• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.43-60
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• 2008

Instrumental studies (e.g., aerodynamic, EPG, and EMMA) have shown that the first of two stops in sequence can be articulatorily reduced in time and space sometimes; either gradient or categorical. The current EMMA study aims to examine possible factors_linguistic (e.g., speech rate, word boundary, and prosodic boundary) and paralinguistic (e.g., natural context and repetition)_to induce gradient reduction of $C_1$ in /pk/ cluster sequences. EMMA data are collected from five Seoul-Korean speakers. The results show that gradient reduction of lip aperture seldom occurs, being quite restricted both in speaker frequency and in token frequency. The results also suggest that the place assimilation is not a lexical process, implying that speakers have not fully developed this process to be phonologized in the abstract level.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.173-177
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• 1997

The speech movements are acquired activity, not determined by instincts or by biologic inheritance either. The child listens to the sound from the surrounding persons, observes the speech movement of the people and tried to imitate them. Then the child acquires their specific phonation pattern. We guessed that the parents influences to the child are very important in the developing of the speech movements. Because the parents are first contact person to the baby. The recognition of parents about the voice changes in the child will be important too. And social environments such as kindergarden, school, friends contact with, can influence to the voice of the child. We investigated the state of the voice, parents influence and social environmental factor. In the bases of this study, we knew that the parents recognition about the voice changes of child, faulty vocal habits of child, social environmental factors influenced to the voice of child. And we thought we have to do our best for the early detection of voice changes and proper treatment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.73-89
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• 2007

This study explored the perception of transplanted English prosody by thirty American and Korean, male and female listeners. The English utterances of various sentence types produced by Korean and American male speakers were employed to transplant the American prosody contours to Korean English utterances. Then, the thirty subjects were instructed to rate the transplanted prosodic components. Results showed that the interactions between the three factors (e.g., rater groups & transplantation types; transplantation types & sentence types; rater groups & transplantation types & sentence types) turned out to be meaningful. Both Americans and Koreans perceived the effectiveness of the combined effect of transplanted duration and pitch or duration and pitch and intensity. However, when perceiving individual prosodic components, Americans and Koreans showed different perceptual ratings. As for the overall prosody change, Americans perceived the change of intensity in a significant way but Koreans did not because intensity is not a crucial semantic factor in Korean. Americans rated the transplantation of duration alone as ineffective while Koreans rated otherwise. This was explained by the difference between English and Korean. The difference of perspective was also significant with different sentence types, especially with the three sentence types that had speech rates slower than other sentence types. A slower speech rate intensified the mismatch between the transplanted duration and the original pitch causing a negative impression on American listeners whereas this did not affect Korean listeners. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.117-124
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of gender in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2342 different sentences, comprising over five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender as an independent factor. The results of acoustic analyses revealed that the most acoustic properties of voiceless sibilants turned out to be different between male and female speakers, but those of voiceless non-sibilants did not show differences. A classification experiment using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) revealed that 85.73% of voiceless fricatives are correctly classified. The sibilants are 88.61% correctly classified, whereas the non-sibilants are only 57.91% correctly classified. The majority of the errors are from the misclassification of /ɵ/ as [f]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 77.67%. Most of the inaccuracy results are from the classification of female speakers in non-sibilants. The results are accounted for by resorting to biological differences as well as macro-social factors. The paper contributes to the understanding of the role of gender in a large-scale speech corpus.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.171-184
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• 2013

This study investigated the devoicing rate of Japanese high vowels, focusing on regional and generational differences by acoustically analyzing vowels from two large speech databases. The first speech database used in this study was collected between 1986 and 1988 from 41 areas (prefectures) which included 607 participants (299 high school students and 308 their grandparents). The second was taken from a 2006-2007 collection from seven areas as a follow-up investigation to the first database consisting of 463 participants ranging in age from 8-90 year olds. The results revealed there is a generational as well as regional difference in the devoicing rate in almost all areas. Based on those results, a new distribution map reflecting a current devoicing rate of the younger generation was presented. Furthermore, by comparing the two data sets, this study confirmed age difference in the devoicing rate is not age-grading but a sound change in progress. This study discusses the social factors for changes in the devoicing rate of some areas and then applies the devoicing rate of five areas to an S-curve model to predict the future devoicing rate.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2E
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• pp.35-42
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• 2009

In this paper, we present criteria of objective measurement of speech quality to provide the mobile-VoIP services efficiently over wireless mobile internet. The mobile-VoIP service, which is based on mobility and is error-prone compared to conventional VoIP over wired network, is about to be launched, but there have not been adequate quality indexes and the Quality of Service (QoS) standards for evaluating speech quality of Mobile-VoIP. In addition, there are many factors influencing on the speech quality in packet network of which packet loss contribute directly to the overall voice communication quality. For this reason, we adopt the Gilbert-Elliot Channel Model for modeling packet network based on IP and assess the voice quality through the objective speech method of ITU-T P. 862 PESQ and ITU-T P. 862.1 MOS-LQO under various packet loss rates in the transmission channel environments. Our simulation results address the specific criteria and QoS for the mobile-VoIP services in terms of the various packet loss environments.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.111-116
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• 2016

