• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.47-63
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• 2010

This study provides a description of the glottal characteristics of the word-initial low vowels /a, $\ae$/ in terms of a set of acoustic parameters and discusses glottal configuration as their acoustic correlates. Furthermore, it examines the effect of prosodic boundary on the glottal properties of the vowels, seeking an account of the possible role of prosodic structure based on prosodic theory. Acoustic parameters reported to indicate glottal characteristics were obtained from the measurements made directly from the speech spectrum on recordings of Korean and English collected from 45 speakers. They consist of two separate groups of native Korean and native English speakers, each including both male and female speakers. Based on the three acoustic parameters of open quotient (OQ), first-formant bandwidth (B1), and spectral tilt (ST), comparisons were made between the speech of males and females, between the speech of native Korean and native English speakers, and between Korean and English produced by native Korean speakers. Acoustic analysis of the experimental data indicates that some or all glottal parameters play a crucial role in differentiating the speech groups, despite substantial interspeaker variations. Statistical analysis of the Korean data indicates prosodic strengthening with respect to the acoustic parameters B1 and OQ, suggesting acoustic enhancement in terms of the degree of glottal abduction and the glottal closure during a vibratory cycle.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.11-22
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to find the influence of Chinese falling-rising tone on the pitch pattern of corresponding Sino-Korean words delivered by Chinese learners of Korean and to examine how the falling-rising tone of corresponding Chinese words affect the pitch patterns of Sino-Korean words. The scope of this research is limited to Chinese learners of Korean, especially when they pronounce same-form-same-meaning Sino-Korean words. In this study, Chinese learners pronounced both Chinese words and corresponding Sino-Korean words. Learners' pitch patterns were recorded and analyzed using software and compared with the tone of corresponding Chinese words. Experimental results showed that Sino-Korean words were affected by Chinese 'falling-rising tone - high and level tone' when they started with lenis sounds. On the other hand, when Sino-Korean words started with aspirated sounds they were affected by Chinese 'falling-rising tone - high and level tone', 'falling-rising tone - falling-rising tone', and 'falling-rising tone - falling tone'. In conclusion, the Chinese learners' pitch patterns of Sino-Korean words are affected by Chinese falling-rising tone, especially when Sino-Korean words start with aspirated sounds.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.3-10
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• 2015

In this paper, different frequency scales in cepstral feature extraction are evaluated for the text-independent speaker recognition. To this end, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCCs), and bilinear warped frequency cepstral coefficients (BWFCCs) are applied to the speaker recognition experiment. In addition, the spectro-temporal features extracted by the cepstral-time matrix (CTM) are examined as an alternative to the delta and delta-delta features. Experiments on the NIST speaker recognition evaluation (SRE) 2004 task are carried out using the Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) method and the joint factor analysis (JFA) method, both based on the ALIZE 3.0 toolkit. Experimental results using both the methods show that BWFCC with appropriate warping factor yields better performance than MFCC and LFCC. It is also shown that the feature set including the spectro-temporal information based on the CTM outperforms the conventional feature set including the delta and delta-delta features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.41-47
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• 2017

The main advantage of the statistical parametric speech synthesis is its flexibility in changing voice characteristics. A personalized text-to-speech(TTS) system can be implemented by combining a speech synthesis system and a voice transformation system, and it is widely used in many application areas. It is known that the fundamental frequency and the spectral envelope of speech signal can be independently modified to convert the voice characteristics. Also it is important to maintain naturalness of the transformed speech. In this paper, a speech synthesis system based on Hidden Markov Model(HMM-based speech synthesis, HTS) using the STRAIGHT vocoder is constructed and voice transformation is conducted by modifying the fundamental frequency and spectral envelope. The fundamental frequency is transformed in a scaling method, and the spectral envelope is transformed through frequency warping method to control the speaker's vocal tract length. In particular, this study proposes a voice transformation method using the correlation between fundamental frequency and vocal tract length. Subjective evaluations were conducted to assess preference and mean opinion scores(MOS) for naturalness of synthetic speech. Experimental results showed that the proposed voice transformation method achieved higher preference than baseline systems while maintaining the naturalness of the speech quality.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.73-77
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences of the speech rate according to the area in the perceptual and acoustic analysis. This study examines regional variation in overall speech rate and articulation rate across speaking situations (picture description, free conversation and story retelling) with 14 normal adult (7 in Gyeongnam and 7 in Honam area). The result of an experimental investigation shows that the perceptual speech rate differs significantly between two regional varieties of Koreans with a picture description examined here. A group of Honam speakers spoke significantly faster than a group of Gyeongnam speakers. However, the result of the acoustic analysis shows that the speech rate of the two groups did not differ. And there were significant regional differences in the overall speech rate and articulation rate on the other two speaking situation, free conversation and story retelling. It suggest that we have to study perceptual evaluation with regard to the free conversation and story retelling in future research, and based on the results of this study, a variety of researches on the speech rate will be needed on the various conditions, including various area and SLPs who have wider background and experiences. It is necessary for SLPs to train and experience more to assess patients properly and reliably.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.57-65
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• 2017

