• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.345-363
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare the speech rate of advanced Korean(L2) learners and Korean native speakers in spontaneous utterances. Specifically, the current study investigated the difference of the two groups' speech pattern according to utterance length. Eight advanced Korean(L2) learners and eight Korean native speakers participated in this study. The data were collected by recording their conversation and physical measurements (speaking rate, articulatory rates, pause and several types of speech disfluency) were taken on extracted 120 utterances from 12 out of the 16 participants. The findings show that advanced Korean learners' speech pattern is similar to that of Koreans in the short-length utterance. However, in the long-length utterance, two groups show different speech patterns; while the articulatory rate of Korean native speakers increased in the long-length utterance, that of Korean learners decreased. This suggests that the frequency of speech disfluency factors might affect this result.

• Animal Bioscience
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.899-907
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• 2023

Objective: The better understanding of laying pattern of birds is crucial for developing breed-specific proper breeding scheme and management. Methods: Daily egg production until 50 wk of age of six chicken breeds including one layer (White Leghorn, WL), three dual-purpose (Rhode Island Red, RIR; Columbian Plymouth Rock, CR; and Barred Plymouth Rock, BR), one synthetic dwarf (DY), and one indigenous (Beijing-You Chicken, BYC) were used to characterize their clutch traits and egg production. The age at first egg, egg number, average and maximum clutch length, pause length, and number of clutches and pauses were calculated accordingly. Results: The egg number and average clutch length in WL, RIR, CR, and BR were higher than those in DY and BYC (p<0.01). The numbers of clutches and pauses, and pause length in WL, RIR, CR, and BR were lower than those in DY and BYC (p<0.01). The coefficient variations of clutch length in WL, RIR, CR, and BR (57.66%, 66.49%, 64.22%, and 55.35%, respectively) were higher than DY (41.84%) and BYC (36.29%), while the coefficient variations of egg number in WL, RIR, CR, and BR (9.10%, 9.97%, 10.82%, and 9.92%) were lower than DY (15.84%) and BYC (16.85%). The clutch length was positively correlated with egg number (r = 0.51 to 0.66; p<0.01), but not correlated with age at first egg in all breeds. Conclusion: The six breeds showed significant different clutch and egg production traits. Due to the selection history, the high and median productive layer breeds had higher clutch length than those of the less productive indigenous BYC. The clutch length is a proper selection criterion for further progress in egg production. The age at first egg, which is independent of clutch traits, is especially encouraged to be improved by selection in the BYC breed.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1103-1109
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• 2002

This study investigated the effect of 2-bromo-$\alpha$-ergocryptine (anti prolactin agent) on plasma levels of prolactin, oestradiol-17$\beta$ and progesterone in domestic hen during the active period of lay. Fifty healthy female White Leghorn birds were administered with anti prolactin agent (2-bromo-$\alpha$-ergocryptine, Sigma-USA., methane sulphonate salt, $C_{32}H_{40}BrN_5O_5.CH_4SO_3$) subcutaneously @100$\mu$g/kg body weight at weekly intervals from 17th to 36th week of age. Another group of fifty birds as controls were given placebo in place of bromocriptine. The level of prolactin remained lower in treated birds than in the control birds from 19 to 36 weeks of age. Level of prolactin even in the control group was found to decrease during the peak production period. Oestradiol-$17{\beta}$ and progesterone concentration in treated birds were significantly (p<0.01) higher than the controls during the treatment. Egg production, is positively correlated with oestradiol-$17{\beta}$ (r=0.02; r=0.67) and progesterone (r=0.49; r=0.90) in control and treated groups respectively where as prolactin level is positively correlated with egg production in the control birds (r=0.07). Prolactin levels were negatively correlated with egg production (r=-0.55) in treated birds; and oestradiol-$17{\beta}$ (r =-0.71; r=-0.53) and progesterone (r=-0.22; r=-0.27) respectively in control and treated groups. The total number of pause days during the treatment period decreased significantly (p<0.01) in the treated group compared to the control group. The reduction in pause days in treated group resulted in 1.76% increase in egg production over that in control group. The increase in egg laying days and the total egg production were found to be significant (p<0.01). These results indicate that a lower level of prolactin in circulatory blood enhances egg production in the domestic hen.

