• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.75-82
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• 2021

Speech and language functions are highly cognitive and human-specific features. The underlying causes of normal speech and language function are believed to reside in the human brain. Developmental persistent stuttering, a speech and language disorder, has been regarded as the most challenging disorder in determining genetic causes because of the high percentage of spontaneous recovery in stutters. This mysterious characteristic hinders speech pathologists from discriminating recovered stutters from completely normal individuals. Over the last several decades, several genetic approaches have been used to identify the genetic causes of stuttering, and remarkable progress has been made in genome-wide linkage analysis followed by gene sequencing. So far, four genes, namely GNPTAB, GNPTG, NAGPA, and AP4E1, are known to cause stuttering. Furthermore, thegeneration of mouse models of stuttering and morphometry analysis has created new ways for researchers to identify brain regions that participate in human speech function and to understand the neuropathology of stuttering. In this review, we aimed to investigate previous progress, challenges, and future perspectives in understanding the genetics and neuropathology underlying persistent developmental stuttering.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.753-755
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• 2008

In this letter, we propose a new histogram equalization technique for feature compensation in speech recognition under noisy environments. The proposed approach combines a signal-to-noise-ratio-dependent feature reconstruction method and the class histogram equalization technique to effectively reduce the acoustic mismatch present in noisy speech features. Experimental results from the Aurora 2 task confirm the superiority of the proposed approach for acoustic feature compensation.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.40-42
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• 2009

This paper presents an algorithm, which is based on Otsu's method, for accurate and robust endpoint detection for speech recognition under noisy environments. The features are extracted in time domain, and then an optimal threshold is selected by minimizing the discriminant criterion, so as to maximize the separability of the speech part and environment part. The simulation results show that the method play a good performance in detection accuracy.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.141-148
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• 2014

Voice is the most common means for communication, but some people have difficulties in generating voice due to their congenital or acquired disorders. Individuals with speech disorders might lose their speaking ability due to hearing impairment, encephalopathy or cerebral palsy accompanied by motor skill impairments, or autism caused by mental problems. However, they have needs for communication, so some of them use various types of AAC (Augmentative & Alternative Communication) devices in order to meet their communication needs. In this paper, a mobile application for literate people having speech disorder was designed and implemented by developing accurate and fast sentence-completion functions for efficient user interaction. From a user study and the previous study on Korean text-based communication for adults having difficulty in speech communication, we identified functionality and usability requirements. Specifically, the user interface with scanning features was designed by considering the users' motor skills in using the touch-screen of a mobile device. Finally, we conducted the usability test for the application. The results of the usability test show that the application is easy to learn and efficient to use in communication with people with speech disorders.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.140-148
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of music training on the characteristics of auditory perception of speech and music. The perception of speech and music stimuli was assessed across their respective stimulus continuum and the resultant plots were compared between musicians and non-musicians. Subjects and Methods: Thirty musicians with formal music training and twenty-seven non-musicians participated in the study (age: 20 to 30 years). They were assessed for identification of consonant-vowel syllables (/da/ to /ga/), vowels (/u/ to /a/), vocal music note (/ri/ to /ga/), and instrumental music note (/ri/ to /ga/) across their respective stimulus continuum. The continua contained 15 tokens with equal step size between any adjacent tokens. The resultant identification scores were plotted against each token and were analyzed for presence of categorical boundary. If the categorical boundary was found, the plots were analyzed by six parameters of categorical perception; for the point of 50% crossover, lower edge of categorical boundary, upper edge of categorical boundary, phoneme boundary width, slope, and intercepts. Results: Overall, the results showed that both speech and music are perceived differently in musicians and non-musicians. In musicians, both speech and music are categorically perceived, while in non-musicians, only speech is perceived categorically. Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicate that music is perceived categorically by musicians, even if the stimulus is devoid of vocal tract features. The findings support that the categorical perception is strongly influenced by training and results are discussed in light of notions of motor theory of speech perception.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.140-148
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of music training on the characteristics of auditory perception of speech and music. The perception of speech and music stimuli was assessed across their respective stimulus continuum and the resultant plots were compared between musicians and non-musicians. Subjects and Methods: Thirty musicians with formal music training and twenty-seven non-musicians participated in the study (age: 20 to 30 years). They were assessed for identification of consonant-vowel syllables (/da/ to /ga/), vowels (/u/ to /a/), vocal music note (/ri/ to /ga/), and instrumental music note (/ri/ to /ga/) across their respective stimulus continuum. The continua contained 15 tokens with equal step size between any adjacent tokens. The resultant identification scores were plotted against each token and were analyzed for presence of categorical boundary. If the categorical boundary was found, the plots were analyzed by six parameters of categorical perception; for the point of 50% crossover, lower edge of categorical boundary, upper edge of categorical boundary, phoneme boundary width, slope, and intercepts. Results: Overall, the results showed that both speech and music are perceived differently in musicians and non-musicians. In musicians, both speech and music are categorically perceived, while in non-musicians, only speech is perceived categorically. Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicate that music is perceived categorically by musicians, even if the stimulus is devoid of vocal tract features. The findings support that the categorical perception is strongly influenced by training and results are discussed in light of notions of motor theory of speech perception.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.613-620
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• 2010

Additive noise and channel distortion strongly degrade the performance of speaker verification systems, as it introduces distortion of the features of speech. This distortion causes a mismatch between the training and recognition conditions such that acoustic models trained with clean speech do not model noisy and channel distorted speech accurately. This paper presents a phase-related feature extraction method in order to improve the robustness of the speaker verification systems. The instantaneous frequency is computed from the phase of speech signals and features from the histogram of the instantaneous frequency are obtained. Experimental results show that the proposed technique offers significant improvements over the standard techniques in both clean and adverse testing environments.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.81-88
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• 2001

In this paper, a Korean digit recognition system based on a multilayer Perceptron is implemented. We also investigate the performance of widely used speech features, such as the Mel-scale filterbank, MFCC, LPCC, and PLP coefficients, by applying them as input of the proposed recognition system. In order to build a robust speech system, the experiments for demonstrating its recognition performance for the clean data as well as corrupt data are carried out. In experiments of recognizing 20 Korean digit, we found that the Mel-scale filterbank coefficients performs best in terms of recognition accuracy for the speech dependent and speech independent database even though noise is considerably added.