The Nasometer is most commonly used to assess the presence and degree of resonance problems in clinical settings and it provides nasalance scores to identify the acoustic correlates of nasality. Nasalance scores are influenced by factors related to speakers and speech stimuli. This study aims to examine the effect of vowel context and length of stimuli and age on nasalance scores. The participants were 20 adults and 45 children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years. The stimuli consisted of 12 sentences containing no nasal consonants. The stimuli in the three vowel contexts (low, high, and mixed) consisted of 4, 8, 16, and 31-syllable long sentences. Speakers were asked to repeat each stimulus after examiner. The results indicated significant effects of vowel contexts and stimulus length on nasalance scores. The nasalance scores for the high vowel contexts were significantly higher than those for the mixed and low vowel contexts. The nasalance scores for the mixed vowel contexts were significantly higher than those for the low vowel contexts. Speakers had higher nasalance scores for 4-syllable long sentences and 31-syllable long sentences than for 16-syllable long sentences. The effect of age on nasalance scores was not significant. The results of the study suggest that the vowel context and length of speech stimuli should be carefully considered when interpreting the nasalance scores.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.19-24
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• 2015

Speech and language are uniquely human-specific traits, which contributed to humans becoming the predominant species on earth. Disruptions in the human speech and language function may result in diverse disorders. These include stuttering, aphasia, articulation disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, verbal dyspraxia, dyslexia and specific language impairment. Among these disorders, stuttering is the most common speech disorder characterized by disruptions in the normal flow of speech. Twin, adoption, and family studies have suggested that genetic factors are involved in susceptibility to stuttering. For several decades, multiple genetic studies including linkage analysis were performed to connect causative gene to stuttering, and several genetic studies have revealed the association of specific gene mutation with stuttering. One notable genetic discovery came from the genetic studies in the consanguineous Pakistani families. These studies suggested that mutations in the lysosomal enzyme-targeting pathway genes (GNPTAB, GNPTG and NAPGA) are associated with non-syndromic persistent stuttering. Although these studies have revealed some clues in understanding the genetic causes of stuttering, only a small fraction of patients are affected by these genes. In this study, we summarize recent advances and future challenges in an effort to understand genetic causes underlying stuttering.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigated the influences of probabilistic accessibility of the word being produced - as determined by its usage frequency and neighborhood density - on native and high-proficiency L2 speakers' realization of six English monophthong vowels. The native group hyperarticulated the vowels over an expanded acoustic space when the vowel occurred in words with low frequency and high density, supporting the claim that vowel forms are modified in accordance with the probabilistic accessibility of words. However, temporal expansion occurred in words with greater accessibility (i.e., with high frequency and low density) as an effect of low phonotactic probability in low-density words, particularly in attended speech. This suggests that temporal modification in the opposite direction may be part of the phonetic characteristics that are enhanced in communicatively driven focus realization. Conversely, none of these spectral and temporal patterns were found in the L2 group, thereby indicating that even the high-proficiency L2 speakers may not have developed experience-based sensitivity to the modulation of sub-categorical phonetic details indexed with word-level probabilistic information. The results are discussed with respect to how phonological representations are shaped in a word-specific manner for the sake of communicatively driven lexical intelligibility, and what factors may contribute to the lack of native-like sensitivity in L2 speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2018

In this study, we examined how the upper and lower lips articulate to produce labial /p/. Using electromagnetic midsagittal articulography, we collected flesh-point tracking movement data from eight native speakers of Seoul Korean (five females and three males). Individual articulatory movements in /p/ were examined in terms of minimum vertical upper lip position, maximum vertical lower lip position, and corresponding vertical upper lip position aligned with maximum vertical lower lip position. Using linear mixed-effect models, we tested two factors (word boundary [across-word vs. within-word] and speech rate [comfortable vs. fast]) and their interaction, considering subjects as random effects. The results are summarized as follows. First, maximum lower lip position varied with different word boundaries and speech rates, but no interaction was detected. In particular, maximum lower lip position was lower (e.g., less constricted or more reduced) in fast rate condition and across-word boundary condition. Second, minimum lower lip position, as well as lower lip position, measured at the time of maximum lower lip position only varied with different word boundaries, showing that they were consistently lower in across-word condition. We provide further empirical evidence of lower lip movement sensitive to both different word boundaries (e.g., linguistic factor) and speech rates (e.g., paralinguistic factor); this supports the traditional idea that the lower lip is an actively moving articulator. The sensitivity of upper lip movement is also observed with different word boundaries; this counters the traditional idea that the upper lip is the target area, which presupposes immobility. Taken together, the lip aperture gesture is a good indicator that takes into account upper and lower lip vertical movements, compared to the traditional approach that distinguishes a movable articulator from target place. Respective of different speech rates, the results of the present study patterned with cross-linguistic lenition-related allophonic variation, which is known to be more sensitive to fast rate.