Speech Production

This paper describes a database of dysarthric speech produced by 19 speakers with cerebral palsy. Speech materials consist of 765 isolated words per speaker: 300 distinct uncommon words and 3 repetitions of digits, computer commands, radio alphabet and common words. Data is recorded through an 8-microphone array and one digital video camera. Our database provides a fundamental resource for automatic speech recognition development for people with neuromotor disability. Research on articulation errors in dysarthria will benefit clinical treatments and contribute to our knowledge of neuromotor mechanisms in speech production. Data files are available via secure ftp upon request.

Most contemporary text books of neurology and of psychology pay little attention to the function of the cerebellum beyond noting it to be an organ of motor control. A historical overview of research on cerebellar function is presented, from pre-Sherrinton suggestions of sensory and motor function, through the post-Sherrinton and dominant 20 th . Century view of "motor" function, to the 21 st . century perspective of "sensorimotor" function. The intrinsic capability of the cerebellum is briefly considered in terms of: its size/complexity/capacity; its information representation/processing characteristics (with "a particular computational function"); its sensory information processing capability; and, its role in sensorimotor regulatory control. It is suggested that the cerebellum can process sensorimotor stimulus information in a statistical (connectionist type) manner and respond to in on the basis of its own learning based sensorimotor representations, albeit at a "level" that does not necessarily involve cerebral "awareness".

Previous studies have found that talkers converge or diverge in phonetic form during a single conversational session or as a result of long-term exposure to a particular linguistic environment. In the current study, five pairs of previously unacquainted male roommates were recorded at four time intervals during the academic year. Phonetic convergence over time was assessed using a perceptual similarity test and measures of vowel spectra. There were distinct patterns of phonetic convergence during the academic year across roommate pairs, and perceptual detection of convergence varied for different linguistic items. In addition, phonetic convergence correlated moderately with roommates' self-reported closeness. These findings suggest that phonetic convergence in college roommates is variable and moderately related to the strength of a relationship.

Work on adult humans has revealed a limit on the size of freely forming conversational groups that has been attributed to the mechanical constraints on human speech production. However, it is also possible that cognitive constraints limit the number of individuals with which it is possible to interact. Data from South African and British children were used to test this hypothesis. A significant developmental trend in both clique and group sizes was found, which mapped onto the developmental trend for metacognitive skills. Notably, children with high levels of metarepresentational skill for their age were not found in significantly larger groups. This may be because group size is set by the average level of metarepresentation within a particular population and/or that extensive experience of within-group peer interaction is needed to function within larger groups. D

This paper reports two experiments designed to investigate whether lexical bias in phonological speech errors is caused by immediate feedback of activation, by self-monitoring of inner speech, or by both. The experiments test a number of predictions derived from a model of self-monitoring of inner speech. This model assumes that, after an error in inner speech, (1) an early interruption of speech may be made when speech was initiated too hastily, (2) the error may be covertly repaired, leading to the correct target, (3) the error may be covertly replaced by another speech error, or (4) an error may go undetected, leading to a completed spoonerism. This model of self-monitoring was supported by the speech errors observed in two SLIP experiments. The pattern of results supports the idea that lexical bias has two sources, immediate feedback of activation and self-monitoring of inner speech.

Purpose This systematic review aimed to determine the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention on speech production in children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified. Method A systematic review methodology was utilized to limit bias in searching, selecting, coding, and synthesizing relevant treatment studies. This involved a multifaceted search for studies written between 1975 and May 2007 using various bibliographic databases, dissertation databases, hand searches of selected journals and published compilations of AAC theses and dissertations, and ancestry searches. To be included, studies had to meet stringent criteria. A coding manual and form facilitated data extraction in terms of participant characteristics, treatment characteristics, design and measurement, and outcomes. Results Nine single-subject experimental design (27 participants) and 2 group studies (98 participants) were included. Results indicated that ...

Stuttering is a developmental disorder of speech production that usually emerges in childhood. In this study, a large population-based twin sample from the Australian Twin Registry (1567 pairs and 634 singles aged 17–29 years) was screened to identify twin pairs in which one or both members reported themselves to be affected by stuttering. Telephone interview-based diagnoses were obtained for 457 of these individuals (self-reported affected cases, cotwins, and controls) to determine whether the self-report was correct. To correct ...

