• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.79-88
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• 2015

English vowels are difficult to teach and learn because both teachers and learners cannot show or see shapes of vocal tract inside their own mouth cavities. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of changes occur in production and perception of English vowels by college students before and after lessons in order to provide fundamental materials for teaching students English vowels. Fifteen volunteer female students attending an English phonetics course participated in the lessons for one and half a month period. Formant values of vowels produced and perceived before and after the lessons were obtained using Flying Popcorn and Praat. Results showed that a produced vowel space after the lessons was greater than that before the lessons with no significant difference. Distances between some adjacent corner vowels were too close to be distinguished. Secondly, perceived vowels before and after the lessons were almost the same. Here again, some adjacent vowels were closely spaced. Thirdly, three groups which were divided by the length of the distance between the vowel /i-${\ae}$/ showed similar patterns in their perception and production. Generally the vowel space expanded from [u] to [${\ae}$]. The author concluded that there was no drastic improvement of vowel perception and production within a short period of time. Further studies would be desirable to examine how successful any long-term English vowel lessons would be and which methods should be taken to evaluate students' achievements proposed here.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.23-34
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• 2011

Many Korean children have difficulty learning English vowels. The gestures inside the oral and pharyngeal cavities are hard to control when they cannot see the gestures and the target vowel system is quite different from that of Korean. This study attempts to collect children's acoustic data of twelve English vowels published by Hillenbrand et al. (1995) online and to examine the acoustic features of English vowels for phoneticians and English teachers. The author used Praat to obtain the data systematically at six equidistant timepoints over the vowel segment avoiding any obvious errors. Results show inherent acoustic properties for vowels from the children's distribution of vowel duration, f0 and intensity values. Second, children's gestures for each vowel coincide with the regression analysis of all formant values at different timepoints regardless of the vocal fold and tract difference. Third, locus points appear higher than those of American males and females. Their gestures along the timepoints display almost similar patterns. From the results the author concludes that vowel formant trajectories provide useful and important information on dynamic articulatory gestures, which may be applicable to Korean children's education and correction of English vowels. Further studies on the developmental study of vowel formants and pitch values are desirable.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.43-50
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• 2010

English vowels can be divided into monophthongs and diphthongs depending on the number of vocal tract shapes. Diphthongs are usually produced with more than one shape. This study attempts to collect acoustical data of English diphthongs published by Hillenbrand et al.(1995) online and to examine acoustic features of the diphthongs for phoneticians and English teachers. Sixty three American males and females were chosen after excluding those subjects with different target vowels or ambiguous formant tracks. The author used Praat to obtain the acoustical data systematically at eleven equidistant timepoints over the diphthongal segment. Obvious errors were corrected based on the spectrographic display of each diphthong. Results show that the formant trajectories of the diphthongs produced by the American males and females appeared quite similar. When the female formant values were uniformly normalized to those of the males, almost a perfect collapse occurred. Secondly, the diphthongal movements on the vowel space appeared not linear due to the coarticulatory gesture for the following consonant. Thirdly, the average duration of the diphthongs produced by the females was 1.156 times longer than that of the males while the pitch ratio between the two groups turned out to be 1.746 with a similar contour over measurement points. The author concludes that English diphthongs produced by various groups can be compared systematically when the acoustical values are obtained at proportional timepoints. Further studies will be desirable on the comparison of English diphthongs produced by native and nonnative speakers.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1996 no.11
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• pp.114-117
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• 1996

In this study, remote articulation training system which connects the hearing disabled trainee and the speech therapist via B-ISDN is introduced. The hearing disabled does not have the hearing feedback of his own pronunciation, and the chance of watching his speech organs' movement trajectory will offer him the self-training of articulation. So the system has two purposes of self articulation training and trainer's on-line checking in remote place. We estimate the vocal tract articulatory movements from the speech signal using inverse modelling and display the movement trajectory on the sideview of human face graphically. The trajectories of trainees' articulation is displayed along with the reference trajectories, so the trainee can control his articulating to make the two trajectories overlapped. For on-line communication and ckecking training record, the system has the function of video conferencing and transferring articulatory data.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06a
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• pp.893-898
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• 1994

In this paper, the influence of voice source estimation and modeling on speech synthesis and coding is examined and then their new estimation and modeling techniques are proposed and verified by computer simulation. It is known that the existing speech synthesizer produced the speech which is dull and inanimated. These problems are arised from the fact that existing estimation and modeling techniques can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can represent a variety of source characteristics. First, we divide speech samples in one pitch region into four parts having different characteristics. Second, the vocal-tract parameters and voice source waveforms are estimated in each regions differently using sequential SVD. Third, we propose composite source model as a new voice source model which is represented by weighted sum of pre-defined basis functions. And finally, the weights and time-shift parameters of the proposed composite source model are estimeted uning EM(estimate maximize) algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the proposed estimation and modeling methods can estimate more accurate voice source waveforms and represent various source characteristics.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.679-686
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• 2020

