Influence of phonetic context on the dysphonic event: contribution of new methodologies for the analysis of pathological voice.

PubMed

Revis, J; Galant, C; Fredouille, C; Ghio, A; Giovanni, A

2012-01-01

Widely studied in terms of perception, acoustics or aerodynamics, dysphonia stays nevertheless a speech phenomenon, closely related to the phonetic composition of the message conveyed by the voice. In this paper, we present a series of three works with the aim to understand the implications of the phonetic manifestation of dysphonia. Our first study proposes a new approach to the perceptual analysis of dysphonia (the phonetic labeling), which principle is to listen and evaluate each phoneme in a sentence separately. This study confirms the hypothesis of Laver that the dysphonia is not a constant noise added to the speech signal, but a discontinuous phenomenon, occurring on certain phonemes, based on the phonetic context. However, the burden of executing the task has led us to look to the techniques of automatic speaker recognition (ASR) to automate the procedure. With the collaboration of the LIA, we have developed a system for automatic classification of dysphonia from the techniques of ASR. This is the subject of our second study. The first results obtained with this system suggest that the unvoiced consonants show predominant performance in the task of automatic classification of dysphonia. This result is surprising since it is often assumed that dysphonia occurs only on laryngeal vibration. We started looking for explanations of this phenomenon and we present our assumptions and experiences in the third work we present.

Perceptual recovery from consonant-cluster simplification in Korean using language-specific phonological knowledge.

PubMed

Cho, Taehong; McQueen, James M

2011-08-01

Two experiments examined whether perceptual recovery from Korean consonant-cluster simplification is based on language-specific phonological knowledge. In tri-consonantal C1C2C3 sequences such as /lkt/ and /lpt/ in Seoul Korean, either C1 or C2 can be completely deleted. Seoul Koreans monitored for C2 targets (/p/ or / k/, deleted or preserved) in the second word of a two-word phrase with an underlying /l/-C2-/t/ sequence. In Experiment 1 the target-bearing words had contextual lexical-semantic support. Listeners recovered deleted targets as fast and as accurately as preserved targets with both Word and Intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries between the two words. In Experiment 2, contexts were low-pass filtered. Listeners were still able to recover deleted targets as well as preserved targets in IP-boundary contexts, but better with physically-present targets than with deleted targets in Word-boundary contexts. This suggests that the benefit of having target acoustic-phonetic information emerges only when higher-order (contextual and phrase-boundary) information is not available. The strikingly efficient recovery of deleted phonemes with neither acoustic-phonetic cues nor contextual support demonstrates that language-specific phonological knowledge, rather than language-universal perceptual processes which rely on fine-grained phonetic details, is employed when the listener perceives the results of a continuous-speech process in which reduction is phonetically complete.

Talker variability in audio-visual speech perception

PubMed Central

Heald, Shannon L. M.; Nusbaum, Howard C.

2014-01-01

A change in talker is a change in the context for the phonetic interpretation of acoustic patterns of speech. Different talkers have different mappings between acoustic patterns and phonetic categories and listeners need to adapt to these differences. Despite this complexity, listeners are adept at comprehending speech in multiple-talker contexts, albeit at a slight but measurable performance cost (e.g., slower recognition). So far, this talker variability cost has been demonstrated only in audio-only speech. Other research in single-talker contexts have shown, however, that when listeners are able to see a talker’s face, speech recognition is improved under adverse listening (e.g., noise or distortion) conditions that can increase uncertainty in the mapping between acoustic patterns and phonetic categories. Does seeing a talker’s face reduce the cost of word recognition in multiple-talker contexts? We used a speeded word-monitoring task in which listeners make quick judgments about target word recognition in single- and multiple-talker contexts. Results show faster recognition performance in single-talker conditions compared to multiple-talker conditions for both audio-only and audio-visual speech. However, recognition time in a multiple-talker context was slower in the audio-visual condition compared to audio-only condition. These results suggest that seeing a talker’s face during speech perception may slow recognition by increasing the importance of talker identification, signaling to the listener a change in talker has occurred. PMID:25076919

Talker variability in audio-visual speech perception.

PubMed

Heald, Shannon L M; Nusbaum, Howard C

2014-01-01

A change in talker is a change in the context for the phonetic interpretation of acoustic patterns of speech. Different talkers have different mappings between acoustic patterns and phonetic categories and listeners need to adapt to these differences. Despite this complexity, listeners are adept at comprehending speech in multiple-talker contexts, albeit at a slight but measurable performance cost (e.g., slower recognition). So far, this talker variability cost has been demonstrated only in audio-only speech. Other research in single-talker contexts have shown, however, that when listeners are able to see a talker's face, speech recognition is improved under adverse listening (e.g., noise or distortion) conditions that can increase uncertainty in the mapping between acoustic patterns and phonetic categories. Does seeing a talker's face reduce the cost of word recognition in multiple-talker contexts? We used a speeded word-monitoring task in which listeners make quick judgments about target word recognition in single- and multiple-talker contexts. Results show faster recognition performance in single-talker conditions compared to multiple-talker conditions for both audio-only and audio-visual speech. However, recognition time in a multiple-talker context was slower in the audio-visual condition compared to audio-only condition. These results suggest that seeing a talker's face during speech perception may slow recognition by increasing the importance of talker identification, signaling to the listener a change in talker has occurred.

Effects of Participant Engagement on Prosodic Prominence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buxó-Lugo, Andrés; Toscano, Joseph C.; Watson, Duane G.

2018-01-01

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in…

Production and perception of contrast: The case of the rise-fall contour in German

PubMed Central

Kügler, Frank; Gollrad, Anja

2015-01-01

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context. PMID:26388795

The Acquisition of Phonetic Details: Evidence from the Production of English Reduced Vowels by Korean Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Han, Jeong-Im; Hwang, Jong-Bai; Choi, Tae-Hwan

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acquisition of non-contrastive phonetic details of a second language. Reduced vowels in English are realized as a schwa or barred- i depending on their phonological contexts, but Korean has no reduced vowels. Two groups of Korean learners of English who differed according to the experience of residence…

Effects and modeling of phonetic and acoustic confusions in accented speech.

PubMed

Fung, Pascale; Liu, Yi

2005-11-01

Accented speech recognition is more challenging than standard speech recognition due to the effects of phonetic and acoustic confusions. Phonetic confusion in accented speech occurs when an expected phone is pronounced as a different one, which leads to erroneous recognition. Acoustic confusion occurs when the pronounced phone is found to lie acoustically between two baseform models and can be equally recognized as either one. We propose that it is necessary to analyze and model these confusions separately in order to improve accented speech recognition without degrading standard speech recognition. Since low phonetic confusion units in accented speech do not give rise to automatic speech recognition errors, we focus on analyzing and reducing phonetic and acoustic confusability under high phonetic confusion conditions. We propose using likelihood ratio test to measure phonetic confusion, and asymmetric acoustic distance to measure acoustic confusion. Only accent-specific phonetic units with low acoustic confusion are used in an augmented pronunciation dictionary, while phonetic units with high acoustic confusion are reconstructed using decision tree merging. Experimental results show that our approach is effective and superior to methods modeling phonetic confusion or acoustic confusion alone in accented speech, with a significant 5.7% absolute WER reduction, without degrading standard speech recognition.

Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bang, Hye-Young; Clayards, Meghan; Goad, Heather

2017-01-01

Purpose: The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined: (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that…

Context Effects in the Processing of Phonolexical Ambiguity in L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chrabaszcz, Anna; Gor, Kira

2014-01-01

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

Lexical exposure to native language dialects can improve non-native phonetic discrimination.

PubMed

Olmstead, Annie J; Viswanathan, Navin

2018-04-01

Nonnative phonetic learning is an area of great interest for language researchers, learners, and educators alike. In two studies, we examined whether nonnative phonetic discrimination of Hindi dental and retroflex stops can be improved by exposure to lexical items bearing the critical nonnative stops. We extend the lexical retuning paradigm of Norris, McQueen, and Cutler (Cognitive Psychology, 47, 204-238, 2003) by having naive American English (AE)-speaking participants perform a pretest-training-posttest procedure. They performed an AXB discrimination task with the Hindi retroflex and dental stops before and after transcribing naturally produced words from an Indian English speaker that either contained these tokens or not. Only those participants who heard words with the critical nonnative phones improved in their posttest discrimination. This finding suggests that exposure to nonnative phones in native lexical contexts supports learning of difficult nonnative phonetic discrimination.

Age-related changes in the anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of young children

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Parson, Mathew; Lloyd, Amanda; Stoddard, Kelly; Nissen, Shawn L.

2003-10-01

This paper investigates the possible patterns of anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of young children. Speech samples were elicited from three groups of children between 3 and 6 years of age and one comparison group of adults. The utterances were recorded online in a quiet room environment using high quality microphones and direct analog-to-digital conversion to computer disk. Formant frequency measures (F1, F2, and F3) were extracted from a centralized and unstressed vowel (schwa) spoken prior to two different sets of productions. The first set of productions consisted of the target vowel followed by a series of real words containing an initial CV(C) syllable (voiceless obstruent-monophthongal vowel) in a range of phonetic contexts, while the second set consisted of a series of nonword productions with a relatively constrained phonetic context. An analysis of variance was utilized to determine if the formant frequencies varied systematically as a function of age, gender, and phonetic context. Results will also be discussed in association with spectral moment measures extracted from the obstruent segment immediately following the target vowel. [Work supported by research funding from Brigham Young University.

Syllable-constituent perception by hearing-aid users: Common factors in quiet and noise

PubMed Central

Miller, James D.; Watson, Charles S.; Leek, Marjorie R.; Dubno, Judy R.; Wark, David J.; Souza, Pamela E.; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Ahlstrom, Jayne B.

2017-01-01

The abilities of 59 adult hearing-aid users to hear phonetic details were assessed by measuring their abilities to identify syllable constituents in quiet and in differing levels of noise (12-talker babble) while wearing their aids. The set of sounds consisted of 109 frequently occurring syllable constituents (45 onsets, 28 nuclei, and 36 codas) spoken in varied phonetic contexts by eight talkers. In nominal quiet, a speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 40 dB, scores of individual listeners ranged from about 23% to 85% correct. Averaged over the range of SNRs commonly encountered in noisy situations, scores of individual listeners ranged from about 10% to 71% correct. The scores in quiet and in noise were very strongly correlated, R = 0.96. This high correlation implies that common factors play primary roles in the perception of phonetic details in quiet and in noise. Otherwise said, hearing-aid users' problems perceiving phonetic details in noise appear to be tied to their problems perceiving phonetic details in quiet and vice versa. PMID:28464618

Brain potentials to native phoneme discrimination reveal the origin of individual differences in learning the sounds of a second language

PubMed Central

Díaz, Begoña; Baus, Cristina; Escera, Carles; Costa, Albert; Sebastián-Gallés, Núria

2008-01-01

Human beings differ in their ability to master the sounds of their second language (L2). Phonetic training studies have proposed that differences in phonetic learning stem from differences in psychoacoustic abilities rather than speech-specific capabilities. We aimed at finding the origin of individual differences in L2 phonetic acquisition in natural learning contexts. We consider two alternative explanations: a general psychoacoustic origin vs. a speech-specific one. For this purpose, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from two groups of early, proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who differed in their mastery of the Catalan (L2) phonetic contrast /e-ε/. Brain activity in response to acoustic change detection was recorded in three different conditions involving tones of different length (duration condition), frequency (frequency condition), and presentation order (pattern condition). In addition, neural correlates of speech change detection were also assessed for both native (/o/-/e/) and nonnative (/o/-/ö/) phonetic contrasts (speech condition). Participants' discrimination accuracy, reflected electrically as a mismatch negativity (MMN), was similar between the two groups of participants in the three acoustic conditions. Conversely, the MMN was reduced in poor perceivers (PP) when they were presented with speech sounds. Therefore, our results support a speech-specific origin of individual variability in L2 phonetic mastery. PMID:18852470

The Effects of Social and Experiential Factors on the Interactions between the Phonetic Systems of Diglossic Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Law, Wai Ling

2017-01-01

In diglossic contexts, when speakers typically use two different languages on a regular basis, bilingual speakers display a wide array of attitudes towards each of their languages and associated cultures (Galindo, 1995) and such variability in attitudes can affect their linguistic behaviors (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum, 1960).…

Phonetic imitation by young children and its developmental changes.

PubMed

Nielsen, Kuniko

2014-12-01

In the current study, the author investigated the developmental course of phonetic imitation in childhood, and further evaluated existing accounts of phonetic imitation. Sixteen preschoolers, 15 third graders, and 18 college students participated in the current study. An experiment with a modified imitation paradigm with a picture-naming task was conducted, in which participants' voice-onset time (VOT) was compared before and after they were exposed to target speech with artificially increased VOT. Extended VOT in the target speech was imitated by preschoolers and 3rd graders as well as adults, confirming previous findings in phonetic imitation. Furthermore, an age effect of phonetic imitation was observed; namely, children showed greater imitation than adults, whereas the degree of imitation was comparable between preschoolers and 3rd graders. No significant effect of gender or word specificity was observed. Young children imitated fine phonetic details of the target speech, and greater degree of phonetic imitation was observed in children compared to adults. These findings suggest that the degree of phonetic imitation negatively correlates with phonological development.

The phonetics of talk in interaction--introduction to the special issue.

PubMed

Ogden, Richard

2012-03-01

This overview paper provides an introduction to work on naturally-occurring speech data, combining techniques of conversation analysis with techniques and methods from phonetics. The paper describes the development of the field, highlighting current challenges and progress in interdisciplinary work. It considers the role of quantification and its relationship to a qualitative methodology. It presents the conversation analytic notion of sequence as a version of context, and argues that sequences of talk constrain relevant phonetic design, and so provide one account for variability in naturally occurring speech. The paper also describes the manipulation of speech and language on many levels simultaneously. All of these themes occur and are explored in more detail in the papers contained in this special issue.

A Perceptual Phonetic Similarity Space for Languages: Evidence from Five Native Language Listener Groups1

PubMed Central

Bradlow, Ann; Clopper, Cynthia; Smiljanic, Rajka; Walter, Mary Ann

2010-01-01

The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. In Experiment 2, an independent group of native English listeners sorted the group of 17 languages in terms of their distance from English. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with four groups of non-native English listeners: Dutch, Mandarin, Turkish and Korean listeners. Taken together, the results of these three experiments represent a step towards establishing an approach to assessing the overall phonetic similarity of languages. This approach could potentially provide the basis for developing predictions regarding foreign-accented speech intelligibility for various listener groups, and regarding speech perception accuracy in the context of background noise in various languages. PMID:21179563

Recognition of speaker-dependent continuous speech with KEAL

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mercier, G.; Bigorgne, D.; Miclet, L.; Le Guennec, L.; Querre, M.

1989-04-01

A description of the speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system KEAL is given. An unknown utterance, is recognized by means of the followng procedures: acoustic analysis, phonetic segmentation and identification, word and sentence analysis. The combination of feature-based, speaker-independent coarse phonetic segmentation with speaker-dependent statistical classification techniques is one of the main design features of the acoustic-phonetic decoder. The lexical access component is essentially based on a statistical dynamic programming technique which aims at matching a phonemic lexical entry containing various phonological forms, against a phonetic lattice. Sentence recognition is achieved by use of a context-free grammar and a parsing algorithm derived from Earley's parser. A speaker adaptation module allows some of the system parameters to be adjusted by matching known utterances with their acoustical representation. The task to be performed, described by its vocabulary and its grammar, is given as a parameter of the system. Continuously spoken sentences extracted from a 'pseudo-Logo' language are analyzed and results are presented.

The role of linguistic experience in the processing of probabilistic information in production.

PubMed

Gustafson, Erin; Goldrick, Matthew

2018-01-01

Speakers track the probability that a word will occur in a particular context and utilize this information during phonetic processing. For example, content words that have high probability within a discourse tend to be realized with reduced acoustic/articulatory properties. Such probabilistic information may influence L1 and L2 speech processing in distinct ways (reflecting differences in linguistic experience across groups and the overall difficulty of L2 speech processing). To examine this issue, L1 and L2 speakers performed a referential communication task, describing sequences of simple actions. The two groups of speakers showed similar effects of discourse-dependent probabilistic information on production, suggesting that L2 speakers can successfully track discourse-dependent probabilities and use such information to modulate phonetic processing.

Keep Listening: Grammatical Context Reduces but Does Not Eliminate Activation of Unexpected Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Strand, Julia F.; Brown, Violet A.; Brown, Hunter E.; Berg, Jeffrey J.

2018-01-01

To understand spoken language, listeners combine acoustic-phonetic input with expectations derived from context (Dahan & Magnuson, 2006). Eye-tracking studies on semantic context have demonstrated that the activation levels of competing lexical candidates depend on the relative strengths of the bottom-up input and top-down expectations (cf.…

Lexical processing of Chinese sub-character components: Semantic activation of phonetic radicals as revealed by the Stroop effect.

PubMed

Yeh, Su-Ling; Chou, Wei-Lun; Ho, Pokuan

2017-11-17

Most Chinese characters are compounds consisting of a semantic radical indicating semantic category and a phonetic radical cuing the pronunciation of the character. Controversy surrounds whether radicals also go through the same lexical processing as characters and, critically, whether phonetic radicals involve semantic activation since they can also be characters when standing alone. Here we examined these issues using the Stroop task whereby participants responded to the ink color of the character. The key finding was that Stroop effects were found when the character itself had a meaning unrelated to color, but contained a color name phonetic radical (e.g., "guess", with the phonetic radical "cyan", on the right) or had a meaning associated with color (e.g., "pity", with the phonetic radical "blood" on the right which has a meaning related to "red"). Such Stroop effects from the phonetic radical within a character unrelated to color support that Chinese character recognition involves decomposition of characters into their constituent radicals; with each of their meanings including phonetic radicals activated independently, even though it would inevitably interfere with that of the whole character. Compared with the morphological decomposition in English whereby the semantics of the morphemes are not necessarily activated, the unavoidable semantic activation of phonetic radicals represents a unique feature in Chinese character processing.

Inhibitory phonetic priming: Where does the effect come from?

PubMed

Dufour, Sophie; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans

2016-01-01

Both phonological and phonetic priming studies reveal inhibitory effects that have been interpreted as resulting from lexical competition between the prime and the target. We present a series of phonetic priming experiments that contrasted this lexical locus explanation with that of a prelexical locus by manipulating the lexical status of the prime and the target and the task used. In the related condition of all experiments, spoken targets were preceded by spoken primes that were phonetically similar but shared no phonemes with the target (/bak/-/dεt/). In Experiments 1 and 2, word and nonword primes produced an inhibitory effect of equal size in shadowing and same-different tasks respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 showed robust inhibitory phonetic priming on both word and nonword targets in the shadowing task, but no effect at all in a lexical decision task. Together, these findings show that the inhibitory phonetic priming effect occurs independently of the lexical status of both the prime and the target, and only in tasks that do not necessarily require the activation of lexical representations. Our study thus argues in favour of a prelexical locus for this effect.

Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals.

PubMed

Barlow, Jessica A

2014-01-01

This study examines age of acquisition (AoA) in Spanish-English bilinguals' phonetic and phonological knowledge of /l/ in English and Spanish. In English, the lateral approximant /l/ varies in darkness by context [based on the second formant (F2) and the difference between F2 and the first formant (F1)], but the Spanish /l/ does not. Further, English /l/ is overall darker than Spanish /l/. Thirty-eight college-aged adults participated: 11 Early Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English before the age of 5 years, 14 Late Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English after the age of 6 years, and 13 English monolinguals. Participants' /l/ productions were acoustically analyzed by language and context. The results revealed a Spanish-to-English phonetic influence on /l/ productions for both Early and Late bilinguals, as well as an English-to-Spanish phonological influence on the patterning of /l/ for the Late Bilinguals. These findings are discussed in terms of the Speech Learning Model and the effect of AoA on the interaction between a bilingual speaker's two languages.

Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals

PubMed Central

Barlow, Jessica A.

2014-01-01

This study examines age of acquisition (AoA) in Spanish-English bilinguals’ phonetic and phonological knowledge of /l/ in English and Spanish. In English, the lateral approximant /l/ varies in darkness by context [based on the second formant (F2) and the difference between F2 and the first formant (F1)], but the Spanish /l/ does not. Further, English /l/ is overall darker than Spanish /l/. Thirty-eight college-aged adults participated: 11 Early Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English before the age of 5 years, 14 Late Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English after the age of 6 years, and 13 English monolinguals. Participants’ /l/ productions were acoustically analyzed by language and context. The results revealed a Spanish-to-English phonetic influence on /l/ productions for both Early and Late bilinguals, as well as an English-to-Spanish phonological influence on the patterning of /l/ for the Late Bilinguals. These findings are discussed in terms of the Speech Learning Model and the effect of AoA on the interaction between a bilingual speaker’s two languages. PMID:24795664

Infants Show a Facilitation Effect for Native Language Phonetic Perception between 6 and 12 Months

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kuhl, Patricia K.; Stevens, Erica; Hayashi, Akiko; Deguchi, Toshisada; Kiritani, Shigeru; Iverson, Paul

2006-01-01

Patterns of developmental change in phonetic perception are critical to theory development. Many previous studies document a decline in nonnative phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. However, much less experimental attention has been paid to developmental change in native-language phonetic perception over the same time period. We…

Effect of Phonetic Association on Lexis Learning in Natural Language Context: A Comparative Study of English, French and Turkish Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ebubekir, Bozavli

2017-01-01

Mother tongue acquisition starts with words and grammar acquired spontaneously by means of communication, while at school foreign language learning takes place based on grammar. Vocabulary learning is very often neglected or rather it turns into an individual activity. The present study, which is considered to be unique on its own, is to reveal…

Phonetic Parallels between the Close-Mid Vowels of Tyneside English: Are They Internally or Externally Motivated?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Watt, Dominic J. L.

2000-01-01

The distribution of variants of the FACE and GOAT vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. Effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and…

Learning to talk

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Messum, Piers

2004-05-01

Is imitation a necessary part of learning to talk? The faithful replication by children of such arbitrary phenomena of English as tense and lax vowel properties, ``rhythm,'' and context-dependent VOT's seems to insist that it is. But a nonimitative account of this is also possible. It relies on two principal mechanisms. First, basic speech sounds are learned by emulation: attempting to reproduce the results achieved by other speakers but without copying their actions to do so. The effectiveness of the output provides sufficient feedback to inform the child of the adequacy of its performance and to guide refinement. Second, phonetic phenomena such as those above appear through aerodynamic accommodation. Key elements of this are (a) that speech breathing is a complex motor skill which dominates other articulatory processes during acquisition and starts pulsatile before becoming smooth, and (b) that a child-scale production system imposes constraints on talking which do not operate in the adult speaker. Much of ``the terrible complexity of phonetic patterns'' [J. Pierrehumbert, Lang. Speech 46, 115-154 (2003)] then becomes epiphenomenal: appearing not as a result of young learners copying phonetic detail that is not linguistically significant, but of them reconciling conflicting production demands while just talking.

Infants Encode Phonetic Detail during Cross-Situational Word Learning

PubMed Central

Escudero, Paola; Mulak, Karen E.; Vlach, Haley A.

2016-01-01

Infants often hear new words in the context of more than one candidate referent. In cross-situational word learning (XSWL), word-object mappings are determined by tracking co-occurrences of words and candidate referents across multiple learning events. Research demonstrates that infants can learn words in XSWL paradigms, suggesting that it is a viable model of real-world word learning. However, these studies have all presented infants with words that have no or minimal phonological overlap (e.g., BLICKET and GAX). Words often contain some degree of phonological overlap, and it is unknown whether infants can simultaneously encode fine phonological detail while learning words via XSWL. We tested 12-, 15-, 17-, and 20-month-olds’ XSWL of eight words that, when paired, formed non-minimal pairs (MPs; e.g., BON–DEET) or MPs (e.g., BON–TON, DEET–DIT). The results demonstrated that infants are able to learn word-object mappings and encode them with sufficient phonetic detail as to identify words in both non-minimal and MP contexts. Thus, this work suggests that infants are able to simultaneously discriminate phonetic differences between words and map words to referents in an implicit learning paradigm such as XSWL. PMID:27708605

Interaction and Representational Integration: Evidence from Speech Errors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldrick, Matthew; Baker, H. Ross; Murphy, Amanda; Baese-Berk, Melissa

2011-01-01

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated…

Mismatch negativity evoked by the McGurk-MacDonald effect: a phonetic representation within short-term memory.

PubMed

Colin, C; Radeau, M; Soquet, A; Demolin, D; Colin, F; Deltenre, P

2002-04-01

The McGurk-MacDonald illusory percept is obtained by dubbing an incongruent articulatory movement on an auditory phoneme. This type of audiovisual speech perception contributes to the assessment of theories of speech perception. The mismatch negativity (MMN) reflects the detection of a deviant stimulus within the auditory short-term memory and besides an acoustic component, possesses, under certain conditions, a phonetic one. The present study assessed the existence of an MMN evoked by McGurk-MacDonald percepts elicited by audiovisual stimuli with constant auditory components. Cortical evoked potentials were recorded using the oddball paradigm on 8 adults in 3 experimental conditions: auditory alone, visual alone and audiovisual stimulation. Obtaining illusory percepts was confirmed in an additional psychophysical condition. The auditory deviant syllables and the audiovisual incongruent syllables elicited a significant MMN at Fz. In the visual condition, no negativity was observed either at Fz, or at O(z). An MMN can be evoked by visual articulatory deviants, provided they are presented in a suitable auditory context leading to a phonetically significant interaction. The recording of an MMN elicited by illusory McGurk percepts suggests that audiovisual integration mechanisms in speech take place rather early during the perceptual processes.

Influence of Role-Switching on Phonetic Convergence in Conversation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pardo, Jennifer S.; Jay, Isabel Cajori; Hoshino, Risa; Hasbun, Sara Maria; Sowemimo-Coker, Chantal; Krauss, Robert M.

2013-01-01

The current study examined phonetic convergence when talkers alternated roles during conversational interaction. The talkers completed a map navigation task in which they alternated instruction Giver and Receiver roles across multiple map pairs. Previous studies found robust effects of the role of a talker on phonetic convergence, and it was…

Independence of Early Speech Processing from Word Meaning

PubMed Central

Travis, Katherine E.; Leonard, Matthew K.; Chan, Alexander M.; Torres, Christina; Sizemore, Marisa L.; Qu, Zhe; Eskandar, Emad; Dale, Anders M.; Elman, Jeffrey L.; Cash, Sydney S.; Halgren, Eric

2013-01-01

We combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) with magnetic resonance imaging and electrocorticography to separate in anatomy and latency 2 fundamental stages underlying speech comprehension. The first acoustic-phonetic stage is selective for words relative to control stimuli individually matched on acoustic properties. It begins ∼60 ms after stimulus onset and is localized to middle superior temporal cortex. It was replicated in another experiment, but is strongly dissociated from the response to tones in the same subjects. Within the same task, semantic priming of the same words by a related picture modulates cortical processing in a broader network, but this does not begin until ∼217 ms. The earlier onset of acoustic-phonetic processing compared with lexico-semantic modulation was significant in each individual subject. The MEG source estimates were confirmed with intracranial local field potential and high gamma power responses acquired in 2 additional subjects performing the same task. These recordings further identified sites within superior temporal cortex that responded only to the acoustic-phonetic contrast at short latencies, or the lexico-semantic at long. The independence of the early acoustic-phonetic response from semantic context suggests a limited role for lexical feedback in early speech perception. PMID:22875868

Phonetic Training in the Foreign Language Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burnham, Kevin R.

2014-01-01

In this experiment we evaluate phonetic training as a tool for language learning. Specifically, we take a group of native speakers (NS) of English (n=24) currently enrolled in Arabic classes at American universities, and evaluate the effectiveness of a high variability phonetic training program (HVPT) to improve their perception of a difficult…

Phonetic Training in the Foreign Language Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burnham, Kevin R.

2014-01-01

In this experiment we evaluate phonetic training as a tool for language learning. Specifically, we take a group of native speakers (NS) of English (n = 24) currently enrolled in Arabic classes at American universities, and evaluate the effectiveness of a high variability phonetic training program (HVPT) to improve their perception of a difficult…

A novel form of perceptual attunement: Context-dependent perception of a native contrast in 14-month-old infants.

PubMed

Fort, Mathilde; Brusini, Perrine; Carbajal, M Julia; Sun, Yue; Peperkamp, Sharon

2017-08-01

By the end of their first year of life, infants have become experts in discriminating the sounds of their native language, while they have lost the ability to discriminate non-native contrasts. This type of phonetic learning is referred to as perceptual attunement. In the present study, we investigated the emergence of a context-dependent form of perceptual attunement in infancy. Indeed, some native contrasts are not discriminated in certain phonological contexts by adults, due to the presence of a language-specific process that neutralizes the contrasts in those contexts. We used a mismatch design and recorded high-density Electroencephalography (EEG) in French-learning 14-month-olds. Our results show that similarly to French adults, infants fail to discriminate a native voicing contrast (e.g., [f] vs. [v]) when it occurs in a specific phonological context (e.g. [ofbe] vs. [ovbe], no mismatch response), while they successfully detected it in other phonological contexts (e.g., [ofne] vs. [ovne], mismatch response). The present results demonstrate for the first time that by the age of 14 months, infants' phonetic learning does not only rely on the processing of individual sounds, but also takes into account in a language-specific manner the phonological contexts in which these sounds occur. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Effects of Phonetic Similarity in the Identification of Mandarin Tones

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Bin; Shao, Jing; Bao, Mingzhen

2017-01-01

Tonal languages differ in how they use phonetic correlates, e.g. average pitch height and pitch direction, for tonal contrasts. Thus, native speakers of a tonal language may need to adjust their attention to familiar or unfamiliar phonetic cues when perceiving non-native tones. On the other hand, speakers of a non-tonal language may need to…

Phonetic Transcription Training Improves Adults' Explicit Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Undergraduate Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Werfel, Krystal L.

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of phonetic transcription training on the explicit phonemic awareness of adults. Fifty undergraduate students enrolled in a phonetic transcription course and 107 control undergraduate students completed a paper-and-pencil measure of explicit phonemic awareness on the first and last days of…

Perceptual effects of dialectal and prosodic variation in vowels

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, Robert Allen; Jacewicz, Ewa; Hatcher, Kristin; Salmons, Joseph

2005-09-01

As was reported earlier [Fox et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 114, 2396 (2003)], certain vowels in the Ohio and Wisconsin dialects of American English are shifting in different directions. In addition, we have found that the spectral characteristics of these vowels (e.g., duration and formant frequencies) changed systematically under varying degrees of prosodic prominence, with somewhat different changes occurring within each dialect. The question addressed in the current study is whether naive listeners from these two dialects are sensitive to both the dialect variations and to the prosodically induced spectral differences. Listeners from Ohio and Wisconsin listened to the stimulus tokens [beIt] and [bɛt] produced in each of three prosodic contexts (representing three different levels of prominence). These words were produced by speakers from Ohio or from Wisconsin (none of the listeners were also speakers). Listeners identified the stimulus tokens in terms of vowel quality and indicated whether it was a good, fair, or poor exemplar of that phonetic category. Results showed that both phonetic quality decisions and goodness ratings were systematically and significantly affected by speaker dialect, listener dialect, and prosodic context. Implications of source and nature of ongoing vowel changes in these two dialects will be discussed. [Work partially supported by NIDCD R03 DC005560-01.

Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian ‘transparent’ vowels

PubMed Central

Benus, Stefan; Gafos, Adamantios I.

2007-01-01

Using a combination of magnetometry and ultrasound, we examined the articulatory characteristics of the so-called ‘transparent’ vowels [iː], [i], and [eː] in Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonologically, transparent vowels are front, but they can be followed by either front or back suffixes. However, a finer look reveals an underlying phonetic coherence in two respects. First, transparent vowels in back harmony contexts show a less advanced (more retracted) tongue body posture than phonemically identical vowels in front harmony contexts: e.g. [i] in buli-val is less advanced than [i] in bili-vel. Second, transparent vowels in monosyllabic stems selecting back suffixes are also less advanced than phonemically identical vowels in stems selecting front suffixes: e.g. [iː] in ír, taking back suffixes, compared to [iː] of hír, taking front suffixes, is less advanced when these stems are produced in bare form (no suffixes). We thus argue that the phonetic degree of tongue body horizontal position correlates with the phonological alternation in suffixes. A hypothesis that emerges from this work is that a plausible phonetic basis for transparency can be found in quantal characteristics of the relation between articulation and acoustics of transparent vowels. More broadly, the proposal is that the phonology of transparent vowels is better understood when their phonological patterning is studied together with their articulatory and acoustic characteristics. PMID:18389086

Phonetic imitation from an individual-difference perspective: subjective attitude, personality and "autistic" traits.

PubMed

Yu, Alan C L; Abrego-Collier, Carissa; Sonderegger, Morgan

2013-01-01

Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic imitation: the process by which the production patterns of an individual become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of her interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies has established a tight connection between language-external factors and a speaker's likelihood to imitate. The present study investigated the phenomenon of phonetic imitation using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered a phonetic imitation task, which included two speech production tasks separated by a perceptual learning task, and a battery of measures assessing traits associated with Autism-Spectrum Condition, working memory, and personality. To examine the effects of subjective attitude on phonetic imitation, participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions, where the perceived sexual orientation of the narrator (homosexual vs. heterosexual) and the outcome (positive vs. negative) of the story depicted in the exposure materials differed. The extent of phonetic imitation by an individual is significantly modulated by the story outcome, as well as by the participant's subjective attitude toward the model talker, the participant's personality trait of openness and the autistic-like trait associated with attention switching.

Speech recognition: Acoustic phonetic and lexical knowledge representation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zue, V. W.

1983-02-01

The purpose of this program is to develop a speech data base facility under which the acoustic characteristics of speech sounds in various contexts can be studied conveniently; investigate the phonological properties of a large lexicon of, say 10,000 words, and determine to what extent the phontactic constraints can be utilized in speech recognition; study the acoustic cues that are used to mark work boundaries; develop a test bed in the form of a large-vocabulary, IWR system to study the interactions of acoustic, phonetic and lexical knowledge; and develop a limited continuous speech recognition system with the goal of recognizing any English word from its spelling in order to assess the interactions of higher-level knowledge sources.

The Effects of Language Experience and Speech Context on the Phonetic Accommodation of English-accented Spanish Voicing.

PubMed

Llanos, Fernando; Francis, Alexander L

2017-03-01

Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, listeners familiar with English relied on an English-like VOT boundary in an English-accented Spanish context even in the absence of clear contextual cues to English VOT. This indicates that Spanish listeners accommodated English-accented Spanish voicing differently depending on their degree of familiarization with the English norm.

Deep Neural Networks for Speech Separation With Application to Robust Speech Recognition

DTIC Science & Technology

acoustic -phonetic features. The second objective is integration of spectrotemporal context for improved separation performance. Conditional random fields...will be used to encode contextual constraints. The third objective is to achieve robust ASR in the DNN framework through integrated acoustic modeling

Perceptual Compensation Is Correlated with Individuals' “Autistic” Traits: Implications for Models of Sound Change

PubMed Central

Yu, Alan C. L.

2010-01-01

Variation is a ubiquitous feature of speech. Listeners must take into account context-induced variation to recover the interlocutor's intended message. When listeners fail to normalize for context-induced variation properly, deviant percepts become seeds for new perceptual and production norms. In question is how deviant percepts accumulate in a systematic fashion to give rise to sound change (i.e., new pronunciation norms) within a given speech community. The present study investigated subjects' classification of /s/ and // before /a/ or /u/ spoken by a male or a female voice. Building on modern cognitive theories of autism-spectrum condition, which see variation in autism-spectrum condition in terms of individual differences in cognitive processing style, we established a significant correlation between individuals' normalization for phonetic context (i.e., whether the following vowel is /a/ or /u/) and talker voice variation (i.e., whether the talker is male or female) in speech and their “autistic” traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). In particular, our mixed-effect logistic regression models show that women with low AQ (i.e., the least “autistic”) do not normalize for phonetic coarticulation as much as men and high AQ women. This study provides first direct evidence that variability in human's ability to compensate for context-induced variations in speech perceptually is governed by the individual's sex and cognitive processing style. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that the systematic infusion of new linguistic variants (i.e., the deviant percepts) originate from a sub-segment of the speech community that consistently under-compensates for contextual variation in speech. PMID:20808859

Phonetic Imitation from an Individual-Difference Perspective: Subjective Attitude, Personality and “Autistic” Traits

PubMed Central

Yu, Alan C. L.; Abrego-Collier, Carissa; Sonderegger, Morgan

2013-01-01

Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic imitation: the process by which the production patterns of an individual become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of her interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies has established a tight connection between language-external factors and a speaker’s likelihood to imitate. The present study investigated the phenomenon of phonetic imitation using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered a phonetic imitation task, which included two speech production tasks separated by a perceptual learning task, and a battery of measures assessing traits associated with Autism-Spectrum Condition, working memory, and personality. To examine the effects of subjective attitude on phonetic imitation, participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions, where the perceived sexual orientation of the narrator (homosexual vs. heterosexual) and the outcome (positive vs. negative) of the story depicted in the exposure materials differed. The extent of phonetic imitation by an individual is significantly modulated by the story outcome, as well as by the participant’s subjective attitude toward the model talker, the participant’s personality trait of openness and the autistic-like trait associated with attention switching. PMID:24098665

Measuring Syntactic Complexity in Spontaneous Spoken Swedish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roll, Mikael; Frid, Johan; Horne, Merle

2007-01-01

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word "att" "that" were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with "att" in disfluent contexts, and the other with "att" in fluent…

Differences in the Association between Segment and Language: Early Bilinguals Pattern with Monolinguals and Are Less Accurate than Late Bilinguals

PubMed Central

Blanco, Cynthia P.; Bannard, Colin; Smiljanic, Rajka

2016-01-01

Early bilinguals often show as much sensitivity to L2-specific contrasts as monolingual speakers of the L2, but most work on cross-language speech perception has focused on isolated segments, and typically only on neighboring vowels or stop contrasts. In tasks that include sounds in context, listeners’ success is more variable, so segment discrimination in isolation may not adequately represent the phonetic detail in stored representations. The current study explores the relationship between language experience and sensitivity to segmental cues in context by comparing the categorization patterns of monolingual English listeners and early and late Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants categorized nonce words containing different classes of English- and Spanish-specific sounds as being more English-like or more Spanish-like; target segments included phonemic cues, cues for which there is no analogous sound in the other language, or phonetic cues, cues for which English and Spanish share the category but for which each language varies in its phonetic implementation. Listeners’ language categorization accuracy and reaction times were analyzed. Our results reveal a largely uniform categorization pattern across listener groups: Spanish cues were categorized more accurately than English cues, and phonemic cues were easier for listeners to categorize than phonetic cues. There were no differences in the sensitivity of monolinguals and early bilinguals to language-specific cues, suggesting that the early bilinguals’ exposure to Spanish did not fundamentally change their representations of English phonology. However, neither did the early bilinguals show more sensitivity than the monolinguals to Spanish sounds. The late bilinguals however, were significantly more accurate than either of the other groups. These findings indicate that listeners with varying exposure to English and Spanish are able to use language-specific cues in a nonce-word language categorization task. Differences in how, and not only when, a language was acquired may influence listener sensitivity to more difficult cues, and the advantage for phonemic cues may reflect the greater salience of categories unique to each language. Implications for foreign-accent categorization and cross-language speech perception are discussed, and future directions are outlined to better understand how salience varies across language-specific phonemic and phonetic cues. PMID:27445947

Effects of Variance and Input Distribution on the Training of L2 Learners' Tone Categorization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Jiang

2013-01-01

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

Syntactic Predictability in the Recognition of Carefully and Casually Produced Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Viebahn, Malte C.; Ernestus, Mirjam; McQueen, James M.

