• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.41-48
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the association among articulation rate, speech intelligibility and working memory in children with dysarthria. Two subject groups of 11 spastic and 11 flaccid dysarthria, respectively, aged between 8 and 17 years of age participated in this study. All participants were administered the following tests: K-WISC III PIQ test, speech intelligibility, working memory and articulation rate. Group differences were compared by an independent t-test. Pearson correlation were computed between all measures. The results of this study are as follows: First, articulation rate and intelligibility were significantly lower for the spastic dysarthria than for the flaccid dysarthria. Second, there was a significant correlation between articulation rate and intelligibility in children with flaccid dysarthria. Lastly, there was no significant correlation between articulation rate and working memory in both groups. The results suggest that articulation rate is not necessarily accompanied by working memory capacity in children with dysarthria, and there are differences in the effect of articulation rate on intelligibility depending on the type of dysarthria.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.19-29
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• 2018

The present study investigated whether there are differences in articulation rate by gender, age, and individual speakers in a spontaneous speech corpus produced by 40 Seoul Korean speakers. This study measured their articulation rates using a second-per-syllable metric and a syllable-per-second metric. The findings are as follows. First, in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech, there was a gender difference in articulation rates only in age group 10-19, among whom men tended to speak faster than women. Second, individual speakers showed variability in their rates of articulation. The tendency for some speakers to speak faster than others was variable. Finally, there were metric differences in articulation rate. That is, regarding the coefficients of variation, the values of the second-per-syllable metric were much higher than those for the syllable-per-second metric. The articulation rate for the syllable-per-second metric tended to be more distinct among individual speakers. The present results imply that data gathered in a corpus of Seoul Korean spontaneous speech may reflect speaker-specific differences in articulatory movements.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.27-39
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• 2017

This paper deals with how speech rate in Korean is affected by the sociolinguistic factors such as region, gender and generation. Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate (excluding physical pauses) and speaking rate (including physical pauses), both expressed as the number of syllables per second (sps). Other acoustic measures such as pause frequency and duration were also examined. Four hundred twelve subjects were chosen from Korean Standard Speech Database considering their age, gender and region. The result shows that generation has a significant effect on both speaking rate and articulation rate. Younger speakers produce their speech with significantly faster speaking rate and articulation rate than older speakers. Mean duration of total pause interval and the total number of pause of older speakers are also significantly different to those of younger speakers. Gender has a significant effect only on articulation rate, which means male speakers' speech rate is characterized by faster articulation rate, longer and more frequent pauses. Finally, region has no effect both on speaking and articulation rates.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.79-90
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• 2016

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of stuttering severity on articulation rate measured from different types of utterances in preschool children who stutter. Participants were 40 boys who stutter (CWS) and age-matched 10 boys who do not stutter (CWNS). CWS were sub-grouped based on the severity of their stuttering: 15 mild, 13 moderate, and 12 severe. Utterances were categorized as "overall utterance" including all utterances that children spoke and "fluent utterance" which did not contain any disfluencies. Utterances containing abnormal disfluencies were categorized as "SLD utterance" for CWS. The results revealed no significant difference among groups in any type of utterance. There were significant positive correlations in articulation rates between utterance types. Stuttering severity was not a factor for characterizing the articulation rate of each type of utterance. Also, current findings suggest that articulation rate may not predict speech motor control ability in preschool CWS.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.193-200
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• 2004

This was a preliminary study for standardizing speech rate and fluency of normal adult Korean speakers and comparing speech rate and fluency of normal speakers with those of professional speakers. The purposes of this study were to investigate (a) the speech rates (the overall speech rate and the articulation rate) and the disfluency characteristics of normnal adult speakers and (b) the speech rates (the overall speech rate and the articulation rate) and the disfluency characteristics between normal adult speakers and professional speakers. The results were as follows: The most frequent disfluency type was 'interjection' in story-telling, 'revision' in text reading and announcing of professional speakers. The professional speakers had the fastest speech rates (overall speech rate and articulation rate) among the 3 groups.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.91-101
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• 2021

