• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

Many speech recognition systems have used pronunciation lexicon with possible multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word. The pronunciation lexicon is of often manually created. This process requires a lot of time and efforts, and furthermore, it is very difficult to maintain consistency of lexicon. To handle these problems, we present a model based on morphophon-ological analysis for automatically generating Korean pronunciation variants. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korean, we have derived about 700 phonemic contexts that would trigger the multilevel application of the corresponding phonological process, which consists of phonemic and allophonic rules. In generating pronunciation variants, morphological analysis is preceded to handle variations of phonological words. According to the morphological category, a set of tables reflecting phonemic context is looked up to generate pronunciation variants. Our experiments show that the proposed model produces mostly correct pronunciation variants of phonological words. Then we estimated how useful the pronunciation lexicon and training phonetic transcription using this proposed systems.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.64 no.10
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• pp.497-503
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• 2021

Reading disability (dyslexia) refers to an unexpected difficulty with reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. Dyslexia is most commonly caused by a difficulty in phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects the ability of an individual to speak, read, and spell. In this paper, I describe reading disabilities by focusing on their underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Neurobiological studies using functional brain imaging have uncovered the reading pathways, brain regions involved in reading, and neurobiological abnormalities of dyslexia. The reading pathway is in the order of visual analysis, letter recognition, word recognition, meaning (semantics), phonological processing, and speech production. According to functional neuroimaging studies, the important areas of the brain related to reading include the inferior frontal cortex (Broca's area), the midtemporal lobe region, the inferior parieto-temporal area, and the left occipitotemporal region (visual word form area). Interventions for dyslexia can affect reading ability by causing changes in brain function and structure. An accurate diagnosis and timely specialized intervention are important in children with dyslexia. In cases in which national infant development screening tests have been conducted, as in Korea, if language developmental delay and early predictors of dyslexia are detected, careful observation of the progression to dyslexia and early intervention should be made.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.158-162
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• 2007

Anomia, word finding difficulty, is one of the most common feature in aphasia. Previous studies support that the process of picture naming consists of three stages, in the order of the object recognition, semantic, and phonological output stages. Anomic patients have many symptoms and it means that anomia can be sub-divided into several symptom groups. Our anomia assessment battery consists of several parts: (1) picture naming set, (2) picture-word matching task, (3) lexical decision task for mental lexicon damage, (4) naming task for phonological lexicon damage, and (5) semantic decision task. Pictures and words were selected on the basis of usage frequency, semantic category, and word length. We administered this anomia evaluation battery to many anomic aphasics and we subdivided patients into several groups. We hope that our anomia evaluation set is useful and helpful for evaluation anomic aphasics

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.339-363
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• 2013

The age of acquisition effect is the phenomenon in which the words acquired early in life are processed better than the words acquired later in life. Age of acquisition and word frequency are critical factors in lexical processing. In this study we examined the age of acquisition effects in Hangul word recognition. In Experiment 1, we examined the AoA effects in word naming and lexical decision tasks. The results showed that there was an interaction between task and age of acquisition. The AoA effects appeared only in the lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, we examined the relationship between age of acquisition and word frequency in the lexical decision task. The results showed that the two variables were significant. The early-acquired words were processed better than the words acquired later, and the words with high frequency were processed better than the words with low frequency. However, there was no interaction between the two variables. In Experiment 3, we examined how phonological changes in Hangul words influence the AoA effects. The results show that the AoA effects were similar whether phonological changes occur or not. Our results are discussed in terms of several theoretical hypotheses.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.9-15
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• 2001

In this paper we investigate context dependent acoustic models to improve the performance of the Korean speech recognition . The algorithm are using the Korean phonological rules and decision tree, By Successive State Splitting(SSS) algorithm the Hidden Merkov Netwwork(HM-Net) which is an efficient representation of phoneme-context-dependent HMMs, can be generated automatically SSS is powerful technique to design topologies of tied-state HMMs but it doesn't treat unknown contexts in the training phoneme contexts environment adequately In addition it has some problem in the procedure of the contextual domain. In this paper we adopt a new state-clustering algorithm of SSS, called Phonetic Decision Tree-based SSS (PDT-SSS) which includes contexts splits based on the Korean phonological rules. This method combines advantages of both the decision tree clustering and SSS, and can generated highly accurate HM-Net that can express any contexts To verify the effectiveness of the adopted methods. the experiments are carried out using KLE 452 word database and YNU 200 sentence database. Through the Korean phoneme word and sentence recognition experiments. we proved that the new state-clustering algorithm produce better phoneme, word and continuous speech recognition accuracy than the conventional HMMs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.10
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• pp.1879-1890
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• 2011

