• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.19-27
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• 2008

Several studies on the pronunciation of English vowels point out that Korean learners have difficulty distinguishing English tense and lax vowel pairs. The acoustic comparisons of those studies are mostly based on the formant measurement at one time point of a given vowel section. However, the English lax vowels usually show dynamic changes across their syllable peaks and subjects' English levels account for various conflicting results. The purposes of this paper are to compare the temporal duration and dynamic formant tracks of English tense and lax vowel pairs produced by five Korean and five American males. The subjects were graduate students of an American state university. Results showed that both the Korean and American males produced the vowels with comparable durations. The duration of the front tense-lax vowel pair was longer than that of the back vowel pair. From the formant track comparisons, the American males produced the tense and lax pairs much more distinctly than the Korean male speakers. The results suggest that the Korean males should pay attention to the F1 and F2 movements, i.e., the jaw and tongue movements, in order to match those of the American males. Further studies are recommended on the auditorily acceptable ranges of F2 variation for the lax vowels.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.140-148
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• 1999

The use of obturator is the prosthetic rehabilitation approach for restoration of the defected maxillary shape and function for the patients with palatal defect. The obturator can change the shape of vocal tract and nasality, but few reports on the effects of the change were presented. So, the authors performed the experimental study to compare the difference between the sizes of vowel triangles produced by maxillectomized patients before and after obturator-wearing and to consider how much improvement in speech intelligibility can be expected by obturator wearing. The 8 patients who were totally maxillectomized due to palatal cancer were participated as subjects. They produced 5 vowels(/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/) before and after obturator-wearing. The formants of the vowels were analyzed by the spectrogram of CSL, and their speech intelligibility were judged by normal 8 listeners. As results, the frequency of the first and the second formant showed no significant difference between the articulation before and after wearing, but the comparison of the sizes of vowel triangles, related with the speech intelligibility, showed significant difference. The vowel triangle of the articulation after wearing was larger than that of the articulation before wearing. /i/ showed the lowest speech intelligibility score among the vowel articulation before wearing. After wearing obturators, their scores increased on the whole, especially, in /a/, but the intelligibility of /u/ decreased after wearing.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.213-221
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• 2010

The number of North Korean refugees entering South Korea is continuously increasing. North Korean speakers show significant differences in vowel and consonant phonetics, length of vowels, and the rhythm and intonation of sentences. The object of this research was to examine the effectiveness of a speech intervention program for North Korean refugees using visual feedback through acoustical analysis for intonation. The subjects were three adults with no speech disabilities who had been in South Korea for less than five years. They had not received any prior treatment for inflection change. The program was set in a discourse situation and used Praat to evaluate intonation and provide visual feedback as demonstrating proper intonation changes through pitch contour. The results after intervention are as follows. First, intonation was significantly improved according to a 5-point subjective evaluation scale. Second, the pitch contour was similar to the contour of standard South Korean pronunciation. The subjects were very satisfied with this initial treatment and showed a high level of motivation. In subsequent study, the development of intervention and the comparison of interventions will be needed as well.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.26 no.6_spc
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• pp.687-696
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• 2016

A series of process to design an acoustic lens for underwater imaging is reviewed and the method to evaluate characteristics of the lens is investigated. If the target specification of lens is given, the design process consists of the material selection, evaluation of its properties, lens geometry design, prediction of lens characteristics, manufacturing, and evaluation by measurement. In this study, an actual acoustical lens is made by cutting polymethylpentene block. The characteristics of lens are predicted by the hybrid method, combination of ray tracing and Rayleigh integral. For the direct comparison between the prediction and measurement results, a simulation method based on the equivalent source method is suggested to reflect the actual radiation pattern of transducer used for measurements. Finally, the measurement is conducted in a small water tank to observe the actual characteristics of the manufactured lens.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.497-502
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• 2005

In mobile phones of multimedia era, microspeakers of high quality sound are essential parts to generate human voice in speaker phone and MP3 song player. In this paper, two types of microspeakers, outer permanent magnet (PM) and combined PM type, are analyzed using electromagnetic, mechanical, acoustical and their coupling analysis. For performance comparison, voice coil diameter is chosen as a design parameter to change excitation position and magnet volume for both types. For combined PM type, sound pressure level (SPL) is improved due to increased PM volume compared to outer PM type. Also, with the decreased voice coil diameter for combined PM type, the 1st resonant mode of the diaphragm is more efficiently excited due to concentrative excitation, resulting in lower and broader frequency range. Therefore, it can be said that the combined PM type microspeakers are more advantageous for high performance microspeaker which are essential for multimedia era.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.367-370
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• 2005