• BMB Reports
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.305-311
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• 2003

A modified actinomycin D was prepared with a hydroxyl group that replaced the amino group at the chromophore 2-position, a substitution known to strongly reduce affinity for double-stranded DNA. Interactions of the modified drug on single-stranded DNAs of the defined sequence were investigated. Competition assays showed that 2-hydroxyactinomycin D has low affinity for two oligonucleotides that have high affinities ($K_a\;=\;5-10{\times}10^6\;M^{-1}$ oligomer) for 7-aminoactinomycin D and actinomycin D. Primer extension inhibition assays performed on several single-stranded DNA templates totaling around 1000 nt in length detected a single high affinity site for 2-hydroxyactinomycin D, while many high affinity binding sites of unmodified actinomycin D were found on the same templates. The sequence selectivity of 2-hydroxyactinomycin D binding is unusually high and approximates the selectivity of restriction endonucleases. Binding appears to require a complex structure, including residues well removed from the polymerase pause site.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.37-42
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• 1996

This study aims to see some prosodic features of English spoken by Japanese learners of English. It focuses on speech rates, pauses, and intonation when the learners read an English passage. Three Japanese learners of English, who are all male university students, were asked to read the speech material, an English passage of 110 word length, at their normal reading speed. Then a native speaker of English, a male American English teacher. was asked to read the same passage. The Japanese speakers were also asked to read a Japanese passage of 286 letters (Japanese Kana) to compare the reading of English with that of japanese. Their speech was analyzed on a computerized system (KAY Computerized Speech Lab). Wave forms, spectrograms, and F0 contours were shown on the screen to measure the duration of pauses, phrases and sentences and to observe intonation contours. One finding of the experiment was that the movement of the low speakers' speech rates showed a similar tendency in their reading of the English passage. Reading of the Japanese passage by the three learners also had a similar tendency in the movement of speech rates. Another finding was that the frequency of pauses in the learners speech was greater than that in the speech of the native speaker, but that the ration of the total pause length to the whole utterance length was about tile same in both the learners' and the native speaker's speech. A similar tendency was observed about the learners' reading of the Japanese passage except that they used shorter pauses in the mid-sentence position. As to intonation contours, we found that the learners used a narrower pitch range than the native speaker in their reading of the English passage while they used a wider pitch range as they read the Japanese passage. It was found that the learners tended to use falling intonation before pauses whereas the native speaker used different intonation patterns. These findings are applicable to the teaching of English pronunciation at the passage level in the sense that they can show the learners. Japanese here, what their problems are and how they could be solved.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.168-176
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• 2001

This paper discusses two important issues of corpus-based synthesis: synthesis unit generation based on phrase break strength information and pruning redundant synthesis unit instances. First, the new sentence set for recording was designed to make an efficient synthesis database, reflecting the characteristics of the Korean language. To obtain prosodic context sensitive units, we graded major prosodic phrases into 5 distinctive levels according to pause length and then discriminated intra-word triphones using the levels. Using the synthesis unit with phrase break strength information, synthetic speech was generated and evaluated subjectively. Second, a new pruning method based on weighted vector quantization (WVQ) was proposed to eliminate redundant synthesis unit instances from the synthesis database. WVQ takes the relative importance of each instance into account when clustering similar instances using vector quantization (VQ) technique. The proposed method was compared with two conventional pruning methods through objective and subjective evaluations of synthetic speech quality: one to simply limit the maximum number of instances, and the other based on normal VQ-based clustering. For the same reduction rate of instance number, the proposed method showed the best performance. The synthetic speech with reduction rate 45% had almost no perceptible degradation as compared to the synthetic speech without instance reduction.

