• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.75-82
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• 2021

Speech and language functions are highly cognitive and human-specific features. The underlying causes of normal speech and language function are believed to reside in the human brain. Developmental persistent stuttering, a speech and language disorder, has been regarded as the most challenging disorder in determining genetic causes because of the high percentage of spontaneous recovery in stutters. This mysterious characteristic hinders speech pathologists from discriminating recovered stutters from completely normal individuals. Over the last several decades, several genetic approaches have been used to identify the genetic causes of stuttering, and remarkable progress has been made in genome-wide linkage analysis followed by gene sequencing. So far, four genes, namely GNPTAB, GNPTG, NAGPA, and AP4E1, are known to cause stuttering. Furthermore, thegeneration of mouse models of stuttering and morphometry analysis has created new ways for researchers to identify brain regions that participate in human speech function and to understand the neuropathology of stuttering. In this review, we aimed to investigate previous progress, challenges, and future perspectives in understanding the genetics and neuropathology underlying persistent developmental stuttering.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.96-105
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• 2024

We propose a method to automatically predict Alzheimer's disease from speech data using the ChatGPT large language model. Alzheimer's disease patients often exhibit distinctive characteristics when describing images, such as difficulties in recalling words, grammar errors, repetitive language, and incoherent narratives. For prediction, we initially employ a speech recognition system to transcribe participants' speech into text. We then gather opinions by inputting the transcribed text into ChatGPT as well as a prompt designed to solicit fluency evaluations. Subsequently, we extract embeddings from the speech, text, and opinions by the pretrained models. Finally, we use a classifier consisting of transformer blocks and linear layers to identify participants with this type of dementia. Experiments are conducted using the extensively used ADReSSo dataset. The results yield a maximum accuracy of 87.3% when speech, text, and opinions are used in conjunction. This finding suggests the potential of leveraging evaluation feedback from language models to address challenges in Alzheimer's disease recognition.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.205-216
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• 2005

This study investigated aspects of caregiver's input relating to the early development of nouns and verbs. Subjects were 34 Korean-Chinese children in Yanji, China. At 1 year of age each child's spontaneous speech during interaction with his/her caregiver was videotaped for about 30 minutes. The children's spontaneous utterances were transcribed and coded on the lexical level(nouns and verbs) and the pragmatic level. Children's speech was recorded, transcribed and coded again at 2 years of age. Results showed that children used more verbs when they were older; there were no differences between the two ages in mother's pragmatic utterances but when they were two-years-old children used more actionoriented utterances and object-described utterances. Mother's input was related to children's pragmatic utterances.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.161-169
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of speech intelligibility of spontaneous speech and the vowel space parameters in patients with Parkinson's disease. Ten PD patients (M=5, F=5) and a corresponding control group of ten normal adults participated in this study. Firstly, subjects were asked to tell a story about their hometown and youth in order to analyze speech intelligibility. Secondly, the subjects were also asked to repeat four vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/) five times in order to compare their vowel spaces. The results were as follows: (1) the speech intelligibility of the PD group was lower than that of the control group. (2) Four parameters including vowel area, vowel articulatory index, formant centralization ratio, F2i/F1u ratio were significantly different in each group. For instance, vowel area and F2 ratio were wider and higher, respectively. As a result, a decrease in speech intelligibility of patients with PD is likely to show different types of errors from the normal group. The results of this research are meaningful in a sense that they could provide the objective standard of speech intelligibility and vowel space parameters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.103-110
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to assess the vowel property by examining the vowel duration of the American English vowles found in the Buckeye corpus[6]. The vowel durations were analyzed in terms of various linguistic factors including the number of syllables of the word containing the vowel, the location of the vowel in a word, types of stress, function versus content word, the word frequency in the corpus and the speech rate calculated from the three consecutive words. The findings from this work agreed mostly with those from earlier studies, but with some exceptions. The relationship between the speech rate and the vowel duration proved non-linear.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of the English voiceless stops [p, t, k] found in the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1]. Three young female speakers were chosen for this study and their VOT values were semi-automatically extracted along with other factors. The factors used for the analysis were place of articulation, location in word, syllabic stress, content word or not, word frequency calculated from the corpus, and the speech rate expressed in syllables per second. Results showed that, for the three places of articulation of each speaker, all the factors had a statistically significant effect on the VOT values. This paper has significance in that the materials used for the analysis were from a corpus of spontaneous natural English speech.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.365-370
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• 2023

This paper aims to compare the performance of speech data classification into two groups, adult and elderly, based on the acoustic and linguistic characteristics that change due to aging, such as changes in respiratory patterns, phonation, pitch, frequency, and language expression ability. For acoustic features we used attributes related to the frequency, amplitude, and spectrum of speech voices. As for linguistic features, we extracted hidden state vector representations containing contextual information from the transcription of speech utterances using KoBERT, a Korean pre-trained language model that has shown excellent performance in natural language processing tasks. The classification performance of each model trained based on acoustic and linguistic features was evaluated, and the F1 scores of each model for the two classes, adult and elderly, were examined after address the class imbalance problem by down-sampling. The experimental results showed that using linguistic features provided better performance for classifying adult and elderly than using acoustic features, and even when the class proportions were equal, the classification performance for adult was higher than that for elderly.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.83-96
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• 2001

It is generally said that falling intonation is used at the end of a declarative sentence. However, this is not the case with all stretches of spontaneous speech which are marked in transcription as sentences. The present paper examines intonation patterns appearing at the end of declarative sentences in oral presentations, and discusses instances where falling intonation does not appear. The texts used for analysis are eight oral presentations collected at international conferences in the field of physics. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are carried out. Three major factors related to discourse structure have been found for non-occurrence of falling intonation at sentence boundaries.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.149-164
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• 2000

It is generally said that falling intonation is used at the end of a declarative sentence. However, this is not the case with all stretches of spontaneous speech which are marked in transcription as sentences. The present paper examines intonation patterns appearing at the end of declarative sentences in oral presentations, and discusses instances where falling intonation does not appear. The texts used for analysis are eight oral presentations collected at international conferences in the field of physics. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are carried out. Three major factors related to discourse structure have been found for nonoccurrence of falling intonation at sentence boundaries.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.59-68
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• 2002

This paper analyzes the prosodic features distinctively associated with Korean topic constructions (marked by nun or its variant un) and subject constructions (marked by ka or its variant i) as a way of explicating the role that prosody plays in differentially constituting their discourse messages. Using both spoken data elicited in controlled settings and spontaneous conversational data, an attempt is made to identify differentiating prosodic features and intonation contours associated with distinct meanings and functions of nun- and ka-constructions evoked in a variety of discourse contexts.