• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.103-113
• /
• 2016

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.24 no.2E
• /
• pp.71-76
• /
• 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
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.65-72
• /
• 2004

The force of articulation is different between voiced and voiceless consonants in the binary opposition system. However, the Korean voiceless stop consonants have a triple opposition system: lenis, aspirated, and glottalized. The aim of this study is to find the primary distinctive feature between the force of articulation and the aspiration for the three different types of Korean stops. Two native speakers of the Seoul dialect participated to this study. The corpus was composed of less than eight syllabic words containing consonants in word-initial position and intervocalic position. Radiocinematography and Mingography were used to analyze the articulatory tension and acoustic characteristics. Korean stops have independent features of articulatory tension and aspiration, in which the indices are different according to position. However, in this system which does not have the opposition of sonority, the force of articulation is the primary distinctive feature and the feature of aspiration is subsidiary.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.185-200
• /
• 2005

The objective of this study is to examine acoustic cues in spoken French for the assessment of pronunciation which is necessary to realization of the multimedia system. The corpus is composed of simple expressions which consist of the French phonological system include all phonemes. This experiment was made on 4 male and female French native speakers and on 20 Korean speakers, university students who had learned the French language more than two years. We analyzed the recorded data by using spectrograph and measured comparative features by the numerical values. First of all, we found the mean and the deviation of all phonemes, and then chose features which had high error frequency and great differences between French and Korean pronunciations. The selected data were simplified and compared among them. After we judged whether the problems of pronunciation in each Korean speaker were either the utterance mistake or the interference of mother tongue, in terms of articulatory and auditory aspects, we tried to find acoustic features as simplified as possible. From this experiment, we could extract acoustic cues for the construction of the French pronunciation training system.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.91-99
• /
• 2019

An innovative tone modeling framework based on deep neural networks in tone recognition was proposed in this paper. In the framework, both the prosodic features and the articulatory features were firstly extracted as the raw input data. Then, a 5-layer-deep deep belief network was presented to obtain high-level tone features. Finally, support vector machine was trained to recognize tones. The 863-data corpus had been applied in experiments, and the results show that the proposed method helped improve the recognition accuracy significantly for all tone patterns. Meanwhile, the average tone recognition rate reached 83.03%, which is 8.61% higher than that of the original method.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.57-66
• /
• 2021

This study focuses on the issue of automatic severity classification of dysarthric speakers based on speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility is a complex measure that is affected by the features of multiple speech dimensions. However, most previous studies are restricted to using features from a single speech dimension. To effectively capture the characteristics of the speech disorder, we extracted features of multiple speech dimensions: voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation. Voice quality consists of jitter, shimmer, Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR), number of voice breaks, and degree of voice breaks. Prosody includes speech rate (total duration, speech duration, speaking rate, articulation rate), pitch (F0 mean/std/min/max/med/25quartile/75 quartile), and rhythm (%V, deltas, Varcos, rPVIs, nPVIs). Pronunciation contains Percentage of Correct Phonemes (Percentage of Correct Consonants/Vowels/Total phonemes) and degree of vowel distortion (Vowel Space Area, Formant Centralized Ratio, Vowel Articulatory Index, F2-Ratio). Experiments were conducted using various feature combinations. The experimental results indicate that using features from all three speech dimensions gives the best result, with a 80.15 F1-score, compared to using features from just one or two speech dimensions. The result implies voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation features should all be considered in automatic severity classification of dysarthria.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.19-33
• /
• 2006

The purpose of this paper was to examine acoustical characteristics of phonatory offset-onset mechanism in the connected speech of female adults with stuttering and normal nonfluency. The phonatory offset-onset mechanism refers to the laryngeal articulatory gestures. Those gestures are required to mark word boundaries in phonetic contexts of the connected speech. This mechanism included 7 patterns based on the speech spectrogram. This study showed the acoustic features in the connected speech in the production of female adults with stuttering (n=1) and normal nonfluency (n=3). Speech tokens in V_V, V_H, and V_S contexts were selected for the analysis. Speech samples were recorded by Sound Forge, and the spectrographic analysis was conducted using Praat. Results revealed a stuttering (with a type of block) female exhibited more laryngealization gestures in the V_V context. Laryngealization gesture was more characterized by a complete glottal stop or glottal fry both in V_H and in V_S contexts. The results were discussed from theoretical and clinical perspectives.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.4
• /
• pp.29-38
• /
• 2009

This study investigated the interaction between consonants and vowels in Korean syllable perception using a speeded classification task (Garner, 1978). Experiment 1 examined whether listeners analytically perceive the component phonemes in CV monosyllables when classification is based on the component phonemes (a consonant or a vowel) and observed a significant redundancy gain and a Garner interference effect. These results imply that the perception of the component phonemes in a CV syllable is not linear. Experiment 2 examined the further relation between consonants and vowels at a subphonemic level comparing classification times based on glottal features (aspiration and lax), on place of articulation features (labial and coronal), and on vowel features (front and back). Across all feature classifications, there were significant but asymmetric interference effects. Glottal feature.based classification showed the least amount of interference effect, while vowel feature.based classification showed moderate interference, and place of articulation feature-based classification showed the most interference. These results show that glottal features are more independent to vowels, but place features are more dependent to vowels in syllable perception. To examine the three-way interaction among glottal, place of articulation, and vowel features, Experiment 3 featured a modified Garner task. The outcome of this experiment indicated that glottal consonant features are independent to both the place of articulation and vowel features, but the place of articulation features are dependent to glottal and vowel features. These results were interpreted to show that speech perception is not abstract and discrete, but nonlinear, and that the perception of features corresponds to the hierarchical organization of articulatory features which is suggested in nonlinear phonology (Clements, 1991; Browman and Goldstein, 1989).

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.345-352
• /
• 1995

The LPC cepstrum coefficients, which are an acoustic features of speech signal, have been widely used as the feature parameter for various speech recognition systems and showed good performance. The vocal tract area function is a kind of articulatory feature, which is related with the physiological mechanism of speech production. This paper proposes the vocal tract area function as an alternative feature parameter for speech recognition. The linear predictive analysis using Burg algorithm and the vector quantization are performed. Then, recognition experiments for 5 Korean vowels and 10 digits are executed using the conventional LPC cepstrum coefficients and the vocal tract area function. The recognitions using the area function showed the slightly better results than those using the conventional LPC cepstrum coefficients.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6
• /
• pp.103-117
• /
• 1999

This paper suggests that the onset-coda asymmetry found in languages like Korean and others should be dealt with in terms of one acoustic feature rather than other articulatory features, claiming that the acoustic feature involved here is [noise], i.e., 'aperiodic waveform energy'. It determines the structural well-formedness of the languages in question whether a coda ends in [noise] or not, regardless of the intensity, the frequency, and the time duration of the [noise]. Fricatives, affricates, aspirated stops, tense stops, and released stops are all disallowed in the coda position due to the acoustic feature [noise] they, commonly end with if they were, posited in the coda. The proposal implies that the three seemingly separate prohibitions of consonants in the coda position -- i) no fricatives/affricates, ii) no aspirated/tense stops, and iii) no released stops -- are directly correlated with each other. Incorporation of the one acoustic feature [noise] in the feature theory enables us to see that the aspects of onset-coda asymmetry are derived from one single source: ban, of [noise] in the coda.