• International Journal of Industrial Entomology and Biomaterials
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.149-153
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• 2002

Induction of non-diapause eggs and manifestation of quantitative characters were studied in different seasons by low temperature incubation of eggs of a low yielding diapause with coloured cocoons silkworm breed, RDI of Bombyx mori. Hundred percent of nandiapause eggs were induced when the egg incubation was carried out at 15$^{\circ}C$ followed by incubation initially at $25^{\circ}C$ and then at $15^{\circ}C$. The diapause-nondia-pause relation was found to be reversible. Analysis of variance study demonstrated significant variation in all the quantitative characters whereas significant variation due to different incubation treatments was observed for larval span, fifth instar larval span, cocoon yield/10,000 larvae by weight, cocoon weight, cocoon shell weight, and cocoon shell ratio. study on hybrid vigour skewed significant heterosis over mid parent value for four economic characters viz., cocoon weight, cocoon shell weight, cocoon shell ratio and filament length in a Fl hybrid between RD1 with diapause eggs and Japanese type bivoltine $NB_{4} D_{2}$.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.67-77
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• 2014

This study investigated (1) whether Korean learners of English use discourse-level prosody in L2 production as native speakers of English do, and (2) whether discourse-level prosody is also found in the Korean language, as is evident in the prosody of native speakers of English. The study compared the production of the same 15 sentences in two types of reading materials, sentence-level and discourse-level. This study analyzed the onset pitch, sentence mean pitch and pause length to examine the paratone (intonational paragraph) realization in discourse-level speech. The results showed that in L2 discourse-level prosody, the Korean speakers were limited in displaying paratone and did not made significant difference between sentence-level and discourse-level prosody. On the other hand, in L1 discourse-level text, both English and Korean participants demonstrated paratone using pitch. However, there were differences in using prosodic cues between two groups. In using pauses, the ES group paused longer before both the orthographically marked and not marked topic sentences. The KS group paused longer only before the orthographically marked topic sentence in both L1 and L2 text reading. In the comparison of sentence-level and discourse-level prosody, the topic sentences were marked by different prosodic cues. English participants used higher sentence mean pitch, and the Korean participants used higher onset pitch.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.16B no.2
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• pp.141-150
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• 2009

This paper proposes a system that can automatically write singing voices to music notes. First, the system uses Stabilized Diffusion Equation(SIDE) to divide the song to a series of syllabic parts based on pitch detection. By the song segmentation, our method can recognize the sound length of each fragment through clustering based on genetic algorithm. Moreover, this study introduces a concept called 'Relative Interval' so as to recognize interval based on pitch of singer. And it also adopted measure extraction algorithm using pause data to implement the higher precision of song transcription. By the experiments using 16 nursery songs, it is shown that the measure recognition rate is 91.5% and DMOS score reaches 3.82. These findings demonstrate effectiveness of system performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.24-33
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• 2001

this paper describes a baseline for an implementation of a corpus-based Korean TTS system. The conventional TTS systems using small-sized speech still generate machine-like synthetic speech. To overcome this problem we introduce the corpus-based TTS system which enables to generate natural synthetic speech without prosodic modifications. The corpus should be composed of a natural prosody of source speech and multiple instances of synthesis units. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we train a speech recognizer with the target speech, and then perform an automatic phoneme segmentation. We also detect the fine pitch period using Laryngo graph signals, which is used for prosodic feature extraction. For break strength allocation, 4 levels of break indices are decided as pause length and also attached to phones to reflect prosodic variations in phrase boundaries. To predict the break strength on texts, we utilize the statistical information of POS (Part-of-Speech) sequences. The best triphone sequences are selected by Viterbi search considering the minimization of accumulative Euclidean distance of concatenating distortion. To get high quality synthesis speech applicable to commercial purpose, we introduce a domain specific database. By adding domain specific database to general domain database, we can greatly improve the quality of synthetic speech on specific domain. From the subjective evaluation, the new Korean corpus-based TTS system shows better naturalness than the conventional demisyllable-based one.