The primary functional role of conversational hand gestures in narrative discourse is disputed. A novel experimental technique investigated whether gestures function primarily to aid speech production by the speaker, or communication to the listener. The experiment involved repeated narration of a cartoon story or stories to a single or multiple listeners. The pattern of results matched that predicted by the communication hypothesis. In a second experiment, the effects of attention in the listener were investigated. Significant differences were found in gesture production when narrating to attentive versus inattentive listeners. These results support the theory that during a narrative task gestures are produced primarily for the benefit of the listener. Our technique can readily be generalized to other tasks and contexts.

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat leads to changes in how acoustic prominence is realized in speech, and whether it leads to changes in how prominence is perceived by observers. For Experiment I (''making beats'') we use an original experimental paradigm in which speakers are instructed to realize a target sentence with different distributions of acoustic and visual cues for prominence. Acoustic analyses reveal that the production of a visual beat indeed has an effect on the acoustic realization of the co-occurring speech, in particular on duration and the higher formants (F 2 and F 3 ), independent of the kind of visual beat and of the presence and position of pitch accents. In Experiment II (''hearing beats''), it is found that visual beats have a significant effect on the perceived prominence of the target words. When a speaker produces a beat gesture, an eyebrow movement or a head nod, the accompanying word is produced with relatively more spoken emphasis. In Experiment III (''seeing beats''), finally, it is found that when participants see a speaker realize a visual beat on a word, they perceive it as more prominent than when they do not see the beat gesture.

This paper examines whether there is an asymmetry in production and perception of the stop-fricative contrast by Dutch learning children. The development of stops and fricatives in both word-initial and post-vocalic position is studied. To investigate the acquisition of stops and fricatives in production, longitudinal spontaneous speech data of six Dutch one- to three-year-olds was analyzed. To test infants’ perception of this contrast, a series of word-learning experiments using the Switch paradigm was conducted with 62 Dutch 14-month-olds. The data show similar phonological asymmetries: in both perception and production infants treat stops differently from fricatives. Based on this phonological asymmetry we argue that (a) children use the same lexical representations for perception and production, suggesting that development in perception and production go hand in hand, that (b) early lexical representations are not specified with respect to all features, and that (c) specification does not occur in all prosodic positions at the same time

The mental health, adaptive behaviour and intellectual abilities of people with Down syndrome (n=129) were evaluated in a population-based survey of social and health care records. Females had better cognitive abilities and speech production compared with males. Males had more behavioural problems than females. Behaviour suggestive of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was often seen in childhood. Depression was diagnosed mainly in adults with mild to moderate intellectual disability. Autistic behaviour was most common in individuals with profound intellectual disability. Elderly people often showed decline of adaptive behaviour associated with Alzheimer's disease. Case descriptions are presented to illustrate the multitude of mental health and behavioural issues seen from childhood to old age in this population.

Infants (from Latin infans, speechless) are human beings who cannot speak. It took most of us the whole first year of our lives to overcome this infancy and to produce our first few meaningful words, but we were not idle as infants. We worked, rather independently, on two basic ingredients of word production. On the one hand, we established our primary notions of agency, interactancy, the temporal and causal structures of events, object permanence and location. This provided us with a matrix for the creation of our first lexical concepts, concepts flagged by way of a verbal label. Initially, these word labels were exclusively auditory patterns, picked up from the environment. On the other hand, we created a repertoire of babbles, a set of syllabic articulatory gestures. These motor patterns normally spring up around the seventh month. The child carefully attends to their acoustic manifestations, leading to elaborate exercises in the repetition and concatenation of these syllabic patterns. In addition, these audiomotor patterns start resonating with real speech input, becoming more and more tuned to the mother tongue (De Boysson-Bardies & Vihman 1991; Elbers 1982). These exercises provided us with a protosyllabary, a core repository of speech motor patterns, which were, however, completely meaningless.

