• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.3-14
• /
• 2006

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between conversational function and question type in mothers' utterances and their infant's language development. The subjects were 20 infants from 1;07 to 1;11 years of age in Yanji, China. Each child's spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her mother was videotaped for about 30 minutes. The children and their mother's spontaneous utterances were transcribed and coded for the number of type and token of word, grammatical morpheme conversational function and type of question in mother's language input to her child. The result showed that mothers used questions as the most frequent conversational function with their infants. The number of questions in conversational function in mothers' utterances positively correlated with the type of word, type of morpheme and grammatical morpheme in infants' utterance. However, there was no correlation between mothers' language input and infant early language development.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.77-91
• /
• 2002

This study investigated the use of grammatical morphemes (substantive morphemes and connective endings) of Korean speaking children with and without language impairment (LI). Participants were two children (ages 5;11 and 6;2) with SLI (specific language impairment), two LD (language delay) children (ages 6;3 and 6;5) with 70-84 range on a performance-IQ test, and two children (ages 5;7 and 6;1) with ND (normal development). Spontaneous language samples were elicited by play activities and story generation. A total of 8,059 (M=I,343, ranged 966-1,659) intelligible and nonimitative utterances were analyzed by the KCLA 2.0 (Korean Computerized Language Analysis 2.0) program for substantive morphemes and connective endings. The findings of this study were as follows; (1) The Korean speaking children with LI including SLI demonstrated less uses of grammatical morphemes than ND children. (2) Few differences were found between LI and ND children in the use of the grammatical morpheme types. (3) LI children produced significantly higher percentage of grammatical morpheme errors in spontaneous speech than ND children. (4) Few differences were found between SLI and LD children in degrees of the use and the error of grammatical morphemes.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.46
• /
• pp.117-126
• /
• 2003

This paper presents our language model adaptation for Korean spontaneous speech recognition. Korean spontaneous speech is observed various characteristics of content and style such as filled pauses, word omission, and contraction as compared with the written text corpus. Our approaches focus on improving the estimation of domain-dependent n-gram models by relevance weighting out-of-domain text data, where style is represented by n-gram based tf/sup */idf similarity. In addition to relevance weighting, we use disfluencies as Predictor to the neighboring words. The best result reduces 9.7% word error rate relatively and shows that n-gram based relevance weighting reflects style difference greatly and disfluencies are good predictor also.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2006.11a
• /
• pp.19-23
• /
• 2006

This paper is for the comparison of prosodic phrasing in Korean spontaneous speech and read speech. For this comparison, The subjects read the transcriptions from their own spontaneous speech. The number of IP in spontaneous speech is more than in read speech, while The number of AP has no difference between them. A accentual phrase in spontaneous speech has less syllable than read speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.23 no.2E
• /
• pp.51-55
• /
• 2004

In this paper, we propose a style-specific language model adaptation scheme using n-gram based tf*idf similarity for Korean spontaneous speech recognition. Korean spontaneous speech shows especially different style-specific characteristics such as filled pauses, word omission, and contraction, which are related to function words and depend on preceding or following words. To reflect these style-specific characteristics and overcome insufficient data for training language model, we estimate in-domain dependent n-gram model by relevance weighting of out-of-domain text data according to their n-. gram based tf*idf similarity, in which in-domain language model include disfluency model. Recognition results show that n-gram based tf*idf similarity weighting effectively reflects style difference.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.39-54
• /
• 2022

This study aims to clarify the prosodic differences in speech types by examining the Korean read speech and spontaneous speech in the Korean part of the L2 Korean Speech Corpus (speech corpus for Korean as a foreign language). To this end, the articulation length, articulation speed, pause length and frequency, and the average fundamental frequency values of sentences were set as variables and analyzed via statistical methodologies (t-test, correlation analysis, and regression analysis). The results found that read speech and spontaneous speech were structurally different in the form of prosodic phrases constituting each sentence and that the prosodic elements differentiating each speech type were articulation length, pause length, and pause frequency. The statistical results show that the correlation between articulation speed and articulation length was highest in read speech, explaining that the longer a given sentence is, the faster the speaker speaks. In spontaneous speech, however, the relationship between the articulation length and the pause frequency in a sentence was high. Overall, spontaneous speech produces more pauses because short intonation phrases are continuously built to make a sentence, and as a result, the sentence gets lengthened.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.17 no.2E
• /
• pp.38-46
• /
• 1998