This study aimed to investigate speech motor control in adults who stutter (AWS) by testing whether articulation rate changes with practice and linguistic complexity. Eleven AWS and 11 adults who do not stutter (AWNS) repeated four sentences of different lengths and syntactic complexity [simple-short (SS), simple-long (SL), complex-long (CL), and faulty-long (FL) sentences]. Overall articulation rates of each sentence were measured and compared between groups. Practice effects were evaluated by comparing the articulation rates of the first three, middle four, and last three productions. Overall, the AWS had significantly slower articulation rates than AWNS across the four sentences. The longer sentences showed significantly slower articulation rates than the baseline sentence (SS). The articulation rates of the middle four and the last three productions were significantly faster than those of the first three productions of each sentence in both groups. The articulation rates of the SS, SL, and CL sentences indicated a consistent practice effect. The slower articulation rates of the AWS are consistent with a speech motor limitation. There was no interaction with linguistic complexity or practice, so a slower articulation rate may be a general feature of the speech of AWS. Both AWS and AWNS showed practice effects with faster articulation rates which may reflect a degree of adaptation to the stimuli.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.133-144
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• 2008

The present study examined multicultural family children's articulation accuracy and phonological process using Assessment of Phonology and Articulation for Children(APAC), and compared them with normally developing children. The subjects of this study were 24 multicultural family children between ages 3 years, 6 months and 3 years, 11 months. The multicultural family children's articulation accuracy was significantly lower than the normally developing children's. In case of the normally developing children, phonological processes the multicultural family children showed were observed at a younger age and did not appear at the age of the children participating in this study. The Japanese multicultural family children and the non Japanese multicultural family children showed different rate of the changes. This result shows that articulation development in the multicultural family children may be different among them according to the classification and that the children's error patterns are related to their mothers' native language. The results of this study are proposed to be applicable to articulation assessment and treatment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.19-28
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• 2015

This study investigated final consonant error characteristics at word-medial position in children with functional articulation disorder. Data was collected from 11 children with functional articulation and 11 normal children, ages 4 to 5. The speech samples were collected from a naming test. Seventy-five words with every possible bi-consonants matrix at the word-medial position were used. The results of this study were as follows : First, percentage of correct word-medial final consonants of functional articulation disorder was lower than normal children. Second, there were significant differences between two groups in omission, substitution and assimilation error. Children with functional articulation disorder showed a high frequency of omission and regressive assimilation error, especially alveolarization in regressive assimilation error most. However, normal children showed a high frequency of regressive assimilation error, especially bilabialization in regressive assimilation error most. Finally, the results of error analysis according to articulation manner, articulation place and phonation type of consonants of initial consonant at word-medial, both functional articulation disorder and normal children showed a high error rate in stop sound-stop sound condition. The error rate of final consonant at word-medial position was high when initial consonant at word-medial position was alveolar sound and alveopalatal sound. Futhermore, when initial sounds were fortis and aspirated sounds, more errors occurred than linis sound was initial sound. The results of this study provided practical error characteristics of final consonant at word-medial position in children with speech sound disorder.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2023

This study investigated the relative effectiveness of letter-based versus syllable-based measures of speech rate and articulation rate in predicting the articulation score, prosody fluency, and rating sum using "English speech data of Koreans for education" from AI Hub. We extracted and analyzed 900 utterances from the training data, including three balanced age groups (13, 19, and 26 years old). The study built three models that best predicted the pronunciation assessment scores using linear mixed-effects regression and compared the predicted scores with the actual scores from the validation data (n=180). The correlation coefficients between them were also calculated. The findings revealed that syllable-based measures of speech and articulation rates were more effective than letter-based measures in all three pronunciation assessment categories. The correlation coefficients between the predicted and actual scores ranged from .65 to .68, indicating the models' good predictive power. However, it remains inconclusive whether speech rate or articulation rate is more effective.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.117-127
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• 2012

This research reports the prosodic characteristics (including articulation speech rate, pause characteristics, duration) of children with cochlear implants with reference to those of children with normal hearing. Subjects are 8-to 10-year-old children, balancing each number of gender as 24. Dialogue speech data are comprised of four types of sentence patterns. Results show that 1) there's a statistically meaningful difference on articulation speech rate between the two groups. 2) On pauses, they are not observed in exclamatory and declarative sentences in normal children. While imperative sentences show no statistical difference on the number of pauses between the two groups, interrogative sentences do. 3) Declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences reveal statistical difference between the two groups in terms of the sentence's final two-syllable word duration, showing no difference on imperative sentences. 4) When it comes to the RFP (duration ratio of sentence final syllable to penultimate syllable), we no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups in all types of sentences exists. 5) Lastly, RWS (the ratio of sentence final two syllable word duration to that of whole sentence duration) shows statistical difference between two groups in imperative sentences, but not in all the rest types.