Purpose: To examine the relationship between phonological processing skills prior to kindergarten entry and reading skills at the end of 1st grade, in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Method: The participants were 17 children with SSD and poor phonological processing skills (SSD-low PP), 16 children with SSD and good phonological processing skills (SSD-high PP), and 35 children with typical speech who were first assessed during their prekindergarten year using measures of phonological processing (i.e., speech perception, rime awareness, and onset awareness tests), speech production, receptive and expressive language, and phonological awareness skills. This assessment was repeated when the children were completing 1st grade. The Test of Word Reading Efficiency was also conducted at that time. First-grade sight word and nonword reading performance was compared across these groups. Results: At the end of 1st grade, the SSD-low PP group achieved significantly lower nonword decoding scores than the SSD-high PP and typical speech groups. The 2 SSD groups demonstrated similarly good receptive language skills and similarly poor articulation skills at that time, however. No between-group differences in sight word reading were observed. All but 1 child (in the SSD-low PP group) obtained reading scores that were within normal limits. Conclusion: Weaknesses in phonological processing were stable for the SSD-low PP subgroup over a 2-year period.

The current study examined the pattern of prosodic phrasing and the distribution of post-lexical pitch accent types in a Spanish-English bilingual child. We collected utterances from natural interactions between parents and the child at the age of 2;6 and 3;0, and analyzed them using MAE_ToBI and SP_ToBI. Then we compared prosodic development across ages within each language, and compared the child's speech production with monolingual English and Spanish parents' productions. Results revealed that both the child and parents divide their short utterances into smaller prosodic phrases and that most content words bear post-lexical pitch accent. The result suggests that there are abundant acoustic correlates of prosodic phrases and prominence in the language input, and it can make the word segmentation task easy for children.

This study focuses on the comorbidity between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and speech sound disorder (SSD). SSD is a developmental disorder characterized by speech production errors that impact intelligibility. Previous research addressing this comorbidity has typically used heterogeneous groups of speech–language disordered children. This study employed more precise speech–language diagnostic criteria and examined ADHD symptomatology in 108 SSD children between the ages of 4 and 7 years old with specific language impairment (SLI) (n = 23, 14 males, 9 females) and without SLI (n = 85, 49 males, 36 females). We also examined whether a subcategory of SSD, persistent (n = 39, 25 males, 14 females) versus normalized SSD (n = 67, 38 males, 29 females), was associated with ADHD and/or interacted with SLI to predict ADHD symptomatology. Results indicated that participants in the SSD + SLI group had higher rates of inattentive ADHD symptoms than those in the SSD-only and control groups. In addition, an unexpected interaction emerged such that children with SLI and normalized-SSD had significantly higher ADHD inattentive ratings than the other subgroups. A proposed explanation for this interaction is discussed.

Poster presented at the International Association for the Study of Dreams, 34th Annual International Conference, June 16-20, 2017. The poster outlines a study on avatar animation of dreamer motor behavior from electromyography collected at the University of Texas, Austin, Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in 2016.

This article presents an overview of the literature on speech tempo and the topics dealt with. Tempo is not one of the more frequently explored areas of speech research, and any possible consequences of tempo variation for other phonetic phenomena have all too often beentaken for granted. Unfortunately, this field is complicated by pitfalls of definition and hazards of numerical treatment.

RESUMEN
Objetivo: observar la capacidad de cinco individuos venezolanos que usan aparatos dentales ortodónticos para articular el habla y verificar la influencia de los aparatos en la percepción del habla por parte de
sus interlocutores. Métodos: se utilizó un corpus conformado por dos grabaciones de la lectura de un Test de Pares Mínimos realizadas por cinco hablantes antes y después de iniciar el tratamiento con los aparatos. Dichas grabaciones fueron luego expuestas a veinte oyentes adultos con la finalidad de que identificaran lo oído; sirviéndose de un test ad hoc, basado en el de los Pares Mínimos arriba indicado. Cada uno de los oyentes marcó la opción que creyó haber percibido. Resultados: el análisis de los datos arrojados por los dos conjuntos de tests permitió determinar los sonidos, los rasgos distintivos y los puntos articulatorios afectados por el uso de aparatos en los hablantes. Se demuestra que los sonidos mayormente afectados por los aparatos dentales son /t/, /m/, /p/, /f/, /b/, / /, /k/ y / /; los rasgos y oposiciones distintivas afectadas son [grave]: /b – d/, /f – s/, /m – /, /m – n/ y /p – t/; [sonoro]: /g – k/, /p – b/ y /t – d/ e [interrupto]: / - s/ ; por su parte, los lugares de articulación afectados son bilabial, alveolar, palatal, dental e interdental. Conclusiones: la presencia de los aparatos dentales ortodónticos en la cavidad bucal causa serios problemas en la articulación de los sonidos lingüísticos afectando de esa manera la percepción del habla por parte de los interlocutores. Los problemas de
articulación con el paso del tiempo van decreciendo.