2015-01-01

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past…

Shaping Speech Patterns via Predictability and Recoverability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Whang, James Doh Yeon

2017-01-01

Recoverability refers to the ease of recovering the underlying form--stored mental representations--given a surface form--actual, variable output signals s (e.g., [Daet^, Daet[superscript h] ] ? /Daet/ "that"). Recovery can be achieved from phonetic cues explicitly present in the acoustic signal or through prediction from the context.…

Perceived Foreign Accent: Extended Stays Abroad, Level of Instruction, and Motivation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martinsen, Rob A.; Alvord, Scott M.; Tanner, Joshua

2014-01-01

Studies have examined various factors that affect pronunciation including phonetic context, style variation, first language transfer, and experience abroad. A plethora of research has also linked motivation to higher levels of proficiency in the second language. The present study uses native speaker ratings and multiple regression analysis to…

Reexamining Effects of Form-Focused Instruction on L2 Pronunciation Development: The Role of Explicit Phonetic Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saito, Kazuya

2013-01-01

The present study examines whether and to what degree providing explicit phonetic information (EI) at the beginning of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language pronunciation can enhance the generalizability and magnitude of FFI effectiveness by increasing learners' ability to notice a new phone. Participants were 49 Japanese learners of…

English speech acquisition in 3- to 5-year-old children learning Russian and English.

PubMed

Gildersleeve-Neumann, Christina E; Wright, Kira L

2010-10-01

English speech acquisition in Russian-English (RE) bilingual children was investigated, exploring the effects of Russian phonetic and phonological properties on English single-word productions. Russian has more complex consonants and clusters and a smaller vowel inventory than English. One hundred thirty-seven single-word samples were phonetically transcribed from 14 RE and 28 English-only (E) children, ages 3;3 (years;months) to 5;7. Language and age differences were compared descriptively for phonetic inventories. Multivariate analyses compared phoneme accuracy and error rates between the two language groups. RE children produced Russian-influenced phones in English, including palatalized consonants and trills, and demonstrated significantly higher rates of trill substitution, final devoicing, and vowel errors than E children, suggesting Russian language effects on English. RE and E children did not differ in their overall production complexity, with similar final consonant deletion and cluster reduction error rates, similar phonetic inventories by age, and similar levels of phonetic complexity. Both older language groups were more accurate than the younger language groups. We observed effects of Russian on English speech acquisition; however, there were similarities between the RE and E children that have not been reported in previous studies of speech acquisition in bilingual children. These findings underscore the importance of knowing the phonological properties of both languages of a bilingual child in assessment.

The effect of speaking style on a locus equation characterization of stop place of articulation.

PubMed

Sussman, H M; Dalston, E; Gumbert, S

1998-01-01

Locus equations were employed to assess the phonetic stability and distinctiveness of stop place categories in reduced speech. Twenty-two speakers produced stop consonant + vowel utterances in citation and spontaneous speech. Coarticulatory increases in hypoarticulated speech were documented only for /dV/ and [gV] productions in front vowel contexts. Coarticulatory extents for /bV/ and [gV] in back vowel contexts remained stable across style changes. Discriminant analyses showed equivalent levels of correct classification across speaking styles. CV reduction was quantified by use of Euclidean distances separating stop place categories. Despite sensitivity of locus equation parameters to articulatory differences encountered in informal speech, stop place categories still maintained a clear separability when plotted in a higher-order slope x y-intercept acoustic space.

Increased Activation in Superior Temporal Gyri as a Function of Increment in Phonetic Features

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Osnes, Berge; Hugdahl, Kenneth; Hjelmervik, Helene; Specht, Karsten

2011-01-01

A common assumption is that phonetic sounds initiate unique processing in the superior temporal gyri and sulci (STG/STS). The anatomical areas subserving these processes are also implicated in the processing of non-phonetic stimuli such as music instrument sounds. The differential processing of phonetic and non-phonetic sounds was investigated in…

The longitudinal development of fine phonetic detail in late learners of Spanish

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Casillas, Joseph Vincent

The present investigation analyzed early second language (L2) learning in adults. A common finding regarding L2 acquisition is that early learning appears to be necessary in order to perform on the same level as a native speaker. Surprisingly, many current theoretical models posit that the human ability to learn novel speech sounds remains active throughout the lifespan. In light of this fact, this project examines L2 acquisition in late learners with a special focus on L1/L2 use, input, and context of learning. Research regarding L1/L2 use has tended to be observational, and throughout the previous six decades of L2 research the role of input has been minimized and left largely unexplained. This study includes two production experiments and two perception experiments and focuses on the role of L1/L2 use and input in L2 acquisition in late learners in order to add to current research regarding their role in accurately and efficiently acquiring a novel speech sound. Moreover, this research is concerned with shedding light on when, if at all, during the acquisition process late learners begin to acquire a new, language-specific phonetic system, and the amount of exposure necessary in order to acquire L2 fine-phonetic detail. The experimental design presented in the present study also aims to shed light on the temporal relationship between production and perception with regard to category formation. To begin to fully understand these issues, the present study proposes a battery of tasks which were administered throughout the course of a domestic immersion program. Domestic immersion provides an understudied linguistic context in which L1 use is minimized, target language use is maximized, and L2 input is abundant. The results suggest that L2 phonetic category formation occurs at an early stage of development, and is perceptually driven. Moreover, early L2 representations are fragile, and especially susceptible to cross-language interference. Together, the studies undertaken for this work add to our understanding of the initial stages of the acquisition of L2 phonology in adult learners.

Lexical Access for Phonetic Ambiguities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spencer, N. J.; Wollman, Neil

1980-01-01

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

The Impact of Otitis Media with Effusion on Infant Phonetic Perception

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Polka, Linda; Rvachew, Susan

2005-01-01

The effect of prior otitis media with effusion (OME) or current middle ear effusion (MEE) on phonetic perception was examined by testing infants' discrimination of "boo" and "goo" syllables in 2 test sessions. Middle ear function was assessed following each perception test using tympanometry. Perceptual performance was compared…

Practising English Phonetic Symbols in a Communicative Way.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chu, Wai Ling

Classroom exercises designed to help students learn phonetic symbols more effectively are described. The exercises were developed for use in a Hong Kong school. The idea behind their creation was that use of the symbols in communicative situations would emphasize their utility for learning English pronunciation. Each exercise uses contextualized…

The Use of Segmentation Cues in Second Language Learners of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Candise Yue

2013-01-01

This dissertation project examined the influence of language typology on the use of segmentation cues by second language (L2) learners of English. Previous research has shown that native English speakers rely more on sentence context and lexical knowledge than segmental (i.e. phonotactics or acoustic-phonetics) or prosodic cues (e.g., word stress)…

VOT Production by Spanish Heritage Speakers in a Trilingual Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Llama, Raquel; López-Morelos, Luz Patricia

2016-01-01

In several studies it is highlighted that the early acquisition of a language in the home results in phonetic and phonological benefits, and that it is not uncommon for early learners to achieve native-like pronunciation in their heritage language. However, most of these studies have been carried out with bilinguals. The present contribution aims…

Practice makes perfect? The pedagogic value of online independent phonetic transcription practice for speech and language therapy students.

PubMed

Titterington, Jill; Bates, Sally

2018-01-01

Accuracy of phonetic transcription is a core skill for speech and language therapists (SLTs) worldwide (Howard & Heselwood, 2002). The current study investigates the value of weekly independent online phonetic transcription tasks to support development of this skill in year one SLT students. Using a mixed methods observational design, students enrolled in a year one phonetics module completed 10 weekly homework activities in phonetic transcription on a stand-alone tutorial site (WebFon (Bates, Matthews & Eagles, 2010)) and 5 weekly online quizzes (the 'Ulster Set' (Titterington, unpublished)). Student engagement with WebFon was measured in terms of the number of responses made to 'sparks' on the University's Virtual Learning Environment Discussion Board. Measures of phonetic transcription accuracy were obtained for the 'Ulster Set' and for a stand-alone piece of coursework at the end of the module. Qualitative feedback about experience with the online learning was gathered via questionnaire. A positive significant association was found between student engagement with WebFon and performance in the 'Ulster Set', and between performance in the 'Ulster Set' and final coursework. Students valued both online independent learning resources as each supported different learning needs. However, student compliance with WebFon was significantly lower than with the 'Ulster Set'. Motivators and inhibitors to engagement with the online resources were investigated identifying what best maximised engagement. These results indicate that while 'independent' online learning can support development of phonetic transcription skills, the activities must be carefully managed and constructively aligned to assessment providing the level of valance necessary to ensure effective engagement.

Negotiating towards a next turn: phonetic resources for 'doing the same'.

PubMed

Sikveland, Rein Ove

2012-03-01

This paper investigates hearers' use of response tokens (back-channels), in maintaining and differentiating their actions. Initial observations suggest that hearers produce a sequence of phonetically similar responses to disengage from the current topic, and dissimilar responses to engage with the current topic. This is studied systematically by combining detailed interactional and phonetic analysis in a collection of naturally-occurring talk in Norwegian. The interactional analysis forms the basis for labeling actions as maintained ('doing the same') and differentiated ('NOT doing the same'), which is then used as a basis for phonetic analysis. The phonetic analysis shows that certain phonetic characteristics, including pitch, loudness, voice quality and articulatory characteristics, are associated with 'doing the same', as different from 'NOT doing the same'. Interactional analysis gives further evidence of how this differentiation is of systematic relevance in the negotiations of a next turn. This paper addresses phonetic variation and variability by focusing on the relationship between sequence and phonetics in the turn-by-turn development of meaning. This has important implications for linguistic/phonetic research, and for the study of back-channels.

Phonetic Recalibration Only Occurs in Speech Mode

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vroomen, Jean; Baart, Martijn

2009-01-01

Upon hearing an ambiguous speech sound dubbed onto lipread speech, listeners adjust their phonetic categories in accordance with the lipread information (recalibration) that tells what the phoneme should be. Here we used sine wave speech (SWS) to show that this tuning effect occurs if the SWS sounds are perceived as speech, but not if the sounds…

Semantic vs. Phonetic Decoding Strategies in Non-Native Readers of Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Clay H.

2010-01-01

This dissertation examines the effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding by high-intermediate level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners. The results of the main study (discussed in Chapter #5) suggest that the CFL learners tested have a well-developed semantic pathway to recognition; however, their…

Phonetic Pause Unites Phonology and Semantics against Morphology and Syntax

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sakarna, Ahmad Khalaf; Mobaideen, Adnan

2012-01-01

The present study investigates the phonological effect triggered by the different types of phonetic pause used in Quran on morphology, syntax, and semantics. It argues that Quranic pause provides interesting evidence about the close relation between phonology and semantics, from one side, and semantics, morphology, and syntax, from the other…

Acoustic variability within and across German, French, and American English vowels: phonetic context effects.

PubMed

Strange, Winifred; Weber, Andrea; Levy, Erika S; Shafiro, Valeriy; Hisagi, Miwako; Nishi, Kanae

2007-08-01

Cross-language perception studies report influences of speech style and consonantal context on perceived similarity and discrimination of non-native vowels by inexperienced and experienced listeners. Detailed acoustic comparisons of distributions of vowels produced by native speakers of North German (NG), Parisian French (PF) and New York English (AE) in citation (di)syllables and in sentences (surrounded by labial and alveolar stops) are reported here. Results of within- and cross-language discriminant analyses reveal striking dissimilarities across languages in the spectral/temporal variation of coarticulated vowels. As expected, vocalic duration was most important in differentiating NG vowels; it did not contribute to PF vowel classification. Spectrally, NG long vowels showed little coarticulatory change, but back/low short vowels were fronted/raised in alveolar context. PF vowels showed greater coarticulatory effects overall; back and front rounded vowels were fronted, low and mid-low vowels were raised in both sentence contexts. AE mid to high back vowels were extremely fronted in alveolar contexts, with little change in mid-low and low long vowels. Cross-language discriminant analyses revealed varying patterns of spectral (dis)similarity across speech styles and consonantal contexts that could, in part, account for AE listeners' perception of German and French front rounded vowels, and "similar" mid-high to mid-low vowels.

Maxent Harmonic Grammars and Phonetic Duration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lefkowitz, Lee Michael

2017-01-01

Research in phonetics has established the grammatical status of gradient phonetic patterns in language, suggesting that there is a component of the grammar that governs systematic relationships between discrete phonological representations and gradiently continuous acoustic or articulatory phonetic representations. This dissertation joins several…

Phonetic Encoding of Coda Voicing Contrast under Different Focus Conditions in L1 vs. L2 English.

PubMed

Choi, Jiyoun; Kim, Sahayng; Cho, Taehong

2016-01-01

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-prosody interface, testing effects of prominence by comparing target segments in three focus conditions (phonological focus, lexical focus, and no focus). Results showed that Korean speakers utilized the temporal dimension (vowel duration) to encode coda voicing contrast, but failed to use the spectral dimension (F1/F2), reflecting their native language experience-i.e., with a more sparsely populated vowel space in Korean, they are less sensitive to small changes in the spectral dimension, and hence fine-grained spectral cues in English are not readily accessible. Results also showed that along the temporal dimension, both the L1 and L2 speakers hyperarticulated coda voicing contrast under prominence (when phonologically or lexically focused), but hypoarticulated it in the non-prominent condition. This indicates that low-level phonetic realization and high-order information structure interact in a communicatively efficient way, regardless of the speakers' native language background. The Korean speakers, however, used the temporal phonetic space differently from the way the native speakers did, especially showing less reduction in the no focus condition. This was also attributable to their native language experience-i.e., the Korean speakers' use of temporal dimension is constrained in a way that is not detrimental to the preservation of coda voicing contrast, given that they failed to add additional cues along the spectral dimension. The results imply that the L2 phonetic system can be more fully illuminated through an investigation of the phonetics-prosody interface in connection with the L2 speakers' native language experience.

Phonetic Encoding of Coda Voicing Contrast under Different Focus Conditions in L1 vs. L2 English

PubMed Central

Choi, Jiyoun; Kim, Sahayng; Cho, Taehong

2016-01-01

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-prosody interface, testing effects of prominence by comparing target segments in three focus conditions (phonological focus, lexical focus, and no focus). Results showed that Korean speakers utilized the temporal dimension (vowel duration) to encode coda voicing contrast, but failed to use the spectral dimension (F1/F2), reflecting their native language experience—i.e., with a more sparsely populated vowel space in Korean, they are less sensitive to small changes in the spectral dimension, and hence fine-grained spectral cues in English are not readily accessible. Results also showed that along the temporal dimension, both the L1 and L2 speakers hyperarticulated coda voicing contrast under prominence (when phonologically or lexically focused), but hypoarticulated it in the non-prominent condition. This indicates that low-level phonetic realization and high-order information structure interact in a communicatively efficient way, regardless of the speakers’ native language background. The Korean speakers, however, used the temporal phonetic space differently from the way the native speakers did, especially showing less reduction in the no focus condition. This was also attributable to their native language experience—i.e., the Korean speakers’ use of temporal dimension is constrained in a way that is not detrimental to the preservation of coda voicing contrast, given that they failed to add additional cues along the spectral dimension. The results imply that the L2 phonetic system can be more fully illuminated through an investigation of the phonetics-prosody interface in connection with the L2 speakers’ native language experience. PMID:27242571

Rapid recalibration of speech perception after experiencing the McGurk illusion.

PubMed

Lüttke, Claudia S; Pérez-Bellido, Alexis; de Lange, Floris P

2018-03-01

The human brain can quickly adapt to changes in the environment. One example is phonetic recalibration: a speech sound is interpreted differently depending on the visual speech and this interpretation persists in the absence of visual information. Here, we examined the mechanisms of phonetic recalibration. Participants categorized the auditory syllables /aba/ and /ada/, which were sometimes preceded by the so-called McGurk stimuli (in which an /aba/ sound, due to visual /aga/ input, is often perceived as 'ada'). We found that only one trial of exposure to the McGurk illusion was sufficient to induce a recalibration effect, i.e. an auditory /aba/ stimulus was subsequently more often perceived as 'ada'. Furthermore, phonetic recalibration took place only when auditory and visual inputs were integrated to 'ada' (McGurk illusion). Moreover, this recalibration depended on the sensory similarity between the preceding and current auditory stimulus. Finally, signal detection theoretical analysis showed that McGurk-induced phonetic recalibration resulted in both a criterion shift towards /ada/ and a reduced sensitivity to distinguish between /aba/ and /ada/ sounds. The current study shows that phonetic recalibration is dependent on the perceptual integration of audiovisual information and leads to a perceptual shift in phoneme categorization.

Investigation of Chinese text entry performance for mobile display interfaces.

PubMed

Lin, Po-Hung

2015-01-01

This study examined the effects of panel type, frequency of use and arrangement of phonetic symbols on operation time, usability, visual fatigue and workload in text entry performance. Three types of panel (solid, touch and mixed), three types of frequency of use (low, medium and high) and two types of the arrangement of phonetic symbols (vertical and horizontal) were investigated through 30 college students in the experiment. The results indicated that panel type, frequency of use, arrangement of phonetic symbols and the interaction between panel type and frequency of use were significant factors on operation time. Panel type was also a significant factor on usability, and a touch panel and a solid panel showed better usability than a mixed panel. Furthermore, a touch panel showed good usability and the lowest workload and therefore it is recommended to use a touch panel with vertical phonetic arrangement in sending Chinese text messages. Practitioner Summary: This study found, from ergonomics considerations, that a touch panel showed good usability and it is recommended to use a touch panel with vertical phonetic arrangement in sending Chinese text messages. Mobile display manufacturers can use the results of this study as a reference for future keyboard design.

Nasal and Oral Inspiration During Natural Speech Breathing

PubMed Central

Lester, Rosemary A.; Hoit, Jeannette D.

2015-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine the typical pattern for inspiration during speech breathing in healthy adults, as well as the factors that might influence it. Method Ten healthy adults, 18–45 years of age, performed a variety of speaking tasks while nasal ram pressure, audio, and video recordings were obtained. Inspirations were categorized as a nasal only, oral only, simultaneous nasal and oral, or alternating nasal and oral inspiration. The method was validated using nasal airflow, oral airflow, audio, and video recordings for two participants. Results The predominant pattern was simultaneous nasal and oral inspirations for all speaking tasks. This pattern was not affected by the nature of the speaking task or by the phonetic context surrounding the inspiration. The validation procedure confirmed that nearly all inspirations during counting and paragraph reading were simultaneous nasal and oral inspirations; whereas for sentence reading, the predominant pattern was alternating nasal and oral inspirations across the three phonetic contexts. Conclusions Healthy adults inspire through both the nose and mouth during natural speech breathing. This pattern of inspiration is likely beneficial in reducing pathway resistance while preserving some of the benefits of nasal breathing. PMID:24129013

Some Computational Analyses of the PBK Test: Effects of Frequency and Lexical Density on Spoken Word Recognition

PubMed Central

Meyer, Ted A.; Pisoni, David B.

2012-01-01

Objective The Phonetically Balanced Kindergarten (PBK) Test (Haskins, Reference Note 2) has been used for almost 50 yr to assess spoken word recognition performance in children with hearing impairments. The test originally consisted of four lists of 50 words, but only three of the lists (lists 1, 3, and 4) were considered “equivalent” enough to be used clinically with children. Our goal was to determine if the lexical properties of the different PBK lists could explain any differences between the three “equivalent” lists and the fourth PBK list (List 2) that has not been used in clinical testing. Design Word frequency and lexical neighborhood frequency and density measures were obtained from a computerized database for all of the words on the four lists from the PBK Test as well as the words from a single PB-50 (Egan, 1948) word list. Results The words in the “easy” PBK list (List 2) were of higher frequency than the words in the three “equivalent” lists. Moreover, the lexical neighborhoods of the words on the “easy” list contained fewer phonetically similar words than the neighborhoods of the words on the other three “equivalent” lists. Conclusions It is important for researchers to consider word frequency and lexical neighborhood frequency and density when constructing word lists for testing speech perception. The results of this computational analysis of the PBK Test provide additional support for the proposal that spoken words are recognized “relationally” in the context of other phonetically similar words in the lexicon. Implications of using open-set word recognition tests with children with hearing impairments are discussed with regard to the specific vocabulary and information processing demands of the PBK Test. PMID:10466571

Speech recognition: Acoustic-phonetic knowledge acquisition and representation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zue, Victor W.

1988-09-01

The long-term research goal is to develop and implement speaker-independent continuous speech recognition systems. It is believed that the proper utilization of speech-specific knowledge is essential for such advanced systems. This research is thus directed toward the acquisition, quantification, and representation, of acoustic-phonetic and lexical knowledge, and the application of this knowledge to speech recognition algorithms. In addition, we are exploring new speech recognition alternatives based on artificial intelligence and connectionist techniques. We developed a statistical model for predicting the acoustic realization of stop consonants in various positions in the syllable template. A unification-based grammatical formalism was developed for incorporating this model into the lexical access algorithm. We provided an information-theoretic justification for the hierarchical structure of the syllable template. We analyzed segmented duration for vowels and fricatives in continuous speech. Based on contextual information, we developed durational models for vowels and fricatives that account for over 70 percent of the variance, using data from multiple, unknown speakers. We rigorously evaluated the ability of human spectrogram readers to identify stop consonants spoken by many talkers and in a variety of phonetic contexts. Incorporating the declarative knowledge used by the readers, we developed a knowledge-based system for stop identification. We achieved comparable system performance to that to the readers.

The Effect of Pitch Peak Alignment on Sentence Type Identification in Russian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Makarova, Veronika

2007-01-01

This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study examining pitch peak alignment in production and perception of three-syllable one-word sentences with phonetic rising-falling pitch movement by speakers of Russian. The first part of the study (Experiment 1) utilizes 22 one-word three-syllable utterances read by five female speakers…

Orthographic Combinability and Phonological Consistency Effects in Reading Chinese Phonograms: An Event-Related Potential Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsu, Chun-Hsien; Tsai, Jie-Li; Lee, Chia-Ying; Tzeng, Ovid J. -L.

2009-01-01

In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to trace the temporal dynamics of phonological consistency and phonetic combinability in the reading of Chinese phonograms. The data showed a significant consistency-by-combinability interaction at N170. High phonetic combinability characters elicited greater negativity at N170 than did low…

Perceptual Training of Second-Language Vowels: Does Musical Ability Play a Role?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghaffarvand Mokari, Payam; Werner, Stefan

2018-01-01

The present study attempts to extend the research on the effects of phonetic training on the production and perception of second-language (L2) vowels. We also examined whether success in learning L2 vowels through high-variability intensive phonetic training is related to the learners' general musical abilities. Forty Azerbaijani learners of…

Second-Language Learners' Identification of Target-Language Phonemes: A Short-Term Phonetic Training Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cebrian, Juli; Carlet, Angelica

2014-01-01

This study examined the effect of short-term high-variability phonetic training on the perception of English /b/, /v/, /d/, /ð/, /ae/, /? /, /i/, and /i/ by Catalan/Spanish bilinguals learning English as a foreign language. Sixteen English-major undergraduates were tested before and after undergoing a four-session perceptual training program…

A retrospective study of phonetic inventory complexity in acquisition of Spanish: Implications for phonological universals

PubMed Central

Cataño, Lorena; Barlow, Jessica A.; Moyna, María Irene

2015-01-01

This study evaluates 39 different phonetic inventories of 16 Spanish-speaking children (ages 0;11 to 5;1) in terms of hierarchical complexity. Phonetic featural differences are considered in order to evaluate the proposed implicational hierarchy of Dinnsen et al.’s phonetic inventory typology for English. The children’s phonetic inventories are examined independently and in relation to one another. Five hierarchical complexity levels are proposed, similar to those of English and other languages, although with some language-specific differences. These findings have implications for theoretical assumptions about the universality of phonetic inventory development, and for remediation of Spanish-speaking children with phonological impairments. PMID:19504400

The cortical organization of lexical knowledge: A dual lexicon model of spoken language processing

PubMed Central

Gow, David W.

2012-01-01

Current accounts of spoken language assume the existence of a lexicon where wordforms are stored and interact during spoken language perception, understanding and production. Despite the theoretical importance of the wordform lexicon, the exact localization and function of the lexicon in the broader context of language use is not well understood. This review draws on evidence from aphasia, functional imaging, neuroanatomy, laboratory phonology and behavioral results to argue for the existence of parallel lexica that facilitate different processes in the dorsal and ventral speech pathways. The dorsal lexicon, localized in the inferior parietal region including the supramarginal gyrus, serves as an interface between phonetic and articulatory representations. The ventral lexicon, localized in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyrus, serves as an interface between phonetic and semantic representations. In addition to their interface roles, the two lexica contribute to the robustness of speech processing. PMID:22498237

Alveolar and Velarized Laterals in Albanian and in the Viennese Dialect.

PubMed

Moosmüller, Sylvia; Schmid, Carolin; Kasess, Christian H

2016-12-01

A comparison of alveolar and velarized lateral realizations in two language varieties, Albanian and the Viennese dialect, has been performed. Albanian distinguishes the two laterals phonemically, whereas in the Viennese dialect, the velarized lateral was introduced by language contact with Czech immigrants. A categorical distinction between the two lateral phonemes is fully maintained in Albanian. Results are not as straightforward in the Viennese dialect. Most prominently, female speakers, if at all, realize the velarized lateral in word-final position, thus indicating the application of a phonetically motivated process. The realization of the velarized lateral by male speakers, on the other hand, indicates that the velarized lateral replaced the former alveolar lateral phoneme. Alveolar laterals are either realized in perceptually salient positions, thus governed by an input-switch rule, or in front vowel contexts, thus subject to coarticulatory influences. Our results illustrate the subtle interplay of phonology, phonetics and sociolinguistics.

Statistical Inference in the Learning of Novel Phonetic Categories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhao, Yuan

2010-01-01

Learning a phonetic category (or any linguistic category) requires integrating different sources of information. A crucial unsolved problem for phonetic learning is how this integration occurs: how can we update our previous knowledge about a phonetic category as we hear new exemplars of the category? One model of learning is Bayesian Inference,…

Word Prediction Programs with Phonetic Spelling Support: Performance Comparisons and Impact on Journal Writing for Students with Writing Difficulties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evmenova, Anna S.; Graff, Heidi J.; Jerome, Marci Kinas; Behrmann, Michael M.

2010-01-01

This investigation examined the effects of currently available word prediction software programs that support phonetic/inventive spelling on the quality of journal writing by six students with severe writing and/or spelling difficulties in grades three through six during a month-long summer writing program. A changing conditions single-subject…

The Influence of Phonotactic Probability and Neighborhood Density on Children's Production of Newly Learned Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heisler, Lori; Goffman, Lisa

2016-01-01

A word learning paradigm was used to teach children novel words that varied in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density. The effects of frequency and density on speech production were examined when phonetic forms were nonreferential (i.e., when no referent was attached) and when phonetic forms were referential (i.e., when a referent was…

The Involvement of Occipital and Inferior Frontal Cortex in the Phonological Learning of Chinese Characters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deng, Yuan; Chou, Tai-li; Ding, Guo-sheng; Peng, Dan-ling; Booth, James R.

2011-01-01

Neural changes related to the learning of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using fMRI. We examined the item-specific learning effects for trained characters and the generalization of phonetic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a phonetic radical (part of a character that gives a clue to the…

Phonetic Symbols through Audiolingual Method to Improve the Students' Listening Skill

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Samawiyah, Zuhrotun; Saifuddin, Muhammad

2016-01-01

Phonetic symbols present linguistics feature to how the words are pronounced or spelled and they offer a way to easily identify and recognize the words. Phonetic symbols were applied in this research to give the students clear input and a comprehension toward English words. Moreover, these phonetic symbols were applied within audio-lingual method…

Exceptionality in vowel harmony

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Szeredi, Daniel

Vowel harmony has been of great interest in phonological research. It has been widely accepted that vowel harmony is a phonetically natural phenomenon, which means that it is a common pattern because it provides advantages to the speaker in articulation and to the listener in perception. Exceptional patterns proved to be a challenge to the phonetically grounded analysis as they, by their nature, introduce phonetically disadvantageous sequences to the surface form, that consist of harmonically different vowels. Such forms are found, for example in the Finnish stem tuoli 'chair' or in the Hungarian suffixed form hi:d-hoz 'to the bridge', both word forms containing a mix of front and back vowels. There has recently been evidence shown that there might be a phonetic level explanation for some exceptional patterns, as the possibility that some vowels participating in irregular stems (like the vowel [i] in the Hungarian stem hi:d 'bridge' above) differ in some small phonetic detail from vowels in regular stems. The main question has not been raised, though: does this phonetic detail matter for speakers? Would they use these minor differences when they have to categorize a new word as regular or irregular? A different recent trend in explaining morphophonological exceptionality by looking at the phonotactic regularities characteristic of classes of stems based on their morphological behavior. Studies have shown that speakers are aware of these regularities, and use them as cues when they have to decide what class a novel stem belongs to. These sublexical phonotactic regularities have already been shown to be present in some exceptional patterns vowel harmony, but many questions remain open: how is learning the static generalization linked to learning the allomorph selection facet of vowel harmony? How much does the effect of consonants on vowel harmony matter, when compared to the effect of vowel-to-vowel correspondences? This dissertation aims to test these two ideas -- that speakers use phonetic cues and/or that they use sublexical phonotactic regularities in categorizing stems as regular or irregular -- and attempt to answer the more detailed questions, like the effect of consonantal patterns on exceptional patterns or the link between allomorph selection and static phonotactic generalizations as well. The phonetic hypothesis is tested on the Hungarian antiharmonicity pattern (stems with front vowels consistently selecting back suffixes, like in the example hi:d-hoz 'to the bridge' above), and the results indicate that while there may be some small phonetic differences between vowels in regular and irregular stems, speakers do not use these, or even enhanced differences when they have to categorize stems. The sublexical hypothesis is tested and confirmed by looking at the disharmonicity pattern in Finnish. In Finnish, stems that contain both back and certain front vowels are frequent and perfectly grammatical, like in the example tuoli 'chair' above, while the mixing of back and some other front vowels is very rare and mostly confined to loanwords like amatoori 'amateur'. It will be seen that speakers do use sublexical phonotactic regularities to decide on the acceptability of novel stems, but certain patterns that are phonetically or phonologically more natural (vowel-to-vowel correspondences) seem to matter much more than other effects (like consonantal effects). Finally, a computational account will be given on how exceptionality might be learned by speakers by using maximum entropy grammars available in the literature to simulate the acquisition of the Finnish disharmonicity pattern. It will be shown that in order to clearly model the overall behavior on the exact pattern, the learner has to have access not only to the lexicon, but also to the allomorph selection patterns in the language.

Rapid recalibration of speech perception after experiencing the McGurk illusion

PubMed Central

Pérez-Bellido, Alexis; de Lange, Floris P.

2018-01-01

The human brain can quickly adapt to changes in the environment. One example is phonetic recalibration: a speech sound is interpreted differently depending on the visual speech and this interpretation persists in the absence of visual information. Here, we examined the mechanisms of phonetic recalibration. Participants categorized the auditory syllables /aba/ and /ada/, which were sometimes preceded by the so-called McGurk stimuli (in which an /aba/ sound, due to visual /aga/ input, is often perceived as ‘ada’). We found that only one trial of exposure to the McGurk illusion was sufficient to induce a recalibration effect, i.e. an auditory /aba/ stimulus was subsequently more often perceived as ‘ada’. Furthermore, phonetic recalibration took place only when auditory and visual inputs were integrated to ‘ada’ (McGurk illusion). Moreover, this recalibration depended on the sensory similarity between the preceding and current auditory stimulus. Finally, signal detection theoretical analysis showed that McGurk-induced phonetic recalibration resulted in both a criterion shift towards /ada/ and a reduced sensitivity to distinguish between /aba/ and /ada/ sounds. The current study shows that phonetic recalibration is dependent on the perceptual integration of audiovisual information and leads to a perceptual shift in phoneme categorization. PMID:29657743

Predicting word-recognition performance in noise by young listeners with normal hearing using acoustic, phonetic, and lexical variables.

PubMed

McArdle, Rachel; Wilson, Richard H

2008-06-01

To analyze the 50% correct recognition data that were from the Wilson et al (this issue) study and that were obtained from 24 listeners with normal hearing; also to examine whether acoustic, phonetic, or lexical variables can predict recognition performance for monosyllabic words presented in speech-spectrum noise. The specific variables are as follows: (a) acoustic variables (i.e., effective root-mean-square sound pressure level, duration), (b) phonetic variables (i.e., consonant features such as manner, place, and voicing for initial and final phonemes; vowel phonemes), and (c) lexical variables (i.e., word frequency, word familiarity, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency). The descriptive, correlational study will examine the influence of acoustic, phonetic, and lexical variables on speech recognition in noise performance. Regression analysis demonstrated that 45% of the variance in the 50% point was accounted for by acoustic and phonetic variables whereas only 3% of the variance was accounted for by lexical variables. These findings suggest that monosyllabic word-recognition-in-noise is more dependent on bottom-up processing than on top-down processing. The results suggest that when speech-in-noise testing is used in a pre- and post-hearing-aid-fitting format, the use of monosyllabic words may be sensitive to changes in audibility resulting from amplification.

Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

International Phonetic Association.

This guide contains concise information on the International Phonetic Alphabet, a universally agreed system of notation in use for over a century, for the sounds of languages, and guidance on how to use it. The handbook replaces the previous edition, "Principles of the International Phonetic Association," which has not been revised since 1949.…

Developing a Weighted Measure of Speech Sound Accuracy

PubMed Central

Preston, Jonathan L.; Ramsdell, Heather L.; Oller, D. Kimbrough; Edwards, Mary Louise; Tobin, Stephen J.

2010-01-01

Purpose The purpose is to develop a system for numerically quantifying a speaker’s phonetic accuracy through transcription-based measures. With a focus on normal and disordered speech in children, we describe a system for differentially weighting speech sound errors based on various levels of phonetic accuracy with a Weighted Speech Sound Accuracy (WSSA) score. We then evaluate the reliability and validity of this measure. Method Phonetic transcriptions are analyzed from several samples of child speech, including preschoolers and young adolescents with and without speech sound disorders and typically developing toddlers. The new measure of phonetic accuracy is compared to existing measures, is used to discriminate typical and disordered speech production, and is evaluated to determine whether it is sensitive to changes in phonetic accuracy over time. Results Initial psychometric data indicate that WSSA scores correlate with other measures of phonetic accuracy as well as listeners’ judgments of severity of a child’s speech disorder. The measure separates children with and without speech sound disorders. WSSA scores also capture growth in phonetic accuracy in toddler’s speech over time. Conclusion Results provide preliminary support for the WSSA as a valid and reliable measure of phonetic accuracy in children’s speech. PMID:20699344

The Role of Lexical Competition and Acoustic-Phonetic Structure in Lexical Processing: Evidence from Normal Subjects and Aphasic Patients

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Misiurski, Cara; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Rissman, Jesse; Berman, Daniel

2005-01-01

This study examined the effects that the acoustic-phonetic structure of a stimulus exerts on the processes by which lexical candidates compete for activation. An auditory lexical decision paradigm was used to investigate whether shortening the VOT of an initial voiceless stop consonant in a real word results in the activation of the…

Phonetic and phonological imitation of intonation in two varieties of Italian

PubMed Central

D’Imperio, Mariapaola; Cavone, Rossana; Petrone, Caterina

2014-01-01

The aim of this study was to test whether both phonetic and phonological representations of intonation can be rapidly modified when imitating utterances belonging to a different regional variety of the same language. Our main hypothesis was that tonal alignment, just as other phonetic features of speech, would be rapidly modified by Italian speakers when imitating pitch accents of a different (Southern) variety of Italian. In particular, we tested whether Bari Italian (BI) speakers would produce later peaks for their native rising L + H* (question pitch accent) in the process of imitating Neapolitan Italian (NI) rising L* + H accents. Also, we tested whether BI speakers are able to modify other phonetic properties (pitch level) as well as phonological characteristics (changes in tonal composition) of the same contour. In a follow-up study, we tested if the reverse was also true, i.e., whether NI speakers would produce earlier peaks within the L* + H accent in the process of imitating the L + H* of BI questions, despite the presence of a contrast between two rising accents in this variety. Our results show that phonetic detail of tonal alignment can be successfully modified by both BI and NI speakers when imitating a model speaker of the other variety. The hypothesis of a selective imitation process preventing alignment modifications in NI was hence not supported. Moreover the effect was significantly stronger for low frequency words. Participants were also able to imitate other phonetic cues, in that they modified global utterance pitch level. Concerning phonological convergence, speakers modified the tonal specification of the edge tones in order to resemble that of the other variety by either suppressing or increasing the presence of a final H%. Hence, our data show that intonation imitation leads to fast modification of both phonetic and phonological intonation representations including detail of tonal alignment and pitch scaling. PMID:25408676

Cross-language comparisons of contextual variation in the production and perception of vowels

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Strange, Winifred

2005-04-01

In the last two decades, a considerable amount of research has investigated second-language (L2) learners problems with perception and production of non-native vowels. Most studies have been conducted using stimuli in which the vowels are produced and presented in simple, citation-form (lists) monosyllabic or disyllabic utterances. In my laboratory, we have investigated the spectral (static/dynamic formant patterns) and temporal (syllable duration) variation in vowel productions as a function of speech-style (list/sentence utterances), speaking rate (normal/rapid), sentence focus (narrow focus/post-focus) and phonetic context (voicing/place of surrounding consonants). Data will be presented for a set of languages that include large and small vowel inventories, stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed prosody, and that vary in the phonological/phonetic function of vowel length, diphthongization, and palatalization. Results show language-specific patterns of contextual variation that affect the cross-language acoustic similarity of vowels. Research on cross-language patterns of perceived phonetic similarity by naive listeners suggests that listener's knowledge of native language (L1) patterns of contextual variation influences their L1/L2 similarity judgments and subsequently, their discrimination of L2 contrasts. Implications of these findings for assessing L2 learners perception of vowels and for developing laboratory training procedures to improve L2 vowel perception will be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD.

Developing a weighted measure of speech sound accuracy.

PubMed

Preston, Jonathan L; Ramsdell, Heather L; Oller, D Kimbrough; Edwards, Mary Louise; Tobin, Stephen J

2011-02-01

To develop a system for numerically quantifying a speaker's phonetic accuracy through transcription-based measures. With a focus on normal and disordered speech in children, the authors describe a system for differentially weighting speech sound errors on the basis of various levels of phonetic accuracy using a Weighted Speech Sound Accuracy (WSSA) score. The authors then evaluate the reliability and validity of this measure. Phonetic transcriptions were analyzed from several samples of child speech, including preschoolers and young adolescents with and without speech sound disorders and typically developing toddlers. The new measure of phonetic accuracy was validated against existing measures, was used to discriminate typical and disordered speech production, and was evaluated to examine sensitivity to changes in phonetic accuracy over time. Reliability between transcribers and consistency of scores among different word sets and testing points are compared. Initial psychometric data indicate that WSSA scores correlate with other measures of phonetic accuracy as well as listeners' judgments of the severity of a child's speech disorder. The measure separates children with and without speech sound disorders and captures growth in phonetic accuracy in toddlers' speech over time. The measure correlates highly across transcribers, word lists, and testing points. Results provide preliminary support for the WSSA as a valid and reliable measure of phonetic accuracy in children's speech.

Foveal splitting causes differential processing of Chinese orthography in the male and female brain.

PubMed

Hsiao, Janet Hui-Wen; Shillcock, Richard

2005-10-01

Chinese characters contain separate phonetic and semantic radicals. A dominant character type exists in which the semantic radical is on the left and the phonetic radical on the right; an opposite, minority structure also exists, with the semantic radical on the right and the phonetic radical on the left. We show that, when asked to pronounce isolated tokens of these two character types, males responded significantly faster when the phonetic information was on the right, whereas females showed a non-significant tendency in the opposite direction. Recent research on foveal structure and reading suggests that the two halves of a centrally fixated character are initially processed in different hemispheres. The male brain typically relies more on the left hemisphere for phonological processing compared with the female brain, causing this gender difference to emerge. This interaction is predicted by an implemented computational model. This study supports the existence of a gender difference in phonological processing, and shows that the effects of foveal splitting in reading extend far enough into word recognition to interact with the gender of the reader in a naturalistic reading task.

