• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.53-59
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• 2023

Detection of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on speech has relied on predefined feature sets due to their ease of use and the capabilities of speech analysis. However, clinical impressions may not be adequately captured due to the broad range and the large number of features included. This paper demonstrates that the knowledge-driven speech features (KDSFs) specifically tailored to the speech traits of ASD are more effective and efficient for detecting speech of ASD children from that of children with typical development (TD) than a predefined feature set, extended Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Standard Parameter Set (eGeMAPS). The KDSFs encompass various speech characteristics related to frequency, voice quality, speech rate, and spectral features, that have been identified as corresponding to certain of their distinctive attributes of them. The speech dataset used for the experiments consists of 63 ASD children and 9 TD children. To alleviate the imbalance in the number of training utterances, a data augmentation technique was applied to TD children's utterances. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier trained with the KDSFs achieved an accuracy of 91.25%, surpassing the 88.08% obtained using the predefined set. This result underscores the importance of incorporating domain knowledge in the development of speech technologies for individuals with disorders.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2005년도 추계 학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.17-20
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• 2005

The purpose of this project is to develop a device that can automatically measure pronunciation of English speech produced by Korean learners of English. Pronunciation proficiency will be measured largely in two areas; suprasegmental and segmental areas. In suprasegmental area, intonation and word stress will be traced and compared with those of native speakers by way of statistical methods using tilt parameters. Durations of phones are also examined to measure speakers' naturalness of their pronunciations. In doing so, statistical duration modelling from a large speech database using CART will be considered. For segmental measurement of pronunciation, acoustic probability of a phone, which is a byproduct when doing the forced alignment, will be a basis of scoring pronunciation accuracy of a phone. The final score will be a feedback to the learners to improve their pronunciation.

• 한국어교육
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• 제23권1호
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

The development of corpus in recent years has attracted increased research on spoken Korean. Nevertheless, these research outcomes are yet to be meaningfully and adequately reflected in Korean language textbooks. The reported speech marker '-dae' is one of these areas that need more attention. This study investigates whether or not in textbooks '-dae' is clearly explained to English-speaking learners to prevent confusion and misuse. Based on a contrastive analysis of Korean and English, this study argues three points: Firstly, '-dae' should be introduced to Korean learners as an independent sentence ender rather than a contracted form of '-dago hae'. Secondly, it is necessary to teach English-speaking learners that '-dae' is not equivalent to the English report speech form. It functions more or less as a third person marker in Korean. Learners should be informed that '-dae' is used for statements in English, if those statements were hearsay but the source of information does not need to be specified. This is a very distinctive difference between Korean and English and should be emphasized in class when 'dae' is taught. Thirdly, '-dae' should be introduced before indirect speech constructions, because it is mainly used in simple statements and the frequency of '-dae' is very high in spoken Korean.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.75-83
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• 2012

The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.65-72
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• 2021