The current study explored how Korean-speaking children processed the multiple acoustic cues (VOT and f0) for the stop laryngeal contrast (/t'/, /t/, and /$t^h$/) and examined whether individual perceptual strategies could be related to a general cognitive ability performing executive functions (EF). 15 children (aged from 7 to 8) participated in the speech perception task identifying the three Korean laryngeal stops (3AFC) on listening to the auditory stimuli of C-/a/ with synthetically varying VOT and f0. They completed a series of EF tasks to measure working memory, inhibition, and cognitive shifting ability. The findings showed that children used the two cues in a highly correlated manner. While children utilized VOT consistently for the three laryngeal categories, their use of f0 was either reduced or enhanced depending on the phonetic categories. Importantly, the children's processing strategies of a f0 suppression for a tense-aspirated contrast were meaningfully associated with children's better cognitive abilities such as working memory, inhibition, and attentional shifting. As a preliminary experimental investigation, the current research demonstrated that listeners with inefficient processing strategies were poor at the EF skills, suggesting that cognitive skills might be responsible for developmental variations of processing sub-phonemic information for the linguistic contrast.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2019

This study investigated individual variability of L2 learners' categorical judgments of L2 stops by exploring English learners' perceptual processing of two acoustic cues (voice onset time [VOT] and f0) and working memory capacity as sources of variation. As prior research has reported that English speakers' greater use of the redundant cue f0 was responsible for gradient processing of native stops, we examined whether the same processing characteristics would be observed in L2 learners' perception of Korean stops (/t/-/t^h/). 22 English learners of L2 Korean with a range of L2 proficiency participated in a visual analogue scaling task and demonstrated variable manners of judging the L2 Korean stops: Some were more gradient than others in performing the task. Correlation analysis revealed that L2 learners' categorical responses were modestly related to individuals' utilizations of a primary cue for the stop contrast (VOT for L1 English stops and f0 for L2 Korean stops), and were also related to better working memory capacity. Together, the current experimental evidence demonstrates adult L2 learners' top-down processing of stop consonants where linguistic and cognitive resources are devoted to a process of determining abstract phonemic identity.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.71-77
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• 2012

Sasang constitution experts utilize voice characteristics as an auxiliary measure for deciding a person's constitutional group. This study aims at establishing a relationship between speech features and the constitutional groups by subjective listening evaluation of voice characteristics. A speech database of 841 speakers whose constitutional groups have been already diagnosed by Sasang constitution experts was constructed. Speech features related to speech source and vocal tract filter were extracted from five vowels and one sentence. Statistically significant speech features for classifying the groups were analyzed using SPSS. The features contributed to constitution classification were speaking rate, Energy, A1, A2, A3, H1, H2, H4, CPP for males in their 20s, F0_mean, CPP, SPI, HNR, Shimmer, Energy, A1, A2, A3, H1, H2, H4 for females in their 20s, Energy, A1, A2, A3, H1, H2, H4, CPP for male in the 60s, and Jitter, HNR, CPP, SPI for females in their 60s. Experimental results show that speech technology is useful in classifying constitutional groups.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.19-28
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• 2009

This paper reports experimental findings about the duration feature of the acoustic components of English stops in Korean speakers' voicing perception. In our experiment, 35 participants discriminated between recorded stimuli and digitally transformed stimuli with different duration features from the original stimuli. 72 sets of paired stimuli are generated to test the effects of the duration feature in various phonetic contexts. The result of our experiment is a complicated cross-tabulation with 540 cells defined by five categorical independent variables plus one response variable. To find a meaningful generalization out of this complex frequency table, we ran logit log-linear regression analyses. Surprisingly, we have found that there is no single effect of the duration feature in all phonetic contexts on Korean speakers' perception of the voicing contrasts of English stops. Instead, the logit log-linear analyses reveal that there are interaction effects among phonetic contexts (=C), the places of articulation of stops (=P), and the voicing contrast (=V), and among duration (=T), phonetic contexts, and the places of articulation. To put it in mathematical terms, the distribution of the data can be explained by a simple log-linear equation, logF=${\mu}+{\lambda}CPV+{\lambda}TCP$.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.