Neural correlates of audiotactile phonetic processing in early-blind readers: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Pishnamazi, Morteza; Nojaba, Yasaman; Ganjgahi, Habib; Amousoltani, Asie; Oghabian, Mohammad Ali

2016-05-01

Reading is a multisensory function that relies on arbitrary associations between auditory speech sounds and symbols from a second modality. Studies of bimodal phonetic perception have mostly investigated the integration of visual letters and speech sounds. Blind readers perform an analogous task by using tactile Braille letters instead of visual letters. The neural underpinnings of audiotactile phonetic processing have not been studied before. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal the neural correlates of audiotactile phonetic processing in 16 early-blind Braille readers. Braille letters and corresponding speech sounds were presented in unimodal, and congruent/incongruent bimodal configurations. We also used a behavioral task to measure the speed of blind readers in identifying letters presented via tactile and/or auditory modalities. Reaction times for tactile stimuli were faster. The reaction times for bimodal stimuli were equal to those for the slower auditory-only stimuli. fMRI analyses revealed the convergence of unimodal auditory and unimodal tactile responses in areas of the right precentral gyrus and bilateral crus I of the cerebellum. The left and right planum temporale fulfilled the 'max criterion' for bimodal integration, but activities of these areas were not sensitive to the phonetical congruency between sounds and Braille letters. Nevertheless, congruency effects were found in regions of frontal lobe and cerebellum. Our findings suggest that, unlike sighted readers who are assumed to have amodal phonetic representations, blind readers probably process letters and sounds separately. We discuss that this distinction might be due to mal-development of multisensory neural circuits in early blinds or it might be due to inherent differences between Braille and print reading mechanisms.

When to simulate and when to associate? Accounting for inter-talker variability in the speech signal.

PubMed

Trude, Alison M

2013-08-01

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory could be modified to describe how listeners rapidly incorporate context to generate predictions about speech despite inter-talker variability. However, in order to do so, the content of "impoverished" predicted percepts must be expanded to include phonetic information. Further, the way listeners identify and represent inter-talker differences and subsequently determine which prediction method to use would require further specification.

A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition

PubMed Central

Feldman, Naomi H.; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Goldwater, Sharon; Morgan, James L.

2013-01-01

Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning. PMID:24219848

Representational specificity of within-category phonetic variation in the mental lexicon

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ju, Min; Luce, Paul A.

2003-10-01

This study examines (1) whether within-category phonetic variation in voice onset time (VOT) is encoded in long-term memory and has consequences for subsequent word recognition and, if so, (2) whether such effects are greater in words with voiced counterparts (pat/bat) than those without (cow/*gow), given that VOT information is more critical for lexical discrimination in the former. Two long-term repetition priming experiments were conducted using words containing word-initial voiceless stops varying in VOT. Reaction times to a lexical decision were compared between the same and different VOT conditions in words with or without voiced counterparts. If veridical representations of each episode are preserved in memory, variation in VOT should have demonstrable effects on the magnitude of priming. However, if within-category variation is discarded and form-based representations are abstract, the variation in VOT should not mediate priming. The implications of these results for the specificity and abstractness of phonetic representations in long-term memory will be discussed.

Automated Analysis of Child Phonetic Production Using Naturalistic Recordings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Xu, Dongxin; Richards, Jeffrey A.; Gilkerson, Jill

2014-01-01

Purpose: Conventional resource-intensive methods for child phonetic development studies are often impractical for sampling and analyzing child vocalizations in sufficient quantity. The purpose of this study was to provide new information on early language development by an automated analysis of child phonetic production using naturalistic…

Phonetics and Other Disciplines: Then and Now.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bronstein, Arthur J.; Raphael, Lawrence J.

Phonetic science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Phoneticians rely on, or at least collaborate with, sociologists, psychologists, biologists, poets, physicists, anthropologists, neurologists and others. A look at the history of phonetics reveals that this seemingly recent trend has deep roots. In fact, it is possible to draw parallels…

An Experimental Investigation of Phonetic Naturalness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Greenwood, Anna

2016-01-01

This dissertation begins with the observation of a typological asymmetry within phonological patterns related to phonetic naturalness. Patterns that are rooted within existing tendencies of perception and/or production--in other words, patterns that are phonetically "natural"--are common in phonological typology and seen in a variety of…

Phonetic difficulty and stuttering in English

PubMed Central

Howell, Peter; Au-Yeung, James; Yaruss, Scott; Eldridge, Kevin

2007-01-01

Previous work has shown that phonetic difficulty affects older, but not younger, speakers who stutter and that older speakers experience more difficulty on content words than function words. The relationship between stuttering rate and a recently-developed index of phonetic complexity (IPC, Jakielski, 1998) was examined in this study separately for function and content words for speakers in 6-11, 11 plus-18 and 18 plus age groups. The hypothesis that stuttering rate on the content words of older speakers, but not younger speakers, would be related to the IPC score was supported. It is argued that the similarity between results using the IPC scores with a previous analysis that looked at late emerging consonants, consonant strings and multiple syllables (also conducted on function and content words separately), validates the former instrument. In further analyses, the factors that are most likely to lead to stuttering in English and their order of importance were established. The order found was consonant by manner, consonant by place, word length and contiguous consonant clusters. As the effects of phonetic difficulty are evident in teenage and adulthood, at least some of the factors may have an acquired influence on stuttering (rather than an innate universal basis, as the theory behind Jakielski's work suggests). This may be established in future work by doing cross-linguistic comparisons to see which factors operate universally. Disfluency on function words in early childhood appears to be responsive to factors other than phonetic complexity. PMID:17342878

Does the Recording Medium Influence Phonetic Transcription of Cleft Palate Speech?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Klintö, Kristina; Lohmander, Anette

2017-01-01

Background: In recent years, analyses of cleft palate speech based on phonetic transcriptions have become common. However, the results vary considerably among different studies. It cannot be excluded that differences in assessment methodology, including the recording medium, influence the results. Aims: To compare phonetic transcriptions from…

Vowel Devoicing in Shanghai.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zee, Eric

A phonetic study of vowel devoicing in the Shanghai dialect of Chinese explored the phonetic conditions under which the high, closed vowels and the apical vowel in Shanghai are most likely to become devoiced. The phonetic conditions may be segmental or suprasegmental. Segmentally, the study sought to determine whether a certain type of pre-vocalic…

Measuring Language-Specific Phonetic Settings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mennen, Ineke; Scobbie, James M.; de Leeuw, Esther; Schaeffler, Sonja; Schaeffler, Felix

2010-01-01

While it is well known that languages have different phonemes and phonologies, there is growing interest in the idea that languages may also differ in their "phonetic setting". The term "phonetic setting" refers to a tendency to make the vocal apparatus employ a language-specific habitual configuration. For example, languages may differ in their…

The interaction of short-term and long-term memory in phonetic category formation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Harnsberger, James D.

2002-05-01

This study examined the role that short-term memory capacity plays in the relationship between novel stimuli (e.g., non-native speech sounds, native nonsense words) and phonetic categories in long-term memory. Thirty native speakers of American English were administered five tests: categorial AXB discrimination using nasal consonants from Malayalam; categorial identification, also using Malayalam nasals, which measured the influence of phonetic categories in long-term memory; digit span; nonword span, a short-term memory measure mediated by phonetic categories in long-term memory; and paired-associate word learning (word-word and word-nonword pairs). The results showed that almost all measures were significantly correlated with one another. The strongest predictor for the discrimination and word-nonword learning results was nonword (r=+0.62) and digit span (r=+0.51), respectively. When the identification test results were partialed out, only nonword span significantly correlated with discrimination. The results show a strong influence of short-term memory capacity on the encoding of phonetic detail within phonetic categories and suggest that long-term memory representations regulate the capacity of short-term memory to preserve information for subsequent encoding. The results of this study will also be discussed with regards to resolving the tension between episodic and abstract models of phonetic category structure.

Phonetic compliance: a proof-of-concept study

PubMed Central

Delvaux, Véronique; Huet, Kathy; Piccaluga, Myriam; Harmegnies, Bernard

2014-01-01

In this paper, we introduce the concept of “phonetic compliance,” which is defined as the intrinsic individual ability to produce speech sounds that are unusual in the native language, and constitutes a part of the ability to acquire L2 phonetics and phonology. We argue that phonetic compliance represents a systematic source of variance that needs to be accounted for if one wants to improve the control over the independent variables manipulated in SLA experimental studies. We then present the results of a two-fold proof-of-concept study aimed at testing the feasibility of assessing phonetic compliance in terms of gradient. In study 1, a pilot data collection paradigm is implemented on an occasional sample of 10 native French speakers engaged in two reproduction tasks involving respectively vowels and aspirated stops, and data are analyzed using descriptive statistics. In study 2, complementary data including L1-typical realizations are collected, resulting in the development of a first set of indicators that may be useful to appropriately assess, and further refine the concept of, phonetic compliance. Based on a critical analysis of the contributions and limitations of the proof-of-concept study, general discussion formulates the guidelines for the following stages of development of a reliable and valid test of phonetic compliance. PMID:25538645

The Involvement of Occipital and Inferior Frontal Cortex in the Phonological Learning of Chinese Characters

PubMed Central

Deng, Yuan; Chou, Tai-li; Ding, Guo-sheng; Peng, Dan-ling; Booth, James R.

2016-01-01

Neural changes related to the learning of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using fMRI. We examined the item-specific learning effects for trained characters and the generalization of phonetic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a phonetic radical (part of a character that gives a clue to the whole character’s pronunciation) with trained characters. Behavioral results showed that shared phonetic information improved performance for transfer characters. Neuroimaging results for trained characters over learning found increased activation in the right lingual gyrus, and greater activation enhancement in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s area 44) was correlated with higher accuracy improvement. Moreover, greater activation for transfer characters in these two regions at the late stage of training was correlated with better knowledge of the phonetic radical in a delayed recall test. The current study suggests that the right lingual gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus are crucial for the learning of Chinese characters and the generalization of that knowledge to novel characters. Left inferior frontal gyrus is likely involved in phonological segmentation, whereas right lingual gyrus may subserve processing visual–orthographic information. PMID:20807053

Binding and unbinding the auditory and visual streams in the McGurk effect.

PubMed

Nahorna, Olha; Berthommier, Frédéric; Schwartz, Jean-Luc

2012-08-01

Subjects presented with coherent auditory and visual streams generally fuse them into a single percept. This results in enhanced intelligibility in noise, or in visual modification of the auditory percept in the McGurk effect. It is classically considered that processing is done independently in the auditory and visual systems before interaction occurs at a certain representational stage, resulting in an integrated percept. However, some behavioral and neurophysiological data suggest the existence of a two-stage process. A first stage would involve binding together the appropriate pieces of audio and video information before fusion per se in a second stage. Then it should be possible to design experiments leading to unbinding. It is shown here that if a given McGurk stimulus is preceded by an incoherent audiovisual context, the amount of McGurk effect is largely reduced. Various kinds of incoherent contexts (acoustic syllables dubbed on video sentences or phonetic or temporal modifications of the acoustic content of a regular sequence of audiovisual syllables) can significantly reduce the McGurk effect even when they are short (less than 4 s). The data are interpreted in the framework of a two-stage "binding and fusion" model for audiovisual speech perception.

High or low? Comparing high and low-variability phonetic training in adult and child second language learners

PubMed Central

Brown, Helen; Clayards, Meghan

2017-01-01

Background High talker variability (i.e., multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training nonnative phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However, no study has directly compared the effectiveness of high versus low talker variability in children. Methods Native Greek-speaking eight-year-olds (N = 52), and adults (N = 41) were exposed to the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast in 10 training sessions through a computerized word-learning game. Pre- and post-training tests examined discrimination of the contrast as well as lexical learning. Participants were randomly assigned to high (four talkers) or low (one talker) variability training conditions. Results Both age groups improved during training, and both improved more while trained with a single talker. Results of a three-interval oddity discrimination test did not show the predicted benefit of high-variability training in either age group. Instead, children showed an effect in the reverse direction—i.e., reliably greater improvements in discrimination following single talker training, even for untrained generalization items, although the result is qualified by (accidental) differences between participant groups at pre-test. Adults showed a numeric advantage for high-variability but were inconsistent with respect to voice and word novelty. In addition, no effect of variability was found for lexical learning. There was no evidence of greater plasticity for phonetic learning in child learners. Discussion This paper adds to the handful of studies demonstrating that, like adults, child learners can improve their discrimination of a phonetic contrast via computerized training. There was no evidence of a benefit of training with multiple talkers, either for discrimination or word learning. The results also do not support the findings of greater plasticity in child learners found in a previous paper (Giannakopoulou, Uther & Ylinen, 2013a). We discuss these results in terms of various differences between training and test tasks used in the current work compared with previous literature. PMID:28584698

High or low? Comparing high and low-variability phonetic training in adult and child second language learners.

PubMed

Giannakopoulou, Anastasia; Brown, Helen; Clayards, Meghan; Wonnacott, Elizabeth

2017-01-01

High talker variability (i.e., multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training nonnative phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However, no study has directly compared the effectiveness of high versus low talker variability in children. Native Greek-speaking eight-year-olds ( N = 52), and adults ( N = 41) were exposed to the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast in 10 training sessions through a computerized word-learning game. Pre- and post-training tests examined discrimination of the contrast as well as lexical learning. Participants were randomly assigned to high (four talkers) or low (one talker) variability training conditions. Both age groups improved during training, and both improved more while trained with a single talker. Results of a three-interval oddity discrimination test did not show the predicted benefit of high-variability training in either age group. Instead, children showed an effect in the reverse direction-i.e., reliably greater improvements in discrimination following single talker training, even for untrained generalization items, although the result is qualified by (accidental) differences between participant groups at pre-test. Adults showed a numeric advantage for high-variability but were inconsistent with respect to voice and word novelty. In addition, no effect of variability was found for lexical learning. There was no evidence of greater plasticity for phonetic learning in child learners. This paper adds to the handful of studies demonstrating that, like adults, child learners can improve their discrimination of a phonetic contrast via computerized training. There was no evidence of a benefit of training with multiple talkers, either for discrimination or word learning. The results also do not support the findings of greater plasticity in child learners found in a previous paper (Giannakopoulou, Uther & Ylinen, 2013a). We discuss these results in terms of various differences between training and test tasks used in the current work compared with previous literature.

Language Adaptive LVCSR Through Polyphone Decision Tree Specialization

DTIC Science & Technology

2000-08-01

transfer models outperform monolingual ones [3], [14]. modeling. Since for the monolingual case the use of larger phonetic context windows has proven to...12.1 2. Multiple Languages German 11.8 61K 200 44.5 43 9.0 For our experiments we developed monolingual LVCSR sys- Japanese 10.0 22K 230 33.8 33 7.9... monolingual recognizer. Since the Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, engines are the same across the languages, differences in the

Phonetic radicals, not phonological coding systems, support orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese.

PubMed

Li, Luan; Wang, Hua-Chen; Castles, Anne; Hsieh, Miao-Ling; Marinus, Eva

2018-07-01

According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), phonological decoding is fundamental to acquiring orthographic representations of novel written words. However, phonological decoding is not straightforward in non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese, where words are presented as characters. Here, we present the first study investigating the role of phonological decoding in orthographic learning in Chinese. We examined two possible types of phonological decoding: the use of phonetic radicals, an internal phonological aid, andthe use of Zhuyin, an external phonological coding system. Seventy-three Grade 2 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of twelve novel compound characters over four days. They were then exposed to the written characters in short stories, and were assessed on their reading accuracy and on their subsequent orthographic learning via orthographic choice and spelling tasks. The novel characters were assigned three different types of pronunciation in relation to its phonetic radical - (1) a pronunciation that is identical to the phonetic radical in isolation; (2) a common alternative pronunciation associated with the phonetic radical when it appears in other characters; and (3) a pronunciation that is unrelated to the phonetic radical. The presence of Zhuyin was also manipulated. The children read the novel characters more accurately when phonological cues from the phonetic radicals were available and in the presence of Zhuyin. However, only the phonetic radicals facilitated orthographic learning. The findings provide the first empirical evidence of orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese, and reveal how phonological decoding functions to support learning in non-alphabetic writing systems. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

READINESS AND PHONETIC ANALYSIS OF WORDS IN GRADES K-2.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

CAMPBELL, BONNIE; QUINN, GOLDIE

THE METHOD USED AT THE BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA, PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO TEACH READING READINESS AND THE PHONETIC ANALYSIS OF WORDS IN KINDERGARTEN THROUGH GRADE TWO IS DESCRIBED. SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHING THE READINESS SKILLS OF AUDITORY AND VISUAL PERCEPTION, VOCABULARY SKILLS OF WORD RECOGNITION AND WORD MEANING, AND THE PHONETIC ANALYSIS OF WORDS IN GRADES…

Repair Sequences in Dysarthric Conversational Speech: A Study in Interactional Phonetics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rutter, Ben

2009-01-01

This paper presents some findings from a case study of repair sequences in conversations between a dysarthric speaker, Chris, and her interactional partners. It adopts the methodology of interactional phonetics, where turn design, sequence organization, and variation in phonetic parameters are analysed in unison. The analysis focused on the use of…

Predicting Phonetic Transcription Agreement: Insights from Research in Infant Vocalizations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ramsdell, Heather L.; Oller, D. Kimbrough; Ethington, Corinna A.

2007-01-01

The purpose of this study is to provide new perspectives on correlates of phonetic transcription agreement. Our research focuses on phonetic transcription and coding of infant vocalizations. The findings are presumed to be broadly applicable to other difficult cases of transcription, such as found in severe disorders of speech, which similarly…

Segments, Letters and Gestures: Thoughts on Doing and Teaching Phonetics and Transcription

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muller, Nicole; Papakyritsis, Ioannis

2011-01-01

This brief article reflects on some pitfalls inherent in the learning and teaching of segmental phonetic transcription. We suggest that a gestural interpretation to disordered speech data, in conjunction with segmental phonetic transcription, can add valuable insight into patterns of disordered speech, and that a gestural orientation should form…

Serial Processing and the "Phonetic Route": Lessons Learned in the Functional Reorganization of Deep Dyslexia.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthews, Claire

1991-01-01

A patient with chronic agrammatic Broca's aphasia exhibited deep dyslexia and was treated with functional reorganization of the phonetic route of reading, with the patient learning consciously to control formerly automatic behaviors. The patient's responses indicated that the phonetic route encompasses at least two dissociable functions:…

Of ens 'n' ands: observations on the phonetic make-up of a coordinator and its uses in talk-in-interaction.

PubMed

Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar

2012-03-01

In grammar books, the various functions of and as phrasal coordinator and clausal conjunction are treated as standard knowledge. In addition, studies on the uses of and in everyday talk-in-interaction have described its discourse-organizational functions on a more global level. In the phonetic literature, in turn, a range of phonetic forms of and have been listed. Yet, so far few studies have related the phonetic features of and to its function. This contribution surveys a range of phonetic forms of and in a corpus of private American English telephone conversations. It shows that the use of forms such as [ænd], [εn], or [en], among others, is not random but, in essence, correlates with the syntactic-pragmatic scope of and and the cognitive closeness of the items the and connects. This, in turn, allows the phonetic design of and to contribute to the organization of turn-taking. The findings presented are based on conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology, which includes quantitative analyses.

Characterizing the motor execution stage of speech production: consonantal effects on delayed naming latency and onset duration.

PubMed

Rastle, Kathleen; Croot, Karen P; Harrington, Jonathan M; Coltheart, Max

2005-10-01

The research described in this article had 2 aims: to permit greater precision in the conduct of naming experiments and to contribute to a characterization of the motor execution stage of speech production. The authors report an exhaustive inventory of consonantal and postconsonantal influences on delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration, derived from a hand-labeled corpus of single-syllable consonant-vowel utterances. Five talkers produced 6 repetitions each of a set of 168 prepared monosyllables, a set that comprised each of the consonantal onsets of English in 3 vowel contexts. Strong and significant effects associated with phonetic characteristics of initial and noninitial phonemes were observed on both delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration. Results are discussed in terms of the biomechanical properties of the articulatory system that may give rise to these effects and in terms of their methodological implications for naming experiments.

Acoustic characteristics of Punjabi retroflex and dental stops.

PubMed

Hussain, Qandeel; Proctor, Michael; Harvey, Mark; Demuth, Katherine

2017-06-01

The phonological category "retroflex" is found in many Indo-Aryan languages; however, it has not been clearly established which acoustic characteristics reliably differentiate retroflexes from other coronals. This study investigates the acoustic phonetic properties of Punjabi retroflex /ʈ/ and dental /ʈ̪/ in word-medial and word-initial contexts across /i e a o u/, and in word-final context across /i a u/. Formant transitions, closure and release durations, and spectral moments of release bursts are compared in 2280 stop tokens produced by 30 speakers. Although burst spectral measures and formant transitions do not consistently differentiate retroflexes from dentals in some vowel contexts, stop release duration, and total stop duration reliably differentiate Punjabi retroflex and dental stops across all word contexts and vocalic environments. These results suggest that Punjabi coronal place contrasts are signaled by the complex interaction of temporal and spectral cues.

Processing Nonnative Consonant Clusters in the Classroom: Perception and Production of Phonetic Detail

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davidson, Lisa; Wilson, Colin

2016-01-01

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

Voice Onset Time in Consonant Cluster Errors: Can Phonetic Accommodation Differentiate Cognitive from Motor Errors?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pouplier, Marianne; Marin, Stefania; Waltl, Susanne

2014-01-01

Purpose: Phonetic accommodation in speech errors has traditionally been used to identify the processing level at which an error has occurred. Recent studies have challenged the view that noncanonical productions may solely be due to phonetic, not phonological, processing irregularities, as previously assumed. The authors of the present study…

Modelling the Architecture of Phonetic Plans: Evidence from Apraxia of Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ziegler, Wolfram

2009-01-01

In theories of spoken language production, the gestural code prescribing the movements of the speech organs is usually viewed as a linear string of holistic, encapsulated, hard-wired, phonetic plans, e.g., of the size of phonemes or syllables. Interactions between phonetic units on the surface of overt speech are commonly attributed to either the…

Electrophysiological evidence for speech-specific audiovisual integration.

PubMed

Baart, Martijn; Stekelenburg, Jeroen J; Vroomen, Jean

2014-01-01

Lip-read speech is integrated with heard speech at various neural levels. Here, we investigated the extent to which lip-read induced modulations of the auditory N1 and P2 (measured with EEG) are indicative of speech-specific audiovisual integration, and we explored to what extent the ERPs were modulated by phonetic audiovisual congruency. In order to disentangle speech-specific (phonetic) integration from non-speech integration, we used Sine-Wave Speech (SWS) that was perceived as speech by half of the participants (they were in speech-mode), while the other half was in non-speech mode. Results showed that the N1 obtained with audiovisual stimuli peaked earlier than the N1 evoked by auditory-only stimuli. This lip-read induced speeding up of the N1 occurred for listeners in speech and non-speech mode. In contrast, if listeners were in speech-mode, lip-read speech also modulated the auditory P2, but not if listeners were in non-speech mode, thus revealing speech-specific audiovisual binding. Comparing ERPs for phonetically congruent audiovisual stimuli with ERPs for incongruent stimuli revealed an effect of phonetic stimulus congruency that started at ~200 ms after (in)congruence became apparent. Critically, akin to the P2 suppression, congruency effects were only observed if listeners were in speech mode, and not if they were in non-speech mode. Using identical stimuli, we thus confirm that audiovisual binding involves (partially) different neural mechanisms for sound processing in speech and non-speech mode. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

DARPA TIMIT acoustic-phonetic continous speech corpus CD-ROM. NIST speech disc 1-1.1

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garofolo, J. S.; Lamel, L. F.; Fisher, W. M.; Fiscus, J. G.; Pallett, D. S.

1993-02-01

The Texas Instruments/Massachusetts Institute of Technology (TIMIT) corpus of read speech has been designed to provide speech data for the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems. TIMIT contains speech from 630 speakers representing 8 major dialect divisions of American English, each speaking 10 phonetically-rich sentences. The TIMIT corpus includes time-aligned orthographic, phonetic, and word transcriptions, as well as speech waveform data for each spoken sentence. The release of TIMIT contains several improvements over the Prototype CD-ROM released in December, 1988: (1) full 630-speaker corpus, (2) checked and corrected transcriptions, (3) word-alignment transcriptions, (4) NIST SPHERE-headered waveform files and header manipulation software, (5) phonemic dictionary, (6) new test and training subsets balanced for dialectal and phonetic coverage, and (7) more extensive documentation.

Pattern learning with deep neural networks in EMG-based speech recognition.

PubMed

Wand, Michael; Schultz, Tanja

2014-01-01

We report on classification of phones and phonetic features from facial electromyographic (EMG) data, within the context of our EMG-based Silent Speech interface. In this paper we show that a Deep Neural Network can be used to perform this classification task, yielding a significant improvement over conventional Gaussian Mixture models. Our central contribution is the visualization of patterns which are learned by the neural network. With increasing network depth, these patterns represent more and more intricate electromyographic activity.

Two Case Studies in the Phonetics-Phonology Interface: Evidence from Turkish Voicing and Norwegian Coalescence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Feizollahi, Zhaleh

2010-01-01

The phonetics-phonology interface has long been debated; some linguists argue for a modular approach (Keating 1984, Pierrehumbert 1990, Zsiga 1997, Cohn 1998), while others argue that there is no interface, and that phonetics and phonology are one and the same (Browman & Goldstein 1989-1992, Ohala 1990). Recent proposals by Gafos (2002), and…

On Phonetics and Phonology: A Broad-Termed Comparison and Contrast between Broad and Narrow Transcription

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ebrahimi, Pouria

2010-01-01

As a subfield of linguistics, phonetics and phonology have as their main axis the concern of articulation of sounds; that is, how human beings produce speech. Although dated back over 2000 years ago, modern contributions of scientists and scholars regarding phonetics and phonology have involved various fields of science and schools of thought such…

Caracteristiques de trois systemes informatiques de transcription phonetique et graphemique (Characteristics of Three Computer-Based Systems of Phonetic and Graphemic Transcription).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marty, Fernand

Three computer-based systems for phonetic/graphemic transcription of language are described, compared, and contrasted. The text is entirely in French, with examples given from the French language. The three approaches to transcription are: (1) text entered in standard typography and exiting in phonetic transcription with markers for rhythmic…

Social Interaction in Infants' Learning of Second-Language Phonetics: An Exploration of Brain-Behavior Relations.

PubMed

Conboy, Barbara T; Brooks, Rechele; Meltzoff, Andrew N; Kuhl, Patricia K

2015-01-01

Infants learn phonetic information from a second language with live-person presentations, but not television or audio-only recordings. To understand the role of social interaction in learning a second language, we examined infants' joint attention with live, Spanish-speaking tutors and used a neural measure of phonetic learning. Infants' eye-gaze behaviors during Spanish sessions at 9.5-10.5 months of age predicted second-language phonetic learning, assessed by an event-related potential measure of Spanish phoneme discrimination at 11 months. These data suggest a powerful role for social interaction at the earliest stages of learning a new language.

A novel probabilistic framework for event-based speech recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Juneja, Amit; Espy-Wilson, Carol

2003-10-01

One of the reasons for unsatisfactory performance of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is the inferior acoustic modeling of low-level acoustic-phonetic information in the speech signal. An acoustic-phonetic approach to ASR, on the other hand, explicitly targets linguistic information in the speech signal, but such a system for continuous speech recognition (CSR) is not known to exist. A probabilistic and statistical framework for CSR based on the idea of the representation of speech sounds by bundles of binary valued articulatory phonetic features is proposed. Multiple probabilistic sequences of linguistically motivated landmarks are obtained using binary classifiers of manner phonetic features-syllabic, sonorant and continuant-and the knowledge-based acoustic parameters (APs) that are acoustic correlates of those features. The landmarks are then used for the extraction of knowledge-based APs for source and place phonetic features and their binary classification. Probabilistic landmark sequences are constrained using manner class language models for isolated or connected word recognition. The proposed method could overcome the disadvantages encountered by the early acoustic-phonetic knowledge-based systems that led the ASR community to switch to systems highly dependent on statistical pattern analysis methods and probabilistic language or grammar models.

Phonetics exercises using the Alvin experiment-control software.

PubMed

Hillenbrand, James M; Gayvert, Robert T; Clark, Michael J

2015-04-01

Exercises are described that were designed to provide practice in phonetic transcription for students taking an introductory phonetics course. The goal was to allow instructors to offload much of the drill that would otherwise need to be covered in class or handled with paper-and-pencil tasks using text rather than speech as input. The exercises were developed using Alvin, a general-purpose software package for experiment design and control. The simplest exercises help students learn sound-symbol associations. For example, a vowel-transcription exercise presents listeners with consonant-vowel-consonant syllables on each trial; students are asked to choose among buttons labeled with phonetic symbols for 12 vowels. Several word-transcription exercises are included in which students hear a word and are asked to enter a phonetic transcription. Immediate feedback is provided for all of the exercises. An explanation of the methods that are used to create exercises is provided. Although no formal evaluation was conducted, comments on course evaluations suggest that most students found the exercises to be useful. Exercises were developed for use in an introductory phonetics course. The exercises can be used in their current form, they can be modified to suit individual needs, or new exercises can be developed.

Impact of tongue reduction on overall speech intelligibility, articulation and oromyofunctional behavior in 4 children with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome.

PubMed

Van Lierde, K; Galiwango, G; Hodges, A; Bettens, K; Luyten, A; Vermeersch, H

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of partial glossectomy (using the keyhole technique) on speech intelligibility, articulation, resonance and oromyofunctional behavior. A partial glossectomy was performed in 4 children with Beckwith- Wiedemann syndrome between the ages of 0.5 and 3.1 years. An ENT assessment, a phonetic inventory, a phonemic and phonological analysis and a consensus perceptual evaluation of speech intelligibility, resonance and oromyofunctional behavior were performed. It was not possible in this study to separate the effects of the surgery from the typical developmental progress of speech sound mastery. Improved speech intelligibility, a more complete phonetic inventory, an increase in phonological skills, normal resonance and increased motor-oriented oral behavior were found in the postsurgical condition. The presence of phonetic distortions, lip incompetence and interdental tongue position were still present in the postsurgical condition. Speech therapy should be focused on correct phonetic placement and a motor-oriented approach to increase lip competence, and on functional tongue exercises and tongue lifting during the production of alveolars. Detailed analyses in a larger number of subjects with and without Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome may help further illustrate the long-term impact of partial glossectomy. Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel.

An fMRI examination of the effects of acoustic-phonetic and lexical competition on access to the lexical-semantic network.

PubMed

Minicucci, Domenic; Guediche, Sara; Blumstein, Sheila E

2013-08-01

The current study explored how factors of acoustic-phonetic and lexical competition affect access to the lexical-semantic network during spoken word recognition. An auditory semantic priming lexical decision task was presented to subjects while in the MR scanner. Prime-target pairs consisted of prime words with the initial voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/, and /k/ followed by word and nonword targets. To examine the neural consequences of lexical and sound structure competition, primes either had voiced minimal pair competitors or they did not, and they were either acoustically modified to be poorer exemplars of the voiceless phonetic category or not. Neural activation associated with semantic priming (Unrelated-Related conditions) revealed a bilateral fronto-temporo-parietal network. Within this network, clusters in the left insula/inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left superior temporal gyrus (STG), and left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) showed sensitivity to lexical competition. The pMTG also demonstrated sensitivity to acoustic modification, and the insula/IFG showed an interaction between lexical competition and acoustic modification. These findings suggest the posterior lexical-semantic network is modulated by both acoustic-phonetic and lexical structure, and that the resolution of these two sources of competition recruits frontal structures. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Of "Ens" "n" "Ands": Observations on the Phonetic Make-Up of a Coordinator and Its Uses in Talk-in-Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar

2012-01-01

In grammar books, the various functions of "and" as phrasal coordinator and clausal conjunction are treated as standard knowledge. In addition, studies on the uses of "and" in everyday talk-in-interaction have described its discourse-organizational functions on a more global level. In the phonetic literature, in turn, a range of phonetic forms of…

49 CFR Appendix A to Part 220 - Recommended Phonetic Alphabet

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A Appendix A to Part...—Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A—ALFA B—BRAVO C—CHARLIE D—DELTA E—ECHO F—FOXTROT G—GOLF H—HOTEL I—INDIA J...—VICTOR W—WHISKEY X—XRAY Y—YANKEE Z—ZULU The letter “ZULU” should be written as “Z” to distinguish it from...

49 CFR Appendix A to Part 220 - Recommended Phonetic Alphabet

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2014-10-01 2014-10-01 false Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A Appendix A to Part...—Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A—ALFA B—BRAVO C—CHARLIE D—DELTA E—ECHO F—FOXTROT G—GOLF H—HOTEL I—INDIA J...—VICTOR W—WHISKEY X—XRAY Y—YANKEE Z—ZULU The letter “ZULU” should be written as “Z” to distinguish it from...

49 CFR Appendix A to Part 220 - Recommended Phonetic Alphabet

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2012-10-01 2012-10-01 false Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A Appendix A to Part...—Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A—ALFA B—BRAVO C—CHARLIE D—DELTA E—ECHO F—FOXTROT G—GOLF H—HOTEL I—INDIA J...—VICTOR W—WHISKEY X—XRAY Y—YANKEE Z—ZULU The letter “ZULU” should be written as “Z” to distinguish it from...

49 CFR Appendix A to Part 220 - Recommended Phonetic Alphabet

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2013-10-01 2013-10-01 false Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A Appendix A to Part...—Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A—ALFA B—BRAVO C—CHARLIE D—DELTA E—ECHO F—FOXTROT G—GOLF H—HOTEL I—INDIA J...—VICTOR W—WHISKEY X—XRAY Y—YANKEE Z—ZULU The letter “ZULU” should be written as “Z” to distinguish it from...

49 CFR Appendix A to Part 220 - Recommended Phonetic Alphabet

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... 49 Transportation 4 2011-10-01 2011-10-01 false Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A Appendix A to Part...—Recommended Phonetic Alphabet A—ALFA B—BRAVO C—CHARLIE D—DELTA E—ECHO F—FOXTROT G—GOLF H—HOTEL I—INDIA J...—VICTOR W—WHISKEY X—XRAY Y—YANKEE Z—ZULU The letter “ZULU” should be written as “Z” to distinguish it from...

Speech Synthesis Using Perceptually Motivated Features

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-01-23

with others a few years prior (with the concurrence of the project’s program manager. Willard Larkin). The Perceptual Flow of Phonetic Information and...34The Perceptual Flow of Phonetic Processing," consonant confusion matrices are analyzed for patterns of phonetic-feature decoding errors conditioned...decoding) is also observed. From these conditional probability patterns, it is proposed that they reflect a temporal flow of perceptual processing

When Actions Speak Too Much Louder than Words: Hand Gestures Disrupt Word Learning when Phonetic Demands Are High

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kelly, Spencer D.; Lee, Angela L.

2012-01-01

It is now widely accepted that hand gestures help people understand and learn language. Here, we provide an exception to this general rule--when phonetic demands are high, gesture actually hurts. Native English-speaking adults were instructed on the meaning of novel Japanese word pairs that were for non-native speakers phonetically hard (/ite/ vs.…

Social Interaction in Infants’ Learning of Second-Language Phonetics: An Exploration of Brain-Behavior Relations

PubMed Central

Conboy, Barbara T.; Brooks, Rechele; Meltzoff, Andrew N.; Kuhl, Patricia K.

2015-01-01

Infants learn phonetic information from a second language with live-person presentations, but not television or audio-only recordings. To understand the role of social interaction in learning a second language, we examined infants’ joint attention with live, Spanish-speaking tutors and used a neural measure of phonetic learning. Infants’ eye-gaze behaviors during Spanish sessions at 9.5 – 10.5 months of age predicted second-language phonetic learning, assessed by an event-related potential (ERP) measure of Spanish phoneme discrimination at 11 months. These data suggest a powerful role for social interaction at the earliest stages of learning a new language. PMID:26179488

Graphemes Sharing Phonetic Features Tend to Induce Similar Synesthetic Colors.

PubMed

Kang, Mi-Jeong; Kim, Yeseul; Shin, Ji-Young; Kim, Chai-Youn

2017-01-01

Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors. We tested five Korean multilingual synesthetes on a color-matching task using graphemes from Korean, English, and Japanese orthography. We then compared the similarity of synesthetic colors induced by those characters sharing a phonetic feature. Results showed that graphemes associated with the same phonetic feature tend to induce synesthetic color in both within- and cross-script analyses. Moreover, this tendency was consistent for graphemes that are not transliterable into each other as well as graphemes that are. These results suggest that it is the perceptual-i.e., phonetic-properties associated with graphemes, not just conceptual associations such as transliteration, that determine synesthetic color.

Phonetic Encoding and Its Impact on Short-Term Memory Abilities and Academic Tasks for Students with Learning Disabilities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marini, Anthony E.

1990-01-01

The verbal encoding ability of 24 students (ages 14-20) with learning disabilities (LD) was compared to that of 24 non-learning-disabled subjects. LD subjects did not show a release from proactive interference, suggesting that such students are less likely to encode the phonetic features of words or use a phonetic code in short-term memory.…

Perception and the temporal properties of speech

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gordon, Peter C.

1991-11-01

Four experiments addressing the role of attention in phonetic perception are reported. The first experiment shows that the relative importance of two cues to the voicing distinction changes when subjects must perform an arithmetic distractor task at the same time as identifying a speech stimulus. The voice onset time cue loses phonetic significance when subjects are distracted, while the F0 onset frequency cue does not. The second experiment shows a similar pattern for two cues to the distinction between the vowels /i/ (as in 'beat') and /I/ (as in 'bit'). Together these experiments indicate that careful attention to speech perception is necessary for strong acoustic cues to achieve their full phonetic impact, while weaker acoustic cues achieve their full phonetic impact without close attention. Experiment 3 shows that this pattern is obtained when the distractor task places little demand on verbal short term memory. Experiment 4 provides a large data set for testing formal models of the role of attention in speech perception. Attention is shown to influence the signal to noise ratio in phonetic encoding. This principle is instantiated in a network model in which the role of attention is to reduce noise in the phonetic encoding of acoustic cues. Implications of this work for understanding speech perception and general theories of the role of attention in perception are discussed.

Some Problems of American Students in Mastering Persian Phonology.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ghadessy, Esmael

1988-12-01

An adult learning to speak a foreign language normally retains an "accent" which may affect the intelligibility of certain sounds, but more often simply conveys the fact that the speaker is a non-native speaker. Various scholars have experimented and discussed the elements involved in a foreign accent. However, in Iran very few researchers have attempted to verify scientifically what are the phonetic and phonological aspects of an "accent." This author tried to determine whether or not a selected group of words, emphasizing stop voicing, produced by native speakers of Persian had significant phonetic and phonemic differences from those achieved by the American students. Subjects for the experiments were three groups of students, one Iranian, two American. A contrastive analysis of the Persian and the English stop consonants was made. An identical measurement test for all three groups was administered. Utilized was a Kay Sona-graph for acoustic analysis, and all spoken data from the Iranian group were compared with those of the American groups. An examination of acoustic correlates of Tehran stops produced by American students shows that the phonetically different but similar feature of /voice/ found in Tehran, Persian and English stops is intuitive to the Americans, and that the language learner cannot readily disassociate a phonological feature from habits of articulation. The results of this research support using the phonetic method for adult learners who want to improve their pronunciation ability. Further research and experimentation is necessary on the effect of the suprasegmental elements on a foreign accent and the most effective teaching materials and methods and to explore other possible techniques in the teaching process.

Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Evidence of Cognate Effects in the Phonetic Production and Processing of a Vowel Contrast.

PubMed

Amengual, Mark

2016-01-01

The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ "forest") or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position ((*)/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals.

A model for ethical practices in clinical phonetics and linguistics.

PubMed

Powell, Thomas W

2007-01-01

The emergence of clinical phonetics and linguistics as an area of scientific inquiry gives rise to the need for guidelines that define ethical and responsible conduct. The diverse membership of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) and the readership of this journal are uniquely suited to consider ethical issues from diverse perspectives. Accordingly, this paper introduces a multi-tiered six-factor model for ethical practices to stimulate discussion of ethical issues.

L'Apport des Faits Phonetiques au Developpement de la Comprehension Auditive en Langue Seconde (The Influence of Phonetic Skills on the Development of Listening Comprehension in a Second Language).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Champagne-Muzar, Cecile

1996-01-01

Ascertains the influence of the development of receptive phonetic skills on the level of listening comprehension of adults learning French as a second language in a formal setting. Test results indicate substantial gains in phonetics by the experimental group and a significant difference between the performance of experimental and control groups.…

A Dual-Route Model that Learns to Pronounce English Words

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Remington, Roger W.; Miller, Craig S.; Null, Cynthia H. (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

This paper describes a model that learns to pronounce English words. Learning occurs in two modules: 1) a rule-based module that constructs pronunciations by phonetic analysis of the letter string, and 2) a whole-word module that learns to associate subsets of letters to the pronunciation, without phonetic analysis. In a simulation on a corpus of over 300 words the model produced pronunciation latencies consistent with the effects of word frequency and orthographic regularity observed in human data. Implications of the model for theories of visual word processing and reading instruction are discussed.

On the intersection of phonetic detail and the organization of interaction: clinical connections.

PubMed

Walker, Gareth; Local, John

2013-01-01

The analysis of language use in real-world contexts poses particular methodological challenges. We codify responses to these challenges as a series of methodological imperatives. To demonstrate the relevance of these imperatives to clinical investigation, we present analyses of single episodes of interaction where one participant has a speech and/or language impairment: atypical prosody, echolalia and dysarthria. We demonstrate there is considerable heuristic and analytic value in taking this approach to analysing the organization of interaction involving individuals with a speech and/or language impairment.

How our own speech rate influences our perception of others.

PubMed

Bosker, Hans Rutger

2017-08-01

In conversation, our own speech and that of others follow each other in rapid succession. Effects of the surrounding context on speech perception are well documented but, despite the ubiquity of the sound of our own voice, it is unknown whether our own speech also influences our perception of other talkers. This study investigated context effects induced by our own speech through 6 experiments, specifically targeting rate normalization (i.e., perceiving phonetic segments relative to surrounding speech rate). Experiment 1 revealed that hearing prerecorded fast or slow context sentences altered the perception of ambiguous vowels, replicating earlier work. Experiment 2 demonstrated that talking at a fast or slow rate prior to target presentation also altered target perception, though the effect of preceding speech rate was reduced. Experiment 3 showed that silent talking (i.e., inner speech) at fast or slow rates did not modulate the perception of others, suggesting that the effect of self-produced speech rate in Experiment 2 arose through monitoring of the external speech signal. Experiment 4 demonstrated that, when participants were played back their own (fast/slow) speech, no reduction of the effect of preceding speech rate was observed, suggesting that the additional task of speech production may be responsible for the reduced effect in Experiment 2. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 replicate Experiments 2 and 3 with new participant samples. Taken together, these results suggest that variation in speech production may induce variation in speech perception, thus carrying implications for our understanding of spoken communication in dialogue settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Phonetic convergence in spontaneous conversations as a function of interlocutor language distance

PubMed Central

Kim, Midam; Horton, William S.; Bradlow, Ann R.

2013-01-01

This study explores phonetic convergence during conversations between pairs of talkers with varying language distance. Specifically, we examined conversations within two native English talkers and within two native Korean talkers who had either the same or different regional dialects, and between native and nonnative talkers of English. To measure phonetic convergence, an independent group of listeners judged the similarity of utterance samples from each talker through an XAB perception test, in which X was a sample of one talker’s speech and A and B were samples from the other talker at either early or late portions of the conversation. The results showed greater convergence for same-dialect pairs than for either the different-dialect pairs or the different-L1 pairs. These results generally support the hypothesis that there is a relationship between phonetic convergence and interlocutor language distance. We interpret this pattern as suggesting that phonetic convergence between talker pairs that vary in the degree of their initial language alignment may be dynamically mediated by two parallel mechanisms: the need for intelligibility and the extra demands of nonnative speech production and perception. PMID:23637712

Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?

PubMed

Babel, Molly; McAuliffe, Michael; Haber, Graham

2013-01-01

This study examines spontaneous phonetic accommodation of a dialect with distinct categories by speakers who are in the process of merging those categories. We focus on the merger of the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets in New Zealand English, presenting New Zealand participants with an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Mergers-in-progress are a uniquely interesting sound change as they showcase the asymmetry between speech perception and production. Yet, we examine mergers using spontaneous phonetic imitation, which is phenomenon that is necessarily a behavior where perceptual input influences speech production. Phonetic imitation is quantified by a perceptual measure and an acoustic calculation of mergedness using a Pillai-Bartlett trace. The results from both analyses indicate spontaneous phonetic imitation is moderated by extra-linguistic factors such as the valence of assigned conditions and social bias. We also find evidence for a decrease in the degree of mergedness in post-exposure productions. Taken together, our results suggest that under the appropriate conditions New Zealanders phonetically accommodate to Australian English and that in the process of speech imitation, mergers-in-progress can, but do not consistently, become less merged.

Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?

PubMed Central

Babel, Molly; McAuliffe, Michael; Haber, Graham

2013-01-01

This study examines spontaneous phonetic accommodation of a dialect with distinct categories by speakers who are in the process of merging those categories. We focus on the merger of the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets in New Zealand English, presenting New Zealand participants with an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Mergers-in-progress are a uniquely interesting sound change as they showcase the asymmetry between speech perception and production. Yet, we examine mergers using spontaneous phonetic imitation, which is phenomenon that is necessarily a behavior where perceptual input influences speech production. Phonetic imitation is quantified by a perceptual measure and an acoustic calculation of mergedness using a Pillai-Bartlett trace. The results from both analyses indicate spontaneous phonetic imitation is moderated by extra-linguistic factors such as the valence of assigned conditions and social bias. We also find evidence for a decrease in the degree of mergedness in post-exposure productions. Taken together, our results suggest that under the appropriate conditions New Zealanders phonetically accommodate to Australian English and that in the process of speech imitation, mergers-in-progress can, but do not consistently, become less merged. PMID:24069011

K-SPAN: A lexical database of Korean surface phonetic forms and phonological neighborhood density statistics.

PubMed

Holliday, Jeffrey J; Turnbull, Rory; Eychenne, Julien

2017-10-01

This article presents K-SPAN (Korean Surface Phonetics and Neighborhoods), a database of surface phonetic forms and several measures of phonological neighborhood density for 63,836 Korean words. Currently publicly available Korean corpora are limited by the fact that they only provide orthographic representations in Hangeul, which is problematic since phonetic forms in Korean cannot be reliably predicted from orthographic forms. We describe the method used to derive the surface phonetic forms from a publicly available orthographic corpus of Korean, and report on several statistics calculated using this database; namely, segment unigram frequencies, which are compared to previously reported results, along with segment-based and syllable-based neighborhood density statistics for three types of representation: an "orthographic" form, which is a quasi-phonological representation, a "conservative" form, which maintains all known contrasts, and a "modern" form, which represents the pronunciation of contemporary Seoul Korean. These representations are rendered in an ASCII-encoded scheme, which allows users to query the corpus without having to read Korean orthography, and permits the calculation of a wide range of phonological measures.

The Identification of High-pitched Sung Vowels in Sense and Nonsense Words by Professional Singers and Untrained Listeners.

PubMed

Deme, Andrea

2017-03-01

High-pitched sung vowels may be considered phonetically "underspecified" because of (i) the tuning of the F 1 to the f 0 accompanying pitch raising and (ii) the wide harmonic spacing of the voice source resulting in the undersampling of the vocal tract transfer function. Therefore, sung vowel intelligibility is expected to decrease as the f 0 increases. Based on the literature of speech perception, it is often suggested that sung vowels are better perceived if uttered in consonantal (CVC) context than in isolation even at high f 0 . The results for singing, however, are contradictory. In the present study, we further investigate this question. We compare vowel identification in sense and nonsense CVC sequences and show that the positive effect of the context disappears if the number of legal choices in a perception test is similar in both conditions, meaning that any positive effect of the CVC context may only stem from the smaller number of possible responses, i.e., from higher probabilities. Additionally, it is also tested whether the training in production (i.e., singing training) may also lead to a perceptual advantage of the singers over nonsingers in the identification of high-pitched sung vowels. The results show no advantage of this kind. Copyright © 2017 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phonetics, Phonology, and Applied Linguistics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nadasdy, Adam

1995-01-01

Examines recent trends in phonetics and phonology and their influence on second language instruction, specifically grammar and lexicography. An annotated bibliography discusses nine important works in the field. (99 references) (MDM)

Listeners are maximally flexible in updating phonetic beliefs over time.

PubMed

Saltzman, David; Myers, Emily

2018-04-01

Perceptual learning serves as a mechanism for listenexrs to adapt to novel phonetic information. Distributional tracking theories posit that this adaptation occurs as a result of listeners accumulating talker-specific distributional information about the phonetic category in question (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015, Psychological Review, 122). What is not known is how listeners build these talker-specific distributions; that is, if they aggregate all information received over a certain time period, or if they rely more heavily upon the most recent information received and down-weight older, consolidated information. In the present experiment, listeners were exposed to four interleaved blocks of a lexical decision task and a phonetic categorization task in which the lexical decision blocks were designed to bias perception in opposite directions along a "s"-"sh" continuum. Listeners returned several days later and completed the identical task again. Evidence was consistent with listeners using a relatively short temporal window of integration at the individual session level. Namely, in each individual session, listeners' perception of a "s"-"sh" contrast was biased by the information in the immediately preceding lexical decision block, and there was no evidence that listeners summed their experience with the talker over the entire session. Similarly, the magnitude of the bias effect did not change between sessions, consistent with the idea that talker-specific information remains flexible, even after consolidation. In general, results suggest that listeners are maximally flexible when considering how to categorize speech from a novel talker.

Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Evidence of Cognate Effects in the Phonetic Production and Processing of a Vowel Contrast

PubMed Central

Amengual, Mark

2016-01-01

The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ “forest”) or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position (*/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals. PMID:27199849

The Phonetics of Head and Body Movement in the Realization of American Sign Language Signs.

PubMed

Tyrone, Martha E; Mauk, Claude E

2016-01-01

Because the primary articulators for sign languages are the hands, sign phonology and phonetics have focused mainly on them and treated other articulators as passive targets. However, there is abundant research on the role of nonmanual articulators in sign language grammar and prosody. The current study examines how hand and head/body movements are coordinated to realize phonetic targets. Kinematic data were collected from 5 deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers to allow the analysis of movements of the hands, head and body during signing. In particular, we examine how the chin, forehead and torso move during the production of ASL signs at those three phonological locations. Our findings suggest that for signs with a lexical movement toward the head, the forehead and chin move to facilitate convergence with the hand. By comparison, the torso does not move to facilitate convergence with the hand for signs located at the torso. These results imply that the nonmanual articulators serve a phonetic as well as a grammatical or prosodic role in sign languages. Future models of sign phonetics and phonology should take into consideration the movements of the nonmanual articulators in the realization of signs. © 2016 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Phonological Feature Re-Assembly and the Importance of Phonetic Cues

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Archibald, John

2009-01-01

It is argued that new phonological features can be acquired in second languages, but that both feature acquisition and feature re-assembly are affected by the robustness of phonetic cues in the input.

Recognition of voice commands using adaptation of foreign language speech recognizer via selection of phonetic transcriptions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maskeliunas, Rytis; Rudzionis, Vytautas

2011-06-01

In recent years various commercial speech recognizers have become available. These recognizers provide the possibility to develop applications incorporating various speech recognition techniques easily and quickly. All of these commercial recognizers are typically targeted to widely spoken languages having large market potential; however, it may be possible to adapt available commercial recognizers for use in environments where less widely spoken languages are used. Since most commercial recognition engines are closed systems the single avenue for the adaptation is to try set ways for the selection of proper phonetic transcription methods between the two languages. This paper deals with the methods to find the phonetic transcriptions for Lithuanian voice commands to be recognized using English speech engines. The experimental evaluation showed that it is possible to find phonetic transcriptions that will enable the recognition of Lithuanian voice commands with recognition accuracy of over 90%.

Phonologic-graphemic transcodifier for Portuguese Language spoken in Brazil (PLB)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fragadasilva, Francisco Jose; Saotome, Osamu; Deoliveira, Carlos Alberto

An automatic speech-to-text transformer system, suited to unlimited vocabulary, is presented. The basic acoustic unit considered are the allophones of the phonemes corresponding to the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil (PLB). The input to the system is a phonetic sequence, from a former step of isolated word recognition of slowly spoken speech. In a first stage, the system eliminates phonetic elements that don't belong to PLB. Using knowledge sources such as phonetics, phonology, orthography, and PLB specific lexicon, the output is a sequence of written words, ordered by probabilistic criterion that constitutes the set of graphemic possibilities to that input sequence. Pronunciation differences of some regions of Brazil are considered, but only those that cause differences in phonological transcription, because those of phonetic level are absorbed, during the transformation to phonological level. In the final stage, all possible written words are analyzed for orthography and grammar point of view, to eliminate the incorrect ones.

Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months

PubMed Central

Dietrich, Christiane; Swingley, Daniel; Werker, Janet F.

2007-01-01

One of the first steps infants take in learning their native language is to discover its set of speech-sound categories. This early development is shown when infants begin to lose the ability to differentiate some of the speech sounds their language does not use, while retaining or improving discrimination of language-relevant sounds. However, this aspect of early phonological tuning is not sufficient for language learning. Children must also discover which of the phonetic cues that are used in their language serve to signal lexical distinctions. Phonetic variation that is readily discriminable to all children may indicate two different words in one language but only one word in another. Here, we provide evidence that the language background of 1.5-year-olds affects their interpretation of phonetic variation in word learning, and we show that young children interpret salient phonetic variation in language-specific ways. Three experiments with a total of 104 children compared Dutch- and English-learning 18-month-olds' responses to novel words varying in vowel duration or vowel quality. Dutch learners interpreted vowel duration as lexically contrastive, but English learners did not, in keeping with properties of Dutch and English. Both groups performed equivalently when differentiating words varying in vowel quality. Thus, at one and a half years, children's phonological knowledge already guides their interpretation of salient phonetic variation. We argue that early phonological learning is not just a matter of maintaining the ability to distinguish language-relevant phonetic cues. Learning also requires phonological interpretation at appropriate levels of linguistic analysis. PMID:17911262

Contributions of speech science to the technology of man-machine voice interactions

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lea, Wayne A.

1977-01-01

Research in speech understanding was reviewed. Plans which include prosodics research, phonological rules for speech understanding systems, and continued interdisciplinary phonetics research are discussed. Improved acoustic phonetic analysis capabilities in speech recognizers are suggested.

Speech perception and production in severe environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pisoni, David B.

1990-09-01

The goal was to acquire new knowledge about speech perception and production in severe environments such as high masking noise, increased cognitive load or sustained attentional demands. Changes were examined in speech production under these adverse conditions through acoustic analysis techniques. One set of studies focused on the effects of noise on speech production. The experiments in this group were designed to generate a database of speech obtained in noise and in quiet. A second set of experiments was designed to examine the effects of cognitive load on the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech. Talkers were required to carry out a demanding perceptual motor task while they read lists of test words. A final set of experiments explored the effects of vocal fatigue on the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech. Both cognitive load and vocal fatigue are present in many applications where speech recognition technology is used, yet their influence on speech production is poorly understood.

Assessment of Severe Apnoea through Voice Analysis, Automatic Speech, and Speaker Recognition Techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fernández Pozo, Rubén; Blanco Murillo, Jose Luis; Hernández Gómez, Luis; López Gonzalo, Eduardo; Alcázar Ramírez, José; Toledano, Doroteo T.

2009-12-01

This study is part of an ongoing collaborative effort between the medical and the signal processing communities to promote research on applying standard Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques for the automatic diagnosis of patients with severe obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Early detection of severe apnoea cases is important so that patients can receive early treatment. Effective ASR-based detection could dramatically cut medical testing time. Working with a carefully designed speech database of healthy and apnoea subjects, we describe an acoustic search for distinctive apnoea voice characteristics. We also study abnormal nasalization in OSA patients by modelling vowels in nasal and nonnasal phonetic contexts using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) pattern recognition on speech spectra. Finally, we present experimental findings regarding the discriminative power of GMMs applied to severe apnoea detection. We have achieved an 81% correct classification rate, which is very promising and underpins the interest in this line of inquiry.

Phonetic complexity and stuttering in Spanish

PubMed Central

Howell, Peter; Au-Yeung, James

2007-01-01

The current study investigated whether phonetic complexity affected stuttering rate for Spanish speakers. The speakers were assigned to three age groups (6-11, 12-17 and 18 years plus) that were similar to those used in an earlier study on English. The analysis was performed using Jakielski's (1998) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC) scheme in which each word is given an IPC score based on the number of complex attributes it includes for each of eight factors. Stuttering on function words for Spanish did not correlate with IPC score for any age group. This mirrors the finding for English that stuttering on these words is not affected by phonetic complexity. The IPC scores of content words correlated positively with stuttering rate for 6-11 year old and adult speakers. Comparison was made between the languages to establish whether or not experience with the factors determines the problem they pose for speakers (revealed by differences in stuttering rate). Evidence was obtained that four factors found to be important determinants of stuttering on content words in English for speakers aged 12 and above, also affected Spanish speakers. This occurred despite large differences in frequency of usage of these factors. It is concluded that phonetic factors affect stuttering rate irrespective of a speaker's experience with that factor. PMID:17364620

Phonetic complexity and stuttering in Spanish.

PubMed

Howell, Peter; Au-Yeung, James

2007-02-01

The current study investigated whether phonetic complexity affected stuttering rate for Spanish speakers. The speakers were assigned to three age groups (6-11, 12-17 and 18-years plus) that were similar to those used in an earlier study on English. The analysis was performed using Jakielski's Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC) scheme in which each word is given an IPC score based on the number of complex attributes it includes for each of eight factors. Stuttering on function words for Spanish did not correlate with IPC score for any age group. This mirrors the finding for English that stuttering on these words is not affected by phonetic complexity. The IPC scores of content words correlated positively with stuttering rate for 6-11-year-old and adult speakers. Comparison was made between the languages to establish whether or not experience with the factors determines the problem they pose for speakers (revealed by differences in stuttering rate). Evidence was obtained that four factors found to be important determinants of stuttering on content words in English for speakers aged 12 and above, also affected Spanish speakers. This occurred despite large differences in frequency of usage of these factors. It is concluded that phonetic factors affect stuttering rate irrespective of a speaker's experience with that factor.

Empirical test of the performance of an acoustic-phonetic approach to forensic voice comparison under conditions similar to those of a real case.

PubMed

Enzinger, Ewald; Morrison, Geoffrey Stewart

2017-08-01

In a 2012 case in New South Wales, Australia, the identity of a speaker on several audio recordings was in question. Forensic voice comparison testimony was presented based on an auditory-acoustic-phonetic-spectrographic analysis. No empirical demonstration of the validity and reliability of the analytical methodology was presented. Unlike the admissibility standards in some other jurisdictions (e.g., US Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and the Daubert criteria, or England & Wales Criminal Practice Directions 19A), Australia's Unified Evidence Acts do not require demonstration of the validity and reliability of analytical methods and their implementation before testimony based upon them is presented in court. The present paper reports on empirical tests of the performance of an acoustic-phonetic-statistical forensic voice comparison system which exploited the same features as were the focus of the auditory-acoustic-phonetic-spectrographic analysis in the case, i.e., second-formant (F2) trajectories in /o/ tokens and mean fundamental frequency (f0). The tests were conducted under conditions similar to those in the case. The performance of the acoustic-phonetic-statistical system was very poor compared to that of an automatic system. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Training to use voice onset time as a cue to talker identification induces a left-ear/right-hemisphere processing advantage.

PubMed

Francis, Alexander L; Driscoll, Courtney

2006-09-01

We examined the effect of perceptual training on a well-established hemispheric asymmetry in speech processing. Eighteen listeners were trained to use a within-category difference in voice onset time (VOT) to cue talker identity. Successful learners (n=8) showed faster response times for stimuli presented only to the left ear than for those presented only to the right. The development of a left-ear/right-hemisphere advantage for processing a prototypically phonetic cue supports a model of speech perception in which lateralization is driven by functional demands (talker identification vs. phonetic categorization) rather than by acoustic stimulus properties alone.

Effects of prosodically modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition.

PubMed

Salverda, Anne Pier; Dahan, Delphine; Tanenhaus, Michael K; Crosswhite, Katherine; Masharov, Mikhail; McDonough, Joyce

2007-11-01

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., Put the cap next to the square) or utterance-final position (e.g., Now click on the cap). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a monosyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a cat), a polysyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a captain) and a distractor (e.g., a beaker). The relative proportion of fixations to the two types of competitor pictures changed as a function of the position of the target word in the utterance, demonstrating that lexical competition is modulated by prosodically conditioned phonetic variation.

Accommodating Variation: Dialects, Idiolects, and Speech Processing

PubMed Central

Kraljic, Tanya; Brennan, Susan E.; Samuel, Arthur G.

2008-01-01

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cognitive and behavioral adjustments. Specifically, we compare adjustments to the same acoustic consequence when it is due to context-independent variation (resulting from articulatory properties unique to a speaker) versus context-conditioned variation (resulting from common articulatory properties of speakers who share a dialect). The contrasting results for these two cases show that the source of a particular acoustic-phonetic variation affects how that variation is handled by the perceptual system. We also show that changes in perceptual representations do not necessarily lead to changes in production. PMID:17803986

Accommodating variation: dialects, idiolects, and speech processing.

PubMed

Kraljic, Tanya; Brennan, Susan E; Samuel, Arthur G

2008-04-01

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cognitive and behavioral adjustments. Specifically, we compare adjustments to the same acoustic consequence when it is due to context-independent variation (resulting from articulatory properties unique to a speaker) versus context-conditioned variation (resulting from common articulatory properties of speakers who share a dialect). The contrasting results for these two cases show that the source of a particular acoustic-phonetic variation affects how that variation is handled by the perceptual system. We also show that changes in perceptual representations do not necessarily lead to changes in production.

Lexical mediation of phonotactic frequency effects on spoken word recognition: A Granger causality analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data.

PubMed

Gow, David W; Olson, Bruna B

2015-07-01

Phonotactic frequency effects play a crucial role in a number of debates over language processing and representation. It is unclear however, whether these effects reflect prelexical sensitivity to phonotactic frequency, or lexical "gang effects" in speech perception. In this paper, we use Granger causality analysis of MR-constrained MEG/EEG data to understand how phonotactic frequency influences neural processing dynamics during auditory lexical decision. Effective connectivity analysis showed weaker feedforward influence from brain regions involved in acoustic-phonetic processing (superior temporal gyrus) to lexical areas (supramarginal gyrus) for high phonotactic frequency words, but stronger top-down lexical influence for the same items. Low entropy nonwords (nonwords judged to closely resemble real words) showed a similar pattern of interactions between brain regions involved in lexical and acoustic-phonetic processing. These results contradict the predictions of a feedforward model of phonotactic frequency facilitation, but support the predictions of a lexically mediated account.

Testing licensing by cue: a case of Russian palatalized coronals.

PubMed

Kochetov, Alexei

2006-01-01

The hypothesis 'licensing by cue' by Steriade holds that phonological contrasts are maintained in environments that provide better acoustic cues to the contrasts and are neutralized in environments that provide poorer acoustic cues or no cues. This paper tests the hypothesis by examining the distribution of a phonological contrast--the Russian plain/palatalized coronal stops /t/ and /tj/ in various syllable-final contexts. The results of a series of acoustic and perceptual experiments presented in this paper provide some support for the hypothesis: the relative salience of releases in different word boundary contexts (_#k > _#n, _#s) correlates strongly with the general patterns of neutralization of the contrast in similar word-internal contexts (_k > _n, _s) in Russian and other related languages. At the same time, the relative salience of VC transitions in different vowel contexts (a_ > u_ > i_) has apparently little to do with attested patterns of neutralization. The results suggest that some perceptual cues are phonologically more relevant than others, providing evidence for interactions between phonetics and phonology more complex than predicted by the hypothesis.

The Dynamics of Phonological Planning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roon, Kevin D.

2013-01-01

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Gender differences in lateralization of mismatch negativity in dichotic listening tasks.

PubMed

Ikezawa, Satoru; Nakagome, Kazuyuki; Mimura, Masaru; Shinoda, Junko; Itoh, Kenji; Homma, Ikuo; Kamijima, Kunitoshi

2008-04-01

With the aim of investigating gender differences in the functional lateralization subserving preattentive processing of language stimuli, we compared auditory mismatch negativities (MMNs) using dichotic listening tasks. Forty-four healthy volunteers, including 23 males and 21 females, participated in the study. MMNs generated by pure-tone and phonetic stimuli were compared, to check for the existence of language-specific gender differences in lateralization. Both EEG amplitude and scalp current density (SCD) data were analyzed. With phonetic MMNs, EEG findings revealed significantly larger amplitude in females than males, especially in the right hemisphere, while SCD findings revealed left hemisphere dominance and contralateral dominance in males alone. With pure-tone MMNs, no significant gender differences in hemispheric lateralization appeared in either EEG or SCD findings. While males exhibited left-lateralized activation with phonetic MMNs, females exhibited more bilateral activity. Further, the contralateral dominance of the SCD distribution associated with the ear receiving deviant stimuli in males indicated that ipsilateral input as well as interhemispheric transfer across the corpus callosum to the ipsilateral side was more suppressed in males than in females. The findings of the present study suggest that functional lateralization subserving preattentive detection of phonetic change differs between the genders. These results underscore the significance of considering the gender differences in the study of MMN, especially when phonetic stimulus is adopted. Moreover, they support the view of Voyer and Flight [Voyer, D., Flight, J., 2001. Gender differences in laterality on a dichotic task: the influence of report strategies. Cortex 37, 345-362.] in that the gender difference in hemispheric lateralization of language function is observed in a well-managed-attention condition, which fits the condition adopted in the MMN measurement; subjects are required to focus attention to a distraction task and thereby ignore the phonetic stimuli that elicit MMN.

Linguistic processing in idiopathic generalized epilepsy: an auditory event-related potential study.

PubMed

Henkin, Yael; Kishon-Rabin, Liat; Pratt, Hillel; Kivity, Sara; Sadeh, Michelle; Gadoth, Natan

2003-09-01

Auditory processing of increasing acoustic and linguistic complexity was assessed in children with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) by using auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) as well as reaction time and performance accuracy. Twenty-four children with IGE [12 with generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCSs), and 12 with absence seizures (ASs)] with average intelligence and age-appropriate scholastic skills, uniformly medicated with valproic acid (VPA), and 20 healthy controls, performed oddball discrimination tasks that consisted of the following stimuli: (a) pure tones; (b) nonmeaningful monosyllables that differed by their phonetic features (i.e., phonetic stimuli); and (c) meaningful monosyllabic words from two semantic categories (i.e., semantic stimuli). AERPs elicited by nonlinguistic stimuli were similar in healthy and epilepsy children, whereas those elicited by linguistic stimuli (i.e., phonetic and semantic) differed significantly in latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution. In children with GTCSs, phonetic and semantic processing were characterized by slower processing time, manifested by prolonged N2 and P3 latencies during phonetic processing, and prolongation of all AERPs latencies during semantic processing. In children with ASs, phonetic and semantic processing were characterized by increased allocation of attentional resources, manifested by enhanced N2 amplitudes. Semantic processing also was characterized by prolonged P3 latency. In both patient groups, processing of linguistic stimuli resulted in different patterns of brain-activity lateralization compared with that in healthy controls. Reaction time and performance accuracy did not differ among the study groups. AERPs exposed linguistic-processing deficits related to seizure type in children with IGE. Neurologic follow-up should therefore include evaluation of linguistic functions, and remedial intervention should be provided, accordingly.

Plasticity of white matter connectivity in phonetics experts.

PubMed

Vandermosten, Maaike; Price, Cathy J; Golestani, Narly

2016-09-01

Phonetics experts are highly trained to analyze and transcribe speech, both with respect to faster changing, phonetic features, and to more slowly changing, prosodic features. Previously we reported that, compared to non-phoneticians, phoneticians had greater local brain volume in bilateral auditory cortices and the left pars opercularis of Broca's area, with training-related differences in the grey-matter volume of the left pars opercularis in the phoneticians group (Golestani et al. 2011). In the present study, we used diffusion MRI to examine white matter microstructure, indexed by fractional anisotropy, in (1) the long segment of arcuate fasciculus (AF_long), which is a well-known language tract that connects Broca's area, including left pars opercularis, to the temporal cortex, and in (2) the fibers arising from the auditory cortices. Most of these auditory fibers belong to three validated language tracts, namely to the AF_long, the posterior segment of the arcuate fasciculus and the middle longitudinal fasciculus. We found training-related differences in phoneticians in left AF_long, as well as group differences relative to non-experts in the auditory fibers (including the auditory fibers belonging to the left AF_long). Taken together, the results of both studies suggest that grey matter structural plasticity arising from phonetic transcription training in Broca's area is accompanied by changes to the white matter fibers connecting this very region to the temporal cortex. Our findings suggest expertise-related changes in white matter fibers connecting fronto-temporal functional hubs that are important for phonetic processing. Further studies can pursue this hypothesis by examining the dynamics of these expertise related grey and white matter changes as they arise during phonetic training.

Contributions of cochlea-scaled entropy and consonant-vowel boundaries to prediction of speech intelligibility in noise

PubMed Central

Chen, Fei; Loizou, Philipos C.

2012-01-01

Recent evidence suggests that spectral change, as measured by cochlea-scaled entropy (CSE), predicts speech intelligibility better than the information carried by vowels or consonants in sentences. Motivated by this finding, the present study investigates whether intelligibility indices implemented to include segments marked with significant spectral change better predict speech intelligibility in noise than measures that include all phonetic segments paying no attention to vowels/consonants or spectral change. The prediction of two intelligibility measures [normalized covariance measure (NCM), coherence-based speech intelligibility index (CSII)] is investigated using three sentence-segmentation methods: relative root-mean-square (RMS) levels, CSE, and traditional phonetic segmentation of obstruents and sonorants. While the CSE method makes no distinction between spectral changes occurring within vowels/consonants, the RMS-level segmentation method places more emphasis on the vowel-consonant boundaries wherein the spectral change is often most prominent, and perhaps most robust, in the presence of noise. Higher correlation with intelligibility scores was obtained when including sentence segments containing a large number of consonant-vowel boundaries than when including segments with highest entropy or segments based on obstruent/sonorant classification. These data suggest that in the context of intelligibility measures the type of spectral change captured by the measure is important. PMID:22559382

Frequency Effects in Second Language Acquisition: An Annotated Survey

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kartal, Galip; Sarigul, Ece

2017-01-01

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between frequency and language acquisition from many perspectives including implicit and explicit instruction, frequency effects on morpheme acquisition in L2, the relationship between frequency and multi-word constructions, frequency effects on phonetics, vocabulary, gerund and infinitive…

Tres mitos de la fonetica espanola (Three Myths of Spanish Phonetics).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dalbor, John B.

1980-01-01

Contrasts current pronunciation of some Spanish consonants with the teachings and theory of pronunciation manuals, advocating more realistic standards of instruction. Gives a detailed phonetic description of common variants of the sounds discussed, covering both Spanish and Latin American dialects. (MES)

Speaker Invariance for Phonetic Information: an fMRI Investigation

PubMed Central

Salvata, Caden; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Myers, Emily B.

2012-01-01

The current study explored how listeners map the variable acoustic input onto a common sound structure representation while being able to retain phonetic detail to distinguish among the identity of talkers. An adaptation paradigm was utilized to examine areas which showed an equal neural response (equal release from adaptation) to phonetic change when spoken by the same speaker and when spoken by two different speakers, and insensitivity (failure to show release from adaptation) when the same phonetic input was spoken by a different speaker. Neural areas which showed speaker invariance were located in the anterior portion of the middle superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. These findings provide support for the view that speaker normalization processes allow for the translation of a variable speech input to a common abstract sound structure. That this process appears to occur early in the processing stream, recruiting temporal structures, suggests that this mapping takes place prelexically, before sound structure input is mapped on to lexical representations. PMID:23264714

Graphemes Sharing Phonetic Features Tend to Induce Similar Synesthetic Colors

PubMed Central

Kang, Mi-Jeong; Kim, Yeseul; Shin, Ji-Young; Kim, Chai-Youn

2017-01-01

Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors. We tested five Korean multilingual synesthetes on a color-matching task using graphemes from Korean, English, and Japanese orthography. We then compared the similarity of synesthetic colors induced by those characters sharing a phonetic feature. Results showed that graphemes associated with the same phonetic feature tend to induce synesthetic color in both within- and cross-script analyses. Moreover, this tendency was consistent for graphemes that are not transliterable into each other as well as graphemes that are. These results suggest that it is the perceptual—i.e., phonetic—properties associated with graphemes, not just conceptual associations such as transliteration, that determine synesthetic color. PMID:28348537

Adaptation to novel accents by toddlers

PubMed Central

White, Katherine S.; Aslin, Richard N.

2010-01-01

Word recognition is a balancing act: listeners must be sensitive to phonetic detail to avoid confusing similar words, yet, at the same time, be flexible enough to adapt to phonetically variable pronunciations, such as those produced by speakers of different dialects or by non-native speakers. Recent work has demonstrated that young toddlers are sensitive to phonetic detail during word recognition; pronunciations that deviate from the typical phonological form lead to a disruption of processing. However, it is not known whether young word learners show the flexibility that is characteristic of adult word recognition. The present study explores whether toddlers can adapt to artificial accents in which there is a vowel category shift with respect to the native language. 18–20-month-olds heard mispronunciations of familiar words (e.g., vowels were shifted from [a] to [æ]: “dog” pronounced as “dag”). In test, toddlers were tolerant of mispronunciations if they had recently been exposed to the same vowel shift, but not if they had been exposed to standard pronunciations or other vowel shifts. The effects extended beyond particular items heard in exposure to words sharing the same vowels. These results indicate that, like adults, toddlers show flexibility in their interpretation of phonological detail. Moreover, they suggest that effects of top-down knowledge on the reinterpretation of phonological detail generalize across the phono-lexical system. PMID:21479106

Influence of the width and cross-sectional shape of major connectors of maxillary dentures on the accuracy of speech production.

PubMed

Wada, Junichiro; Hideshima, Masayuki; Inukai, Shusuke; Matsuura, Hiroshi; Wakabayashi, Noriyuki

2014-01-01

To investigate the effects of the width and cross-sectional shape of the major connectors of maxillary dentures located in the middle area of the palate on the accuracy of phonetic output of consonants using an originally developed speech recognition system. Nine adults (4 males and 5 females, aged 24-26 years) with sound dentition were recruited. The following six sounds were considered: [∫i], [t∫i], [ɾi], [ni], [çi], and [ki]. The experimental connectors were fabricated to simulate bars (narrow, 8-mm width) and plates (wide, 20-mm width). Two types of cross-sectional shapes in the sagittal plane were specified: flat and plump edge. The appearance ratio of phonetic segment labels was calculated with the speech recognition system to indicate the accuracy of phonetic output. Statistical analysis was conducted using one-way ANOVA and Tukey's test. The mean appearance ratio of correct labels (MARC) significantly decreased for [ni] with the plump edge (narrow connector) and for [ki] with both the flat and plump edge (wide connectors). For [çi], the MARCs tended to be lower with flat plates. There were no significant differences for the other consonants. The width and cross-sectional shape of the connectors had limited effects on the articulation of consonants at the palate. © 2015 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Auditory attention strategy depends on target linguistic properties and spatial configurationa)

PubMed Central

McCloy, Daniel R.; Lee, Adrian K. C.

2015-01-01

Whether crossing a busy intersection or attending a large dinner party, listeners sometimes need to attend to multiple spatially distributed sound sources or streams concurrently. How they achieve this is not clear—some studies suggest that listeners cannot truly simultaneously attend to separate streams, but instead combine attention switching with short-term memory to achieve something resembling divided attention. This paper presents two oddball detection experiments designed to investigate whether directing attention to phonetic versus semantic properties of the attended speech impacts listeners' ability to divide their auditory attention across spatial locations. Each experiment uses four spatially distinct streams of monosyllabic words, variation in cue type (providing phonetic or semantic information), and requiring attention to one or two locations. A rapid button-press response paradigm is employed to minimize the role of short-term memory in performing the task. Results show that differences in the spatial configuration of attended and unattended streams interact with linguistic properties of the speech streams to impact performance. Additionally, listeners may leverage phonetic information to make oddball detection judgments even when oddballs are semantically defined. Both of these effects appear to be mediated by the overall complexity of the acoustic scene. PMID:26233011

A weighted reliability measure for phonetic transcription.

PubMed

Oller, D Kimbrough; Ramsdell, Heather L

2006-12-01

The purpose of the present work is to describe and illustrate the utility of a new tool for assessment of transcription agreement. Traditional measures have not characterized overall transcription agreement with sufficient resolution, specifically because they have often treated all phonetic differences between segments in transcriptions as equivalent, thus constituting an unweighted approach to agreement assessment. The measure the authors have developed calculates a weighted transcription agreement value based on principles derived from widely accepted tenets of phonological theory. To investigate the utility of the new measure, 8 coders transcribed samples of speech and infant vocalizations. Comparing the transcriptions through a computer-based implementation of the new weighted and the traditional unweighted measures, they investigated the scaling properties of both. The results illustrate better scaling with the weighted measure, in particular because the weighted measure is not subject to the floor effects that occur with the traditional measure when applied to samples that are difficult to transcribe. Furthermore, the new weighted measure shows orderly relations in degree of agreement across coded samples of early canonical-stage babbling, early meaningful speech in English, and 3 adult languages. The authors conclude that the weighted measure may provide improved foundations for research on phonetic transcription and for monitoring of transcription reliability.

Articulation in schoolchildren and adults with neurofibromatosis type 1.

PubMed

Cosyns, Marjan; Mortier, Geert; Janssens, Sandra; Bogaert, Famke; D'Hondt, Stephanie; Van Borsel, John

2012-01-01

Several authors mentioned the occurrence of articulation problems in the neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) population. However, few studies have undertaken a detailed analysis of the articulation skills of NF1 patients, especially in schoolchildren and adults. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine in depth the articulation skills of NF1 schoolchildren and adults, both phonetically and phonologically. Speech samples were collected from 43 Flemish NF1 patients (14 children and 29 adults), ranging in age between 7 and 53 years, using a standardized speech test in which all Flemish single speech sounds and most clusters occur in all their permissible syllable positions. Analyses concentrated on consonants only and included a phonetic inventory, a phonetic, and a phonological analysis. It was shown that phonetic inventories were incomplete in 16.28% (7/43) of participants, in which totally correct realizations of the sibilants /ʃ/ and/or /ʒ/ were missing. Phonetic analysis revealed that distortions were the predominant phonetic error type. Sigmatismus stridens, multiple ad- or interdentality, and, in children, rhotacismus non vibrans were frequently observed. From a phonological perspective, the most common error types were substitution and syllable structure errors. Particularly, devoicing, cluster simplification, and, in children, deletion of the final consonant of words were perceived. Further, it was demonstrated that significantly more men than women presented with an incomplete phonetic inventory, and that girls tended to display more articulation errors than boys. Additionally, children exhibited significantly more articulation errors than adults, suggesting that although the articulation skills of NF1 patients evolve positively with age, articulation problems do not resolve completely from childhood to adulthood. As such, the articulation errors made by NF1 adults may be regarded as residual articulation disorders. It can be concluded that the speech of NF1 patients is characterized by mild articulation disorders at an age where this is no longer expected. Readers will be able to describe neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and explain the articulation errors displayed by schoolchildren and adults with this genetic syndrome. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Lexical mediation of phonotactic frequency effects on spoken word recognition: A Granger causality analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data

PubMed Central

Gow, David W.; Olson, Bruna B.

