• 재활복지
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.189-208
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• 2018

This case study investigated the changes in speech intelligibility of patients with head and neck cancers who participated in a therapeutic singing-based intervention. Three patients received a total of twelve 30-minute individual sessions. The intervention consisted of three steps: movements for relaxing breathing muscles, vocalization for increasing the range of articulatory movements, and therapeutic singing. In order to examine the changes in speech intelligibility, the voice quality parameters, diadochokinesis (DDK) and the quadrangle vowel space area (VSA) were measured at pre- and posttest. The recording of what each patient read a written paragraph, which were transcribed by blinded assessors, were also analyzed. The results demonstrated that all of the patients showed positive changes in the voice quality, the rate of repetitive syllable production measured by DDK, and the articulatory working space measured by VSA. Along with these measured changes, increases in positive mood and rehabilitation motivation reported by the patients support that the therapeutic singing-based intervention could induce meaningful changes in terms of speech intelligibility from patients with head and neck cancers. Given that this study was conducted with a small sample size, suggestions for further investigation on the effects of the intervention were also presented.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.21-27
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• 1997

Total laryngectomy has become an usual treatment for any advanced carcinoma of the laynx, but most patients who have undergone total laryngectomy have shown permanant disability in voice production. I compared the first three formant frequencies estimated from MRI to those measured directly from speech data of the T-E patients and the normal. It was to estimate the accuracy of MRI and to compare the vocal tract shape of the normal to T-E patients. The obtained results were as follows : 1. The middle sagittle section of the MRI represents vocal tract well during pnonation. The vocal tract shape of the T-E shunt patients are lack of pharyngeal space and superior space of the glottis. 2. The length of the normal subject's vocal tract is 17 cm. For the T-E shunt patients, the length from lip to shunt opening is 17.5 cm in case 1, and 18.5 cm in case 2. That of the true resonante chamber is 13 cm and 13.5 cm for each case respectively. 3. T-E shunt patients phonated strained voice. The intensity of the higher formant frequency decreased especially in /o/, /u/. 4. The vocal tract is shortened during the phonation by T-E shunt patients. In case of /e/ and /i/, front cavities are constricted while back cavities are shortened. 5. The pseudoglottis of the T-E shunt patients is located at $14{\sim}15\;cm$ below from lips.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.99-109
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• 2024

Coarticulation is affected by the continuous movement of the articulator within a limited time and space through the neighboring segments and various overlaps. This study investigated the differences in coarticulation characteristics of children with reading disabilities and nondisabled children in CVC and VCV syllables consisted of stops, affricates, and vowels (a, i, u). The subjects were 13 children with reading disabilities and nondisabled children in the 2nd to 6th grades in elementary school. Two second formants were measured. One was measured at the point where the vowel began, and the other was measured at the mid point of the vowel stable section. Regression analysis was performed with F2 onset and F2 of the following vowel to obtain the locus equation (LE). 3-way ANOVA was conducted to the slope of the LE according to the groups (reading disabilities vs. nondisabled), places of articulation, and phonation types. In CVC syllable, dyslexic children showed a flatter slope than nondisabled children. With respect to the places of articulation, velar or bilabial sounds showed steeper LE slope than alveolar or palatal sounds. There were no main effects regarding group and phonation types variable for VCV syllable, and the significant differences in the places of articulation were also differed from the results for the CVC syllables. This study confirmed that dyslexic children showed a different pattern of coarticulation slope depending on the syllable structure. We also found that the higher pause rate of the dyslexic children had a stronger effect on the coarticulation in VCV structures.

• MALSORI
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• no.56
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• pp.103-125
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• 2005

We present a new method of measuring the volume and cross-sectional area of the vocal tract from magnetic resonance images. The vocal tract was divided by the 2 constriction points on the horizontal and vertical planes. The ratios of the volumes of the segment vocal tracts to that of the entire vocal tract play a crucial role in discriminating Korean monophthongs in that vowels were successfully discriminated by the ratios. The discriminant analysis also demonstrated that the acoustic parameters F1 and F2, in addition to the segment volumes, serve as significant parameters in discriminating Korean monophthongs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.19-27
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• 2019

