate, and pause between the children with mild and moderate Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) who performed Sentence Repetition Tasks and the Typically Developing children (TD) of the same chronological age. The results showed that three groups are categorized in terms of speaking rate and articulatory rate. There is no difference between the two groups with SSD children, namely between the mild and moderate groups. However, there is a significant difference in their rate of speech and the articulatory rate between the two groups, such that the two groups with SSD are significantly slower than the TD group. The results also showed that there are no significant difference in the length and frequency of pause between the moderate group and the mild group. However, there is a substantial difference between them and the TD group. This study, provided the basic data for evaluating the speech rate of the children and implies that there are limitations in speech rate among the children with SSD.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.187-190
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to research the phonetic parameters used on the voice imitation. First of all, the fundamental frequency is imitated effectively. Distinctive prosodic patterns are used repeatedly on the voice imitation. Speaking rate is used in special measure in case the target speaker has extraordinary speaking rate. Also formant frequency is imitated variously. In sum, distinctive characteristics perceived by listener are used on voice imitation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.149-156
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• 2015

We propose a new method for automatic fluency scoring of English speaking tests spoken by nonnative speakers in a free-talking style. The proposed method is different from the previous methods in that it does not require the transcribed texts for spoken utterances. At first, an input utterance is segmented into a phone sequence by using a phone recognizer trained by using native speech databases. For each utterance, a feature vector with 6 features is extracted by processing the segmentation results of the phone recognizer. Then, fluency score is computed by applying support vector regression (SVR) to the feature vector. The parameters of SVR are learned by using the rater scores for the utterances. In computer experiments with 3 tests taken by 48 Korean adults, we show that speech rate, phonation time ratio, and smoothed unfilled pause rate are best for fluency scoring. The correlation of between the rater score and the SVR score is shown to be 0.84, which is higher than the correlation of 0.78 among raters. Although the correlation is slightly lower than the correlation of 0.90 when the transcribed texts are given, it implies that the proposed method can be used as a preprocessing tool for fluency evaluation of speaking tests.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.125-136
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• 2003

Speech coding techniques have been studied to reduce the complexity and bit rate but also to improve the sound quality. CELP type vocoder, has used as a one of standard, supports the great sound quality even low bit rate. In this paper, the preprocessing of input speech to reduce the bit rate is the different with the conventional vocoder. The different kinds of parameter are used for the preprocessing so this paper is compared with theses parameters for finding the more appropriate parameter for the vocoder. The parameters are used to synthesize the speech not to encode or decode for coding technique so we proposed the simple algorithm not to have the influence on the processing time or the computation time. The parameters in used the preprocessing step are speaking rate, duration and PSOLA technique.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.73-77
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences of the speech rate according to the area in the perceptual and acoustic analysis. This study examines regional variation in overall speech rate and articulation rate across speaking situations (picture description, free conversation and story retelling) with 14 normal adult (7 in Gyeongnam and 7 in Honam area). The result of an experimental investigation shows that the perceptual speech rate differs significantly between two regional varieties of Koreans with a picture description examined here. A group of Honam speakers spoke significantly faster than a group of Gyeongnam speakers. However, the result of the acoustic analysis shows that the speech rate of the two groups did not differ. And there were significant regional differences in the overall speech rate and articulation rate on the other two speaking situation, free conversation and story retelling. It suggest that we have to study perceptual evaluation with regard to the free conversation and story retelling in future research, and based on the results of this study, a variety of researches on the speech rate will be needed on the various conditions, including various area and SLPs who have wider background and experiences. It is necessary for SLPs to train and experience more to assess patients properly and reliably.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.91-109
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• 2016

This study was mainly aimed to investigate on the perceptions of occupational suitability for speakers who stutter and the associated factors. 90 college students who do not stutter participated in this study and asked to hear one of three audio recordings(i.e., fluent version, mildly-stuttered version, and severely-stuttered version) of a male speaker who stuttered. Then, the participants were asked to rate the speaker's communicative functioning, personal attributes, and suitability for 31 occupations, along with perceptions of the occupations' speaking demands and educational requirements. Results show that speakers who stuttered (i.e., mildly-stuttered and severely-stuttered version) received lower suitability ratings for high speaking demand occupations than for low speaking demand occupations. In addition, it has been shown that perceived speaking demand strongly affected occupational suitability ratings at both levels of stuttering severity. However, it has been shown that occupational suitability ratings were not associated with ratings of the speaker's personal attributes and perceived educational requirements. From these findings it can be argued that adults who stutter may face occupational stereotyping and/or role entrapment in work settings.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2023

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that Korean evaluators can score L2 speech appropriately, even when speech rate features are unavailable. Two perception experiments-preliminary and main-were conducted sequentially. The purpose of the preliminary experiment was to categorize English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speakers into two groups-advanced learners and lower-level learners-based on the proficiency scores given by five human raters. In the main experiment, a set of stimuli was prepared such that the speech rate of all data tokens was modified to have a uniform speech rate. Ten human evaluators were asked to score the stimulus tokens on a 5-point scale. These scores were statistically analyzed to determine whether there was a significant difference in utterance production between the two groups. The results of the preliminary experiment confirm that higher-proficiency learners speak faster than lower-proficiency learners. The results of the main experiment indicate that under controlled speech-rate conditions, human raters can appropriately assess learner proficiency, probably thanks to the linguistic features that the raters considered during the evaluation process.