2015-01-01

Phonotactic frequency effects play a crucial role in a number of debates over language processing and representation. It is unclear however, whether these effects reflect prelexical sensitivity to phonotactic frequency, or lexical “gang effects” in speech perception. In this paper, we use Granger causality analysis of MR-constrained MEG/EEG data to understand how phonotactic frequency influences neural processing dynamics during auditory lexical decision. Effective connectivity analysis showed weaker feedforward influence from brain regions involved in acoustic-phonetic processing (superior temporal gyrus) to lexical areas (supramarginal gyrus) for high phonotactic frequency words, but stronger top-down lexical influence for the same items. Low entropy nonwords (nonwords judged to closely resemble real words) showed a similar pattern of interactions between brain regions involved in lexical and acoustic-phonetic processing. These results contradict the predictions of a feedforward model of phonotactic frequency facilitation, but support the predictions of a lexically mediated account. PMID:25883413

Phonetic Ability in Stuttering

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wingate, M. E.

1971-01-01

On two tests of phonetic manipulation 25 male stutterers were found to be inferior to matched controls. Results are reported to be consistent with previous findings of author and to interrelate with earlier research suggesting that some inadequacy in sound-making skills is an important aspect of stuttering. (Author/KW)

Phonetic Processing When Learning Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Havy, Mélanie; Bouchon, Camillia; Nazzi, Thierry

2016-01-01

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

A test of the role of the medial temporal lobe in single-word decoding.

PubMed

Osipowicz, Karol; Rickards, Tyler; Shah, Atif; Sharan, Ashwini; Sperling, Michael; Kahn, Waseem; Tracy, Joseph

2011-01-15

The degree to which the MTL system contributes to effective language skills is not well delineated. We sought to determine if the MTL plays a role in single-word decoding in healthy, normal skilled readers. The experiment follows from the implications of the dual-process model of single-word decoding, which provides distinct predictions about the nature of MTL involvement. The paradigm utilized word (regular and irregularly spelled words) and pseudoword (phonetically regular) stimuli that differed in their demand for non-lexical as opposed lexical decoding. The data clearly showed that the MTL system was not involved in single word decoding in skilled, native English readers. Neither the hippocampus nor the MTL system as a whole showed significant activation during lexical or non-lexical based decoding. The results provide evidence that lexical and non-lexical decoding are implemented by distinct but overlapping neuroanatomical networks. Non-lexical decoding appeared most uniquely associated with cuneus and fusiform gyrus activation biased toward the left hemisphere. In contrast, lexical decoding appeared associated with right middle frontal and supramarginal, and bilateral cerebellar activation. Both these decoding operations appeared in the context of a shared widespread network of activations including bilateral occipital cortex and superior frontal regions. These activations suggest that the absence of MTL involvement in either lexical or non-lexical decoding appears likely a function of the skilled reading ability of our sample such that whole-word recognition and retrieval processes do not utilize the declarative memory system, in the case of lexical decoding, and require only minimal analysis and recombination of the phonetic elements of a word, in the case of non-lexical decoding. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Test of the Role of the Medial Temporal Lobe in Single-Word Decoding

PubMed Central

Osipowicz, Karol; Rickards, Tyler; Shah, Atif; Sharan, Ashwini; Sperling, Michael; Kahn, Waseem; Tracy, Joseph

2012-01-01

The degree to which the MTL system contributes to effective language skills is not well delineated. We sought to determine if the MTL plays a role in single-word decoding in healthy, normal skilled readers. The experiment follows from the implications of the dual-process model of single-word decoding, which provides distinct predictions about the nature of MTL involvement. The paradigm utilized word (regular and irregularly spelled words) and pseudoword (phonetically regular) stimuli that differed in their demand for non-lexical as opposed lexical decoding. The data clearly showed that the MTL system was not involved in single word decoding in skilled, native English readers. Neither the hippocampus, nor the MTL system as a whole showed significant activation during lexical or non-lexical based decoding. The results provide evidence that lexical and non-lexical decoding are implemented by distinct but overlapping neuroanatomical networks. Non-lexical decoding appeared most uniquely associated with cuneus and fusiform gyrus activation biased toward the left hemisphere. In contrast, lexical decoding appeared associated with right middle frontal and supramarginal, and bilateral cerebellar activation. Both these decoding operations appeared in the context of a shared widespread network of activations including bilateral occipital cortex and superior frontal regions. These activations suggest that the absence of MTL involvement in either lexical or non-lexical decoding appears likely a function of the skilled reading ability of our sample such that whole-word recognition and retrieval processes do not utilize the declarative memory system, in the case of lexical decoding, and require only minimal analysis and recombination of the phonetic elements of a word, in the case of non-lexical decoding. PMID:20884357

Effects of prosodically-modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition

PubMed Central

Salverda, Anne Pier; Dahan, Delphine; Tanenhaus, Michael K.; Crosswhite, Katherine; Masharov, Mikhail; McDonough, Joyce

2007-01-01

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., Put the cap next to the square) or utterance-final position (e.g., Now click on the cap). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a monosyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a cat), a polysyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a captain) and a distractor (e.g., a beaker). The relative proportion of fixations to the two types of competitor pictures changed as a function of the position of the target word in the utterance, demonstrating that lexical competition is modulated by prosodically-conditioned phonetic variation. PMID:17141751

Auditory-Phonetic Projection and Lexical Structure in the Recognition of Sine-Wave Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Remez, Robert E.; Dubowski, Kathryn R.; Broder, Robin S.; Davids, Morgana L.; Grossman, Yael S.; Moskalenko, Marina; Pardo, Jennifer S.; Hasbun, Sara Maria

2011-01-01

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances…

Phonetic Variation and Interactional Contingencies in Simultaneous Responses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walker, Gareth

2016-01-01

An auspicious but unexplored environment for studying phonetic variation in naturalistic interaction is where two or more participants say the same thing at the same time. Working with a core dataset built from the multimodal Augmented Multi-party Interaction corpus, the principles of conversation analysis were followed to analyze the sequential…

Phonetic Detail in the Developing Lexicon

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Swingley, Daniel

2003-01-01

Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children' s knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct…

Phonetics and Phonology. Occasional Papers, No. 16.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Essex Univ., Colchester (England). Dept. of Language and Linguistics.

This volume is devoted to phonetics and phonology. It consists of the following papers: (1) "Generative Phonology, Dependency Phonology and Southern French," by J. Durand, which discusses aspects of a regional pronunciation of French, the status of syllables in generative phonology, and concepts of dependency phonology; (2) "On the…

Negotiating towards a Next Turn: Phonetic Resources for "Doing the Same"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sikveland, Rein Ove

2012-01-01

This paper investigates hearers' use of response tokens (back-channels), in maintaining and differentiating their actions. Initial observations suggest that hearers produce a sequence of phonetically similar responses to disengage from the current topic, and dissimilar responses to engage with the current topic. This is studied systematically by…

Fun Games and Activities for Pronunciation and Phonetics Classes at Universities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Makarova, Veronica

Class activities and games designed to stimulate student interest and provide feedback in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESOL) pronunciation and phonetics are described. They are intended to address specific challenges of a typical Japanese, ESOL classroom--low student motivation and inadequate feedback--and to supplement conventional language…

Developing a Weighted Measure of Speech Sound Accuracy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Preston, Jonathan L.; Ramsdell, Heather L.; Oller, D. Kimbrough; Edwards, Mary Louise; Tobin, Stephen J.

2011-01-01

Purpose: To develop a system for numerically quantifying a speaker's phonetic accuracy through transcription-based measures. With a focus on normal and disordered speech in children, the authors describe a system for differentially weighting speech sound errors on the basis of various levels of phonetic accuracy using a Weighted Speech Sound…

The Psychological Reality of Phonetic Features in Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zagar, Linda L.; Locke, John L.

1986-01-01

Ten linguistically normal four to five year olds were trained to associate consonantal features of voicing, manner, and place of articulation with cups of particular location and color. It was concluded that phonetic features are of limited availability to children in associative tasks and that their clinical value with phonologically disordered…

Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms of Clear Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luque, Jenna Silver

2017-01-01

Clear speech is a speaking style that has been shown to improve intelligibility in adverse listening conditions, for various listener and talker populations. Clear-speech phonetic enhancements include a slowed speech rate, expanded vowel space, and expanded pitch range. Although clear-speech phonetic enhancements have been demonstrated across a…

Statistical Learning of Phonetic Categories: Insights from a Computational Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McMurray, Bob; Aslin, Richard N.; Toscano, Joseph C.

2009-01-01

Recent evidence (Maye, Werker & Gerken, 2002) suggests that statistical learning may be an important mechanism for the acquisition of phonetic categories in the infant's native language. We examined the sufficiency of this hypothesis and its implications for development by implementing a statistical learning mechanism in a computational model…

Phonetic Diversity, Statistical Learning, and Acquisition of Phonology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pierrehumbert, Janet B.

2003-01-01

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language…

Phonological Encoding and Phonetic Duration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fricke, Melinda Denise

2013-01-01

Studies of connected speech have repeatedly shown that the contextual predictability of a word is related to its phonetic duration; more predictable words tend to be produced with shorter duration, when other factors are controlled for (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Bell et al., 2003; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gahl,…

The stop voicing contrast in French: From citation speech to sentencial speech

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Abdelli-Beruh, Nassima; Demaio, Eileen; Hisagi, Miwako

2004-05-01

This study explores the influence of speaking style on the salience of the acoustic correlates to the stop voicing distinction in French. Monolingual French speakers produced twenty-one C_vC_ syllables in citation speech, in minimal pairs and in sentence-length utterances (/pa/-/a/ context: /il a di pa C_vC_ a lui/; /pas/-/s/ context: /il a di pas C_vC_ sa~ lui/). Prominent stress was on the C_vC_. Voicing-related differences in percentages of closure voicing, durations of aspiration, closure, and vowel were analyzed as a function of these three speaking styles. Results show that the salience of the acoustic-phonetic segments present when the syllables are uttered in isolation or in minimal pairs is different than when the syllables are spoken in a sentence. These results are in agreement with findings in English.

Acoustic Source Characteristics, Across-Formant Integration, and Speech Intelligibility Under Competitive Conditions

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

An important aspect of speech perception is the ability to group or select formants using cues in the acoustic source characteristics—for example, fundamental frequency (F0) differences between formants promote their segregation. This study explored the role of more radical differences in source characteristics. Three-formant (F1+F2+F3) synthetic speech analogues were derived from natural sentences. In Experiment 1, F1+F3 were generated by passing a harmonic glottal source (F0 = 140 Hz) through second-order resonators (H1+H3); in Experiment 2, F1+F3 were tonal (sine-wave) analogues (T1+T3). F2 could take either form (H2 or T2). In some conditions, the target formants were presented alone, either monaurally or dichotically (left ear = F1+F3; right ear = F2). In others, they were accompanied by a competitor for F2 (F1+F2C+F3; F2), which listeners must reject to optimize recognition. Competitors (H2C or T2C) were created using the time-reversed frequency and amplitude contours of F2. Dichotic presentation of F2 and F2C ensured that the impact of the competitor arose primarily through informational masking. In the absence of F2C, the effect of a source mismatch between F1+F3 and F2 was relatively modest. When F2C was present, intelligibility was lowest when F2 was tonal and F2C was harmonic, irrespective of which type matched F1+F3. This finding suggests that source type and context, rather than similarity, govern the phonetic contribution of a formant. It is proposed that wideband harmonic analogues are more effective informational maskers than narrowband tonal analogues, and so become dominant in across-frequency integration of phonetic information when placed in competition. PMID:25751040

Instrumental and perceptual phonetic analyses: the case for two-tier transcriptions.

PubMed

Howard, Sara; Heselwood, Barry

2011-11-01

In this article, we discuss the relationship between instrumental and perceptual phonetic analyses. Using data drawn from typical and atypical speech production, we argue that the use of two-tier transcriptions, which can compare and contrast perceptual and instrumental information, is valuable both for our general understanding of the mechanisms of speech production and perception and also for assessment and intervention for individuals with atypical speech production. The central tenet of our case is that instrumental and perceptual analyses are not in competition to give a single 'correct' account of speech data. They take instead perspectives on complementary phonetic domains, which interlock in the speech chain to encompass production, transmission and perception.

Segmenting words from natural speech: subsegmental variation in segmental cues.

PubMed

Rytting, C Anton; Brew, Chris; Fosler-Lussier, Eric

2010-06-01

Most computational models of word segmentation are trained and tested on transcripts of speech, rather than the speech itself, and assume that speech is converted into a sequence of symbols prior to word segmentation. We present a way of representing speech corpora that avoids this assumption, and preserves acoustic variation present in speech. We use this new representation to re-evaluate a key computational model of word segmentation. One finding is that high levels of phonetic variability degrade the model's performance. While robustness to phonetic variability may be intrinsically valuable, this finding needs to be complemented by parallel studies of the actual abilities of children to segment phonetically variable speech.

The Effectiveness of Clear Speech as a Masker

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Calandruccio, Lauren; Van Engen, Kristin; Dhar, Sumitrajit; Bradlow, Ann R.

2010-01-01

Purpose: It is established that speaking clearly is an effective means of enhancing intelligibility. Because any signal-processing scheme modeled after known acoustic-phonetic features of clear speech will likely affect both target and competing speech, it is important to understand how speech recognition is affected when a competing speech signal…

Lorma: A Reference Handbook of Phonetics, Grammar, Lexicon and Learning Procedures.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dwyer, David James

The grammar, phonetics, and lexicon of Lorma, one of the Mande languages of Liberia, are described for the use of Peace Corps volunteers learning the language without teacher assistance. This handbook includes an introduction to the languages of Liberia, procedures for learning a language without assistance, guidelines for tutors, a reference…

Adults Show Less Sensitivity to Phonetic Detail in Unfamiliar Words, Too

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Katherine S.; Yee, Eiling; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Morgan, James L.

2013-01-01

Young word learners fail to discriminate phonetic contrasts in certain situations, an observation that has been used to support arguments that the nature of lexical representation and lexical processing changes over development. An alternative possibility, however, is that these failures arise naturally as a result of how word familiarity affects…

Le qualita espressive del linguaggio orale: Il simbolismo fonetico (The Expressive Qualities of Oral Language: Phonetic Symbolism).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cavaliere, Roberto

1988-01-01

Discusses a study of the expressive qualities of oral language. Results suggest that there is a natural rather than an arbitrary relationship between words and their meanings. Practical applications of this theory of phonetic symbolism in the area of commercial advertising are presented. (CFM)

Infant-Directed Speech Supports Phonetic Category Learning in English and Japanese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Werker, Janet F.; Pons, Ferran; Dietrich, Christiane; Kajikawa, Sachiyo; Fais, Laurel; Amano, Shigeaki

2007-01-01

Across the first year of life, infants show decreased sensitivity to phonetic differences not used in the native language [Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. "Infant Behaviour and Development," 7, 49-63]. In an artificial language learning…

Phonology Shaped by Phonetics: The Case of Intervocalic Lenition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaplan, Abby

2010-01-01

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the phonetic bases of intervocalic lenition--specifically, voicing and spirantization of intervocalic stops. A traditional understanding of phonological patterns like these is that they involve articulatory effort reduction, in that speakers substitute an easy sound for a hard one. Experiment 1 uses a…

Manual of Articulatory Phonetics: Teacher's Guide.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smalley, William A.

This teaching guide is closely integrated with the "Manual of Articulatory Phonetics" (FL 002 882) and its "Workbook Supplement" (FL 002 881). The guide is based on lesson plans which have been developed by the staff using the manual during its developmental period. An introduction on using the lesson plans and teaching techniques is provided.…

Phonetic Variability in Residual Speech Sound Disorders: Exploration of Subtypes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Preston, Jonathan L.; Koenig, Laura L.

2011-01-01

Purpose: To explore whether subgroups of children with residual speech sound disorders (R-SSDs) can be identified through multiple measures of token-to-token phonetic variability (changes in one spoken production to the next). Method: Children with R-SSDs were recorded during a rapid multisyllabic picture naming task and an oral diadochokinetic…

L'Enseignement de la Prononciation Francaise aux Niveaux Phonemique et Phonetique (The Teaching of French Pronunciation at the Phonemic and Phonetic Levels)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maire, Jean-Francois

1975-01-01

Gives the justification, text, and examples of two recordings illustrating the phonetic oppositions of four French vowels. The tapes were produced and tested at the Universite de Lausanne, and are intended for language laboratory use. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Systeme de fautes et correction phonetique par la methode verbo-tonale des francophones belges qui apprenent l'espagnol (Phonetic Correction and the Verbo-tonal Method for Teaching Spanish to French-speaking Belgians)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sarmiento Padilla, Jose

1974-01-01

Describes experiments in the field of phonetic correction. Several techniques used at the University of Mons for teaching Spanish pronunciation to French-speaking Belgians are explained. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Process Dissociation of Sight Vocabulary and Phonetic Decoding in Reading: A New Perspective on Surface and Phonological Dyslexias

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McDougall, Patricia; Borowsky, Ron; MacKinnon, G. E.; Hymel, Shelley

2005-01-01

Recent research on developmental dyslexia has suggested a phonological core deficit hypothesis (e.g., Manis, Seidenberg, Doi, McBride-Chang, & Peterson, 1996; Stanovich, Siegel, & Gottardo, 1997) whereby pure cases of developmental phonological dyslexia (dysfunctional phonetic decoding processing but normal sight vocabulary processing) can exist,…

N170 Tuning in Chinese: Logographic Characters and Phonetic Pinyin Script

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Qin, Rui; Maurits, Natasha; Maassen, Ben

2016-01-01

In alphabetic languages, print consistently elicits enhanced, left-lateralized N170 responses in the event-related potential compared to control stimuli. In the current study, we adopted a cross-linguistic design to investigate N170 tuning to logographic Chinese and to "pinyin," an auxiliary phonetic system in Chinese. The results…

Phonetic Realization and Perception of Prominence among Lexical Tones in Mandarin Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bao, Mingzhen

2008-01-01

Linguistic prominence is defined as words or syllables perceived auditorily as standing out from their environment. It is explored through changes in pitch, duration and loudness. In this study, phonetic realization and perception of prominence among lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese was investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 explored…

On the Phonetic Consonance in Quranic Verses-Final "Fawa?il"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aldubai, Nadhim Abdulamalek

2015-01-01

The present research aims to discuss the phonological patterns in Quranic verse-final pauses ("fawa?il") in order to provide an insight into the phonetic network governing the symmetrical and the asymmetrical pauses ("fawa?il") in terms of concordance ("al-nasaq al-?awti"). The data are collected from different parts…

Articulatory Mediation of Speech Perception: A Causal Analysis of Multi-Modal Imaging Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gow, David W., Jr.; Segawa, Jennifer A.

2009-01-01

The inherent confound between the organization of articulation and the acoustic-phonetic structure of the speech signal makes it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the competing claims of motor and acoustic-phonetic accounts of how listeners recognize coarticulated speech. Here we use Granger causation analysis of high spatiotemporal resolution…

Acoustic and Durational Properties of Indian English Vowels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maxwell, Olga; Fletcher, Janet

2009-01-01

This paper presents findings of an acoustic phonetic analysis of vowels produced by speakers of English as a second language from northern India. The monophthongal vowel productions of a group of male speakers of Hindi and male speakers of Punjabi were recorded, and acoustic phonetic analyses of vowel formant frequencies and vowel duration were…

Phonetic, Phonemic, and Phonological Factors in Cross-Language Discrimination of Phonotactic Contrasts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davidson, Lisa

2011-01-01

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

Report of the Phonology Laboratory, No. 2.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

California Univ., Berkeley. Dept. of Linguistics.

This is one of a series of reports intended to make the results of research available and to serve as progress reports. The following abstracts are included: (1) "Learning the Phonetic Cues to the Voiced-Voiceless Distinction: Preliminary Study of Four American English Speaking Children," Mel Greenlee; (2) "Learning the Phonetic Cues to the…

Variability in Phonetics. York Papers in Linguistics, No. 6.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tatham, M. A. A.

Variability is a term used to cover several types of phenomena in language sound patterns and in phonetic realization of those patterns. Variability refers to the fact that every repetition of an utterance is different, in amplitude, rate of delivery, formant frequencies, fundamental frequency or minor phase relationship changes across the sound…

A Multimedia English Learning System Using HMMs to Improve Phonemic Awareness for English Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lai, Yen-Shou; Tsai, Hung-Hsu; Yu, Pao-Ta

2009-01-01

This paper proposes a multimedia English learning (MEL) system, based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and mastery theory strategy, for teaching students with the aim of enhancing their English phonetic awareness and pronunciation. It can analyze phonetic structures, identify and capture pronunciation errors to provide students with targeted advice…

One hundred years of instrumental phonetic fieldwork on North America Indian languages

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McDonough, Joyce

2005-04-01

A resurgence of interest in phonetic fieldwork on generally morphologically complex North American Indian languages over the last 15 years is a continuation of a tradition started a century ago with the Earle Pliny Goddard, who collected kymographic and palatographic field-data between 1906-1927 on several Athabaskan languages: Coastal Athabaskan (Hupa and Kato), Apachean (Mescalero, Jicarilla, White Mountain, San Juan Carlos Apache), and several Athabaskan languages in Northern Canada (Cold Lake and Beaver); data that remains important for its record of segmental timing profiles and rare articulatory documentation in then largely monolingual communities. This data in combination with new work has resulted in the emergence of a body of knowledge of these typologically distinct families that often challenge notions of phonetic universality and typology. Using the Athabaskan languages as benchmark example and starting with Goddard's work, two types of emergent typological patterns will be discussed; the persistence of fine-grained timing and duration details across the widely dispersed family, and the broad variation in prosodic types that exists, both of which are unaccounted for by phonetic or phonological theories.

The effects of indexical and phonetic variation on vowel perception in typically developing 9- to 12-year-old children

PubMed Central

Jacewicz, Ewa; Fox, Robert Allen

2015-01-01

Purpose To investigate how linguistic knowledge interacts with indexical knowledge in older children's perception under demanding listening conditions created by extensive talker variability. Method Twenty five 9- to 12-year-old children, 12 from North Carolina (NC) and 13 from Wisconsin (WI), identified 12 vowels in isolated hVd-words produced by 120 talkers representing the two dialects (NC and WI), both genders and three age groups (generations) of residents from the same geographic locations as the listeners. Results Identification rates were higher for responses to talkers from the same dialect as the listeners and for female speech. Listeners were sensitive to systematic positional variations in vowels and their dynamic structure (formant movement) associated with generational differences in vowel pronunciation resulting from sound change in a speech community. Overall identification rate was 71.7%, which is 8.5% lower than for the adults responding to the same stimuli in Jacewicz and Fox (2012). Conclusions Typically developing older children are successful in dealing with both phonetic and indexical variation related to talker dialect, gender and generation. They are less consistent than the adults most likely due to their less efficient encoding of acoustic-phonetic information in the speech of multiple talkers and relative inexperience with indexical variation. PMID:24686520

Acoustic-Phonetic Versus Lexical Processing in Nonnative Listeners Differing in Their Dominant Language.

PubMed

Shi, Lu-Feng; Koenig, Laura L

2016-09-01

Nonnative listeners have difficulty recognizing English words due to underdeveloped acoustic-phonetic and/or lexical skills. The present study used Boothroyd and Nittrouer's (1988)j factor to tease apart these two components of word recognition. Participants included 15 native English and 29 native Russian listeners. Fourteen and 15 of the Russian listeners reported English (ED) and Russian (RD) to be their dominant language, respectively. Listeners were presented 119 consonant-vowel-consonant real and nonsense words in speech-spectrum noise at +6 dB SNR. Responses were scored for word and phoneme recognition, the logarithmic quotient of which yielded j. Word and phoneme recognition was comparable between native and ED listeners but poorer in RD listeners. Analysis of j indicated less effective use of lexical information in RD than in native and ED listeners. Lexical processing was strongly correlated with the length of residence in the United States. Language background is important for nonnative word recognition. Lexical skills can be regarded as nativelike in ED nonnative listeners. Compromised word recognition in ED listeners is unlikely a result of poor lexical processing. Performance should be interpreted with caution for listeners dominant in their first language, whose word recognition is affected by both lexical and acoustic-phonetic factors.

[Children with specific language impairment: electrophysiological and pedaudiological findings].

PubMed

Rinker, T; Hartmann, K; Smith, E; Reiter, R; Alku, P; Kiefer, M; Brosch, S

2014-08-01

Auditory deficits may be at the core of the language delay in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). It was therefore hypothesized that children with SLI perform poorly on 4 tests typically used to diagnose central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) as well in the processing of phonetic and tone stimuli in an electrophysiological experiment. 14 children with SLI (mean age 61,7 months) and 16 children without SLI (mean age 64,9 months) were tested with 4 tasks: non-word repetition, language discrimination in noise, directional hearing, and dichotic listening. The electrophysiological recording Mismatch Negativity (MMN) employed sine tones (600 vs. 650 Hz) and phonetic stimuli (/ε/ versus /e/). Control children and children with SLI differed significantly in the non-word repetition as well as in the dichotic listening task but not in the two other tasks. Only the control children recognized the frequency difference in the MMN-experiment. The phonetic difference was discriminated by both groups, however, effects were longer lasting for the control children. Group differences were not significant. Children with SLI show limitations in auditory processing that involve either a complex task repeating unfamiliar or difficult material and show subtle deficits in auditory processing at the neural level. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Children's early bilingualism and musical training influence prosodic discrimination of sentences in an unknown language.

PubMed

Stepanov, Arthur; Pavlič, Matic; Stateva, Penka; Reboul, Anne

2018-01-01

This study investigated whether early bilingualism and early musical training positively influence the ability to discriminate between prosodic patterns corresponding to different syntactic structures in otherwise phonetically identical sentences in an unknown language. In a same-different discrimination task, participants (N = 108) divided into four groups (monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, bilingual non-musicians, and bilingual musicians) listened to pairs of short sentences in a language unknown to them (French). In discriminating phonetically identical but prosodically different sentences, musicians, bilinguals, and bilingual musicians outperformed the controls. However, there was no interaction between bilingualism and musical training to suggest an additive effect. These results underscore the significant role of both types of experience in enhancing the listeners' sensitivity to prosodic information.

He nui na ala e hiki aku ai: Factors Influencing Phonetic Variation in the Hawaiian Word "keia"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Drager, Katie; Comstock, Bethany Kaleialohapau'ole Chun; Kneubuhl, Hina Puamohala

2017-01-01

Apart from a handful of studies (e.g., Kinney 1956), linguists know little about what variation exists in Hawaiian and what factors constrain the variation. In this paper, we present an analysis of phonetic variation in the word "keia," meaning "this," examining the social, linguistic, and probabilistic factors that constrain…

Sub-Lexical Phonological and Semantic Processing of Semantic Radicals: A Primed Naming Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhou, Lin; Peng, Gang; Zheng, Hong-Ying; Su, I-Fan; Wang, William S.-Y.

2013-01-01

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

Training and Research in Phonetics for Spanish as a Second Language with Technological Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blanco Canales, Ana

2013-01-01

Foreign language acquisition must inevitably start with phonetics, an aspect of language whose importance is matched only by its neglect. Different research has shown how the systematic teaching of pronunciation is beneficial not only because it aids the comprehension of messages and their expression, but also because it diminishes the anxiety…

Etymological and Phonetic Changes among Foreign Words in Kiswahili.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patel, R.B.

1967-01-01

The author considers the etymological sources and phonetic changes which have occurred in such words as "bangi,""butu,""kalua,""mrututu," and "sambarau." The source of these words, which have found a place in Swahili, has been doubted or could not be established by compilers of different Swahili dictionaries. The author feels that the study and…

Two French-Speaking Cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome: An Acoustic-Phonetic Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roy, Johanna-Pascale; Macoir, Joel; Martel-Sauvageau, Vincent; Boudreault, Carol-Ann

2012-01-01

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurologic disorder in which an individual suddenly and unintentionally speaks with an accent which is perceived as being different from his/her usual accent. This study presents an acoustic-phonetic description of two Quebec French-speaking cases. The first speaker presents a perceived accent shift to…

L'application de l'appareil Suvaglingua de correction phonetique a l'enseignement de l'espagnol aux francophones (The Use of the Suvaglingua Synthesizer for Phonetic Correction in Spanish Courses for French Speakers)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sarmiento, Jose; And Others

1974-01-01

Describes the use of the verbo-tonal method of phonetic correction and the Suvaglingua synthesizer in Spanish courses at the International School of Interpreters at Mons, France. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Phonetic Aspects of Children's Elicited Word Revisions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paul-Brown, Diane; Yeni-Komshian, Grace H.

A study of the phonetic changes occurring when a speaker attempts to revise an unclear word for a listener focuses on changes made in the sound segment duration to maximize differences between phonemes. In the study, five-year-olds were asked by adults to revise words differing in voicing of initial and final stop consonants; a control group of…

Vowel Harmony Is a Basic Phonetic Rule of the Turkic Languages

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shoibekova, Gaziza B.; Odanova, Sagira A.; Sultanova, Bibigul M.; Yermekova, Tynyshtyk N.

2016-01-01

The present study comprehensively analyzes vowel harmony as an important phonetic rule in Turkic languages. Recent changes in the vowel harmony potential of Turkic sounds caused by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors were described. Vowels in the Kazakh, Turkish, and Uzbek language were compared. The way this or that phoneme sounded in the…

The Acquisition of Phonetic Categories in Bilingual Infants: New Data from an Anticipatory Eye Movement Paradigm

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Albareda-Castellot, Barbara; Pons, Ferran; Sebastian-Galles

2011-01-01

Contrasting results have been reported regarding the phonetic acquisition of bilinguals. A lack of discrimination has been observed for certain native contrasts in 8-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants (Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 2003a), though not in French-English bilingual infants (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007; Sundara, Polka &…

Visual Speech Contributes to Phonetic Learning in 6-Month-Old Infants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Teinonen, Tuomas; Aslin, Richard N.; Alku, Paavo; Csibra, Gergely

2008-01-01

Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. "Science, 218", 1138-1141; Patterson, M. L., & Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. "Infant…

Literacy: Parent Training in the Elementary Educational System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mathis Hill, Mattie Darlene

2012-01-01

Over several years, second grade parents have expressed concerns about not understanding the curriculum in the area of phonetic coding. The purpose of this study was to give second grade parents the skills they lacked in understanding phonetic coding so they could better help their children with homework and thus see if a significant difference in…

Deconstructing Phonetic Transcription: Covert Contrast, Perceptual Bias, and an Extraterrestrial View of "Vox Humana"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Munson, Benjamin; Edwards, Jan; Schellinger, Sarah K.; Beckman, Mary E.; Meyer, Marie K.

2010-01-01

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

The Influence of Phonetic Complexity on Stuttered Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coalson, Geoffrey A.; Byrd, Courtney T.; Davis, Barbara L.

2012-01-01

The primary purpose of this study was to re-examine the influence of phonetic complexity on stuttering in young children through the use of the Word Complexity Measure (WCM). Parent-child conversations were transcribed for 14 children who stutter (mean age = 3 years, 7 months; SD = 11.20 months). Lexical and linguistic factors were accounted for…

Bilingual Infants Demonstrate Perceptual Flexibility in Phoneme Discrimination but Perceptual Constraint in Face Discrimination

PubMed Central

Singh, Leher; Loh, Darrell; Xiao, Naiqi G.

2017-01-01

Perceptual narrowing is a highly significant development associated with the first year of life. It conventionally refers to an orientation toward nativeness whereby infant's perceptual sensitivities begin to align with the phonetic properties of their native environment. Nativeness effects, such as perceptual narrowing, have been observed in several domains, most notably, in face discrimination within other-race faces and speech discrimination of non-native phonemes. Thus, far, nativeness effects in the face and speech perception have been theoretically linked, but have mostly been investigated independently. An important caveat to nativeness effects is that diversifying experiences, such as bilingualism or multiracial exposure, can lead to a reduction or postponement in attunement to the native environment. The present study was designed to investigate whether bilingualism influences nativeness effects in phonetic and face perception. Eleven-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants were tested on their abilities to discriminate native and non-native speech contrasts as well as own-race and other-race face contrasts. While monolingual infants demonstrated nativeness effects in face and speech perception, bilingual infants demonstrated nativeness effects in the face perception but demonstrated flexibility in speech perception. Results support domain-specific effects of bilingual experience on nativeness effects. PMID:28955278

On the Locus of the Syllable Frequency Effect in Speech Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Laganaro, Marina; Alario, F. -Xavier

2006-01-01

The observation of a syllable frequency effect in naming latencies has been an argument in favor of a functional role of stored syllables in speech production. Accordingly, various theoretical models postulate that a repository of syllable representations is accessed during phonetic encoding. However, the direct empirical evidence for locating the…

Anatomic, clinical, and neuropsychological correlates of spelling errors in primary progressive aphasia.

PubMed

Shim, Hyungsub; Hurley, Robert S; Rogalski, Emily; Mesulam, M-Marsel

2012-07-01

This study evaluates spelling errors in the three subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA): agrammatic (PPA-G), logopenic (PPA-L), and semantic (PPA-S). Forty-one PPA patients and 36 age-matched healthy controls were administered a test of spelling. The total number of errors and types of errors in spelling to dictation of regular words, exception words and nonwords, were recorded. Error types were classified based on phonetic plausibility. In the first analysis, scores were evaluated by clinical diagnosis. Errors in spelling exception words and phonetically plausible errors were seen in PPA-S. Conversely, PPA-G was associated with errors in nonword spelling and phonetically implausible errors. In the next analysis, spelling scores were correlated to other neuropsychological language test scores. Significant correlations were found between exception word spelling and measures of naming and single word comprehension. Nonword spelling correlated with tests of grammar and repetition. Global language measures did not correlate significantly with spelling scores, however. Cortical thickness analysis based on MRI showed that atrophy in several language regions of interest were correlated with spelling errors. Atrophy in the left supramarginal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars orbitalis correlated with errors in nonword spelling, while thinning in the left temporal pole and fusiform gyrus correlated with errors in exception word spelling. Additionally, phonetically implausible errors in regular word spelling correlated with thinning in the left IFG pars triangularis and pars opercularis. Together, these findings suggest two independent systems for spelling to dictation, one phonetic (phoneme to grapheme conversion), and one lexical (whole word retrieval). Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Intonation and talker variability in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by Spanish, German and French listeners.

PubMed

Schwab, Sandra; Dellwo, Volker

2017-10-01

The perception of stress is highly influenced by listeners' native language. In this research, the authors examined the effect of intonation and talker variability (here: phonetic variability) in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by native Spanish (N = 17), German (N = 21), and French (N = 27) listeners. Participants listened to 216 trials containing three Spanish disyllabic words, where one word carried a different lexical stress to the others. The listeners' task was to identify the deviant word in each trial (Odd-One-Out task). The words in the trials were produced by either the same talker or by two different talkers, and carried the same or varying intonation patterns. The German listeners' performance was lower compared to the Spanish listeners but higher than that of the French listeners. French listeners performed above chance level with and without talker variability, and performed at chance level when intonation variability was introduced. Results are discussed in the context of the stress "deafness" hypothesis.

Acoustic analysis of trill sounds.

PubMed

Dhananjaya, N; Yegnanarayana, B; Bhaskararao, Peri

2012-04-01

In this paper, the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of steady apical trills--trill sounds produced by the periodic vibration of the apex of the tongue--are studied. Signal processing methods, namely, zero-frequency filtering and zero-time liftering of speech signals, are used to analyze the excitation source and the resonance characteristics of the vocal tract system, respectively. Although it is natural to expect the effect of trilling on the resonances of the vocal tract system, it is interesting to note that trilling influences the glottal source of excitation as well. The excitation characteristics derived using zero-frequency filtering of speech signals are glottal epochs, strength of impulses at the glottal epochs, and instantaneous fundamental frequency of the glottal vibration. Analysis based on zero-time liftering of speech signals is used to study the dynamic resonance characteristics of vocal tract system during the production of trill sounds. Qualitative analysis of trill sounds in different vowel contexts, and the acoustic cues that may help spotting trills in continuous speech are discussed.

Communication Disorders in Speakers of Tone Languages: Etiological Bases and Clinical Considerations

PubMed Central

Wong, Patrick C. M.; Perrachione, Tyler K.; Gunasekera, Geshri; Chandrasekaran, Bharath

2009-01-01

Lexical tones are a phonetic contrast necessary for conveying meaning in a majority of the world’s languages. Various hearing, speech, and language disorders affect the ability to perceive or produce lexical tones, thereby seriously impairing individuals’ communicative abilities. The number of tone language speakers is increasing, even in otherwise English-speaking nations, yet insufficient emphasis has been placed on clinical assessment and rehabilitation of lexical tone disorders. The similarities and dissimilarities between lexical tones and other speech sounds make a richer scientific understanding of their physiological bases paramount to more effective remediation of speech and language disorders in general. Here we discuss the cognitive and biological bases of lexical tones, emphasizing the neural structures and networks that support their acquisition, perception, and cognitive representation. We present emerging research on lexical tone learning in the context of the clinical disorders of hearing, speech, and language that this body of research will help to address. PMID:19711234

Phonetically Governed Voicing Onset and Offset in Preschool Children Who Stutter

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arenas, Richard M.; Zebrowski, Patricia M.; Moon, Jerald B.

2012-01-01

Phonetically governed changes in the fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) of vowels that immediately precede and follow voiceless stop plosives have been found to follow consistent patterns in adults and children as young as four years of age. In the present study, F[subscript 0] onset and offset patterns in 14 children who stutter (CWS) and 14…

Phonetic Parameters and Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English by American and Japanese Listeners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riney, Timothy J.; Takagi, Naoyuki; Inutsuka, Kumiko

2005-01-01

In this study we identify some of the phonetic parameters that correlate with nonnative speakers' (NNSs) perceptual judgments of accent in English and investigate NNS listener perceptions of English from a World Englishes point of view. Our main experiment involved 3,200 assessments of the perceived degree of accent in English of two speaker…

Individual Differences in Late Bilinguals' L2 Phonological Processes: From Acoustic-Phonetic Analysis to Lexical Access

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Diaz, Begona; Mitterer, Holger; Broersma, Mirjam; Sebastian-Galles, Nuria

2012-01-01

The extent to which the phonetic system of a second language is mastered varies across individuals. The present study evaluates the pattern of individual differences in late bilinguals across different phonological processes. Fifty-five late Dutch-English bilinguals were tested on their ability to perceive a difficult L2 speech contrast (the…

Automated Training in Auditory Perception and Phonetic Transcription for Beginning Students in Speech Pathology and Audiology. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leutenegger, Ralph R.