To judge the influence of speaker background on the quality of five long vowels and diphthongs /oU/, /eI/, /Au/, /EI/, and /2y/ in Standard Dutch, the spectra of these vowel realizations in spontaneous speech were measured for 70 subjects, and analyzed with regard to the subjects' regions of education and residence, their level of education and occupation, as well as their sex and age. Our preliminary analyses indic- ated that high educated speakers lowered (higher F1, articulated more open) the long vowels and diph- thongs and diphthongized them stronger than low educated speakers. There seemed to be effects of age but more data were needed to specify these. The new data show that besides the level of educa- tion or occupation, the factor 'age group' has a ma- jor effect on the variations in speech production. The vowel attributes 'onset' and 'degree of diphthong- ization' were affected variably by speaker back- ground data. Speakers of the older ...

Early foreign language (FL) programs have grown rapidly worldwide in the past two decades, resting on the assumption that “earlier is better” for learning a FL. However, the majority of empirical studies that investigated the “earlier is better” hypothesis were conducted in naturalistic immersion contexts. Given the substantial differences in the quality and quantity of input and instruction, whether or not the results in immersion contexts can be generalized to FL learning contexts remains unknown. The current study aimed to fill this gap by reviewing and synthesizing 40 empirical studies published in the past fifty years that examined the age of learning effect in FL learning contexts. Overall, the synthesis revealed no solid evidence for a younger learner advantage in short-term or long-term linguistic outcomes. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

Keywords: early foreign language education, formal classroom instruction, age of learning effect, research synthesis, critical/sensitive period.

This paper presents the feature analysis and design of compensators for speaker recognition under stressed speech conditions. Any condition that causes a speaker to vary his or her speech production from normal or neutral condition is called stressed speech condition. Stressed speech is induced by emotion, high workload, sleep deprivation, frustration and environmental noise. In stressed condition, the characteristics of speech signal are different from that of normal or neutral condition. Due to changes in speech signal characteristics, performance of the speaker recognition system may degrade under stressed speech conditions. Firstly, six speech features (mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), linear prediction (LP) coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients (LPCC), reflection coefficients (RC), arc-sin reflection coefficients (ARC) and log-area ratios (LAR)), which are widely used for speaker recognition, are analyzed for evaluation of their characteristics under stressed condition. Secondly, Vector Quantization (VQ) classifier and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) are used to evaluate speaker recognition results with different speech features. This analysis help select the best feature set for speaker recognition under stressed condition. Finally, four VQ based novel compensation techniques are proposed and evaluated for improvement of speaker recognition under stressed condition. The compensation techniques are speaker and stressed information based compensation (SSIC), compensation by removal of stressed vectors G. Senthil Raja ( ) iKoa semiconductor pvt.

Transcription is an essential clinical tool for speech-language pathologists as it provides a permanent written record of communicative behaviour and forms an important source of data for analysis, interpretation, decision making, and dissemination. One of the responsibilities in speech-language pathology is to faithfully capture the speech production characteristics of clinical populations so that informed management decisions may be made. Notation systems that are appropriately suited for this purpose are mandatory. In Australia today, the conventional phonemic transcription system was first described over 60 years ago. However, an alternative to this traditional system has more recently been proposed by Harrington, Cox and Evans (HCE). This paper details the HCE system and argues its advantage as a clinical tool for speechlanguage pathologists in Australia. This new system provides a more accurate phonetically oriented foundation against which atypical vowel production can be assessed. It is further argued that the HCE system can form the basis for narrower phonetic examination and has pedagogical value in the description of Standard Australian English.

The Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT) represents, next to pauses and slips of the tongue, a further impairment in speech production. When experiencing a TOT, one has access to semantic (concept) and syntactic information (lemma) but only partial access to phonological information (lexeme). The complete word form cannot be retrieved.

In order to evoke TOTs in an experimental setting, definitions were presented on a computer screen, for example, “a lift consisting of a series of linked compartments moving continuously“ for paternoster. The subjects pressed a button on the keyboard indicating that they know the word and are able to name it (KNOW), that they do not know the word (DON’T KNOW), or that the word is on their tip of the tongue (TOT). When in a TOT, a cue was presented visually.

