• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.189-198
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the occupational performance of Korean workers with and without hearing loss and analyze the hearing-related difficulties in the working environment. Subjects and Methods: The Amsterdam checklist for hearing and work was used for the analyses and the occupational environments of the Korean workers were investigated. Out of 129 total participants, 86 workers experienced severe to profound hearing loss and 43 had the normal hearing ability. The hearing-impaired workers were recruited from two leading vocational centers and normal-hearing workers were their colleagues. Results: The hearing-impaired workers were found to take fewer sick leaves and exhibited higher rates of permanent job statuses compared to the normal-hearing workers. Workers with hearing loss rarely detected background sound; however, they could perceive reverberation more frequently. They felt more satisfied with their careers than the normal hearing workers as they received social support and needed to put their effort into hearing for most hearing activities. Furthermore, the effort in hearing increased with the increase in job demand, job control, social support, and career satisfaction. The working hours per week increased with the increase in age, education level, job demand, job control, and social support. Different trends were observed in 9 out of 12 variables while comparing the data from the present study with that obtained from the hearing-impaired workers of the Netherlands, indicating a large difference between countries. Conclusions: Although the hearing-impaired Korean workers operate diligently with good job positions, it is necessary to enhance their acoustic environment and provide them social support. Considering the cultural background of the hearing-impaired workers, the development of suitable vocational rehabilitation programs and specific questionnaires is strongly recommended worldwide.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.189-199
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the occupational performance of Korean workers with and without hearing loss and analyze the hearing-related difficulties in the working environment. Subjects and Methods: The Amsterdam checklist for hearing and work was used for the analyses and the occupational environments of the Korean workers were investigated. Out of 129 total participants, 86 workers experienced severe to profound hearing loss and 43 had the normal hearing ability. The hearing-impaired workers were recruited from two leading vocational centers and normal-hearing workers were their colleagues. Results: The hearing-impaired workers were found to take fewer sick leaves and exhibited higher rates of permanent job statuses compared to the normal-hearing workers. Workers with hearing loss rarely detected background sound; however, they could perceive reverberation more frequently. They felt more satisfied with their careers than the normal hearing workers as they received social support and needed to put their effort into hearing for most hearing activities. Furthermore, the effort in hearing increased with the increase in job demand, job control, social support, and career satisfaction. The working hours per week increased with the increase in age, education level, job demand, job control, and social support. Different trends were observed in 9 out of 12 variables while comparing the data from the present study with that obtained from the hearing-impaired workers of the Netherlands, indicating a large difference between countries. Conclusions: Although the hearing-impaired Korean workers operate diligently with good job positions, it is necessary to enhance their acoustic environment and provide them social support. Considering the cultural background of the hearing-impaired workers, the development of suitable vocational rehabilitation programs and specific questionnaires is strongly recommended worldwide.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.3-8
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• 2009

In an effort to improve speech recognition, we investigated the effect of the number of clusters. In usual LBG clustering, the number of codebook clusters is doubled on each bifurcation and hence cannot be chosen arbitrarily in a natural way. To have the number of clusters at our control, we combined adaptive resonance theory (ART2) with LBG and perform the clustering in two stages. The codebook thus formed was used in subsequent processing of fuzzy vector quantization (FVQ) and HMM for speech recognition tests. Compared to conventional LBG, our method was shown to reduce the best recognition error rate by 0${\sim$}0.9% depending on the vocabulary size. The result also showed that between 400 and 800 would be the optimal number of clusters in the limit of small and large vocabulary speech recognitions of isolated words, respectively.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.173-184
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• 2004

This study aims to discuss the test methodologies that evaluate the speech intelligibility of hearing-impaired adults using various contexts. Seven adults with severe hearing loss participated in the experiment. The context of the speech intelligibility consists of 77 pairs of one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts, 30 two-syllable words and the list of each 12 and 10 sentences. The speech intelligibility of various contexts had significant correlation, and both one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts and the sentence 1 had higher correlation than other tests. The one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts took longer to test than others, and it demanded more effort to select the pair of words. However, from the point of view of the identification of segmental difficulties, the one-syllable words with phonemic contrasts that reflected segmental factors contributing to the intelligibility was useful.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.3E
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• pp.25-32
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• 2000