The phonetic transcription ability of 78 college students whose transcription instruction was administered by means of pre-programed Language Master cards was compared with that of 81 students whose instruction was non-automated. Ability was measured by seven weekly tests. There was no significant relationship on any of 29 variables with type of…

Sounds for Study: Speech and Language Therapy Students' Use and Perception of Exercise Podcasts for Phonetics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Knight, Rachael-Anne

2010-01-01

Currently little is known about how students use podcasts of exercise material (as opposed to lecture material), and whether they perceive such podcasts to be beneficial. This study aimed to assess how exercise podcasts for phonetics are used and perceived by second year speech and language therapy students. Eleven podcasts of graded phonetics…

Signs and Transitions: Do They Differ Phonetically and Does It Matter?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jantunen, Tommi

2013-01-01

The point of departure of this article is the cluster of three pre-theoretical presuppositions (P) governing modern research on sign languages: (1) that a stream of signing consists of signs (S) and transitions (T), (2) that only Ss are linguistically relevant units, and (3) that there is a qualitative (e.g., phonetic) difference between Ss and…

Talking with John Trim (Part I): A Career in Phonetics, Applied Linguistics and the Public Service

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Little, David; King, Lid

2013-01-01

As this issue was in preparation, the journal learned with great regret of the passing of John Trim. John was a long-serving member of the "Language Teaching" Board and his insight and advice proved invaluable for this and previous editors. An expert in the field of phonetics, linguistics, language didactics and policy, John worked…

Development of Phonological Constancy: 19-Month-Olds, but Not 15-Month-Olds, Identify Words in a Non-Native Regional Accent

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mulak, Karen E.; Best, Catherine T.; Tyler, Michael D.; Kitamura, Christine; Irwin, Julia R.

2013-01-01

By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity ("phonological distinctiveness"). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do "not" ("phonological constancy"). To test development of phonological constancy, sixteen 15-month-olds and sixteen 19-month-olds completed…

Multilingual Phoneme Models for Rapid Speech Processing System Development

DTIC Science & Technology

2006-09-01

processes are used to develop an Arabic speech recognition system starting from monolingual English models, In- ternational Phonetic Association (IPA...clusters. It was found that multilingual bootstrapping methods out- perform monolingual English bootstrapping methods on the Arabic evaluation data initially...International Phonetic Alphabet . . . . . . . . . 7 2.3.2 Multilingual vs. Monolingual Speech Recognition 7 2.3.3 Data-Driven Approaches

Building up Thai EFL Students' Positive Attitudes toward Their Non-Native English Accented Speech with the Use of Phonetics Website

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tananuraksakul, Noparat

2017-01-01

This paper examined the hypothesis that Thai EFL students' positive attitudes toward their non-native English accented speech could be promoted by the use of University of Iowa's "Sounds of American English" website, known as the "number 1 phonetics website". Fifty-two undergraduate students in the field of sciences…

From Phonemes to Articulatory Codes: An fMRI Study of the Role of Broca's Area in Speech Production

PubMed Central

de Zwart, Jacco A.; Jansma, J. Martijn; Pickering, Martin J.; Bednar, James A.; Horwitz, Barry

2009-01-01

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neuroanatomical substrates of phonetic encoding and the generation of articulatory codes from phonological representations. Our focus was on the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and in particular whether the LIFG plays a role in sublexical phonological processing such as syllabification or whether it is directly involved in phonetic encoding and the generation of articulatory codes. To answer this question, we contrasted the brain activation patterns elicited by pseudowords with high– or low–sublexical frequency components, which we expected would reveal areas related to the generation of articulatory codes but not areas related to phonological encoding. We found significant activation of a premotor network consisting of the dorsal precentral gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, and the supplementary motor area for low– versus high–sublexical frequency pseudowords. Based on our hypothesis, we concluded that these areas and in particular the LIFG are involved in phonetic and not phonological encoding. We further discuss our findings with respect to the mechanisms of phonetic encoding and provide evidence in support of a functional segregation of the posterior part of Broca's area, the pars opercularis. PMID:19181696

Learning to talk: A non-imitative account of the replication of phonetics by child learners

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Messum, Piers

2005-04-01

How is it that an English-speaking 5-year-old comes to: pronounce the vowel of seat to be longer than that of sit, but shorter than that of seed; say a multi-word phrase with stress-timed rhythm; aspirate the /p/s of pin, polite, and spin to different degrees? These are systematic features of English, and most people believe that a child replicates them by imitation. If so, he is paying attention to phonetic detail in adult speech that is not very significant linguistically, and then making the effort to reproduce it. With all the other communicative challenges he faces, how plausible is this? An alternative, non-imitative account of the replication of these features relies on two mechanisms: (1) emulation, and (2) the conditioning of articulatory activity by the developing characteristics of speech breathing. The phenomena above then become no more than expressions of how a child finds ways to warp his phonetic output in order to reconcile conflicting production demands. The criteria he uses to do this make the challenges both of learning to talk and then of managing the interaction of complex phonetic patterns considerably more straightforward than has been imagined.

Mapping Phonetic Features for Voice-Driven Sound Synthesis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Janer, Jordi; Maestre, Esteban

In applications where the human voice controls the synthesis of musical instruments sounds, phonetics convey musical information that might be related to the sound of the imitated musical instrument. Our initial hypothesis is that phonetics are user- and instrument-dependent, but they remain constant for a single subject and instrument. We propose a user-adapted system, where mappings from voice features to synthesis parameters depend on how subjects sing musical articulations, i.e. note to note transitions. The system consists of two components. First, a voice signal segmentation module that automatically determines note-to-note transitions. Second, a classifier that determines the type of musical articulation for each transition based on a set of phonetic features. For validating our hypothesis, we run an experiment where subjects imitated real instrument recordings with their voice. Performance recordings consisted of short phrases of saxophone and violin performed in three grades of musical articulation labeled as: staccato, normal, legato. The results of a supervised training classifier (user-dependent) are compared to a classifier based on heuristic rules (user-independent). Finally, from the previous results we show how to control the articulation in a sample-concatenation synthesizer by selecting the most appropriate samples.

Within- and across-language spectral and temporal variability of vowels in different phonetic and prosodic contexts: Russian and Japanese

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gilichinskaya, Yana D.; Hisagi, Miwako; Law, Franzo F.; Berkowitz, Shari; Ito, Kikuyo

2005-04-01

Contextual variability of vowels in three languages with large vowel inventories was examined previously. Here, variability of vowels in two languages with small inventories (Russian, Japanese) was explored. Vowels were produced by three female speakers of each language in four contexts: (Vba) disyllables and in 3-syllable nonsense words (gaC1VC2a) embedded within carrier sentences; contexts included bilabial stops (bVp) in normal rate sentences and alveolar stops (dVt) in both normal and rapid rate sentences. Dependent variables were syllable durations and formant frequencies at syllable midpoint. Results showed very little variation across consonant and rate conditions in formants for /i/ in both languages. Japanese short /u, o, a/ showed fronting (F2 increases) in alveolar context relative to labial context (1.3-2.0 Barks), which was more pronounced in rapid sentences. Fronting of Japanese long vowels was less pronounced (0.3 to 0.9 Barks). Japanese long/short vowel ratios varied with speaking style (syllables versus sentences) and speaking rate. All Russian vowels except /i/ were fronted in alveolar vs labial context (1.1-3.1 Barks) but showed little change in either spectrum or duration with speaking rate. Comparisons of these patterns of variability with American English, French and German vowel results will be discussed.

Automatic speech recognition and training for severely dysarthric users of assistive technology: the STARDUST project.

PubMed

Parker, Mark; Cunningham, Stuart; Enderby, Pam; Hawley, Mark; Green, Phil

2006-01-01

The STARDUST project developed robust computer speech recognizers for use by eight people with severe dysarthria and concomitant physical disability to access assistive technologies. Independent computer speech recognizers trained with normal speech are of limited functional use by those with severe dysarthria due to limited and inconsistent proximity to "normal" articulatory patterns. Severe dysarthric output may also be characterized by a small mass of distinguishable phonetic tokens making the acoustic differentiation of target words difficult. Speaker dependent computer speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models was achieved by the identification of robust phonetic elements within the individual speaker output patterns. A new system of speech training using computer generated visual and auditory feedback reduced the inconsistent production of key phonetic tokens over time.

Extrinsic cognitive load impairs low-level speech perception.

PubMed

Mattys, Sven L; Barden, Katharine; Samuel, Arthur G

2014-06-01

Recent research has suggested that the extrinsic cognitive load generated by performing a nonlinguistic visual task while perceiving speech increases listeners' reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases their capacity to perceive phonetic detail. In the present study, we asked whether this effect is accounted for better at a lexical or a sublexical level. The former would imply that cognitive load directly affects lexical activation but not perceptual sensitivity; the latter would imply that increased lexical reliance under cognitive load is only a secondary consequence of imprecise or incomplete phonetic encoding. Using the phoneme restoration paradigm, we showed that perceptual sensitivity decreases (i.e., phoneme restoration increases) almost linearly with the effort involved in the concurrent visual task. However, cognitive load had only a minimal effect on the contribution of lexical information to phoneme restoration. We concluded that the locus of extrinsic cognitive load on the speech system is perceptual rather than lexical. Mechanisms by which cognitive load increases tolerance to acoustic imprecision and broadens phonemic categories were discussed.

Lexical stress contrast marking in fluent and non-fluent aphasia in Spanish: The relationship between acoustic cues and compensatory strategies.

PubMed

Baqué, Lorraine

2017-01-01

This study sought to investigate stress production in Spanish by patients with Broca's (BA) and conduction aphasia (CA) as compared to controls. Our objectives were to assess whether: a) there were many abnormal acoustic correlates of stress as produced by patients, b) these abnormalities had a phonetic component and c) ability for articulatory compensation for stress marking was preserved. The results showed abnormal acoustic values in both BA and CA's productions, affecting not only duration but also F0 and intensity cues, and an interaction effect of stress pattern and duration on intensity cubes in BA, but not in CA or controls. The results are interpreted as deriving from two different underlying phenomena: in BA, a compensatory use of intensity as a stress cue in order to avoid 'equal stress'; in CA, related to either a 'subtle phonetic deficit' involving abnormal stress acoustic cue-processing or to 'clear-speech' effects.

Visual Similarity of Words Alone Can Modulate Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence From Modeling Chinese Character Recognition.

PubMed

Hsiao, Janet H; Cheung, Kit

2016-03-01

In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere (LH) lateralized than PS character processing. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is due to phonetic radical position or character type frequency. Through computational modeling with artificial lexicons, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception but do not assume phonological processing being LH lateralized, we show that the difference in character type frequency alone is sufficient to exhibit the effect that the dominant type has a stronger LH lateralization than the minority type. This effect is due to higher visual similarity among characters in the dominant type than the minority type, demonstrating the modulation of visual similarity of words on hemispheric lateralization. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Speech-Sound Duration Processing in a Second Language is Specific to Phonetic Categories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nenonen, Sari; Shestakova, Anna; Huotilainen, Minna; Naatanen, Risto

2005-01-01

The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential was used to determine the effect of native language, Russian, on the processing of speech-sound duration in a second language, Finnish, that uses duration as a cue for phonological distinction. The native-language effect was compared with Finnish vowels that either can…

The Influence of Adaptation and Inhibition on the Effects of Onset Asynchrony on Auditory Grouping

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holmes, Stephen D.; Roberts, Brian

2011-01-01

Onset asynchrony is an important cue for auditory scene analysis. For example, a harmonic of a vowel that begins before the other components contributes less to the perceived phonetic quality. This effect was thought primarily to involve high-level grouping processes, because the contribution can be partly restored by accompanying the leading…

The Role of Experience in the Perception of Phonetic Detail in Children's Speech: A Comparison between Speech-Language Pathologists and Clinically Untrained Listeners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Munson, Benjamin; Johnson, Julie M.; Edwards, Jan

2012-01-01

Purpose: This study examined whether experienced speech-language pathologists (SLPs) differ from inexperienced people in their perception of phonetic detail in children's speech. Method: Twenty-one experienced SLPs and 21 inexperienced listeners participated in a series of tasks in which they used a visual-analog scale (VAS) to rate children's…

On Being Echolalic: An Analysis of the Interactional and Phonetic Aspects of an Autistic's Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Local, John; Wootton, Tony

1996-01-01

A case study analyzed the echolalia behavior of an autistic 11-year-old boy, based on recordings made in his home and school. Focus was on the subset of immediate echolalia referred to as pure echoing. Using an approach informed by conversation analysis and descriptive phonetics, distinctions are drawn between different forms of pure echo. It is…

Visual Field Differences in Visual Word Recognition Can Emerge Purely from Perceptual Learning: Evidence from Modeling Chinese Character Pronunciation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsiao, Janet Hui-wen

2011-01-01

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is…

Do Learners Lighten Up?: Phonetic and Allophonic Acquisition of Spanish /l/ by English-Speaking Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Solon, Megan

2017-01-01

This study explores the second language (L2) acquisition of a segment that exists in learners' first language (L1) and in their L2 but that differs in its phonetic realization and allophonic patterning in the two languages. Specifically, this research tracks development in one aspect of the production of the alveolar lateral /l/ in the L2 Spanish…

Flore et menagerie phonetiques; Collages; Tirez a vous la couverture; A propos d'un quiproquo (Phonetic Flora and Fauna; Collages; Take the Covers; A Propos of a Quid Pro Quo).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Francais dans le Monde, 1987

1987-01-01

Four suggestions for classroom language-learning activities include a series of dot-to-dot phonetics games, small group collage making and presentation, use of magazine covers to stimulate class discussion and introduction of vocabulary, and student-written sketches based on misunderstandings. (MSE)

Speech Research: A Report on the Status and Progress of Studies on the Nature of Speech, Instrumentation for Its Investigation, and Practical Applications, 1 April - 30 June 1973.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT.

This document, containing 15 articles and 2 abstracts, is a report on the current status and progress of speech research. The following topics are investigated: phonological fusion, phonetic prerequisites for first-language learning, auditory and phonetic levels of processing, auditory short-term memory in vowel perception, hemispheric…

Cross-language Perception of Non-native Tonal Contrasts: Effects of Native Phonological and Phonetic Influences

PubMed Central

SO, CONNIE K.; BEST, CATHERINE T.

2010-01-01

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naïve Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors (confusions). The A-prime results revealed that the English listeners' sensitivity to Tone 4 identifications specifically was significantly lower than that of the other two groups. The analysis of tonal errors revealed that all listener groups showed perceptual confusion of tone pairs with similar phonetic features (T1–T2, T1–T4 and T2–T3 pairs), but not of those with completely dissimilar features (T1–T3, T2–T4, and T3–T4). Language specific errors were also observed in their performance, which may be explained within the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best, 1995; Best & Tyler, 2007). The findings imply that linguistic experience with native tones does not necessarily facilitate non-native tone perception. Rather, the phonemic status and the phonetic features (similarities or dissimilarities) between the tonal systems of the target language and the listeners' native languages play critical roles in the perception of non-native tones. PMID:20583732

Phonetic measures of reduced tongue movement correlate with negative symptom severity in hospitalized patients with first-episode schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Covington, Michael A; Lunden, S L Anya; Cristofaro, Sarah L; Wan, Claire Ramsay; Bailey, C Thomas; Broussard, Beth; Fogarty, Robert; Johnson, Stephanie; Zhang, Shayi; Compton, Michael T

2012-12-01

Aprosody, or flattened speech intonation, is a recognized negative symptom of schizophrenia, though it has rarely been studied from a linguistic/phonological perspective. To bring the latest advances in computational linguistics to the phenomenology of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, a clinical first-episode psychosis research team joined with a phonetics/computational linguistics team to conduct a preliminary, proof-of-concept study. Video recordings from a semi-structured clinical research interview were available from 47 first-episode psychosis patients. Audio tracks of the video recordings were extracted, and after review of quality, 25 recordings were available for phonetic analysis. These files were de-noised and a trained phonologist extracted a 1-minute sample of each patient's speech. WaveSurfer 1.8.5 was used to create, from each speech sample, a file of formant values (F0, F1, F2, where F0 is the fundamental frequency and F1 and F2 are resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity). Variability in these phonetic indices was correlated with severity of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative symptom scores using Pearson correlations. A measure of variability of tongue front-to-back position-the standard deviation of F2-was statistically significantly correlated with the severity of negative symptoms (r=-0.446, p=0.03). This study demonstrates a statistically significant and meaningful correlation between negative symptom severity and phonetically measured reductions in tongue movements during speech in a sample of first-episode patients just initiating treatment. Further studies of negative symptoms, applying computational linguistics methods, are warranted. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The “Perceptual Wedge” hypothesis as the basis for bilingual babies’ phonetic processing advantage: New insights from fNIRS brain imaging

PubMed Central

Petitto, L. A.; Berens, M. S.; Kovelman, I.; Dubins, M. H.; Jasinska, K.; Shalinsky, M.

2011-01-01

In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4–6 months, older 10–12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic processing in bilingual and monolingual babies is accomplished with the same language-specific brain areas classically observed in adults, including the left superior temporal gyrus (associated with phonetic processing) and the left inferior frontal cortex (associated with the search and retrieval of information about meanings, and syntactic and phonological patterning), with intriguing developmental timing differences: left superior temporal gyrus activation was observed early and remained stably active over time, while left inferior frontal cortex showed greater increase in neural activation in older babies notably at the precise age when babies’ enter the universal first-word milestone, thus revealing a first-time focal brain correlate that may mediate a universal behavioral milestone in early human language acquisition. A difference was observed in the older bilingual babies’ resilient neural and behavioral sensitivity to Non-Native phonetic contrasts at a time when monolingual babies can no longer make such discriminations. We advance the “Perceptual Wedge Hypothesis”as one possible explanation for how exposure to greater than one language may alter neural and language processing in ways that we suggest are advantageous to language users. The brains of bilinguals and multilinguals may provide the most powerful window into the full neural “extent and variability” that our human species’ language processing brain areas could potentially achieve. PMID:21724244

Phonetic Measures of Reduced Tongue Movement Correlate with Negative Symptom Severity in Hospitalized Patients with First-Episode Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders

PubMed Central

Covington, Michael A.; Lunden, S.L. Anya; Cristofaro, Sarah L.; Wan, Claire Ramsay; Bailey, C. Thomas; Broussard, Beth; Fogarty, Robert; Johnson, Stephanie; Zhang, Shayi; Compton, Michael T.

2012-01-01

Background Aprosody, or flattened speech intonation, is a recognized negative symptom of schizophrenia, though it has rarely been studied from a linguistic/phonological perspective. To bring the latest advances in computational linguistics to the phenomenology of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, a clinical first-episode psychosis research team joined with a phonetics/computational linguistics team to conduct a preliminary, proof-of-concept study. Methods Video recordings from a semi-structured clinical research interview were available from 47 first-episode psychosis patients. Audio tracks of the video recordings were extracted, and after review of quality, 25 recordings were available for phonetic analysis. These files were de-noised and a trained phonologist extracted a 1-minute sample of each patient’s speech. WaveSurfer 1.8.5 was used to create, from each speech sample, a file of formant values (F0, F1, F2, where F0 is the fundamental frequency and F1 and F2 are resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity). Variability in these phonetic indices was correlated with severity of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative symptom scores using Pearson correlations. Results A measure of variability of tongue front-to-back position—the standard deviation of F2—was statistically significantly correlated with the severity of negative symptoms (r=−0.446, p=0.03). Conclusion This study demonstrates a statistically significant and meaningful correlation between negative symptom severity and phonetically measured reductions in tongue movements during speech in a sample of first-episode patients just initiating treatment. Further studies of negative symptoms, applying computational linguistics methods, are warranted. PMID:23102940

The Role of Phonetics in the Teaching of Foreign Languages in India

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bansal, R. K.

1974-01-01

Oral work is considered the most effective way of laying the foundations for language proficiency. Recognition and production of vowels and consonants, use of a pronouncing dictionary, and practice in accent rhythm and intonation should all be included in a pronunciation course. (SC)

Cognitive Aspects of Regularity Exhibit When Neighborhood Disappears

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Sau-Chin; Hu, Jon-Fan

2015-01-01

Although regularity refers to the compatibility between pronunciation of character and sound of phonetic component, it has been suggested as being part of consistency, which is defined by neighborhood characteristics. Two experiments demonstrate how regularity effect is amplified or reduced by neighborhood characteristics and reveals the…

An Analysis of the Variations from Standard English Pronunciation in the Phonetic Performance of Two Groups of Nonstandard-English-Speaking Children. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Frederick, Ed.; And Others

In this second of two studies conducted with portions of the National Speech and Hearing Survey data, the investigators analyzed the phonetic variants from standard American English in the speech of two groups of nonstandard English speaking children. The study used samples of free speech and performance on the Gold-Fristoe Test of Articulation…

Phonetics and Technology in the Classroom: A Practical Approach to Using Speech Analysis Software in Second-Language Pronunciation Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olsen, Daniel J.

2014-01-01

While speech analysis technology has become an integral part of phonetic research, and to some degree is used in language instruction at the most advanced levels, it appears to be mostly absent from the beginning levels of language instruction. In part, the lack of incorporation into the language classroom can be attributed to both the lack of…

Auditory Modeling for Noisy Speech Recognition.

DTIC Science & Technology

2000-01-01

multiple platforms including PCs, workstations, and DSPs. A prototype version of the SOS process was tested on the Japanese Hiragana language with good...judgment among linguists. American English has 48 phonetic sounds in the ARPABET representation. Hiragana , the Japanese phonetic language, has only 20... Japanese Hiragana ," H.L. Pfister, FL 95, 1995. "State Recognition for Noisy Dynamic Systems," H.L. Pfister, Tech 2005, Chicago, 1995. "Experiences

Kyushu Neuro Psychiatry (Selected Articles),

DTIC Science & Technology

1983-04-22

to left and vertical lines from bottom to top. (Note: it is possible to write Japanese either vertically or horizontally.) But it was possible to read...five words in phonetic characters ( hiragana ) and in Chinese characters (kanji). 3) Copying short and long sentences: short sentences of forteen...was conducted on Day 3 and Day 6. The subjects were asked to write the five hiragana (phonetic, cursive characters) and kanji (Chinese characters

The "Perceptual Wedge Hypothesis" as the Basis for Bilingual Babies' Phonetic Processing Advantage: New insights from fNIRS Brain Imaging

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Petitto, L. A.; Berens, M. S.; Kovelman, I.; Dubins, M. H.; Jasinska, K.; Shalinsky, M.

2012-01-01

In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4-6 months, older 10-12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic…

Phonetically Irregular Word Pronunciation and Cortical Thickness in the Adult Brain

PubMed Central

Blackmon, Karen; Barr, William B.; Kuzniecky, Ruben; DuBois, Jonathan; Carlson, Chad; Quinn, Brian T.; Blumberg, Mark; Halgren, Eric; Hagler, Donald J.; Mikhly, Mark; Devinsky, Orrin; McDonald, Carrie R.; Dale, Anders M.; Thesen, Thomas

2010-01-01

Accurate pronunciation of phonetically irregular words (exception words) requires prior exposure to unique relationships between orthographic and phonemic features. Whether such word knowledge is accompanied by structural variation in areas associated with orthographic-to-phonemic transformations has not been investigated. We used high resolution MRI to determine whether performance on a visual word-reading test composed of phonetically irregular words, the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR), is associated with regional variations in cortical structure. A sample of 60 right-handed, neurologically intact individuals were administered the WTAR and underwent 3T volumetric MRI. Using quantitative, surface-based image analysis, cortical thickness was estimated at each vertex on the cortical mantle and correlated with WTAR scores while controlling for age. Higher scores on the WTAR were associated with thicker cortex in bilateral anterior superior temporal gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus/posterior superior temporal gyrus, and left hemisphere intraparietal sulcus. Higher scores were also associated with thinner cortex in left hemisphere posterior fusiform gyrus and central sulcus, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, and right hemisphere lingual gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. These results suggest that the ability to correctly pronounce phonetically irregular words is associated with structural variations in cortical areas that are commonly activated in functional neuroimaging studies of word reading, including areas associated with grapheme-to–phonemic conversion. PMID:20302944

Rise time and formant transition duration in the discrimination of speech sounds: the Ba-Wa distinction in developmental dyslexia.

PubMed

Goswami, Usha; Fosker, Tim; Huss, Martina; Mead, Natasha; Szucs, Dénes

2011-01-01

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure (phonological structure) of speech. One likely cause of their difficulties with phonology is a perceptual difficulty in auditory temporal processing (Tallal, 1980). Tallal (1980) proposed that basic auditory processing of brief, rapidly successive acoustic changes is compromised in dyslexia, thereby affecting phonetic discrimination (e.g. discriminating /b/ from /d/) via impaired discrimination of formant transitions (rapid acoustic changes in frequency and intensity). However, an alternative auditory temporal hypothesis is that the basic auditory processing of the slower amplitude modulation cues in speech is compromised (Goswami et al., 2002). Here, we contrast children's perception of a synthetic speech contrast (ba/wa) when it is based on the speed of the rate of change of frequency information (formant transition duration) versus the speed of the rate of change of amplitude modulation (rise time). We show that children with dyslexia have excellent phonetic discrimination based on formant transition duration, but poor phonetic discrimination based on envelope cues. The results explain why phonetic discrimination may be allophonic in developmental dyslexia (Serniclaes et al., 2004), and suggest new avenues for the remediation of developmental dyslexia. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Nonword Repetition in Children and Adults: Effects on Movement Coordination

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sasisekaran, Jayanthi; Smith, Anne; Sadagopan, Neeraja; Weber-Fox, Christine

2010-01-01

Hearing and repeating novel phonetic sequences, or novel nonwords, is a task that taps many levels of processing, including auditory decoding, phonological processing, working memory, speech motor planning and execution. Investigations of nonword repetition abilities have been framed within models of psycholinguistic processing, while the motor…

Apraxia of Speech: The Effectiveness of a Treatment Regimen.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dworkin, James Paul; And Others

1988-01-01

A treatment program is described which successfully improved the speech of a 57-year-old apraxic patient. The program was composed of physiologic (nonspeech) and phonetic (articulatory) tasks that began with oroneuromotor control activities and progressed to consonant-vowel syllable, word, and sentence drills, with all activities paced by a…

The Effects of Phonetic Similarity and List Length on Children's Sound Categorization Performance.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Snowling, Margaret J.; And Others

1994-01-01

Examined the phonological analysis and verbal working memory components of the sound categorization task and their relationships to reading skill differences. Children were tested on sound categorization by having them identify odd words in sequences. Sound categorization performance was sensitive to individual differences in speech perception…

ESCOL '90: Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (7th, Columbus, Ohio, September 21-23, 1990).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

No, Yongkyoon, Ed.; Libucha, Mark, Ed.

Papers include: "Length and Structure Effects in Syntactic Processing"; Nantong Tone Sandhi and Tonal Feature Geometry"; "Event Reference and Property Theory"; "Function-Argument Structure, Category Raising and Bracketing Paradoxes"; "At the Phonetics-Phonology Interface: (Re)Syllabification and English Stop…

Perception of English Intonation by English, Spanish, and Chinese Listeners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grabe, Esther; Rosner, Burton S.; Garcia-Albea, Jose E.; Zhou, Xiaolin

2003-01-01

Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was…

Imitation of Para-Phonological Detail Following Left Hemisphere Lesions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kappes, Juliane; Baumgaertner, Annette; Peschke, Claudia; Goldenberg, Georg; Ziegler, Wolfram

2010-01-01

Imitation in speech refers to the unintentional transfer of phonologically irrelevant acoustic-phonetic information of auditory input into speech motor output. Evidence for such imitation effects has been explained within the framework of episodic theories. However, it is largely unclear, which neural structures mediate speech imitation and how…

Cross-language categorization of French and German vowels by naive American listeners.

PubMed

Strange, Winifred; Levy, Erika S; Law, Franzo F

2009-09-01

American English (AE) speakers' perceptual assimilation of 14 North German (NG) and 9 Parisian French (PF) vowels was examined in two studies using citation-form disyllables (study 1) and sentences with vowels surrounded by labial and alveolar consonants in multisyllabic nonsense words (study 2). Listeners categorized multiple tokens of each NG and PF vowel as most similar to selected AE vowels and rated their category "goodness" on a nine-point Likert scale. Front, rounded vowels were assimilated primarily to back AE vowels, despite their acoustic similarity to front AE vowels. In study 1, they were considered poorer exemplars of AE vowels than were NG and PF back, rounded vowels; in study 2, front and back, rounded vowels were perceived as similar to each other. Assimilation of some front, unrounded and back, rounded NG and PF vowels varied with language, speaking style, and consonantal context. Differences in perceived similarity often could not be predicted from context-specific cross-language spectral similarities. Results suggest that listeners can access context-specific, phonetic details when listening to citation-form materials, but assimilate non-native vowels on the basis of context-independent phonological equivalence categories when processing continuous speech. Results are interpreted within the Automatic Selective Perception model of speech perception.

Cross-language categorization of French and German vowels by naïve American listeners

PubMed Central

Strange, Winifred; Levy, Erika S.; Law, Franzo F.

2009-01-01

American English (AE) speakers’ perceptual assimilation of 14 North German (NG) and 9 Parisian French (PF) vowels was examined in two studies using citation-form disyllables (study 1) and sentences with vowels surrounded by labial and alveolar consonants in multisyllabic nonsense words (study 2). Listeners categorized multiple tokens of each NG and PF vowel as most similar to selected AE vowels and rated their category “goodness” on a nine-point Likert scale. Front, rounded vowels were assimilated primarily to back AE vowels, despite their acoustic similarity to front AE vowels. In study 1, they were considered poorer exemplars of AE vowels than were NG and PF back, rounded vowels; in study 2, front and back, rounded vowels were perceived as similar to each other. Assimilation of some front, unrounded and back, rounded NG and PF vowels varied with language, speaking style, and consonantal context. Differences in perceived similarity often could not be predicted from context-specific cross-language spectral similarities. Results suggest that listeners can access context-specific, phonetic details when listening to citation-form materials, but assimilate non-native vowels on the basis of context-independent phonological equivalence categories when processing continuous speech. Results are interpreted within the Automatic Selective Perception model of speech perception. PMID:19739759

Comparative cognitive effects of bilateral subthalamic stimulation and subcutaneous continuous infusion of apomorphine in Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Alegret, Montse; Valldeoriola, Francesc; Martí, MaJosé; Pilleri, Manuela; Junqué, Carme; Rumià, Jordi; Tolosa, Eduardo

2004-12-01

Bilateral subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) and continuous subcutaneous infusion of apomorphine (APM-csi) can provide a comparable improvement on motor function in patients with advanced Parkinson's disease (PD), but the mechanisms by which both therapies exert their effects are different. We analyzed the cognitive effects of APM-csi. We also compared neuropsychological effects induced by STN-DBS and APM-csi in advanced PD to ascertain the neuropsychological aspects relevant in determining the therapeutic procedure that is the most appropriate in a particular patient. We studied 9 patients treated with STN-DBS and 7 patients with APM-csi. Neuropsychological measures included Rey's Auditory-Verbal Learning, Stroop, Trail Making, phonetic verbal fluency, and Judgment of Line Orientation tests. In the APM-csi group, significant changes were not observed in the neuropsychological tests performance. By contrast, in the STN-DBS group, moderate worsening was found in phonetic verbal fluency and Stroop Naming scores that was partially reversible at long-term follow-up and did not have consequences on regular activities. Consequently, these findings could be interpreted as being not relevant in deciding the most suitable treatment in a given patient. 2004 Movement Disorder Society.

Mismatch Negativity with Visual-only and Audiovisual Speech

PubMed Central

Ponton, Curtis W.; Bernstein, Lynne E.; Auer, Edward T.

2009-01-01

The functional organization of cortical speech processing is thought to be hierarchical, increasing in complexity and proceeding from primary sensory areas centrifugally. The current study used the mismatch negativity (MMN) obtained with electrophysiology (EEG) to investigate the early latency period of visual speech processing under both visual-only (VO) and audiovisual (AV) conditions. Current density reconstruction (CDR) methods were used to model the cortical MMN generator locations. MMNs were obtained with VO and AV speech stimuli at early latencies (approximately 82-87 ms peak in time waveforms relative to the acoustic onset) and in regions of the right lateral temporal and parietal cortices. Latencies were consistent with bottom-up processing of the visible stimuli. We suggest that a visual pathway extracts phonetic cues from visible speech, and that previously reported effects of AV speech in classical early auditory areas, given later reported latencies, could be attributable to modulatory feedback from visual phonetic processing. PMID:19404730

Dramatic effects of speech task on motor and linguistic planning in severely dysfluent parkinsonian speech

PubMed Central

Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana; Cameron, Krista; Sidtis, John J.

2015-01-01

In motor speech disorders, dysarthric features impacting intelligibility, articulation, fluency, and voice emerge more saliently in conversation than in repetition, reading, or singing. A role of the basal ganglia in these task discrepancies has been identified. Further, more recent studies of naturalistic speech in basal ganglia dysfunction have revealed that formulaic language is more impaired than novel language. This descriptive study extends these observations to a case of severely dysfluent dysarthria due to a parkinsonian syndrome. Dysfluencies were quantified and compared for conversation, two forms of repetition, reading, recited speech, and singing. Other measures examined phonetic inventories, word forms, and formulaic language. Phonetic, syllabic, and lexical dysfluencies were more abundant in conversation than in other task conditions. Formulaic expressions in conversation were reduced compared to normal speakers. A proposed explanation supports the notion that the basal ganglia contribute to formulation of internal models for execution of speech. PMID:22774929

Multistage audiovisual integration of speech: dissociating identification and detection.

PubMed

Eskelund, Kasper; Tuomainen, Jyrki; Andersen, Tobias S

2011-02-01

Speech perception integrates auditory and visual information. This is evidenced by the McGurk illusion where seeing the talking face influences the auditory phonetic percept and by the audiovisual detection advantage where seeing the talking face influences the detectability of the acoustic speech signal. Here, we show that identification of phonetic content and detection can be dissociated as speech-specific and non-specific audiovisual integration effects. To this end, we employed synthetically modified stimuli, sine wave speech (SWS), which is an impoverished speech signal that only observers informed of its speech-like nature recognize as speech. While the McGurk illusion only occurred for informed observers, the audiovisual detection advantage occurred for naïve observers as well. This finding supports a multistage account of audiovisual integration of speech in which the many attributes of the audiovisual speech signal are integrated by separate integration processes.

Advances in EPG for treatment and research: an illustrative case study.

PubMed

Scobbie, James M; Wood, Sara E; Wrench, Alan A

2004-01-01

Electropalatography (EPG), a technique which reveals tongue-palate contact patterns over time, is a highly effective tool for speech research. We report here on recent developments by Articulate Instruments Ltd. These include hardware for Windows-based computers, backwardly compatible (with Reading EPG3) software systems for clinical intervention and laboratory-based analysis for EPG and acoustic data, and an enhanced clinical interface with client and file management tools. We focus here on a single case study of a child aged 10+/-years who had been diagnosed with an intractable speech disorder possibly resulting ultimately from a complete cleft of hard and soft palate. We illustrate how assessment, diagnosis and treatment of the intractable speech disorder are undertaken using this new generation of instrumental phonetic support. We also look forward to future developments in articulatory phonetics that will link EPG with ultrasound for research and clinical communities.

A Western apache writing system: the symbols of silas john.

PubMed

Basso, K H; Anderson, N

1973-06-08

At the outset of this article, it was observed that the adequacy of an etic typology of written symbols could be judged by its ability to describe all the emic distinctions in all the writing systems of the world. In conclusion, we should like to return to this point and briefly examine the extent to which currently available etic concepts can be used to describe the distinctions made by Western Apaches in relation to the writing system of Silas John. Every symbol in the Silas John script may be classified as a phonetic-semantic sign. Symbols of this type denote linguistic expressions that consist of one or more words and contrast as a class with phonetic-nonsemantic signs, which denote phonemes (or phoneme clusters), syllables (or syllable clusters), and various prosodic phenomena (2, pp. 2, 248). Phonetic semantic signs are commonly partitioned into two subclasses: alogographs (which denote single words) and phraseographs (which denote on or more words). Although every symbol in the Silas John script can be assigned to one or the other of these categories, such an exercise is without justification (21). We have no evidence to suggest that Western Apaches classify symbols according to the length or complexity of their linguistic referents, and therefore the imposition of distinctions based on these criteria would be inappropriate and misleading. A far more useful contrast, and one we have already employed, is presented in most etic typologies as an opposition between compound (composite) and noncompound (noncomposite) symbols. Used to break down the category of phonetic-semantic signs, these two concepts enable us to describe more or less exactly the distinction Apaches draw between "symbol elements put together" (ke?escin ledidilgoh) and "symbol elements standing alone" (ke?- escin doledidildaahi). The former may now be defined as consisting of compound phonetic-semantic signs, while the latter is composed of noncompound phonetic-semantic signs. Up to this point, etic concepts have served us well. However, a deficiency appears when we search for a terminology that allows us to describe the distinction between "symbols that tell what to say" and "symbols that tell what to do." As far as we have been able to determine, standard typologies make no provision for this kind of contrast, apparently because their creators have tacitly assumed that systems composed of phonetic-semantic signs serve exclusively to communicate linguistic information. Consequently, the possibility that these systems might also convey nonlinguistic information seems to have been ignored. This oversight may be a product of Western ethnocentrism; after all, it is. we who use alphabets who most frequently associate writing with language (22). On the other hand, it may simply stem from the fact that systems incorporating symbols with kinesic referents are exceedingly rare and have not yet been reported. In any case, it is important to recognize that the etic inventory is not complete. Retaining the term "phonetic sign" as a label for written symbols. that denote linguistic phenomena, we propose that the term "kinetic sign" be introduced to label symbols that denote sequences of nonverbal behavior. Symbols of the latter type that simultaneously denote some unit of language may be classified as "phonetic-kinetic" signs. With these concepts, the contrast between " symbols that tell what to say" and "symbols that tell what to do" can be rephrased as one that distinguishes phonetic signs (by definition nonkinetic) from phonetic-kinetic signs. Purely kinetic signs-symbols that refer solely to physical gestures-are absent from the Silas John script. The utility of the kinetic sign and the phonetic-kinetic sign as comparative concepts must ultimately be judged on the basis of their capacity to clarify and describe emic distinctions in other systems of writing. However, as we have previously pointed out, ethnographic studies of American Indian systems that address themselves to the identification of these distinctions-and thus provide the information necessary to evaluate the relevance and applicability of etic concepts-are in very short supply. As a result, meaningful comparisons cannot be made. At this point, we simply alack the data with which to determine whether the kinetic component so prominen in the Silas John script is unique or whether it had counterparts else-where in North America. The view is still prevalent among anthropologists and linguists that the great majority of American Indian writing systems conform to one or two global "primitive" types. Our study of the Silas John script casts doubt upon this position, for it demonstrates that fundamental emic distinctions remain to be discovered and that existing etic frameworks are less than adequatelyequipped to describe them. The implications of these findings are clear. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the possibility that several structurally distinct forms of writing were developed by North America's Indian cultures. Concomitantly, we must be prepared to aabandon traditional ideas of typological similarity and simplicity among thes systems in favor of those that take into account variation and complexity.

SyllabO+: A new tool to study sublexical phenomena in spoken Quebec French.

PubMed

Bédard, Pascale; Audet, Anne-Marie; Drouin, Patrick; Roy, Johanna-Pascale; Rivard, Julie; Tremblay, Pascale

2017-10-01

Sublexical phonotactic regularities in language have a major impact on language development, as well as on speech processing and production throughout the entire lifespan. To understand the impact of phonotactic regularities on speech and language functions at the behavioral and neural levels, it is essential to have access to oral language corpora to study these complex phenomena in different languages. Yet, probably because of their complexity, oral language corpora remain less common than written language corpora. This article presents the first corpus and database of spoken Quebec French syllables and phones: SyllabO+. This corpus contains phonetic transcriptions of over 300,000 syllables (over 690,000 phones) extracted from recordings of 184 healthy adult native Quebec French speakers, ranging in age from 20 to 97 years. To ensure the representativeness of the corpus, these recordings were made in both formal and familiar communication contexts. Phonotactic distributional statistics (e.g., syllable and co-occurrence frequencies, percentages, percentile ranks, transition probabilities, and pointwise mutual information) were computed from the corpus. An open-access online application to search the database was developed, and is available at www.speechneurolab.ca/syllabo . In this article, we present a brief overview of the corpus, as well as the syllable and phone databases, and we discuss their practical applications in various fields of research, including cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, experimental psychology, phonetics, and phonology. Nonacademic practical applications are also discussed, including uses in speech-language pathology.