In the cueing paradigm so far, syllable cues were embedded in words or pseudowords, and presented in word lists in order to manipulate TOT resolution. In the present studies, syllable cues were presented in isolation. The advantage is that the syllable itself has no semantic (word meaning) and syntactic information (word type). The presentation of isolated correct, incorrect, and extended syllables is new in TOT research. Furthermore, the present work offers the first investigation for both cueing and reaction times (RT) in German TOT research.

In the pre-test, definitions were verified, and in the two pilot studies, the design of the reaction time measurement was evaluated, and more definitions were collected and validated. In the first experiment, it was shown that after the presentation of the correct syllable (e.g., pa for paternoster), TOTs could be resolved about twice as fast compared to after an incorrect syllable (e.g., co) and to the control condition (xxx). The correct syllable also led to significantly more accurate answers compared to the other two conditions. The incorrect syllable did not block TOT resolution (not more inaccurate answers), but there was an inhibition effect: There were fewer accurate answers and more unresolved TOTs. In the second experiment, it was demonstrated that the extended syllable (e.g., pat for paternoster) significantly speeded up lexical access (shorter RTs), and significantly increased TOT resolution (more accurate answers). This may be explained with the segmental overlap effect. The results support models of speech production that allow for an interactive activation spread and assume a syllable level below the phoneme level.

This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one's native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.

The first part of this paper reviews research evidence for typological similarity and/or L2 status as determinants of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in multilingual lexical production. The second part presents a model of vocabulary acquisition as a framework to explain CLI at form, (syntactic) frame, and meaning levels as well as some of the developmental changes that have been reported for CLI patterns in relation to L3 learners’ proficiency. It is suggested that these patterns can be related to default processes and stages involved in the acquisition of individual word forms and their integration into networks of existing lexical triads as described in the Parasitic Model of vocabulary acquisition. The third part of this paper points to research into the complexity and non-linearity of multilingual lexical development and the need to learn more about it.

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de duas experiências que testaram a percepção e a produção de vogais anteriores inglesas por dez falantes nativos de mandarim. No que diz respeito a produção, foram medidos os dois primeiros formantes e a duração das vogais. Os resultados revelam que as informantes chinesas tiveram dificuldades em produzir vogais inglesas sem equivalentes na língua nativa (L1), mostrando tendência para perceber duas categorias da língua estrangeira (L2) como sendo apenas uma e para produzir as vogais da L2 com menor duração do que as informantes americanas que formavam o grupo de controlo. Quanto a percepção, os resultados de um teste de identificação mostram que a vogal da L2 com uma equivalente na L1 (/i/) foi a que teve taxas de identificação correcta mais elevadas. Os resultados demonstram que a performance perceptiva e superior a produtiva, e que a percepção e a produção estão relacionadas: as taxas de identificação mais elevadas no teste de percepção correspondiam a resultados melhores em termos de produção; e as taxas de identificação mais baixas a uma produção menos precisa.

Despite abundant evidence of malleability in speech production, previous studies of the effects of late second-language learning on first-language production have been limited to advanced learners. This dissertation examines these effects in novice learners, finding that experience in a second language rapidly, and possibly inexorably, affects production of the native language. In a longitudinal study of Korean acquisition, native English-speaking adult learners (n = 19) produced the same English words at weekly intervals over the course of intensive elementary Korean classes. Results of two acoustic case studies indicate that experience with Korean rapidly influences the production of English, and that the effect is one of assimilation to phonetic properties of Korean. In case study 1, experience with Korean stop types is found to influence the production of English stop types (in terms of voice onset time and/or fundamental frequency onset) as early as the second week of Korean classes, resulting in the lengthening of VOT in English voiceless stops (in approximation to the longer VOT of the perceptually similar Korean aspirated stops) and the raising of F0 onset following English voiced and voiceless stops (in approximation to the higher F0 levels of Korean). Similarly, in case study 2, experience with the Korean vowel space is found to have a significant effect on production of the English vowel space, resulting in a general raising of females' English vowels in approximation to the overall higher Korean vowel space. These rapid effects of second-language experience on first-language production suggest that cross-language linkages are established from the onset of second-language learning, that they occur at multiple levels, and that they are based not on orthographic equivalence, but on phonetic and/or phonological proximity between languages. The findings are discussed with respect to current notions of cross-linguistic similarity, exemplar models of phonology, and language teaching and research practices.