• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제8권3호
• /
• pp.51-59
• /
• 2016

The purpose of present study is to examine differences between habitual speech (HS) and clear speech (CS) in individuals with mild dysarthria. Twelve speakers with mild dysarthria and twelve healthy control speakers read sentences in two speaking styles. Formant and intensity related values, triangular area, and center of gravity of /a/, /i/, and /u/ were measured. In addition, formant-ratio variables such as vowel space area(VSA), vowel articulatory index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and F2i/F1u ratio (F2 ratio) were calculated. The results of repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant difference in F2 of vowel /i/ and F2 energy of vowel /a/ between groups. Regarding formant energy, F2 energy of vowel /a/ were observed as meaningful variables between speaking styles. There were significant speaking style-by-group interactions for F2 energy of vowel /a/. These findings indicated that current parameters could discriminate healthy group and mild dysarthria group meaningfully and that speaker with dysarthria had larger clear speech benefit than healthy talkers. We also claim that various acoustic changes of clear speech may contribute to improving vowel intelligibility.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.91-99
• /
• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제4권1호
• /
• pp.21-28
• /
• 2012

Many previous studies reported acoustic parameters of English vowels produced by a clear speaking style. In everyday usage, we actually produce speech sounds with various speaking styles. Different styles may yield different acoustic measurements. This study attempts to examine pitch and formant trajectories of eleven English vowels produced by nine American males in order to understand acoustic variations depending on clear and conversational speaking styles. The author used Praat to obtain trajectories systematically at seven equidistant time points over the vowel segment while checking measurement validity. Results showed that pitch trajectories indicated distinct patterns depending on four speaking styles. Generally, higher pitch values were observed in the higher vowels and the pitch was higher in the clear speaking styles than that in the conversational styles. The same trend was observed in the three formant trajectories of front vowels and the first formant trajectories of back vowels. The second and third trajectories of back vowels revealed an opposite or inconsistent trend, which might be attributable to the coarticulation of the following consonant or lip rounding gestures. The author made a tentative conclusion that people tend to produce vowels to enhance pitch and formant differences to transmit their information clearly. Further perceptual studies on synthesized vowels with varying pitch and formant values are desirable to address the conclusion.

• 한국생활과학회지
• /
• 제14권6호
• /
• pp.961-972
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate the improvement of English proficiency of children in the ESL and EFL learning style classrooms through the experiment method. The results of this research are as follows: first, the scores of listening and speaking and the perception of alphabets in the ESL program are higher than that in the EFL program. This means that learning in the ESL style classroom is the better way to improve English skills than in the EFL style classroom, which is common in Korea. Second, there is no difference in the English listening and speaking skills and the perception of the English alphabets between the two gender groups in the ESL & EFL style classrooms. These results suggest that the target language may be used in the English classrooms by the teachers and the students with the materials, books, and equipment are English. Teachers are expected to be in charge of playing decisive roles as demonstrators of speech, models and correctors of pronunciation and providers of materials including TV, VCR, CD players, and cassette recorders, etc.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제2권1호
• /
• pp.3-11
• /
• 2010

The present study confirmed the intelligibility improvement benefit of clear speech by investigating the intelligibility of Korean stops produced in different speaking styles: conversational, citation-form, and clear speech. This finding supports the Hypo- & Hyper-speech theory that speakers adjust vocal effort to accommodate hearers' speech perception difficulty. A progressive intelligibility improvement was found for the three speaking styles investigated: clear speech was more intelligible than citation-form speech citation-form speech was more intelligible than conversational speech and clear speech was also more intelligible than conversational speech. These findings suggest that the manipulations to elicit three distinct speaking styles in a laboratory setting were successful. Korean lenis stops showed the least intelligibility improvement among the three Korean stop types, and this result suggests that lenis stops should be more resistant to intelligibility enhancement efforts in clear speech than aspirated and fortis stops.

• 말소리와 음성과학
• /
• 제7권2호
• /
• pp.149-156
• /
• 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.

• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제12권2호
• /
• pp.61-85
• /
• 2006

The purpose of the present study is to compare Korean EFL learners' speech corpus (i.e. oral productions) with their composition corpus (i.e. written productions). Four college students participated in the study. The composition corpus was collected through a writing assignment, and the speech corpus was gathered by audio-taping their oral presentations. The results of the data analysis indicate that (i) As for error frequency, young adult low-intermediate Korean EFL learners showed high frequency in determiners (mostly, indefinite articles), vocabulary (mostly, semantic errors), and prepositions. The frequency order did not show much difference between the speech corpus and the composition corpus; and (ii) When comparing the oral productions with the written productions, there were not many differences between them in terms of the contents, a style (i.e., colloquial vs. literary), vocabulary selection, and error types and frequency. Therefore, it is assumed that the proficiency in oral presentation of EFL learners at this learning stage heavily depends on how much/how well they are able to write. In other words, EFL learners' writing and speaking skills are closely co-related. It implies that the teacher does not need to separate teaching how to speak from teaching how to write. The teacher may use the same methods or strategies to help the learners improve their English speaking and writing skills. Furthermore, it will be more effective to teach writing before speaking since they have more opportunities to write than speak in the EFL contexts.

• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제13권1호
• /
• pp.27-46
• /
• 2007

Teachers can maximize students' L2 learning by knowing preferred learning styles. This paper presents the results of a survey that asked 309 English learners to identify their perceptual learning style preferences. It further compared students' favored learning styles in terms of their gender and major field of study and explored a possible link between learning styles and English achievement. Collected data using Reid's (1995) questionnaire were analyzed by descriptive statistics, MANOVA, ANOVA, correlations, multiple regressions including squared partial correlations, and Cronbach's alpha. The results indicated that Korean students favored English learning in group regardless of gender, while their preferred mode of learning was significantly different in regard to their major field of study. Certain learning styles might be profitable for English achievement. Multiple regression analyses revealed that individual mode of learning was the best predictor of students' English achievement. It furthermore showed significant relationships between visual and individual styles of learning and English performance. The findings of the study reflected students' English learning context in which English native-speaking teachers frequently used communicative pair and small group activities for speaking practices that were consonant with students' learning styles.

• 한국식생활문화학회지
• /
• 제12권5호
• /
• pp.519-529
• /
• 1997

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors of food adaptation and the changes of food habit on Koreans residing in America. The subject was 89 Koreans residing in Knoxville, TN. The survey was undertaken from October to December of 1995. Demographic characteristics, food behavior, composite adaptation score(CAS), composition of Korean and American foods in 1 day, and frequence and preference changes of foods was determined. The results were summarized as fellows : The mean CAS for all subjects was 17.6 with individual scores ranging from 9 to 23. The CAS were significantly different in residing age, American friends, English speaking ability, eat with Koreans, American food experience before, American food experience now, breakfast type in weekday, breakfast type in weekday, and self-food habits change at p<0.05. No significant differences in CAS could be attributed to sex, marital status, children, and job. Food consumption patterns for breakfast was Korean style 58%, American style 39.3%. For lunch both style was almost same, and for supper Korean style was 78.2%. The intake of food most frequent was rice, and then Kimchee. The preference of Korean foods was increased, though the frequence was decreased. The preference and frequence of American foods were increased respectively.

• 한국주거학회논문집
• /
• 제3권2호
• /
• pp.51-61
• /
• 1992

The aims of this study are to imvestigate the changes seen in rural kitchens and the factors affecting the modernization of agrarian kitchen space in mountain areas, and to compare them with those in the plains. The major findings are as follows. 1) The kitchen space in mountain areas remained in the state of a combined style(depicting both western and traditional styles), while the kitchen space in the plains after the 1980s showed a tendency toward the western style. Generally speaking, the physical state of kitchens in mountain farmhouses, therefore, was at a low level in comparison with that of the plains. 2) The kitchen improvement projects of Sae-Ma-Eul Movement fostered a trend toward the western and combined style kitchens in the plains, but it did exert a little influence only on a part of the four mountain areas, and it resu]led in a combination of both styles. 3) Among the socio-demographic characteristics under consideratien. only the level of education achieved by the wi fe was found to be a determinant factor of the kitchen type in the mountain areas. but the level of education achieved by the husband and the family life cycle were two determinant factors in the plains. Under the category of family life style. the factors affecting the kitchen type in the mountain areas were cooking-heating fuel and the position of the refrigerator, while the main factors in p]ains were the place and the method of eating. cooking-heating fuel, the position of refrigerator, and numbers of family-memorials.