Voice Register in Mon: Acoustics and Electroglottography

PubMed Central

Abramson, Arthur S.; Tiede, Mark K.; Luangthongkum, Theraphan

2016-01-01

Mon is spoken in villages in Thailand and Myanmar. The dialect of Ban Nakhonchum, Thailand has two voice registers, modal and breathy; these phonation types, along with other phonetic properties, distinguish minimal pairs. Four native speakers of this dialect recorded repetitions of 14 randomized words (seven minimal pairs) for acoustic analysis. We used a subset of these pairs in a listening test to verify the perceptual robustness of the register distinction. Acoustic analysis found significant differences in noise component, spectral slope, and fundamental frequency. In a subsequent session four speakers were also recorded using electroglottography (EGG), which showed systematic differences in the contact quotient (CQ). The salience of these properties in maintaining the register distinction is discussed in the context of possible tonogenesis for this language. PMID:26636544

Levels of processing with free and cued recall and unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy.

PubMed

Lespinet-Najib, Véronique; N'Kaoua, Bernard; Sauzéon, Hélène; Bresson, Christel; Rougier, Alain; Claverie, Bernard

2004-04-01

This study investigates the role of the temporal lobes in levels-of-processing tasks (phonetic and semantic encoding) according to the nature of recall tasks (free and cued recall). These tasks were administered to 48 patients with unilateral temporal epilepsy (right "RTLE"=24; left "LTLE"=24) and a normal group (n=24). The results indicated that LTLE patients were impaired for semantic processing (free and cued recall) and for phonetic processing (free and cued recall), while for RTLE patients deficits appeared in free recall with semantic processing. It is suggested that the left temporal lobe is involved in all aspects of verbal memory, and that the right temporal lobe is specialized in semantic processing. Moreover, our data seem to indicate that RTLE patients present a retrieval processing impairment (semantic condition), whereas the LTLE group is characterized by encoding difficulties in the phonetic and semantic condition.

Predicting phonetic transcription agreement: Insights from research in infant vocalizations

PubMed Central

RAMSDELL, HEATHER L.; OLLER, D. KIMBROUGH; ETHINGTON, CORINNA A.

2010-01-01

The purpose of this study is to provide new perspectives on correlates of phonetic transcription agreement. Our research focuses on phonetic transcription and coding of infant vocalizations. The findings are presumed to be broadly applicable to other difficult cases of transcription, such as found in severe disorders of speech, which similarly result in low reliability for a variety of reasons. We evaluated the predictiveness of two factors not previously documented in the literature as influencing transcription agreement: canonicity and coder confidence. Transcribers coded samples of infant vocalizations, judging both canonicity and confidence. Correlation results showed that canonicity and confidence were strongly related to agreement levels, and regression results showed that canonicity and confidence both contributed significantly to explanation of variance. Specifically, the results suggest that canonicity plays a major role in transcription agreement when utterances involve supraglottal articulation, with coder confidence offering additional power in predicting transcription agreement. PMID:17882695

Onset age of L2 acquisition influences language network in early and late Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals.

PubMed

Liu, Xiaojin; Tu, Liu; Wang, Junjing; Jiang, Bo; Gao, Wei; Pan, Ximin; Li, Meng; Zhong, Miao; Zhu, Zhenzhen; Niu, Meiqi; Li, Yanyan; Zhao, Ling; Chen, Xiaoxi; Liu, Chang; Lu, Zhi; Huang, Ruiwang

2017-11-01

Early second language (L2) experience influences the neural organization of L2 in neuro-plastic terms. Previous studies tried to reveal these plastic effects of age of second language acquisition (AoA-L2) and proficiency-level in L2 (PL-L2) on the neural basis of language processing in bilinguals. Although different activation patterns have been observed during language processing in early and late bilinguals by task-fMRI, few studies reported the effect of AoA-L2 and high PL-L2 on language network at resting state. In this study, we acquired resting-state fMRI (R-fMRI) data from 10 Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) early bilinguals (acquired L2: 3years old) and 11 late bilinguals (acquired L2: 6years old), and analyzed their topological properties of language networks after controlling the language daily exposure and usage as well as PL in L1 and L2. We found that early bilinguals had significantly a higher clustering coefficient, global and local efficiency, but significantly lower characteristic path length compared to late bilinguals. Modular analysis indicated that compared to late bilinguals, early bilinguals showed significantly stronger intra-modular functional connectivity in the semantic and phonetic modules, stronger inter-modular functional connectivity between the semantic and phonetic modules as well as between the phonetic and syntactic modules. Differences in global and local parameters may reflect different patterns of neuro-plasticity respectively for early and late bilinguals. These results suggested that different L2 experience influences topological properties of language network, even if late bilinguals achieve high PL-L2. Our findings may provide a new perspective of neural mechanisms related to early and late bilinguals. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Contrast-marking prosodic emphasis in Williams syndrome: results of detailed phonetic analysis.

PubMed

Ito, Kiwako; Martens, Marilee A

2017-01-01

Past reports on the speech production of individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) suggest that their prosody is anomalous and may lead to challenges in spoken communication. While existing prosodic assessments confirm that individuals with WS fail to use prosodic emphasis to express contrast, those reports typically lack detailed phonetic analysis of speech data. The present study examines the acoustic properties of speech prosody, aiming for the future development of targeted speech interventions. The study examines the three primary acoustic correlates of prosodic emphasis (duration, intensity, F0) and determines whether individuals with WS have difficulty in producing all or a particular set of the three prosodic cues. Speech produced by 12 individuals with WS and 12 chronological age (CA)-matched typically developing individuals were recorded. A sequential picture-naming task elicited production of target phrases in three contexts: (1) no contrast: gorilla with a racket → rabbit with a balloon; (2) contrast on the animal: fox with a balloon → rabbit with a balloon; and (3) contrast on the object: rabbit with a ball → rabbit with a balloon. The three acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence (duration, intensity and F0) were compared across the three referential contexts. The two groups exhibited striking similarities in their use of word duration and intensity for expressing contrast. Both groups showed the reduction and enhancement of final lengthening, and the enhancement and reduction of intensity difference for the animal contrast and for the object contrast conditions, respectively. The two groups differed in their use of F0: the CA group produced higher F0 for the animal than for the object regardless of the context, and this difference was enhanced when the animal noun was contrastive. In contrast, the WS group produced higher F0 for the object than for the animal when the object was contrastive. The present data contradict previous assessment results that report a lack of prosodic skills to mark contrast in individuals with WS. The methodological differences that may account for this variability are discussed. The present data suggest that individuals with WS produce appropriate prosodic cues to express contrast, although their use of pitch may be somewhat atypical. Additional data and future speech comprehension studies will determine whether pitch modulation can be targeted for speech intervention in individuals with WS. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Fiches pratiques: Si on jouait a la famille Dubois...; Pic et pic...et phonetique; Les rendez-vous des souvenirs; A l'ami (Practical Ideas: Let's Play House; Tick and Tick...and Phonetic; Rendezvous with Memories; To My Friend).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bravo, Maria Antonia Lavandera; And Others

1991-01-01

Four activities for French language classroom use are presented, including a simulation of the relationships and communication within a family; pronunciation instruction through phonetic transcription; cultural awareness through students' analysis of their own and their parents' specific memories; and analysis and comparison of a literary text and…

Speech Recognition: Acoustic-Phonetic Knowledge Acquisition and Representation.

DTIC Science & Technology

1987-09-25

the release duration is the voice onset time, or VOT. For the purpose of this investigation, alveolar flaps ( as in "butter’) and and glottalized /t/’s...Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Abstract females and 8 males. The other sentence was said by 7 females We discuss a framework for an acoustic-phonetic...tarned a number of semivowels. One sentence was said by 6 vowels + + "jpporte.d by a Xerox Fellowhsp Table It Features which characterite

L'environnement pedagogique: source de difficulte dans la maitrise des habiletes phonetiques en langue seconde (The Learning Environment: Source of Difficulty in the Mastery of Second Language Phonetic Skills).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Champagne, Cecile

1984-01-01

Research is reported that showed phonetic and phonological training to be given peripheral attention or neglected in second language instruction in one geographic area. It is suggested this neglect stems from (1) low teacher and student expectation of success in attaining a native-like accent, and (2) assumptions that a non-native-like accent will…

Sensory-motor relationships in speech production in post-lingually deaf cochlear-implanted adults and normal-hearing seniors: Evidence from phonetic convergence and speech imitation.

PubMed

Scarbel, Lucie; Beautemps, Denis; Schwartz, Jean-Luc; Sato, Marc

2017-07-01

Speech communication can be viewed as an interactive process involving a functional coupling between sensory and motor systems. One striking example comes from phonetic convergence, when speakers automatically tend to mimic their interlocutor's speech during communicative interaction. The goal of this study was to investigate sensory-motor linkage in speech production in postlingually deaf cochlear implanted participants and normal hearing elderly adults through phonetic convergence and imitation. To this aim, two vowel production tasks, with or without instruction to imitate an acoustic vowel, were proposed to three groups of young adults with normal hearing, elderly adults with normal hearing and post-lingually deaf cochlear-implanted patients. Measure of the deviation of each participant's f 0 from their own mean f 0 was measured to evaluate the ability to converge to each acoustic target. showed that cochlear-implanted participants have the ability to converge to an acoustic target, both intentionally and unintentionally, albeit with a lower degree than young and elderly participants with normal hearing. By providing evidence for phonetic convergence and speech imitation, these results suggest that, as in young adults, perceptuo-motor relationships are efficient in elderly adults with normal hearing and that cochlear-implanted adults recovered significant perceptuo-motor abilities following cochlear implantation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Phonics Is Phonics Is Phonics--Or Is It?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCulloch, Myrna T.

For 60 years, confusion and misinformation have reigned supreme whenever the subject of teaching phonics comes up for discussion. The paper considers various phonics programs, both old and new, and appraises their effectiveness. It also discusses works on phonetics by some well-known researchers and experts in reading, among them Frank Smith,…

English Speech Acquisition in 3- to 5-Year-Old Children Learning Russian and English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gildersleeve-Neumann, Christina E.; Wright, Kira L.

2010-01-01

Purpose: English speech acquisition in Russian-English (RE) bilingual children was investigated, exploring the effects of Russian phonetic and phonological properties on English single-word productions. Russian has more complex consonants and clusters and a smaller vowel inventory than English. Method: One hundred thirty-seven single-word samples…

Piecing Together Phonics and Whole Language: A Balanced Approach.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pernai, Karen; Pulciani, Jodie; Vahle, Heather

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the implementation of the Hello Reader Scholastic Phonics program as an addition to an already rich, literature-based curriculum. Test data suggested that primary grade students were not developing phonetic skills sufficient to meet district expectations. This research was designed to…

A System for Adaptive High-Variability Segmental Perceptual Training: Implementation, Effectiveness, Transfer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Qian, Manman; Chukharev-Hudilainen, Evgeny; Levis, John

2018-01-01

Many types of L2 phonological perception are often difficult to acquire without instruction. These difficulties with perception may also be related to intelligibility in production. Instruction on perception contrasts is more likely to be successful with the use of phonetically variable input made available through computer-assisted pronunciation…

Audiovisual Speech Recalibration in Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Linden, Sabine; Vroomen, Jean

2008-01-01

In order to examine whether children adjust their phonetic speech categories, children of two age groups, five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, were exposed to a video of a face saying /aba/ or /ada/ accompanied by an auditory ambiguous speech sound halfway between /b/ and /d/. The effect of exposure to these audiovisual stimuli was measured on…

Children with Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia: Changes in Articulation and Perceived Resilience with Intensive Multimodal Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Maureen K; Wright, Lindsay Elizabeth; Perry, Susan; Cornett, Daphne; Schraeder, Missy; Johnson, James T.

2016-01-01

Research into intervention strategies for developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD) clearly demonstrates the need to identify effective interventions. The goals of this study were to examine changes in articulation skills following the use of phonetic, multimodal intervention and to consider the relationship between these improved articulation skills…

Phonetic Effects on the Timing of Gestural Coordination in Modern Greek Consonant Clusters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yip, Jonathan Chung-Kay

2013-01-01

Theoretical approaches to the principles governing the coordination of speech gestures differ in their assessment of the contributions of biomechanical and perceptual pressures on this coordination. Perceptually-oriented accounts postulate that, for consonant-consonant (C1-C2) sequences, gestural timing patterns arise from speakers' sensitivity to…

Effects of acoustic manipulation on the real-time inflectional processing of children with specific language impairment.

PubMed

Montgomery, James W; Leonard, Laurence B

2006-12-01

This study reports the findings of an investigation designed to examine the effects of acoustic enhancement on the processing of low-phonetic-substance inflections (e.g., 3rd-person singular -s, possessive -s) versus a high-phonetic-substance inflection (e.g., present progressive -ing) by children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a word recognition, reaction time (RT) processing task. The effects of acoustic enhancement on the processing of the same morphemes as well as an additional morpheme (comparative -er) were examined in an offline grammaticality judgment task. The grammatical function of 1 of the higher-phonetic-substance inflections, -ing, was presumed to be hypothesized relatively early by children; the function of the other, -er, was presumed to be hypothesized relatively late. Sixteen children with SLI (age(M) = 9 years;0 months) and 16 chronological age (CA; age(M) = 8;11) children participated. For both tasks, children listened to sentences containing the target morphemes as they were produced naturally (natural condition) or with acoustic enhancement (enhanced condition). On the RT task, the children with SLI demonstrated RT sensitivity only to the presence of the high-substance inflection, irrespective of whether it was produced naturally or with enhancement. Acoustic enhancement had no effect on these children's processing of low-substance inflections. The CA children, by contrast, showed sensitivity to low-substance inflections when they were produced naturally and with acoustic enhancement. These children also showed sensitivity to the high-substance inflection in the natural condition, but in the enhanced condition they demonstrated significantly slower RT. On the grammaticality judgment task, the children with SLI performed worse than the CA children overall and showed especially poor performance on low-substance inflections. Acoustic enhancement had a beneficial effect on the inflectional processing of the children with SLI, but it had no effect on CA children. The findings are interpreted to suggest that the reduced language processing capacity of children with SLI constrains their ability to process low-substance grammatical material in real time. This factor should be considered along with any difficulty that might be attributable to the grammatical function of the inflection.

Paralinguistic mechanisms of production in human "beatboxing": a real-time magnetic resonance imaging study.

PubMed

Proctor, Michael; Bresch, Erik; Byrd, Dani; Nayak, Krishna; Narayanan, Shrikanth

2013-02-01

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) was used to examine mechanisms of sound production by an American male beatbox artist. rtMRI was found to be a useful modality with which to study this form of sound production, providing a global dynamic view of the midsagittal vocal tract at frame rates sufficient to observe the movement and coordination of critical articulators. The subject's repertoire included percussion elements generated using a wide range of articulatory and airstream mechanisms. Many of the same mechanisms observed in human speech production were exploited for musical effect, including patterns of articulation that do not occur in the phonologies of the artist's native languages: ejectives and clicks. The data offer insights into the paralinguistic use of phonetic primitives and the ways in which they are coordinated in this style of musical performance. A unified formalism for describing both musical and phonetic dimensions of human vocal percussion performance is proposed. Audio and video data illustrating production and orchestration of beatboxing sound effects are provided in a companion annotated corpus.

Efficacy of Multiple-Talker Phonetic Identification Training in Postlingually Deafened Cochlear Implant Listeners.

PubMed

Miller, Sharon E; Zhang, Yang; Nelson, Peggy B

2016-02-01

This study implemented a pretest-intervention-posttest design to examine whether multiple-talker identification training enhanced phonetic perception of the /ba/-/da/ and /wa/-/ja/ contrasts in adult listeners who were deafened postlingually and have cochlear implants (CIs). Nine CI recipients completed 8 hours of identification training using a custom-designed training package. Perception of speech produced by familiar talkers (talkers used during training) and unfamiliar talkers (talkers not used during training) was measured before and after training. Five additional untrained CI recipients completed identical pre- and posttests over the same time course as the trainees to control for procedural learning effects. Perception of the speech contrasts produced by the familiar talkers significantly improved for the trained CI listeners, and effects of perceptual learning transferred to unfamiliar talkers. Such training-induced significant changes were not observed in the control group. The data provide initial evidence of the efficacy of the multiple-talker identification training paradigm for CI users who were deafened postlingually. This pattern of results is consistent with enhanced phonemic categorization of the trained speech sounds.

Modelling category goodness judgments in children with residual sound errors.

PubMed

Dugan, Sarah Hamilton; Silbert, Noah; McAllister, Tara; Preston, Jonathan L; Sotto, Carolyn; Boyce, Suzanne E

2018-05-24

This study investigates category goodness judgments of /r/ in adults and children with and without residual speech errors (RSEs) using natural speech stimuli. Thirty adults, 38 children with RSE (ages 7-16) and 35 age-matched typically developing (TD) children provided category goodness judgments on whole words, recorded from 27 child speakers, with /r/ in various phonetic environments. The salient acoustic property of /r/ - the lowered third formant (F3) - was normalized in two ways. A logistic mixed-effect model quantified the relationships between listeners' responses and the third formant frequency, vowel context and clinical group status. Goodness judgments from the adult group showed a statistically significant interaction with the F3 parameter when compared to both child groups (p < 0.001) using both normalization methods. The RSE group did not differ significantly from the TD group in judgments of /r/. All listeners were significantly more likely to judge /r/ as correct in a front-vowel context. Our results suggest that normalized /r/ F3 is a statistically significant predictor of category goodness judgments for both adults and children, but children do not appear to make adult-like judgments. Category goodness judgments do not have a clear relationship with /r/ production abilities in children with RSE. These findings may have implications for clinical activities that include category goodness judgments in natural speech, especially for recorded productions.

Effects of emotion on different phoneme classes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lee, Chul Min; Yildirim, Serdar; Bulut, Murtaza; Busso, Carlos; Kazemzadeh, Abe; Lee, Sungbok; Narayanan, Shrikanth

2004-10-01

This study investigates the effects of emotion on different phoneme classes using short-term spectral features. In the research on emotion in speech, most studies have focused on prosodic features of speech. In this study, based on the hypothesis that different emotions have varying effects on the properties of the different speech sounds, we investigate the usefulness of phoneme-class level acoustic modeling for automatic emotion classification. Hidden Markov models (HMM) based on short-term spectral features for five broad phonetic classes are used for this purpose using data obtained from recordings of two actresses. Each speaker produces 211 sentences with four different emotions (neutral, sad, angry, happy). Using the speech material we trained and compared the performances of two sets of HMM classifiers: a generic set of ``emotional speech'' HMMs (one for each emotion) and a set of broad phonetic-class based HMMs (vowel, glide, nasal, stop, fricative) for each emotion type considered. Comparison of classification results indicates that different phoneme classes were affected differently by emotional change and that the vowel sounds are the most important indicator of emotions in speech. Detailed results and their implications on the underlying speech articulation will be discussed.

Phonological Codes Constrain Output of Orthographic Codes via Sublexical and Lexical Routes in Chinese Written Production

PubMed Central

Wang, Cheng; Zhang, Qingfang

2015-01-01

To what extent do phonological codes constrain orthographic output in handwritten production? We investigated how phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes via sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production. Participants wrote down picture names in a picture-naming task in Experiment 1or response words in a symbol—word associative writing task in Experiment 2. A sublexical phonological property of picture names (phonetic regularity: regular vs. irregular) in Experiment 1and a lexical phonological property of response words (homophone density: dense vs. sparse) in Experiment 2, as well as word frequency of the targets in both experiments, were manipulated. A facilitatory effect of word frequency was found in both experiments, in which words with high frequency were produced faster than those with low frequency. More importantly, we observed an inhibitory phonetic regularity effect, in which low-frequency picture names with regular first characters were slower to write than those with irregular ones, and an inhibitory homophone density effect, in which characters with dense homophone density were produced more slowly than those with sparse homophone density. Results suggested that phonological codes constrained handwritten production via lexical and sublexical routes. PMID:25879662

L'influenza dell'attenzione, della memoria e della discriminazione fonetica nell'apprendimento della seconda lingua nella scuola elementare: Risultati di alcuni test (Influence of Attention, Memory, and Phonetic Discrimination in Second Language Learning in Elementary School: Results of Several Tests).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Colonna-Preti, Paola; Taeschner, Traute

1987-01-01

Using a new method, 48 children in an elementary school in Rome, Italy, were taught a foreign language (26 English, 22 German) and tested after three years. The authors attempt to explain the variation in test results in terms of the students' attention, memory, and phonetic discrimination. (CFM)

Selections from Kuang-Ming JIH-PAO (Source Span: 17 May - 26 June 1961), Number 8 Communist China.

DTIC Science & Technology

1961-08-31

to have a feeling of being unaccustomed to a certain new method, much like the feeling they have towards the use of phonetic symbols, Romanization or...seems to me that there is a certain unanimity among those who advocate the checking of Chinese words through phonetic sounds. The differences are...children’s mental development. We could not possibly ask children in kindergarten to learn algebra because natural maturity is also important. We have

Word recognition and phonetic structure acquisition: Possible relations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Morgan, James

2002-05-01

Several accounts of possible relations between the emergence of the mental lexicon and acquisition of native language phonological structure have been propounded. In one view, acquisition of word meanings guides infants' attention toward those contrasts that are linguistically significant in their language. In the opposing view, native language phonological categories may be acquired from statistical patterns of input speech, prior to and independent of learning at the lexical level. Here, a more interactive account will be presented, in which phonological structure is modeled as emerging consequentially from the self-organization of perceptual space underlying word recognition. A key prediction of this model is that early native language phonological categories will be highly context specific. Data bearing on this prediction will be presented which provide clues to the nature of infants' statistical analysis of input.

Born with an ear for dialects? Structural plasticity in the expert phonetician brain.

PubMed

Golestani, Narly; Price, Cathy J; Scott, Sophie K

2011-03-16

Are experts born with particular predispositions, or are they made through experience? We examined brain structure in expert phoneticians, individuals who are highly trained to analyze and transcribe speech. We found a positive correlation between the size of left pars opercularis and years of phonetic transcription training experience, illustrating how learning may affect brain structure. Phoneticians were also more likely to have multiple or split left transverse gyri in the auditory cortex than nonexpert controls, and the amount of phonetic transcription training did not predict auditory cortex morphology. The transverse gyri are thought to be established in utero; our results thus suggest that this gross morphological difference may have existed before the onset of phonetic training, and that its presence confers an advantage of sufficient magnitude to affect career choices. These results suggest complementary influences of domain-specific predispositions and experience-dependent brain malleability, influences that likely interact in determining not only how experience shapes the human brain but also why some individuals become engaged by certain fields of expertise.

Compensation for Coarticulation: Disentangling Auditory and Gestural Theories of Perception of Coarticulatory Effects in Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Viswanathan, Navin; Magnuson, James S.; Fowler, Carol A.

2010-01-01

According to one approach to speech perception, listeners perceive speech by applying general pattern matching mechanisms to the acoustic signal (e.g., Diehl, Lotto, & Holt, 2004). An alternative is that listeners perceive the phonetic gestures that structured the acoustic signal (e.g., Fowler, 1986). The two accounts have offered different…

Interlingual Influence in Bilingual Speech: Cognate Status Effect in a Continuum of Bilingualism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Amengual, Mark

2012-01-01

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish-English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical…

Effects of Prosodically Modulated Sub-Phonetic Variation on Lexical Competition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salverda, Anne Pier; Dahan, Delphine; Tanenhaus, Michael K.; Crosswhite, Katherine; Masharov, Mikhail; McDonough, Joyce

2007-01-01

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., "Put the cap next to the square") or utterance-final position (e.g., "Now click on the cap"). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a…

Effects of Noise and Proficiency on Intelligibility of Chinese-Accented English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rogers, Catherine L.; Dalby, Jonathan; Nishi, Kanae

2004-01-01

This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948).…

Effects of Hearing and Aging on Sentence-Level Time-Gated Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Molis, Michelle R.; Kampel, Sean D.; McMillan, Garnett P.; Gallun, Frederick J.; Dann, Serena M.; Konrad-Martin, Dawn

2015-01-01

Purpose: Aging is known to influence temporal processing, but its relationship to speech perception has not been clearly defined. To examine listeners' use of contextual and phonetic information, the Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN) was used to develop a time-gated word (TGW) task. Method: In Experiment 1, R-SPIN sentence lists…

Evaluating the Effectiveness of First Grade Literacy Interventions: Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Heidi Thomson

2014-01-01

This is a quantitative research project utilizing secondary data. Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention are two early literacy interventions based on a whole language and phonetic approach to reading instruction. For the purposes of this study, the end-of-first-grade benchmark is a Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) 18 and the…

Phonological Neighborhood Effects in Spoken Word Production: An fMRI Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peramunage, Dasun; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Myers, Emily B.; Goldrick, Matthew; Baese-Berk, Melissa

2011-01-01

The current study examined the neural systems underlying lexically conditioned phonetic variation in spoken word production. Participants were asked to read aloud singly presented words, which either had a voiced minimal pair (MP) neighbor (e.g., cape) or lacked a minimal pair (NMP) neighbor (e.g., cake). The voiced neighbor never appeared in the…

The Stroop Effect in Kana and Kanji Scripts in Native Japanese Speakers: An fMRI Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coderre, Emily L.; Filippi, Christopher G.; Newhouse, Paul A.; Dumas, Julie A.

2008-01-01

Prior research has shown that the two writing systems of the Japanese orthography are processed differently: kana (syllabic symbols) are processed like other phonetic languages such as English, while kanji (a logographic writing system) are processed like other logographic languages such as Chinese. Previous work done with the Stroop task in…

Effect of Phonetic Association on Learning Vocabulary in Foreign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bozavli, Ebubekir

2017-01-01

Word is one of the most important components of a natural language. Speech is meaningful because of the meanings of words. Vocabulary acquired in one's mother tongue is learned consciously in a foreign language in non-native settings. Learning vocabulary in a system based on grammar is generally neglected or learned in conventional ways. This…

EFFECTS AND INTERACTIONS OF AUDITORY AND VISUAL CUES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

KEYS, JOHN W.; AND OTHERS

VISUAL AND AUDITORY CUES WERE TESTED, SEPARATELY AND JOINTLY, TO DETERMINE THE DEGREE OF THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO IMPROVING OVERALL SPEECH SKILLS OF THE AURALLY HANDICAPPED. EIGHT SOUND INTENSITY LEVELS (FROM 6 TO 15 DECIBELS) WERE USED IN PRESENTING PHONETICALLY BALANCED WORD LISTS AND MULTIPLE-CHOICE INTELLIGIBILITY LISTS TO A SAMPLE OF 24…

Characteristics of the Lax Vowel Space in Dysarthria

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tjaden, Kris; Rivera, Deanna; Wilding, Gregory; Turner, Greg S.

2005-01-01

It has been hypothesized that lax vowels may be relatively unaffected by dysarthria, owing to the reduced vocal tract shapes required for these phonetic events (G. S. Turner, K. Tjaden, & G. Weismer, 1995). It also has been suggested that lax vowels may be especially susceptible to speech mode effects (M. A. Picheny, N. I. Durlach, & L. D. Braida,…

Neural Signatures of Phonetic Learning in Adulthood: A Magnetoencephalography Study

PubMed Central

Zhang, Yang; Kuhl, Patricia K.; Imada, Toshiaki; Iverson, Paul; Pruitt, John; Stevens, Erica B.; Kawakatsu, Masaki; Tohkura, Yoh'ichi; Nemoto, Iku

2010-01-01

The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine perceptual learning of American English /r/ and /l/ categories by Japanese adults who had limited English exposure. A training software program was developed based on the principles of infant phonetic learning, featuring systematic acoustic exaggeration, multi-talker variability, visible articulation, and adaptive listening. The program was designed to help Japanese listeners utilize an acoustic dimension relevant for phonemic categorization of /r-l/ in English. Although training did not produce native-like phonetic boundary along the /r-l/ synthetic continuum in the second language learners, success was seen in highly significant identification improvement over twelve training sessions and transfer of learning to novel stimuli. Consistent with behavioral results, pre-post MEG measures showed not only enhanced neural sensitivity to the /r-l/ distinction in the left-hemisphere mismatch field (MMF) response but also bilateral decreases in equivalent current dipole (ECD) cluster and duration measures for stimulus coding in the inferior parietal region. The learning-induced increases in neural sensitivity and efficiency were also found in distributed source analysis using Minimum Current Estimates (MCE). Furthermore, the pre-post changes exhibited significant brain-behavior correlations between speech discrimination scores and MMF amplitudes as well as between the behavioral scores and ECD measures of neural efficiency. Together, the data provide corroborating evidence that substantial neural plasticity for second-language learning in adulthood can be induced with adaptive and enriched linguistic exposure. Like the MMF, the ECD cluster and duration measures are sensitive neural markers of phonetic learning. PMID:19457395

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report

PubMed Central

Logan, John S.; Lively, Scott E.; Pisoni, David B.

2012-01-01

Native speakers of Japanese learning English generally have difficulty differentiating the phonemes /r/ and /l/, even after years of experience with English. Previous research that attempted to train Japanese listeners to distinguish this contrast using synthetic stimuli reported little success, especially when transfer to natural tokens containing /r/ and /l/ was tested. In the present study, a different training procedure that emphasized variability among stimulus tokens was used. Japanese subjects were trained in a minimal pair identification paradigm using multiple natural exemplars contrasting /r/ and /l/ from a variety of phonetic environments as stimuli. A pretest–posttest design containing natural tokens was used to assess the effects of training. Results from six subjects showed that the new procedure was more robust than earlier training techniques. Small but reliable differences in performance were obtained between pretest and posttest scores. The results demonstrate the importance of stimulus variability and task-related factors in training nonnative speakers to perceive novel phonetic contrasts that are not distinctive in their native language. PMID:2016438

The stability of locus equation slopes across stop consonant voicing/aspiration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sussman, Harvey M.; Modarresi, Golnaz

2004-05-01

The consistency of locus equation slopes as phonetic descriptors of stop place in CV sequences across voiced and voiceless aspirated stops was explored in the speech of five male speakers of American English and two male speakers of Persian. Using traditional locus equation measurement sites for F2 onsets, voiceless labial and coronal stops had significantly lower locus equation slopes relative to their voiced counterparts, whereas velars failed to show voicing differences. When locus equations were derived using F2 onsets for voiced stops that were measured closer to the stop release burst, comparable to the protocol for measuring voiceless aspirated stops, no significant effects of voicing/aspiration on locus equation slopes were observed. This methodological factor, rather than an underlying phonetic-based explanation, provides a reasonable account for the observed flatter locus equation slopes of voiceless labial and coronal stops relative to voiced cognates reported in previous studies [Molis et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 2925 (1994); O. Engstrand and B. Lindblom, PHONUM 4, 101-104]. [Work supported by NIH.

Preparing novice teachers to develop basic reading and spelling skills in children.

PubMed

Spear-Swerling, Louise; Brucker, Pamela Owen

2004-12-01

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers' word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Tutored children were assessed on several measures of basic reading and spelling skills. Novice teachers who received word-structure instruction outperformed a comparison group of teachers in word-structure knowledge at post-test. Tutored children improved significantly from pre-test to post-test on all assessments. Teachers' post-test knowledge on the graphophonemic segmentation and irregular words tasks correlated significantly with tutored children's progress in decoding phonetically regular words; error analyses indicated links between teachers' patterns of word-structure knowledge and children's patterns of decoding progress. The study suggests that word-structure knowledge is important to effective teaching of word decoding and underscores the need to include this information in teacher preparation.

Musically tone-deaf individuals have difficulty discriminating intonation contours extracted from speech.

PubMed

Patel, Aniruddh D; Foxton, Jessica M; Griffiths, Timothy D

2005-12-01

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (). We test this idea by presenting intonation contours for discrimination, both in the context of the original sentences in which they occur and in a "pure" form dissociated from any phonetic context. The pure form consists of gliding-pitch analogs of the original intonation contours which exactly follow their pattern of pitch and timing. If the spared intonation perception of tone-deaf individuals is due to the coarse pitch contrasts of intonation, then such individuals should discriminate the original sentences and the gliding-pitch analogs equally well. In contrast, we find that discrimination of the gliding-pitch analogs is severely degraded. Thus it appears that the dissociation between spoken and musical pitch perception in tone-deaf individuals is due to a deficit at a higher level than simple pitch-change detection.

Psychophysics of complex auditory and speech stimuli

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pastore, Richard E.

1993-10-01

A major focus on the primary project is the use of different procedures to provide converging evidence on the nature of perceptual spaces for speech categories. Completed research examined initial voiced consonants, with results providing strong evidence that different stimulus properties may cue a phoneme category in different vowel contexts. Thus, /b/ is cued by a rising second format (F2) with the vowel /a/, requiring both F2 and F3 to be rising with /i/, and is independent of the release burst for these vowels. Furthermore, cues for phonetic contrasts are not necessarily symmetric, and the strong dependence of prior speech research on classification procedures may have led to errors. Thus, the opposite (falling F2 and F3) transitions lead somewhat ambiguous percepts (i.e., not /b/) which may be labeled consistently (as /d/ or /g/), but requires a release burst to achieve high category quality and similarity to category exemplars. Ongoing research is examining cues in other vowel contexts and issuing procedures to evaluate the nature of interaction between cues for categories of both speech and music.

Early language delay phenotypes and correlation with later linguistic abilities.

PubMed

Petinou, Kakia; Spanoudis, George

2014-01-01

The present study focused on examining the continuity and directionality of language skills in late talkers (LTs) and identifying factors which might contribute to language outcomes at the age of 3 years. Subjects were 23 Cypriot-Greek-speaking toddlers classified as LTs and 24 age-matched typically developing peers (TDs). Participants were assessed at 28, 32 and 36 months, using various linguistic measures such as size of receptive and expressive vocabulary, mean length of utterance (MLU) of words and number of consonants produced. Data on otitis media familial history were also analyzed. The ANOVA results indicated parallel developmental profiles between the two groups, with a language lag characterizing LTs. Concurrent correlations between measures showed that poor phonetic inventories in the LT group at 28 months predicted poor MLU at the ages of 32 and 36 months. Significant cross-lagged correlations supported the finding that poor phonetic inventories at 28 months served as a good predictor for MLU and expressive vocabulary at the age of 32 and for MLU at 36 months. The results highlight the negative effect of early language delay on language skills up to the age of 3 years and lend support to the current literature regarding the universal linguistic picture of early and persistent language delay. Based on the current results, poor phonetic inventories at the age of intake might serve as a predictive factor for language outcomes at the age of 36 months. Finally, the findings are discussed in view of the need for further research with a focus on more language-sensitive tools in testing later language outcomes. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Australian children with cleft palate achieve age-appropriate speech by 5 years of age.

PubMed

Chacon, Antonia; Parkin, Melissa; Broome, Kate; Purcell, Alison

2017-12-01

Children with cleft palate demonstrate atypical speech sound development, which can influence their intelligibility, literacy and learning. There is limited documentation regarding how speech sound errors change over time in cleft palate speech and the effect that these errors have upon mono-versus polysyllabic word production. The objective of this study was to examine the phonetic and phonological speech skills of children with cleft palate at ages 3 and 5. A cross-sectional observational design was used. Eligible participants were aged 3 or 5 years with a repaired cleft palate. The Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP) Articulation subtest and a non-standardised list of mono- and polysyllabic words were administered once for each child. The Profile of Phonology (PROPH) was used to analyse each child's speech. N = 51 children with cleft palate participated in the study. Three-year-old children with cleft palate produced significantly more speech errors than their typically-developing peers, but no difference was apparent at 5 years. The 5-year-olds demonstrated greater phonetic and phonological accuracy than the 3-year-old children. Polysyllabic words were more affected by errors than monosyllables in the 3-year-old group only. Children with cleft palate are prone to phonetic and phonological speech errors in their preschool years. Most of these speech errors approximate typically-developing children by 5 years. At 3 years, word shape has an influence upon phonological speech accuracy. Speech pathology intervention is indicated to support the intelligibility of these children from their earliest stages of development. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Speech research

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

1992-06-01

Phonology is traditionally seen as the discipline that concerns itself with the building blocks of linguistic messages. It is the study of the structure of sound inventories of languages and of the participation of sounds in rules or processes. Phonetics, in contrast, concerns speech sounds as produced and perceived. Two extreme positions on the relationship between phonological messages and phonetic realizations are represented in the literature. One holds that the primary home for linguistic symbols, including phonological ones, is the human mind, itself housed in the human brain. The second holds that their primary home is the human vocal tract.

Electronic publishing: opportunities and challenges for clinical linguistics and phonetics.

PubMed

Powell, Thomas W; Müller, Nicole; Ball, Martin J

2003-01-01

This paper discusses the contributions of informatics technology to the field of clinical linguistics and phonetics. The electronic publication of research reports and books has facilitated both the dissemination and the retrieval of scientific information. Electronic archives of speech and language corpora, too, stimulate research efforts. Although technology provides many opportunities, there remain significant challenges. Establishment and maintenance of scientific archives is largely dependent upon volunteer efforts, and there are few standards to ensure long-term access. Coordinated efforts and peer review are necessary to ensure utility and quality.

The Emergence of the Allophonic Perception of Unfamiliar Speech Sounds: The Effects of Contextual Distribution and Phonetic Naturalness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Noguchi, Masaki; Hudson Kam, Carla L.

2018-01-01

In human languages, different speech sounds can be contextual variants of a single phoneme, called allophones. Learning which sounds are allophones is an integral part of the acquisition of phonemes. Whether given sounds are separate phonemes or allophones in a listener's language affects speech perception. Listeners tend to be less sensitive to…

The Effect of Pinyin Input Experience on the Link between Semantic and Phonology of Chinese Character in Digital Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Jingjun; Luo, Rong; Liu, Huashan

2017-01-01

With the development of ICT, digital writing is becoming much more common in people's life. Differently from keyboarding alphabets directly to input English words, keyboarding Chinese character is always through typing phonetic alphabets and then identify the glyph provided by Pinyin input-method software while in this process which do not need…

Attention to Semantic versus Phonetic Verbal Attributes as a Function of Individual Differences in Arousal and Learning Strategy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schmeck, Ronald R; Spofford, Mark

1982-01-01

An investigation was undertaken to determine whether highly aroused (e.g. highly anxious) students are handicapped with regard to their ability to learn through deep processing and elaboration. The hypothesis that well-developed deep and elaborative habits of thought might counteract the disruptive effects that excessive arousal has upon students…

The Link between Form and Meaning in British Sign Language: Effects of Iconicity for Phonological Decisions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Robin L.; Vinson, David P.; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2010-01-01

Signed languages exploit the visual/gestural modality to create iconic expression across a wide range of basic conceptual structures in which the phonetic resources of the language are built up into an analogue of a mental image (Taub, 2001). Previously, we demonstrated a processing advantage when iconic properties of signs were made salient in a…

Effect of Group Work on EFL Students' Attitudes and Learning in Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taqi, Hanan A.; Al-Nouh, Nowreyah A.

2014-01-01

The use of group work in classroom activities is a method used for motivating learning and increasing the idea of pleasure through learning. The current study investigates the advantages of group work in exams in the English department, in the College of Basic Education. 40 students in two classes of "The Introduction of Phonetics and…

Examining the Effects of Multiple Sclerosis on Speech Production: Does Phonetic Structure Matter?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosen, Kristin M.; Goozee, Justine V.; Murdoch, Bruce E.