Lateral approximants are well known as having complex articulatory characteristics, which vary cross-linguistically, across speakers, and across utterances. However, less attention has been paid to the articulation of Korean laterals, which do not contrast with a rhotic and may thus exhibit greater-than-normal variability. The focus of this study is to investigate the general articulatory characteristics of the Korean lateral [l] as well as the articulatory variation using novel 3D ultrasound imaging methods. The results of this study revealed significant between-speaker variation and some vowel-dependent variation with regard to the articulation of the Korean lateral [l], which has not been reported previously. Even though all participants in this study showed an anterior occlusion, the place of articulation and the size of the occlusion varied greatly across speakers. The data also revealed that left-right asymmetry is present in the articulation of the Korean lateral. The individual variation of the Korean lateral [l] suggests that it has a large articulatory-acoustic space for variation, since it has no contrasting sound that causes perceptual confusion.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.634-642
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• 2018

People with spinocerebellar ataxia, a hereditary and progressive neurogenic disorder, suffer from ataxic dysarthria due to cerebellar dystrophy. This study was designed to examine if intensive motor speech treatment yields improvement in progressive ataxic dysarthria and if then, to investigate magnitude of therapeutic effect. SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ was provided to a 55-year old female diagnosed with SCA for improving motor speech functions. Magnitude of therapeutic effect was large in changes of MPT and vocal intensity across speech tasks. Small effect size was found in changes of fundamental frequency, however, large therapeutic effect was observed in changes of frequency range. In addition, improvement of vocal quality based on jitter, shimmer, and HNR was observed with large therapeutic effect size and vowel space was expanded, particularly, due to F1. Lastly, VHI scores were decreased. Intensive motor speech treatment, called as SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ was effective enough to observe improvement in vocal intensity, frequency range, and vocal quality, expanding vowel space and lowering VHI scores. Based on the results of this case study, further efficacy evaluation of SPEAK $OUT!^{(R)}$ for improving progressive ataxic dysarthria in people with SCA is required.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.2219-2228
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• 2015

The proposed RDT(Reversed Double T) girder bridge is suitable to eco corridor, because of its cross section which resembles Korean alphabet vowel "ㅛ". The total height and cost of bridge would be reduced for its inner space containing some of plant soil. In this study, the performance of the RDT girder was assessed by comparing results of static test with those of nonlinear analysis. The cracking load of the RDT girder was evaluated more than two times of design load.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.133-144
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• 2009

Pharyngeal flap surgery changes the space and shape of the oral cavity and vocal tract, and these changing conditions bring resonance change. The purpose of this study was to determine the most reliable and valuable parameters for evaluating hypernasality to distinguish two patients before and after pharyngeal flap surgery. Each patient was asked to clearly speak the vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/ for voice recording. There were nine parameters: Formant (F1, F2, F3), Bandwidth (BW1, BW2, BW3), LPC energy slope ($\Delta$ |A2-A1/F2-F1|), and Band Energy (0-500 Hz, 500-1000 Hz) by each vowel. From the results of discrimination analyses on acoustic parameters, the vowels /a/, /e/ appeared to be insignificant but vowels /i/, /u/, /o/ appeared to be efficient in the separation. A 95%, 100%, and 100% recognition score could be reached when vowels /i/, /u/, and /o/ were analyzed. The results showed that F2, BW3, and LPC slope are more important parameters than the others. Finally, there is a relation between perceptual evaluation score and LPC energy slope of acoustic parameters by least square slope.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.51-57
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• 2018

In this paper, we studied about the extraction of the parameter and implementation of speechreading system to recognize the Korean 8 vowel. Face features are detected by amplifying, reducing the image value and making a comparison between the image value which is represented for various value in various color space. The eyes position, the nose position, the inner boundary of lip, the outer boundary of upper lip and the outer line of the tooth is found to the feature and using the analysis the area of inner lip, the hight and width of inner lip, the outer line length of the tooth rate about a inner mouth area and the distance between the nose and outer boundary of upper lip are used for the parameter. 2400 data are gathered and analyzed. Based on this analysis, the neural net is constructed and the recognition experiments are performed. In the experiment, 5 normal persons were sampled. The observational error between samples was corrected using normalization method. The experiment show very encouraging result about the usefulness of the parameter.