본 연구의 목적은 말소리장애 아동이 산출하는 이중모음의 특성을 파악하여 평가 및 중재에 활용할 수 있는 기초 자료를 마련하는 것이다. 현재까지 말소리장애 아동의 이중모음 산출 특성에 관한 음향학적 연구는 미비하였다. 이에 말소리장애 아동과 일반 아동을 대상으로 집단 간 이중모음 산출 특성의 차이를 파악하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 각 10명의 만 4-5세 말소리장애와 일반 아동을 대상으로, 무의미 2음절 '이중모음+다'를 모방하도록 하였다. 산출된 이중모음의 활음 구간 내 제1, 2 포먼트 기울기, 포먼트 변화량, 활음 지속시간을 Praat(version 6.1.16)을 이용해 분석하였다. 연구 결과, 두 집단 간 /유/의 F1 기울기에 집단 간 유의한 차이가 있었다. 또한, 말소리장애 아동이 일반 아동에 비해 전반적으로 작은 포먼트 변화량과 더 짧은 활음 지속시간을 보였다. 유의한 포먼트 변화량의 집단 간 차이는 /유, 예/의 F1과 /야, 예/의 F2에서 나타났으며, 유의한 활음 지속시간의 차이는 /유, 예/에서 나타났다. 본 연구의 결과는 말소리장애 아동이 이중모음을 조음하는 범위가 일반 아동보다 상대적으로 작아 그만큼 조음하는데 걸리는 시간이 줄었음을 보여준다. 이러한 점은 말소리장애 아동의 이중모음에 관한 평가와 중재를 할 때 말소리장애 아동의 조음 범위를 고려해야 하며, 이에 음향학적 도구를 활용하는 것이 필요함을 뒷받침한다.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권4호
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• pp.225-254
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to contrast the patterns of realization and understanding of refusal speech acts between Korean and Thai learners. This study intends to answer the following questions: (1) Do Koreans and Thai learners perform refusal speech acts differently? (2) Do Koreans and Thai learners understand refusal speech acts differently? A DCT and a follow-up interview were conducted to collect data of two groups of 30 native Korean speakers and 30 native Thai speakers. For research question 1, we analyzed the refusal strategy and provided reasons given by Koreans and Thai learners depending on the context. For research question 2, we ran a chi-squared test on the elements of the follow-up interviews, such as the weight of burden of refusing, and whether the participant would actually refuse or not. The differences between the refusal strategies of the two groups could be categorized by the preceding inducing speech act. In refusing a request, the difference was prominent in the apologizing strategy, whereas in refusing a suggestion, the difference was mainly in the direct refusal strategy. When refusing an invitation, the most evident difference was the number of refusal strategies employed. When providing an explanation of refusal to people with high social status, Koreans gave more specific reasons for refusals, whereas Thai learners tended to use more vague reasons. Moreover, when refusing an invitation, Koreans primarily mentioned the relationship, and Thai learners showed the spirit of Greng Jai. When asked the weight of burden of refusing, Koreans felt pressured to refuse a request from people with high social status, and a suggestion or invitation from people with high level of intimacy while Thai learners found it highly difficult to make a refusal in all cases. In answering whether they would actually refuse or not, Koreans tried not to make a refusal to people with high level of intimacy, and such a trend was not evident among the Thai. This study can help us better understand the learner's pragmatic failure, and serve as a basis in establishing a curriculum for teaching speech acts.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• 제13권3호
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• pp.267-277
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose an educational system that involves a business game simulator and related curriculum. To develop these two elements, we examined the decision-making process related to business management and identified some significant skills thereby. In addition, we created an original simulator, named BizLator (http://bizlator.com), to help students develop these skills efficiently. Next, we developed a curriculum suitable for the simulator. We confirmed the effectiveness of the simulator and curriculum in a business-game-based class at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. On the basis of this, we compared our education system with a conventional system. This allowed us to identify advantages of and issues with our proposed system. Furthermore, we proposed a speech recognition support system named BizVoice in order to provide the teachers with more meaningful feedback, such as level of students' understanding. Concretely, BizVocie fetches students' speech of discussion during the game and converts the voice data to text data with speech recognition technology. Finally, teachers can grasp students' parameters of understanding, and thereby, the students also can take more effective class using BizLator. We also confirmed the effectiveness of the system in the class of Aoyama Gakuin Universiry.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• 통합자연과학논문집
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• 제11권3호
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• pp.131-138
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• 2018

In this paper, we have implemented speeches that utilized the emotion information of the user's speech and image matching and recommendation system. To classify the user's emotional information of speech, the emotional information of speech about the user's speech is extracted and classified using the PLP algorithm. After classification, an emotional DB of speech is constructed. Moreover, emotional color and emotional vocabulary through factor analysis are matched to one space in order to classify emotional information of image. And a standardized image recommendation system based on the matching of each keyword with the BM-GA algorithm for the data of the emotional information of speech and emotional information of image according to the more appropriate emotional information of speech of the user. As a result of the performance evaluation, recognition rate of standardized vocabulary in four stages according to speech was 80.48% on average and system user satisfaction was 82.4%. Therefore, it is expected that the classification of images according to the user's speech information will be helpful for the study of emotional exchange between the user and the computer.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권4호
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• pp.67-74
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• 2021

본 연구는 영유아 교육시설에서 근무하는 음성의 불편감을 호소하는 10명의 여성 교사들을 대상으로 반폐쇄성도훈련(semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, SOVTE)을 원격으로 실시하였을 때 주관적으로 평가하는 음성평가에 미치는 효과를 살펴보았다. 원격 SOVTE의 효과는 한국어판 음성장애지수(Korean voice handicap index, KVHI), 음성 활동 및 참여 프로파일-한국판(Korean version of the voice activity and participation profile, K-VAPP), 음성노력도 및 GRBAS를 이용한 청지각적 평가로 평가하였다. 연구 결과, KVHI의 총 점수, 기능적 점수, 신체적 점수는 원격 SOVTE를 실시한 후에 통계적으로 유의하게 낮아졌다. 원격 SOVTE 실시 후 K-VAPP의 총 점수도 유의하게 감소하였으며, 음성노력도 또한 유의하게 감소하였다. 그러나 GRB 척도는 원격 SOVTE 실시 전과 후 간에 통계적으로 유의한 차이를 보이지 않았다. 본 연구를 통해 영유아 여성 교사에게 원격으로 실시한 SOVTE는 음성의 불편감을 감소시키는데 효과적임을 입증하였으며, 원격으로 실시한 음성치료가 효과가 있음을 보여준다.