This paper investigated the sound characteristics in an apartment complex. The field measurement was conducted in order to examine the acoustical characteristics of the apartment complex in situ. As a result, it shows that there are around 3 sec. reverberation time and the additional sound reinforcements at the area of high height due to the surrounded buildings. Thus, 1:50 Scale model measurement and Raynoise computer simulation were carried out with insertion of the parapet and the canopy on the balcony. In case of a single building, the parapet was effective to reduce noise level at low floor levels, and the canopy was effective to reduce noise level at high floor levels. But it also shows that both the parapet and the canopy were not effective to reduce noise level at middle floor levels. In case of an apartment complex, the canopy was less effective to reduce noise level at each floor in comparison with case of the single building.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.1776-1781
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• 2008

To reduce interior noise of running vehicles, a floating floor construction has been widely used in recent railway industry. Among the key factors of the floating floor design, dynamic stiffness is of most important in acoustical point of view. Sometimes hard rubber type supports have often been selected due to the other design constraints such as heavy load condition, durability of rubber element and its cost etc., even though it seems like the softer support, the better isolation of noise and vibration. In this paper two representative floor supports have been considered to evaluate their effectiveness in interior noise contribution: one is a soft rubber and another is a relatively hard one. From the measured dynamic stiffness of the specimens, equivalent stiffness of actual floating floor has been derived to use in the analytical models. Calculated air-borne and structure-borne noise insulation properties of the floating floors have been compared with experiments in prototype car. In full car model interior noise levels of running vehicles have been predicted to quantify the effectiveness of the two different floating support materials and verified through the measured inside noise levels of actual train as well. By comparison with difference of running noise levels two materials for floor support can be investigated quantitatively so that it could be applied in floating floor design.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.57-63
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• 1997

In this paper, we study the efficient feature vector extraction method and front-end processing to improve the performance of the speech recognition system using KT(Korea Telecommunication) database collected through various telephone channels. First of all, we compare the recognition performances of the feature vectors known to be robust to noise and environmental variation and verify the performance enhancement of the recognition system using weighted cepstral distance measure methods. The experiment result shows that the recognition rate is increasedby using both PLP(Perceptual Linear Prediction) and MFCC(Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient) in comparison with LPC cepstrum used in KT recognition system. In cepstral distance measure, the weighted cepstral distance measure functions such as RPS(Root Power Sums) and BPL(Band-Pass Lifter) help the recognition enhancement. The application of the spectral subtraction method decrease the recognition rate because of the effect of distortion. However, RASTA(RelAtive SpecTrAl) processing, CMS(Cepstral Mean Subtraction) and SBR(Signal Bias Removal) enhance the recognition performance. Especially, the CMS method is simple but shows high recognition enhancement. Finally, the performances of the modified methods for the real-time implementation of CMS are compared and the improved method is suggested to prevent the performance degradation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.175-182
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• 2016

For application to several MHz photoacoustic imaging systems, a needle hydrophone was designed and fabricated by using PMN-PZT piezoelectric single crystal, and its characteristics were evaluated through comparison with a commercial PVDF(Polybinylidene Fluoride) hydrophone of which receiving sensitivity is known. The simulation using the KLM model results show that the peak receiving impulse response for $50{\Omega}$ terminating impedance of the fabricated hydrophone is -261.6 dB re $1V/{\mu}Pa$ and the frequency response is relatively flat over 2 ~ 12 MHz with fluctuation less than 5 dB. The measurement results using tone burst signals also show that it has higher (ave. 10.9 dB) sensitivity than the commercial hydrophone in 2 ~ 8 MHz, and the receiving sensitivity of $-255.8{\pm}2.8$ dB re $1V/{\mu}Pa$ was measured for the fabricated hydrophone. In addition, it is known that the photoacoustic signals and the image of a hair obtained by a mechanical scanned photoacoustic imaging system with the fabricated hydrophone were bigger and better than those obtained with the commercial hydrophone.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.223-233
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• 2016

Design of a vegetation type sound barrier was presented as a noise barrier on the boundary of neighborhood facilities including schools, and apartments. The suggested noise barrier is made of unit blocks that are to be formed by stacking over the wall structure containing the plant and soils in the blocks. The advantage of the vegetation noise barrier is to acquire not only sound absorptive effects of plants and soils, but also sound diffusive effect caused by the irregular surface of the barrier which could eventually mitigate the noise. First, the optimum size of the units to obtain the highest noise reduction was investigated using 1/10 scaled model experiment, and sound attenuation experiments were carried out using a 1/2 mock-up model which is 2 m high and 5 m long. Total 1,137 unit blocks were made of synthetic woods with the size of $10{\times}10{\times}9cm$. These unit blocks were installed on the both side of the 1/2 mock-up steel framed noise barrier. As a result, it was revealed that the block typed vegetation noise barrier has 7 dB higher insertion loss in comparison with the general plane noise barrier. Also, it was found that the appropriate size of unit blocks is $20{\times}20cm$ which has large effect of sound insertion loss.