• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.71-83
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• 1994

This paper deals with the improvement of the synthesized speech quality and naturality in the Korean TTS(Text-to-Speech) system. We had extracted the parameters(table2) such as its amplitude, duration and pitch period in a syllable through the analysis of speech waveforms(table1) in the time domain and synthesized syllables using them. To the frequencies of the Korean pronunciation large vocabulary dictionary we had synthesized speeches selected 229 syllables such as V types are 19, CV types are 80. VC types are 30 and CVC types are 100. According to the 4 Korean syllable types from the data format dictionary(table3) we had tested each 15 syllables with the objective MOS(Mean Opinion Score) evaluation method about the 4 items i.e., intelligibility, clearness, loudness, and naturality after selecting random group without the knowledge of them. As the results of experiments the qualities of them are very clear and we can control the prosodic elements such as durations, accents and pitch periods (fig9, 10, 11, 12).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.403-408
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• 2007

In a large corpus-based speech synthesizer, a break, which is a parameter influencing the naturalness and intelligibility, is used as an important feature during a unit selection process. Japanese is a language having intonations, which ate indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the APs(Accentual Phrases) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI(Japanese-Tones and Break Indices), which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method is to conduct a unit search by dividing breaks into two types, such as a fixed break and a flexible break, in order to use the advantages of a large-scale corpus, which includes various types of prosodies. As a result of an experiment, the proposed unit selection method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.9-21
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• 2019

This study aimed to compare the prosodic characteristics of North Korean defectors and South Koreans in three types of sentences (declarative, interrogative, and negative) in two reading tasks (short and dialogue) through acoustic analysis and auditory-perceptual evaluation. In addition, this study examined the relationship between the auditory-perceptual evaluation scores and self-assessment questionnaires on intonation for North Korean defectors. The participants were 15 North Korean defectors and 15 Korean speakers with standard Seoul accents. For statistical analysis, three-way mixed ANOVA and multivariate analysis were performed within the three types of sentences in the reading tasks through acoustic analysis and the Mann-Whitney U Test for auditory-perceptual evaluation. Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficients were also used to identify the correlations between the results of the self-assessment questionnaire on intonation and the auditory-perceptual evaluation. The North Korean defectors were found to have a significantly lower pitch range and auditory-perceptual evaluation score than South Koreans in reading tasks. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between their auditory-perceptual evaluations and self-assessment questionnaires on intonation. The study findings suggest that North Korean defectors, who face many challenges with intonation, showed a tendency to think that their intonation differed from the standard Korean intonation and showed better auditory evaluation results for interrogative sentences.