• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2006.05a
• /
• pp.101-104
• /
• 2006

The present study examined two acoustic characteristics(duration and intensity) of vowels produced by 4 cerebral palsic adults and 4 nondisabled adults in conversational and clear speech. In this study, clear speech means: (1) slow one's speech rate just a little, (2) articulate all phonemes accurately and increase vocal volume. Speech material included 10 bisyllabic real words in the frame sentences. Temporal-acoustic analysis showed that vowels produced by two speaker groups in clear speech(in this case, more accurate and louder speech) were significantly longer than vowels in conversational speech. In addition, intensity of vowels produced by cerebral palsic speakers in clear speech(in this case, more accurate and louder speech) was higher than in conversational speech.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.187-192
• /
• 2019

Background and Objectives: Clear speech is an effective communication strategy used in difficult listening situations that draws on techniques such as accurate articulation, a slow speech rate, and the inclusion of pauses. Although too slow speech and improperly amplified spectral information can deteriorate overall speech intelligibility, certain amplitude of increments of the mid-frequency bands (1 to 3 dB) and around 50% slower speech rates of clear speech, when compared to those in conversational speech, were reported as factors that can improve speech intelligibility positively. The purpose of this study was to identify whether amplitude increments of mid-frequency areas and slower speech rates were evident in Korean clear speech as they were in English clear speech. Subjects and Methods: To compare the acoustic characteristics of the two methods of speech production, the voices of 60 participants were recorded during conversational speech and then again during clear speech using a standardized sentence material. Results: The speech rate and longterm average speech spectrum (LTASS) were analyzed and compared. Speech rates for clear speech were slower than those for conversational speech. Increased amplitudes in the mid-frequency bands were evident for the LTASS of clear speech. Conclusions:The observed differences in the acoustic characteristics between the two types of speech production suggest that Korean clear speech can be an effective communication strategy to improve speech intelligibility.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.19-26
• /
• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.3-11
• /
• 2010

The present study confirmed the intelligibility improvement benefit of clear speech by investigating the intelligibility of Korean stops produced in different speaking styles: conversational, citation-form, and clear speech. This finding supports the Hypo- & Hyper-speech theory that speakers adjust vocal effort to accommodate hearers' speech perception difficulty. A progressive intelligibility improvement was found for the three speaking styles investigated: clear speech was more intelligible than citation-form speech citation-form speech was more intelligible than conversational speech and clear speech was also more intelligible than conversational speech. These findings suggest that the manipulations to elicit three distinct speaking styles in a laboratory setting were successful. Korean lenis stops showed the least intelligibility improvement among the three Korean stop types, and this result suggests that lenis stops should be more resistant to intelligibility enhancement efforts in clear speech than aspirated and fortis stops.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.7-16
• /
• 1972

By analyzing the frequency of the speech under test to be affected the effect of a co-articulation, we find out the fact that a conversational speech is far from the collective sound continued by a monotone, and define also the frequency range of a Formant at the Korean conversational speech.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.71-77
• /
• 2011

In this paper, we propose a conversational quality measurement (CQM) system for providing the objective QoS of high quality mobile VoIP voice telecommunication. For measuring the conversational quality, the VoIP telecommunication system is implemented in two smart phones connected with VoIP. The VoIP telecommunication system consists of echo cancellation, noise reduction, speech encoding/decoding, packet generation with RTP (Real-Time Protocol), jitter buffer control and POS (Play-out Schedule) with LC (loss Concealment). The CQM system is connected to a microphone and a speaker of each smart phone. The voice signal of each speaker is recorded and used to measure CE (Conversational Efficiency), CS (Conversational Symmetry), PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) and CE-CS-PESQ correlation. We prove the CQM system by measuring CE, CS and PESQ under various SNR, delay and loss due to IP network environment.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.187-192
• /
• 2019

Background and Objectives: Clear speech is an effective communication strategy used in difficult listening situations that draws on techniques such as accurate articulation, a slow speech rate, and the inclusion of pauses. Although too slow speech and improperly amplified spectral information can deteriorate overall speech intelligibility, certain amplitude of increments of the mid-frequency bands (1 to 3 dB) and around 50% slower speech rates of clear speech, when compared to those in conversational speech, were reported as factors that can improve speech intelligibility positively. The purpose of this study was to identify whether amplitude increments of mid-frequency areas and slower speech rates were evident in Korean clear speech as they were in English clear speech. Subjects and Methods: To compare the acoustic characteristics of the two methods of speech production, the voices of 60 participants were recorded during conversational speech and then again during clear speech using a standardized sentence material. Results: The speech rate and longterm average speech spectrum (LTASS) were analyzed and compared. Speech rates for clear speech were slower than those for conversational speech. Increased amplitudes in the mid-frequency bands were evident for the LTASS of clear speech. Conclusions:The observed differences in the acoustic characteristics between the two types of speech production suggest that Korean clear speech can be an effective communication strategy to improve speech intelligibility.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.28 no.6
• /
• pp.807-810
• /
• 2006

This letter presents a prediction model for sentence-final intonations for Korean conversational-style text-to-speech systems in which we introduce the linguistic feature of 'modality' as a new parameter. Based on their function and meaning, we classify tonal forms in speech data into tone types meaningful for speech synthesis and use the result of this classification to build our prediction model using a tree structured classification algorithm. In order to show that modality is more effective for the prediction model than features such as sentence type or speech act, an experiment is performed on a test set of 970 utterances with a training set of 3,883 utterances. The results show that modality makes a higher contribution to the determination of sentence-final intonation than sentence type or speech act, and that prediction accuracy improves up to 25% when the feature of modality is introduced.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.27-37
• /
• 2015

This study was mainly aimed at investigating on the effects of background noises (i.e., white noise, multi-speaker conversational babble) on stuttering rate and other speech-related measures (i.e., articulation rate, speech effort). Nine Korean-speaking adults who stutter participated in the study. Each of the participants was asked to read a series of passages under each of four experimental conditions (i.e., typical solo reading (TR), choral reading (CR), reading under white noise presented (WR), reading with multi-speaker conversational babble presented (BR). Stuttering rate was computed based on a percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS) and articulation rate was also assessed as another speech-related measure under each of the experimental conditions. To examine the amount of physical effort needed to read, the speech effort was measured by using the 9-point Speech Effort Self Rating Scale originally employed by Ingham et al. (2006). Study results showed that there were no significant differences among each of the passage reading conditions in terms of stuttering rate, articulation rate, and speech effort. In conclusion, it can be argued that the two different types of background noises (i.e., white noise and multi-speaker conversational babble) are not different in the extent to which each of them enhances fluency of adults who stutter. Self ratings of speech effort may be also useful in measuring speech-related variables associated with vocal changes induced under each of the fluency enhancing conditions.