Previous studies of syllable frequency effects have proposed that inhibitory effects due to high first syllable frequency were the products of competitions between activated lexical candidates within a lexical level. However, these studies have primarily used lexical decision tasks to examine the nature of syllable frequency effects. This study investigates whether a syllable frequency effect can arise in semantic categorization tasks and whether phonologically or orthographically defined syllables interact with semantically related variables such as morphological family size. If the syllable frequency effect was created by activations and competitions on a lexical level, it is highly possible that the effect was related to semantic categorization tasks. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, morphological family size and phonological syllable frequency were factorially manipulated. In Experiment 2, morphological family size and orthographic syllable frequency were factorially manipulated. The results demonstrate that morphemes have no relationship with phonological syllables but do with orthographic syllables. This suggests that phonological syllables and orthographic syllables have different roles in the syllable frequency effect on visual word recognition process.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.74-80
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• 2002

There are many researches on post-processing methods for the Korean continuous speech recognition enhancement using natural language processing techniques. It is very difficult to use a formal morphological analyzer for improving the speech recognition because the analysis technique of natural language processing is mainly for formal written languages. In this paper, we propose a speech recognition enhancement model using syntactic unit of morphemes. This approach uses the functional word level longest match which dose not consider spacing words. We describe the post-processing mechanism for the improving speech recognition by using proposed model which uses the relationship of phonological structure information between predicates md auxiliary predicates or bound nouns that are frequently occurred in Korean sentences.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.83-92
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• 2010

The present study examined how listeners of Seoul Korean would recover deleted phonemes in consonant cluster simplification. In a phoneme monitoring experiment, listeners had to monitor for C2 (/k/ or /p/) in C1C2C3 when C2 was deleted (C1 was preserved) or preserved (C1 was deleted). The target consonant (C2) was either /k/ or /p/ (e.g., i$\b{lk}$-t${\partial}$lato vs. pa$\b{lp}$-t${\partial}$lato), and there were two listener groups, one group tested in 2002 and the other in 2009. Some points have emerged from the results. First, listeners were able to detect deleted phonemes as accurately and rapidly as preserved phonemes, showing that the physical presence of the acoustic information did not improve the listeners' performance. This suggests that listeners must have relied on language-specific phonological knowledge about the consonant cluster simplification, rather than relying on the low-level acoustic-phonetic information. Second, listener groups (participants in 2002 vs. 2009), differed in processing /p/ versus /k/: listeners in 2009 failed to detect /p/ more frequently than those in 2002, suggesting that the way the consonant cluster sequence is produced and perceived has changed over time. This result was interpreted as coming from statistical patterns of speech production in contemporary Seoul Korean as reported in a recent study by Cho & Kim (2009): /p/ is deleted far more often than /p/ is preserved, which is likely reflected in the way listeners process simplified variants. Finally, listeners processed /k/ more efficiently than /p/, especially when the target was physically present (in C-preserved condition), indicating that listeners benefited more from the presence of /k/ than of /p/. This was interpreted as supporting the view that velars are perceptually more robust than labials, which constrains shaping phonological patterns of the language. These results were then discussed in terms of their implications for theories of spoken word recognition.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.226-234
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• 2007

In this paper, we develop a speech recognition system using a throat microphone. The use of this kind of microphone minimizes the impact of environmental noise. However, because of the absence of high frequencies and the partially loss of formant frequencies, previous systems developed with those devices have shown a lower recognition rate than systems which use standard microphone signals. This problem has led to researchers using throat microphone signals as supplementary data sources supporting standard microphone signals. In this paper, we present a high performance ASR system which we developed using only a throat microphone by taking advantage of Korean Phonological Feature Theory and a detailed throat signal analysis. Analyzing the spectrum and the result of FFT of the throat microphone signal, we find that the conventional MFCC feature vector that uses a critical pass filter does not characterize the throat microphone signals well. We also describe the conditions of the feature extraction algorithm which make it best suited for throat microphone signal analysis. The conditions involve (1) a sensitive band-pass filter and (2) use of feature vector which is suitable for voice/non-voice classification. We experimentally show that the ZCPA algorithm designed to meet these conditions improves the recognizer's performance by approximately 16%. And we find that an additional noise-canceling algorithm such as RAST A results in 2% more performance improvement.