The main question addressed in this research was whether an adaptation of a standard exercise Physiology Procedure would be sensitive enough to record excess oxygen uptake associated with speech activity. Oxygen consumption was recorded for a single subject during 7-minute rest periods and an automatic speech task, also 7-minutes long and performed at three different vocal efforts. The data show measurable and systematic speech-induced modifications of breathing and oxygen uptake patterns. The subject was found to use less power for normal than for soft and loud speech. This result is similar to findings reported by experimental biologists on the energetics of locomotion. However, more comprehensive feasibility studies need to be undertaken on a larger population before solid and detailed conclusions about speech energy costs are possible. However, it appears clear that, for experimental tasks like the present one, i.e., variations in vocal effort, standard exercise physiology methods may indeed offer a viable approach to recording excess oxygen uptake associated with speech movements.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2E
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• pp.71-76
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• 2005

Compared to normal speech, distant-talking speech is characterized by the acoustic effect due to interfering sound and echoes as well as articulatory changes resulting from the speaker's effort to be more intelligible. In this paper, the acoustic features for distant-talking speech due to the articulatory changes will be analyzed and compared with those of the Lombard effect. In order to examine the effect of different distances and articulatory changes, speech recognition experiments were conducted for normal speech as well as distant-talking speech at different distances using HTK. The speech data used in this study consist of 4500 distant-talking utterances and 4500 normal utterances of 90 speakers (56 males and 34 females). Acoustic features selected for the analysis were duration, formants (F1 and F2), fundamental frequency, total energy and energy distribution. The results show that the acoustic-phonetic features for distant-talking speech correspond mostly to those of Lombard speech, in that the main resulting acoustic changes between normal and distant-talking speech are the increase in vowel duration, the shift in first and second formant, the increase in fundamental frequency, the increase in total energy and the shift in energy from low frequency band to middle or high bands.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.131-144
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• 2007

In an effort to improve the performance of mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), we investigate the effects of varying the parameters for the filter banks and their associated windows on speech recognition rates. Specifically, the mel and bark scales are combined with various types of filter bank windows. Comparison and evaluation of the suggested methods are performed by two independent ways of speech recognition and the Fisher discriminant objective function. It is shown that the Hanning window based on the bark scale yields 28.1% relative performance improvements over the triangular window with the mel scale in speech recognition error rate. Further work on incorporating PCA and/or LDA would be desirable as a postprocessor to MFCC extraction.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.177-186
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• 2006

In an effort to enhance the quality of feature vector classification and thereby reduce the recognition error rate of the speaker-independent speech recognition, we employ the Mahalanobis distance in the calculation of the similarity measure between feature vectors. It is assumed that the metric matrix of the Mahalanobis distance be diagonal for the sake of cost reduction in memory and time of calculation. We propose that the diagonal elements be given in terms of the variations of the feature vector components. Geometrically, this prescription tends to redistribute the set of data in the shape of a hypersphere in the feature vector space. The idea is applied to the speech recognition by hidden Markov model with fuzzy vector quantization. The result shows that the recognition is improved by an appropriate choice of the relevant adjustable parameter. The Viterbi score difference of the two winners in the recognition test shows that the general behavior is in accord with that of the recognition error rate.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.218-227
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• 2018

Vocal effort detection is important for both robust speech recognition and speaker recognition. In this paper, the spectral information entropy feature which contains more salient information regarding the vocal effort level is firstly proposed. Then, the model fusion method based on complementary model is presented to recognize vocal effort level. Experiments are conducted on isolated words test set, and the results show the spectral information entropy has the best performance among the three kinds of features. Meanwhile, the recognition accuracy of all vocal effort levels reaches 81.6%. Thus, potential of the proposed method is demonstrated.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.5-15
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• 1998

This paper proposes a speech state-dependent spectral subtraction method to regulate the blind spectral subtraction for improved enhancement. In the proposed method, a modified subtraction rule is applied over the speech selectively contingent to the speech state being voiced or unvoiced, in an effort to incorporate the acoustic characteristics of phonemes. In particular, the objective of the proposed method is to remedy the subtraction induced signal distortion attained by two state-dependent procedures, spectrum sharpening and minimum spectral bound. In order to remove the residual noise, the proposed method employs a procedure utilizing the masking effect. Proposed spectral subtraction including state-dependent subtraction and residual noise reduction using the masking threshold shows effectiveness in compensation of spectral distortion in the unvoiced region and residual noise reduction.