In this thesis, an enhanced method for the feature extraction of vocal source signals and score combination using an MCE-Based weight estimation of the score of multiple feature vectors are proposed for the performance improvement of speaker recognition systems. The proposed feature vector is composed of perceptual linear predictive cepstral coefficients, skewness, and kurtosis extracted with lowpass filtered glottal flow signals to eliminate the flat spectrum region, which is a meaningless information section. The proposed feature was used to improve the conventional speaker recognition system utilizing the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the perceptual linear predictive cepstral coefficients extracted with the speech signals and Gaussian mixture models. In addition, to increase the reliability of the estimated scores, instead of estimating the weight using the probability distribution of the convectional score, the scores evaluated by the conventional vocal tract, and the proposed feature are fused by the MCE-Based score combination method to find the optimal speaker. The experimental results showed that the proposed feature vectors contained valid information to recognize the speaker. In addition, when speaker recognition is performed by combining the MCE-based multiple feature parameter scores, the recognition system outperformed the conventional one, particularly in low Gaussian mixture cases.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-74
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• 2004

In this paper, a contort- and speaker-dependent cepstrum extraction method and a channel normalization method for minimizing the loss of speaker characteristics in the cepstrum were proposed for a robust speaker recognition system over the channel. The proposed extraction method creates a cepstrum based on the pitch synchronous analysis using the inherent pitch of the speaker. Therefore, the cepstrum called the 〃pitch synchronous cepstrum〃 (PSC) represents the impulse response of the vocal tract more accurately in voiced speech. And the PSC can compensate for channel distortion because the pitch is more robust in a channel environment than the spectrum of speech. And the proposed channel normalization method, the 〃formant-broadened pitch synchronous CMS〃 (FBPSCMS), applies the Formant-Broadened CMS to the PSC and improves the accuracy of the intraframe processing. We compared the text-independent closed-set speaker identification on 56 females and 112 males using TIMIT and NTIMIT database, respectively. The results show that pitch synchronous km improves the error reduction rate by up to 7.7% in comparison with conventional short-time cepstrum and the error rates of the FBPSCMS are more stable and lower than those of pole-filtered CMS.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.89-95
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• 1995

The waveform coding technique has concerned with simply preserving the waveform shape of speech signal through a redundancy reduction process. In the case of speech synthesis, the waveform coding with high sound quality is mainly used to the synthesis by analysis. However, since the parameters of this coding are not classified into either excitation or vocal tract parameters, it is difficult to applying the waveform coding to the synthesis by rule. In order to apply the waveform coding to the synthesis by rule, the pitch alteration technique is required in prosody control. In this paper, we propose a new pitch alteration method that can change the pitch period in waveform coding by scaling the time-axis and compensating the spectrum. This is relevant to the time-frequency domain method were the phase components of the waveform is preserved with a little spectrum distortion of 2.5 % and less for 50% pitch change.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.99-107
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers in order to better instruct pronunciation skills of English vowels for Korean English learners. A Praat script was developed to collect the first and second formant values(F1 and F2) of eight words in each sound file which was recorded from an internet speech archive. Then, the Euclidean distances were measured between the three vowel pairs: [i-ɛ], [i-ɪ], and [ɛ-æ]. The first vowel pair [i-ɛ] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel wih differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Secondly, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-ɪ] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [ɛ-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level. The author concluded that Korean speakers should produce the front high vowels distinctively by securing sufficient relative distance of the formant values. Further studies would be desirable to examine how strong the Korean speakers' English proficiency correlate with the relative distance of target words of comparable productions.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.96-101
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• 2007

Laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) is the retrograde movement of gastric contents into the larynx, pharynx, and upper aero-digestive tract. LPR differs from gastroesophageal reflux in that it is often not associated with heartburn and regurgitation symptoms. Otolaryngological manifestations of acid reflux include a wide range of pharyngeal and laryngeal symptoms. Belafsky et al. developed a useful self-administered tool, the reflux symptom index (RSI), for assessing the degree of LPR symptoms. Patients are asked to use a 0 to 5 point scale to grade the following symptoms: 1) hoarseness or voice problems; 2) throat clearing; 3) excess throat mucus or postnasal drip ; 4) difficulty swallowing; 5) coughing after eating or lying down; 6) breathing difficulties ; 7) troublesome or annoying cough; 8) sensation of something sticking or a lump in the throat; 9) heartburn, chest pain, indigestion or stomach acid coming up. A RSI score greater than 13 is considered abnormal. As there is no validated instrument to document the physical findings and severity of LPR, Belafsky et al. developed an eight-item clinical severity scale for judging laryngoscopic finding, the reflux finding score (RFS). They rated eight LPR-associated findings on a scale from 0 to 4 : subglottic edema, ventricular obliteration, erythema/hyperemia, vocal-fold edema, diffuse laryngeal edema, posterior commissure hypertrophy, granuloma/granulation tissue, and thick endolaryngeal mucus. A RFS score of greater than 7 was found to suggest LPR-associated laryngitis. Although both indices (RSI and RFS) are widely used, there is some controversy about their validity (sensitivity and specificity) and reliability (intra-rater and inter-rater) in LPR diagnosis and treatment. We discuss the validity and reliability of RSI and RFS with literature review.