In this paper, we propose a remote speech input device, a new method of user-friendly speech input in spontaneous speech recognition system. We focus the user friendliness on hands-free and microphone independence in speech recognition applications. Our method adopts two algorithms, the automatic speech detection and the microphone array delay-and-sum beamforming (DSBF)-based speech enhancement. The automatic speech detection algorithm is composed of two stages; the detection of speech and nonspeech using the pitch information for the detected speech portion candidate. The DSBF algorithm adopts the time domain cross-correlation method as its time delay estimation. In the performance evaluation, the speech detection algorithm shows within-200 ms start point accuracy of 93%, 99% under 15dB, 20dB, and 25dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments, respectively and those for the end point are 72%, 89%, and 93% for the corresponding environments, respectively. The classification of speech and nonspeech for the start point detected region of input signal is performed by the pitch information-base method. The percentages of correct classification for speech and nonspeech input are 99% and 90%, respectively. The eight microphone array-based speech enhancement using the DSBF algorithm shows the maximum SNR gaing of 6dB over a single microphone and the error reductin of more than 15% in the spontaneous speech recognition domain.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.11-16
• /
• 2024

The fundamental frequency (f0), representing an acoustic measure of vocal fold vibration, serves as an indicator of the speaker's emotional state and language-specific pattern in daily conversations. This study aimed to examine the f0 distribution in an English corpus of spontaneous speech, establishing normative data for American speakers. The corpus involved 40 participants engaging in free discussions on daily activities and personal viewpoints. Using Praat, f0 values were collected filtering outliers after removing nonspeech sounds and interviewer voices. Statistical analyses were performed with R. Results indicated a median f0 value of 145 Hz for all the speakers. The f0 values for all speakers exhibited a right-skewed, pointy distribution within a frequency range of 216 Hz from 75 Hz to 339 Hz. The female f0 range was wider than that of males, with a median of 113 Hz for males and 181 Hz for females. This spontaneous speech corpus provides valuable insights for linguists into f0 variation among individuals or groups in a language. Further research is encouraged to develop analytical and statistical measures for establishing reliable f0 standards for the general population.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
• /
• v.22 no.2
• /
• pp.291-300
• /
• 2001

This study investigated the effects of shared writing strategies within a whole language approach on children's writing behaviors and abilities. The subjects were thirty-six 5-to 6-year-old kindergarten children, 18 each in the experimental and control groups. The results indicated a significant increase in frequency of spontaneous writing, quantity of writing, and quality of writing in the experimental group compared with the control group. The educational implications for kindergarten teachers are that teachers need to integrate shared writing strategies into teacher-initiated activities and use various strategies of whole language to improve literacy learning for children.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.4
• /
• pp.85-94
• /
• 2009

This paper investigates the intonation patterns of Korean spontaneous speech through an analysis of four dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The speech corpus, which is a subset of spontaneous speech database recorded and distributed by ETRI, is labeled in APs and IPs based on K-ToBI system using Momel, an intonation stylization algorithm. It was found that unlike in English, a significant number of APs and IPs include hesitation lengthening, which is known to be a disfluency phenomenon due to speech planning. This paper also claims that the hesitation lengthening is different from the IP-final lengthening and that it should be categorized as a new category, as it greatly affects the intonation patterns of the language. Except for the fact that 19.09% of APs show hesitation lengthening, the spontaneous speech shows the same AP patterns as in read speech with higher frequency of falling patterns such as LHL in comparison with read speech which show more LH and LHLH patterns. The IP boundary tones of spontaneous speech, showing the same five patterns such as L%, HL%, LHL%, H%, LH% as in read speech, show higher frequency of rising patterns (H% and LH%) and contour tones (HL%, LH%, LHL%) while read speech on the contrary shows higher frequency of falling patterns and simple tones at the end of IPs.