2008-01-01

The second formant (F2) is well-known to be important to intelligibility (e.g. [Delattre, P., Liberman, A., & Cooper, F. (1955). Acoustic loci and transitional cues for consonants. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27", 769-774]) and is affected by a variety of dysarthrias [Weismer, G., & Martin, R. (1992). Acoustic and perceptual…

The Effects of Indexical and Phonetic Variation on Vowel Perception in Typically Developing 9- to 12-Year-Old Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacewicz, Ewa; Fox, Robert Allen

2014-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how linguistic knowledge interacts with indexical knowledge in older children's perception under demanding listening conditions created by extensive talker variability. Method: Twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children, 12 from North Carolina (NC) and 13 from Wisconsin (WI), identified 12 vowels…

Viva Survivors--The Effect of Peer-Mentoring on Pre-Viva Anxiety in Early-Years Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Knight, Rachael-Anne; Dipper, Lucy; Cruice, Madeline

2018-01-01

"Viva voce" exams are used in many disciplines as a test of students' knowledge and skills. Whilst acknowledged as a useful form of assessment, vivas commonly lead to a great deal of anxiety for students. This anxiety is also apparent for vivas in phonetics, where the students must produce and recognise sounds drawn from across the…

Acquiring Novel Words and Their Past Tenses: Evidence from Lexical Effects on Phonetic Categorisation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lindsay, Shane; Sedin, Leanne M.; Gaskell, M. Gareth

2012-01-01

Two experiments addressed how novel verbs come to be represented in the auditory input lexicon, and how the inflected forms of such novel words are acquired and recognised. Participants were introduced to new spoken forms as uninflected verbs. These varied in whether they contained a final /d/ (e.g., "confald" or "confal"). Either immediately…

Status report on speech research. A report on the status and progress of studies of the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation and practical applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Studdert-Kennedy, M.; Obrien, N.

1983-05-01

This report is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Manuscripts cover the following topics: The influence of subcategorical mismatches on lexical access; The Serbo-Croatian orthography constraints the reader to a phonologically analytic strategy; Grammatical priming effects between pronouns and inflected verb forms; Misreadings by beginning readers of Serrbo-Croatian; Bi-alphabetism and work recognition; Orthographic and phonemic coding for word identification: Evidence for Hebrew; Stress and vowel duration effects on syllable recognition; Phonetic and auditory trading relations between acoustic cues in speech perception: Further results; Linguistic coding by deaf children in relation beginning reading success; Determinants of spelling ability in deaf and hearing adults: Access to linguistic structures; A dynamical basis for action systems; On the space-time structure of human interlimb coordination; Some acoustic and physiological observations on diphthongs; Relationship between pitch control and vowel articulation; Laryngeal vibrations: A comparison between high-speed filming and glottographic techniques; Compensatory articulation in hearing impaired speakers: A cinefluorographic study; and Review (Pierre Delattre: Studies in comparative phonetics.)

Training in Temporal Information Processing Ameliorates Phonetic Identification.

PubMed

Szymaszek, Aneta; Dacewicz, Anna; Urban, Paulina; Szelag, Elzbieta

2018-01-01

Many studies revealed a link between temporal information processing (TIP) in a millisecond range and speech perception. Previous studies indicated a dysfunction in TIP accompanied by deficient phonemic hearing in children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study we concentrate in SLI on phonetic identification, using the voice-onset-time (VOT) phenomenon in which TIP is built-in. VOT is crucial for speech perception, as stop consonants (like /t/ vs. /d/) may be distinguished by an acoustic difference in time between the onsets of the consonant (stop release burst) and the following vibration of vocal folds (voicing). In healthy subjects two categories (voiced and unvoiced) are determined using VOT task. The present study aimed at verifying whether children with SLI indicate a similar pattern of phonetic identification as their healthy peers and whether the intervention based on TIP results in improved performance on the VOT task. Children aged from 5 to 8 years ( n = 47) were assigned into two groups: normal children without any language disability (NC, n = 20), and children with SLI ( n = 27). In the latter group participants were randomly classified into two treatment subgroups, i.e., experimental temporal training (EG, n = 14) and control non-temporal training (CG, n = 13). The analyzed indicators of phonetic identification were: (1) the boundary location (α) determined as the VOT value corresponding to 50% voicing/unvoicing distinctions; (2) ranges of voiced/unvoiced categories; (3) the slope of identification curve (β) reflecting the identification correctness; (4) percent of voiced distinctions within the applied VOT spectrum. The results indicated similar α values and similar ranges of voiced/unvoiced categories between SLI and NC. However, β in SLI was significantly higher than that in NC. After the intervention, the significant improvement of β was observed only in EG. They achieved the level of performance comparable to that observed in NC. The training-related improvement in CG was non-significant. Furthermore, only in EG the β values in post-test correlated with measures of TIP as well as with phonemic hearing obtained in our previous studies. These findings provide another evidence that TIP is omnipresent in language communication and reflected not only in phonemic hearing but also in phonetic identification.

Linking Cognitive and Social Aspects of Sound Change Using Agent-Based Modeling.

PubMed

Harrington, Jonathan; Kleber, Felicitas; Reubold, Ulrich; Schiel, Florian; Stevens, Mary

2018-03-26

The paper defines the core components of an interactive-phonetic (IP) sound change model. The starting point for the IP-model is that a phonological category is often skewed phonetically in a certain direction by the production and perception of speech. A prediction of the model is that sound change is likely to come about as a result of perceiving phonetic variants in the direction of the skew and at the probabilistic edge of the listener's phonological category. The results of agent-based computational simulations applied to the sound change in progress, /u/-fronting in Standard Southern British, were consistent with this hypothesis. The model was extended to sound changes involving splits and mergers by using the interaction between the agents to drive the phonological reclassification of perceived speech signals. The simulations showed no evidence of any acoustic change when this extended model was applied to Australian English data in which /s/ has been shown to retract due to coarticulation in /str/ clusters. Some agents nevertheless varied in their phonological categorizations during interaction between /str/ and /ʃtr/: This vacillation may represent the potential for sound change to occur. The general conclusion is that many types of sound change are the outcome of how phonetic distributions are oriented with respect to each other, their association to phonological classes, and how these types of information vary between speakers that happen to interact with each other. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Topics in Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Cognitive Science Society.

Perception of initial obstruent voicing is influenced by gestural organization

PubMed Central

Best, Catherine T.; Hallé, Pierre A.

2009-01-01

Cross-language differences in phonetic settings for phonological contrasts of stop voicing have posed a challenge for attempts to relate specific phonological features to specific phonetic details. We probe the phonetic-phonological relationship for voicing contrasts more broadly, analyzing in particular their relevance to nonnative speech perception, from two theoretical perspectives: feature geometry and articulatory phonology. Because these perspectives differ in assumptions about temporal/phasing relationships among features/gestures within syllable onsets, we undertook a cross-language investigation on perception of obstruent (stop, fricative) voicing contrasts in three nonnative onsets that use a common set of features/gestures but with differing time-coupling. Listeners of English and French, which differ in their phonetic settings for word-initial stop voicing distinctions, were tested on perception of three onset types, all nonnative to both English and French, that differ in how initial obstruent voicing is coordinated with a lateral feature/gesture and additional obstruent features/gestures. The targets, listed from least complex to most complex onsets, were: a lateral fricative voicing distinction (Zulu /ɬ/-ɮ/), a laterally-released affricate voicing distinction (Tlingit /tɬ/-/dɮ/), and a coronal stop voicing distinction in stop+/l/ clusters (Hebrew /tl/-/dl/). English and French listeners' performance reflected the differences in their native languages' stop voicing distinctions, compatible with prior perceptual studies on singleton consonant onsets. However, both groups' abilities to perceive voicing as a separable parameter also varied systematically with the structure of the target onsets, supporting the notion that the gestural organization of syllable onsets systematically affects perception of initial voicing distinctions. PMID:20228878

Identification of prelinguistic phonological categories.

PubMed

Ramsdell, Heather L; Oller, D Kimbrough; Buder, Eugene H; Ethington, Corinna A; Chorna, Lesya

2012-12-01

The prelinguistic infant's babbling repertoire of syllables--the phonological categories that form the basis for early word learning--is noticed by caregivers who interact with infants around them. Prior research on babbling has not explored the caregiver's role in recognition of early vocal categories as foundations for word learning. In the present work, the authors begin to address this gap. The authors explored vocalizations produced by 8 infants at 3 ages (8, 10, and 12 months) in studies illustrating identification of phonological categories through caregiver report, laboratory procedures simulating the caregiver's natural mode of listening, and the more traditional laboratory approach (phonetic transcription). Caregivers reported small repertoires of syllables for their infants. Repertoires of similar size and phonetic content were discerned in the laboratory by judges who simulated the caregiver's natural mode of listening. However, phonetic transcription with repeated listening to infant recordings yielded repertoire sizes that vastly exceeded those reported by caregivers and naturalistic listeners. The results suggest that caregiver report and naturalistic listening by laboratory staff can provide a new way to explore key characteristics of early infant vocal categories, a way that may provide insight into later speech and language development.

Musical duplex perception: perception of figurally good chords with subliminal distinguishing tones.

PubMed

Hall, M D; Pastore, R E

1992-08-01

In a variant of duplex perception with speech, phoneme perception is maintained when distinguishing components are presented below intensities required for separate detection, forming the basis for the claim that a phonetic module takes precedence over nonspeech processing. This finding is replicated with music chords (C major and minor) created by mixing a piano fifth with a sinusoidal distinguishing tone (E or E flat). Individual threshold intensities for detecting E or E flat in the context of the fixed piano tones are established. Chord discrimination thresholds defined by distinguishing tone intensity were determined. Experiment 2 verified masked detection thresholds and subliminal chord identification for experienced musicians. Accurate chord perception was maintained at distinguishing tone intensities nearly 20 dB below the threshold for separate detection. Speech and music findings are argued to demonstrate general perceptual principles.

Attention, motivation, and reading coherence failure: a neuropsychological perspective.

PubMed

Wasserman, Theodore

2012-01-01

Reading coherence, defined as the ability to create appropriate, meaningful connections between the elements within a specific text itself and between elements within a text and the reader's prior knowledge, is one of the key processes involved in reading comprehension. This article describes reading coherence within the context of a neuropsychological model combining recent research in motivation, attention, and working memory. Specifically, a unique neuropsychologically identifiable form of reading coherence failure arising from the attentional and motivational deficiencies, based in altered frontoventral striatal reward circuits associated with noradrenaline (NA) circuitry, consistent with the delay-aversion model (dual-pathway model) of Sonuga-Barke ( 2003 ) is postulated. This article provides a model for this subset of reading disorders of which etiology is based on the executive support processes for reading and not in the mechanics of actual reading such as decoding and phonetics.

Teaching Semantic Radicals Facilitates Inferring New Character Meaning in Sentence Reading for Nonnative Chinese Speakers

PubMed Central

Nguyen, Thi Phuong; Zhang, Jie; Li, Hong; Wu, Xinchun; Cheng, Yahua

2017-01-01

This study investigates the effects of teaching semantic radicals in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar characters among nonnative Chinese speakers. A total of 54 undergraduates majoring in Chinese Language from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam, who had 1 year of learning experience in Chinese were assigned to two experimental groups that received instructional intervention, called “old-for-new” semantic radical teaching, through two counterbalanced sets of semantic radicals, with one control group. All of the students completed pre- and post-tests of a sentence cloze task where they were required to choose an appropriate character that fit the sentence context among four options. The four options shared the same phonetic radicals but had different semantic radicals. The results showed that the pre-test and post-test score increases were significant for the experimental groups, but not for the control group. Most importantly, the experimental groups successfully transferred the semantic radical strategy to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar characters containing semantic radicals that had not been taught. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching semantic radicals for lexical inference in sentence reading for nonnative speakers, and highlight the ability of transfer learning to acquire semantic categories of sub-lexical units (semantic radicals) in Chinese characters among foreign language learners. PMID:29109694

Comparison of spectrographic records of two syllables pronounced from scripts in hiragana and romaji by students with different familiarity with English.

PubMed

Ototake, Harumi; Yamada, Jun

2005-10-01

The same syllables /mu/ and /ra/ written in Japanese hiragana and romaji given on a standard speeded naming task elicited phonetically or acoustically different responses in a syllabic hiragana condition and a romaji condition. The participants were two groups of Japanese college students (ns = 15 and 16) with different familiarity with English as a second language. The results suggested that the phonetic reality of syllables represented in these scripts can differ, depending on the interaction between the kind of script and speakers' orthographic familiarity.

Effect of Domain Initial Strengthening on Vowel Height and Backness Contrasts in French: Acoustic and Ultrasound Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Georgeton, Laurianne; Antolík, Tanja Kocjancic; Fougeron, Cécile

2016-01-01

Purpose: Phonetic variation due to domain initial strengthening was investigated with respect to the acoustic and articulatory distinctiveness of vowels within a subset of the French oral vowel system /i, e, ?, a, o, u/, organized along 4 degrees of height for the front vowels and 2 degrees of backness at the close and midclose height levels.…

Translations on Environmental Quality, Number 180

DTIC Science & Technology

1978-09-29

Where no processing indicator is given, the infor- Sfii nation was summarized or extracted . ill Unfamiliar names rendered phonetically or...Regulations on Discharge of Palm Oil Effluent in Effect (Anne Koh; BUSINESS TIMES, 1 Jul 78) .... 1 NEW ZEALAND Car Pollution Soars in Christchurch (THE...Out of Istanbul (Alp Orcun; GUNAYDIN, 8 Jul 78) 49 Briefs Marmaris Forest Fire Damage 51 - c - MALAYSIA REGULATIONS ON DISCHARGE OF PALM OIL

A Phenomenological Study: The Impacts of Developing Phonetic Awareness through Technological Resources on English Language Learners' (ELL) Communicative Competences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fabre-Merchán, Paolo; Torres-Jara, Gabriela; Andrade-Dominguez, Francisco; Ortiz-Zurita, Ma. José; Alvarez-Muñoz, Patricio

2017-01-01

Throughout our experience within the English Language Teaching (ELT) field and while acquiring a second language in English a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) settings, we have noticed that one of the main perceived challenges for English Language Learners (ELLs) is to effectively communicate. Most of the time, this…

Some considerations in evaluating spoken word recognition by normal-hearing, noise-masked normal-hearing, and cochlear implant listeners. I: The effects of response format.

PubMed

Sommers, M S; Kirk, K I; Pisoni, D B

1997-04-01

The purpose of the present studies was to assess the validity of using closed-set response formats to measure two cognitive processes essential for recognizing spoken words---perceptual normalization (the ability to accommodate acoustic-phonetic variability) and lexical discrimination (the ability to isolate words in the mental lexicon). In addition, the experiments were designed to examine the effects of response format on evaluation of these two abilities in normal-hearing (NH), noise-masked normal-hearing (NMNH), and cochlear implant (CI) subject populations. The speech recognition performance of NH, NMNH, and CI listeners was measured using both open- and closed-set response formats under a number of experimental conditions. To assess talker normalization abilities, identification scores for words produced by a single talker were compared with recognition performance for items produced by multiple talkers. To examine lexical discrimination, performance for words that are phonetically similar to many other words (hard words) was compared with scores for items with few phonetically similar competitors (easy words). Open-set word identification for all subjects was significantly poorer when stimuli were produced in lists with multiple talkers compared with conditions in which all of the words were spoken by a single talker. Open-set word recognition also was better for lexically easy compared with lexically hard words. Closed-set tests, in contrast, failed to reveal the effects of either talker variability or lexical difficulty even when the response alternatives provided were systematically selected to maximize confusability with target items. These findings suggest that, although closed-set tests may provide important information for clinical assessment of speech perception, they may not adequately evaluate a number of cognitive processes that are necessary for recognizing spoken words. The parallel results obtained across all subject groups indicate that NH, NMNH, and CI listeners engage similar perceptual operations to identify spoken words. Implications of these findings for the design of new test batteries that can provide comprehensive evaluations of the individual capacities needed for processing spoken language are discussed.

Estimating the Relative Sociolinguistic Salience of Segmental Variables in a Dialect Boundary Zone

PubMed Central

Llamas, Carmen; Watt, Dominic; MacFarlane, Andrew E.

2016-01-01

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such ‘top–down’ associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature – the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance – can evoke multiple social category associations, depending upon the dialect in which the feature is embedded and the context in which it is heard. In a given speech community it is reasonable to expect, as a consequence of the salience of the linguistic form in question, a certain level of intersubjective agreement on social category associations. Two metrics we can use to quantify the salience of a linguistic feature are (a) the speed with which the association is made, and (b) the degree to which members of a speech community appear to share the association. Through the use of a new technique, designed as an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test, this paper examines levels of agreement among 40 informants from the Scottish/English border region with respect to the associations they make between four key phonetic variables and the social categories of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England.’ Our findings reveal that the participants exhibit differential agreement patterns across the set of phonetic variables, and that listeners’ responses vary in line with whether participants are members of the Scottish or the English listener groups. These results demonstrate the importance of community-level agreement with respect to the associations that listeners make between social categories and linguistic forms, and as a means of ranking the forms’ relative salience. PMID:27574511

The role of typography in differentiating look-alike/sound-alike drug names.

PubMed

Gabriele, Sandra

2006-01-01

Until recently, when errors occurred in the course of caring for patients, blame was assigned to the healthcare professionals closest to the incident rather than examining the larger system and the actions that led up to the event. Now, the medical profession is embracing expertise and methodologies used in other fields to improve its own systems in relation to patient safety issues. This exploratory study, part of a Master's of Design thesis project, was a response to the problem of errors that occur due to confusion between look-alike/sound-alike drug names (medication names that have orthographic and/or phonetic similarities). The study attempts to provide a visual means to help differentiate problematic names using formal typographic and graphic cues. The FDA's Name Differentiation Project recommendations and other typographic alternatives were considered to address issues of attention and cognition. Eleven acute care nurses participated in testing that consisted of word-recognition tasks and questions intended to elicit opinions regarding the visual treatment of look-alike/sound-alike names in the context of a label prototype. Though limited in sample size, testing provided insight into the kinds of typographic differentiation that might be effective in a high-risk situation.

Status report on speech research. A report on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liberman, A. M.

1984-08-01

This report (1 January-30 June) is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Manuscripts cover the following topics: Sources of variability in early speech development; Invariance: Functional or descriptive?; Brief comments on invariance in phonetic perception; Phonetic category boundaries are flexible; On categorizing asphasic speech errors; Universal and language particular aspects of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation; Functional specific articulatory cooperation following jaw perturbation; during speech: Evidence for coordinative structures; Formant integration and the perception of nasal vowel height; Relative power of cues: FO shifts vs. voice timing; Laryngeal management at utterance-internal word boundary in American English; Closure duration and release burst amplitude cues to stop consonant manner and place of articulation; Effects of temporal stimulus properties on perception of the (sl)-(spl) distinction; The physics of controlled conditions: A reverie about locomotion; On the perception of intonation from sinusoidal sentences; Speech Perception; Speech Articulation; Motor Control; Speech Development.

Word-level prominence in Persian: An Experimental Study.

PubMed

Sadeghi, Vahid

2017-12-01

Previous literature on the phonetics of stress in Persian has reported that fundamental frequency is the only reliable acoustic correlate of stress, and that stressed and unstressed syllables are not differentiated from each other in the absence of accentuation. In this study, the effects of lexical stress on duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt were examined in Persian both in the accented and unaccented conditions. Results showed that syllable duration is consistently affected by stress in Persian in both the accented and unaccented conditions across all vowel types. Unlike duration, the results for overall intensity and spectral tilt were significant only in the accented condition, suggesting that measures of intensity are not a correlate of stress in Persian but they are mainly caused by the presence of a pitch movement. The findings are phonologically interpreted as suggesting that word-level prominence in Persian is typologically similar to 'stress accent' languages, in which multiple phonetic cues are used to signal the prominence contrast in the accented condition, and stressed and unstressed syllables are different from each other even when the word is not pitch-accented.

Masculine men articulate less clearly.

PubMed

Kempe, Vera; Puts, David A; Cárdenas, Rodrigo A

2013-12-01

In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal various aspects of mate quality and threat potential. But the human voice is also a medium of linguistic communication. The present study explores whether physical and vocal indicators of male mate quality and threat potential are linked to effective communicative behaviors such as vowel differentiation and use of more salient phonetic variants of consonants. We show that physical and vocal indicators of male threat potential, height and formant position, are negatively linked to vowel space size, and that height and levels of circulating testosterone are negatively linked to the use of the aspirated variant of the alveolar stop consonant /t/. Thus, taller, more masculine men display less clarity in their speech and prefer phonetic variants that may be associated with masculine attributes such as toughness. These findings suggest that vocal signals of men's mate quality and/or dominance are not confined to the realm of voice acoustics but extend to other aspects of communicative behavior, even if this means a trade-off with speech patterns that are considered communicatively advantageous, such as clarity and indexical cues to higher social class.

"When Music Speaks": Auditory Cortex Morphology as a Neuroanatomical Marker of Language Aptitude and Musicality.

PubMed

Turker, Sabrina; Reiterer, Susanne M; Seither-Preisler, Annemarie; Schneider, Peter

2017-01-01

Recent research has shown that the morphology of certain brain regions may indeed correlate with a number of cognitive skills such as musicality or language ability. The main aim of the present study was to explore the extent to which foreign language aptitude, in particular phonetic coding ability, is influenced by the morphology of Heschl's gyrus (HG; auditory cortex), working memory capacity, and musical ability. In this study, the auditory cortices of German-speaking individuals ( N = 30; 13 males/17 females; aged 20-40 years) with high and low scores in a number of language aptitude tests were compared. The subjects' language aptitude was measured by three different tests, namely a Hindi speech imitation task (phonetic coding ability), an English pronunciation assessment, and the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT). Furthermore, working memory capacity and musical ability were assessed to reveal their relationship with foreign language aptitude. On the behavioral level, significant correlations were found between phonetic coding ability, English pronunciation skills, musical experience, and language aptitude as measured by the MLAT. Parts of all three tests measuring language aptitude correlated positively and significantly with each other, supporting their validity for measuring components of language aptitude. Remarkably, the number of instruments played by subjects showed significant correlations with all language aptitude measures and musicality, whereas, the number of foreign languages did not show any correlations. With regard to the neuroanatomy of auditory cortex, adults with very high scores in the Hindi testing and the musicality test (AMMA) demonstrated a clear predominance of complete posterior HG duplications in the right hemisphere. This may reignite the discussion of the importance of the right hemisphere for language processing, especially when linked or common resources are involved, such as the inter-dependency between phonetic and musical aptitude.

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. III. Long-term retention of new phonetic categories

PubMed Central

Lively, Scott E.; Pisoni, David B.; Yamada, Reiko A.; Tohkura, Yoh’ichi; Yamada, Tsuneo

2012-01-01

Monolingual speakers of Japanese were trained to identify English /r/ and /l/ using Logan et al.’s [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 874–886 (1991)] high-variability training procedure. Subjects’ performance improved from the pretest to the post-test and during the 3 weeks of training. Performance during training varied as a function of talker and phonetic environment. Generalization accuracy to new words depended on the voice of the talker producing the /r/–/l/ contrast: Subjects were significantly more accurate when new words were produced by a familiar talker than when new words were produced by an unfamiliar talker. This difference could not be attributed to differences in intelligibility of the stimuli. Three and six months after the conclusion of training, subjects returned to the laboratory and were given the post-test and tests of generalization again. Performance was surprisingly good on each test after 3 months without any further training: Accuracy decreased only 2% from the post-test given at the end of training to the post-test given 3 months later. Similarly, no significant decrease in accuracy was observed for the tests of generalization. After 6 months without training, subjects’ accuracy was still 4.5% above pretest levels. Performance on the tests of generalization did not decrease and significant differences were still observed between talkers. The present results suggest that the high-variability training paradigm encourages a long-term modification of listeners’ phonetic perception. Changes in perception are brought about by shifts in selective attention to the acoustic cues that signal phonetic contrasts. These modifications in attention appear to be retrained over time, despite the fact that listeners are not exposed to the /r/–/l/ contrast in their native language environment. PMID:7963022

English speech sound development in preschool-aged children from bilingual English-Spanish environments.

PubMed

Gildersleeve-Neumann, Christina E; Kester, Ellen S; Davis, Barbara L; Peña, Elizabeth D

2008-07-01

English speech acquisition by typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children with monolingual English was compared to English speech acquisition by typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children with bilingual English-Spanish backgrounds. We predicted that exposure to Spanish would not affect the English phonetic inventory but would increase error frequency and type in bilingual children. Single-word speech samples were collected from 33 children. Phonetically transcribed samples for the 3 groups (monolingual English children, English-Spanish bilingual children who were predominantly exposed to English, and English-Spanish bilingual children with relatively equal exposure to English and Spanish) were compared at 2 time points and for change over time for phonetic inventory, phoneme accuracy, and error pattern frequencies. Children demonstrated similar phonetic inventories. Some bilingual children produced Spanish phonemes in their English and produced few consonant cluster sequences. Bilingual children with relatively equal exposure to English and Spanish averaged more errors than did bilingual children who were predominantly exposed to English. Both bilingual groups showed higher error rates than English-only children overall, particularly for syllable-level error patterns. All language groups decreased in some error patterns, although the ones that decreased were not always the same across language groups. Some group differences of error patterns and accuracy were significant. Vowel error rates did not differ by language group. Exposure to English and Spanish may result in a higher English error rate in typically developing bilinguals, including the application of Spanish phonological properties to English. Slightly higher error rates are likely typical for bilingual preschool-aged children. Change over time at these time points for all 3 groups was similar, suggesting that all will reach an adult-like system in English with exposure and practice.

The Stroop Effect in Kana and Kanji Scripts in Native Japanese Speakers: An fMRI Study

PubMed Central

Coderre, Emily L.; Filippi, Christopher G.; Newhouse, Paul A.; Dumas, Julie A.

2008-01-01

Prior research has shown that the two writing systems of the Japanese orthography are processed differently: kana (syllabic symbols) are processed like other phonetic languages such as English, while kanji (a logographic writing system) are processed like other logographic languages like Chinese. Previous work done with the Stroop task in Japanese has shown that these differences in processing strategies create differences in Stroop effects. This study investigated the Stroop effect in kanji and kana using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the similarities and differences in brain processing between logographic and phonetic languages. Nine native Japanese speakers performed the Stroop task both in kana and kanji scripts during fMRI. Both scripts individually produced significant Stroop effects as measured by the behavioral reaction time data. The imaging data for both scripts showed brain activation in the anterior cingulate gyrus, an area involved in inhibiting automatic processing. Though behavioral data showed no significant differences between the Stroop effects in kana and kanji, there were differential areas of activation in fMRI found for each writing system. In fMRI, the Stroop task activated an area in the left inferior parietal lobule during the kana task and the left inferior frontal gyrus during the kanji task. The results of the present study suggest that the Stroop task in Japanese kana and kanji elicits differential activation in brain regions involved in conflict detection and resolution for syllabic and logographic writing systems. PMID:18325582

Oromaxillary Prosthetic Rehabilitation of a Maxillectomy Patient Using a Magnet Retained Two-Piece Hollow Bulb Definitive Obturator; A Clinical Report

PubMed Central

Mohamed Usman, Jafar Abdulla; Ayappan, Anuroopa; Ganapathy, Dhanraj; Nasir, Nilofer Nisha

2013-01-01

Resection of a malignant lesion involving the maxilla produces severe oromaxillary defect that can seriously jeopardize the normal phonetics of the patient. These defects are effectively managed by well-designed and fabricated obturator. This paper discusses the oromaxillary prosthetic rehabilitation of a maxillectomy patient using a magnet retained two-piece hollow bulb definitive obturator. PMID:23533823

The Effect of Borders on the Linguistic Production and Perception of Regional Identity in Louisville, Kentucky

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cramer, Jennifer Suzanne

2010-01-01

A great deal of scholarly research has addressed the issue of dialect mapping in the United States. These studies, usually based on phonetic or lexical items, aim to present an overall picture of the dialect landscape. But what is often missing in these types of projects is an attention to the borders of a dialect region and to what kinds of…

The influence of ambient speech on adult speech productions through unintentional imitation.

PubMed

Delvaux, Véronique; Soquet, Alain

2007-01-01

This paper deals with the influence of ambient speech on individual speech productions. A methodological framework is defined to gather the experimental data necessary to feed computer models simulating self-organisation in phonological systems. Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 was run on French native speakers from two regiolects of Belgium: two from Liège and two from Brussels. When exposed to the way of speaking of the other regiolect via loudspeakers, the speakers of one regiolect produced vowels that were significantly different from their typical realisations, and significantly closer to the way of speaking specific of the other regiolect. Experiment 2 achieved a replication of the results for 8 Mons speakers hearing a Liège speaker. A significant part of the imitative effect remained up to 10 min after the end of the exposure to the other regiolect productions. As a whole, the results suggest that: (i) imitation occurs automatically and unintentionally, (ii) the modified realisations leave a memory trace, in which case the mechanism may be better defined as 'mimesis' than as 'imitation'. The potential effects of multiple imitative speech interactions on sound change are discussed in this paper, as well as the implications for a general theory of phonetic implementation and phonetic representation.

Setting up of teeth in the neutral zone and its effect on speech

PubMed Central

Al-Magaleh, Wafa’a Radwan; Swelem, Amal Ali; Shohdi, Sahar Saad; Mawsouf, Nadia Mohamed

2011-01-01

Rational goals for denture construction are basically directed at the restoration of esthetics and masticatory function and the healthy preservation of the remaining natural tissues. Little concern has been given to the perfection and optimization of the phonetic quality of denture users. However, insertion of prosthodontic restorations may lead to speech defects. Most such defects are mild but, nevertheless, can be a source of concern to the patient. For the dental practitioner, there are few guidelines for designing a prosthetic restoration with maximum phonetic success. One of these guidelines involves the setting up of teeth within the neutral zone. The aim of this study was to evaluate, subjectively and objectively, the effect on speech of setting up teeth in the neutral zone. Three groups were examined: group I (control) included 10 completely dentulous subjects, group II included 10 completely edentulous patients with conventional dentures, and group III included the same 10 edentulous patients with neutral zone dentures. Subjective assessment included patient satisfaction. Objective assessment included duration taken for recitation of Al-Fateha and acoustic analysis. Subjectively, patients were more satisfied with their neutral zone dentures. Objectively, speech produced with the neutral zone dentures was closer to normal than speech with conventional dentures. PMID:23960527

Phonetic diversity, statistical learning, and acquisition of phonology.

PubMed

Pierrehumbert, Janet B

2003-01-01

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language acquisition. It argues that categories are initiated bottom-up from statistical modes in use of the phonetic space, and sketches how exemplar theory can be used to model the updating of categories once they are initiated. It also argues that bottom-up initiation of categories is successful thanks to the perception-production loop operating in the speech community. The behavior of this loop means that the superficial statistical properties of speech available to the infant indirectly reflect the contrastiveness and discriminability of categories in the adult grammar. The article also argues that the developing system is refined using internal feedback from type statistics over the lexicon, once the lexicon is well-developed. The application of type statistics to a system initiated with surface statistics does not cause a fundamental reorganization of the system. Instead, it exploits confluences across levels of representation which characterize human language and make bootstrapping possible.

Two ways to listen: Do L2-dominant bilinguals perceive stop voicing according to language mode?

PubMed Central

Antoniou, Mark; Tyler, Michael D.; Best, Catherine T.

2012-01-01

How listeners categorize two phones predicts the success with which they will discriminate the given phonetic distinction. In the case of bilinguals, such perceptual patterns could reveal whether the listener’s two phonological systems are integrated or separate. This is of particular interest when a given contrast is realized differently in each language, as is the case with Greek and English stop-voicing distinctions. We had Greek–English early sequential bilinguals and Greek and English monolinguals (baselines) categorize, rate, and discriminate stop-voicing contrasts in each language. All communication with each group of bilinguals occurred solely in one language mode, Greek or English. The monolingual groups showed the expected native-language constraints, each perceiving their native contrast more accurately than the opposing nonnative contrast. Bilinguals’ category-goodness ratings for the same physical stimuli differed, consistent with their language mode, yet their discrimination performance was unaffected by language mode and biased toward their dominant language (English). We conclude that bilinguals integrate both languages in a common phonetic space that is swayed by their long-term dominant language environment for discrimination, but that they selectively attend to language-specific phonetic information for phonologically motivated judgments (category-goodness ratings). PMID:22844163

Deconstructing phonetic transcription: covert contrast, perceptual bias, and an extraterrestrial view of Vox Humana.

PubMed

Munson, Benjamin; Edwards, Jan; Schellinger, Sarah K; Beckman, Mary E; Meyer, Marie K

2010-01-01

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast (covert contrast). This study presents evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naïve listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /theta/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /theta/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities.

Deconstructing Phonetic Transcription: Covert Contrast, Perceptual Bias, and an Extraterrestrial View of Vox Humana

PubMed Central

Munson, Benjamin; Edwards, Jan; Schellinger, Sarah; Beckman, Mary E.; Meyer, Marie K.

2010-01-01

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast (covert contrast). We present evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naïve listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /θ/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /θ/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities. PMID:20345255

The level of audiovisual print-speech integration deficits in dyslexia.

PubMed

Kronschnabel, Jens; Brem, Silvia; Maurer, Urs; Brandeis, Daniel

2014-09-01

The classical phonological deficit account of dyslexia is increasingly linked to impairments in grapho-phonological conversion, and to dysfunctions in superior temporal regions associated with audiovisual integration. The present study investigates mechanisms of audiovisual integration in typical and impaired readers at the critical developmental stage of adolescence. Congruent and incongruent audiovisual as well as unimodal (visual only and auditory only) material was presented. Audiovisual presentations were single letters and three-letter (consonant-vowel-consonant) stimuli accompanied by matching or mismatching speech sounds. Three-letter stimuli exhibited fast phonetic transitions as in real-life language processing and reading. Congruency effects, i.e. different brain responses to congruent and incongruent stimuli were taken as an indicator of audiovisual integration at a phonetic level (grapho-phonological conversion). Comparisons of unimodal and audiovisual stimuli revealed basic, more sensory aspects of audiovisual integration. By means of these two criteria of audiovisual integration, the generalizability of audiovisual deficits in dyslexia was tested. Moreover, it was expected that the more naturalistic three-letter stimuli are superior to single letters in revealing group differences. Electrophysiological and hemodynamic (EEG and fMRI) data were acquired simultaneously in a simple target detection task. Applying the same statistical models to event-related EEG potentials and fMRI responses allowed comparing the effects detected by the two techniques at a descriptive level. Group differences in congruency effects (congruent against incongruent) were observed in regions involved in grapho-phonological processing, including the left inferior frontal and angular gyri and the inferotemporal cortex. Importantly, such differences also emerged in superior temporal key regions. Three-letter stimuli revealed stronger group differences than single letters. No significant differences in basic measures of audiovisual integration emerged. Convergence of hemodynamic and electrophysiological signals appeared to be limited and mainly occurred for highly significant and large effects in visual cortices. The findings suggest efficient superior temporal tuning to audiovisual congruency in controls. In impaired readers, however, grapho-phonological conversion is effortful and inefficient, although basic audiovisual mechanisms seem intact. This unprecedented demonstration of audiovisual deficits in adolescent dyslexics provides critical evidence that the phonological deficit might be explained by impaired audiovisual integration at a phonetic level, especially for naturalistic and word-like stimulation. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Musical expertise induces neuroplasticity of the planum temporale.

PubMed

Meyer, Martin; Elmer, Stefan; Jäncke, Lutz

2012-04-01

The present manuscript summarizes and discusses the implications of recent neuroimaging studies, which have investigated the relationship between musical expertise and structural, as well as functional, changes in an auditory-related association cortex, namely, the planum temporale (PT). Since the bilateral PT is known to serve as a spectrotemporal processor that supports perception of acoustic modulations in both speech and music, it comes as no surprise that musical expertise corresponds to functional sensitivity and neuroanatomical changes in cortical architecture. In this context, we focus on the following question: To what extent does musical expertise affect the functioning of the left and right plana temporalia? We discuss the relationship between behavioral, hemodynamic, and neuroanatomical data obtained from musicians in light of maturational and developmental issues. In particular, we introduce two studies of our group that show to what extent brains of musicians are more proficient in phonetic task performance. © 2012 New York Academy of Sciences.

Learning general phonological rules from distributional information: a computational model.

PubMed

Calamaro, Shira; Jarosz, Gaja

2015-04-01

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony (Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, & Dupoux, 2006). This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Patient identity management for secondary use of biomedical research data in a distributed computing environment.

PubMed

Nitzlnader, Michael; Schreier, Günter

2014-01-01

Dealing with data from different source domains is of increasing importance in today's large scale biomedical research endeavours. Within the European Network for Cancer research in Children and Adolescents (ENCCA) a solution to share such data for secondary use will be established. In this paper the solution arising from the aims of the ENCCA project and regulatory requirements concerning data protection and privacy is presented. Since the details of secondary biomedical dataset utilisation are often not known in advance, data protection regulations are met with an identity management concept that facilitates context-specific pseudonymisation and a way of data aggregation using a hidden reference table later on. Phonetic hashing is proposed to prevent duplicated patient registration and re-identification of patients is possible via a trusted third party only. Finally, the solution architecture allows for implementation in a distributed computing environment, including cloud-based elements.

Effect of Context and Hearing Loss on Time-Gated Word Recognition in Children.

PubMed

Lewis, Dawna; Kopun, Judy; McCreery, Ryan; Brennan, Marc; Nishi, Kanae; Cordrey, Evan; Stelmachowicz, Pat; Moeller, Mary Pat

The purpose of this study was to examine word recognition in children who are hard of hearing (CHH) and children with normal hearing (CNH) in response to time-gated words presented in high- versus low-predictability sentences (HP, LP), where semantic cues were manipulated. Findings inform our understanding of how CHH combine cognitive-linguistic and acoustic-phonetic cues to support spoken word recognition. It was hypothesized that both groups of children would be able to make use of linguistic cues provided by HP sentences to support word recognition. CHH were expected to require greater acoustic information (more gates) than CNH to correctly identify words in the LP condition. In addition, it was hypothesized that error patterns would differ across groups. Sixteen CHH with mild to moderate hearing loss and 16 age-matched CNH participated (5 to 12 years). Test stimuli included 15 LP and 15 HP age-appropriate sentences. The final word of each sentence was divided into segments and recombined with the sentence frame to create series of sentences in which the final word was progressively longer by the gated increments. Stimuli were presented monaurally through headphones and children were asked to identify the target word at each successive gate. They also were asked to rate their confidence in their word choice using a five- or three-point scale. For CHH, the signals were processed through a hearing aid simulator. Standardized language measures were used to assess the contribution of linguistic skills. Analysis of language measures revealed that the CNH and CHH performed within the average range on language abilities. Both groups correctly recognized a significantly higher percentage of words in the HP condition than in the LP condition. Although CHH performed comparably with CNH in terms of successfully recognizing the majority of words, differences were observed in the amount of acoustic-phonetic information needed to achieve accurate word recognition. CHH needed more gates than CNH to identify words in the LP condition. CNH were significantly lower in rating their confidence in the LP condition than in the HP condition. CHH, however, were not significantly different in confidence between the conditions. Error patterns for incorrect word responses across gates and predictability varied depending on hearing status. The results of this study suggest that CHH with age-appropriate language abilities took advantage of context cues in the HP sentences to guide word recognition in a manner similar to CNH. However, in the LP condition, they required more acoustic information (more gates) than CNH for word recognition. Differences in the structure of incorrect word responses and their nomination patterns across gates for CHH compared with their peers with NH suggest variations in how these groups use limited acoustic information to select word candidates.

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

PubMed

Larraza, Saioa; Samuel, Arthur G; Oñederra, Miren Lourdes

2016-11-01

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where accommodation to dialectal variation takes place. Dialectal effects were analyzed at different levels: An AXB discrimination task tapped phonetic-phonological representations, an auditory lexical-decision task tested for effects in accessing the lexicon, and an auditory priming task looked for semantic processing effects. Within that central focus, the goal was to see whether perceptual adjustment at a given level is affected by 2 main linguistic factors: bilinguals' first language and age of acquisition of the L2. Taking advantage of the cross-linguistic situation of the Basque language, bilinguals with different first languages (Spanish or French) and ages of acquisition of Basque (simultaneous, early, or late) were tested. Our use of multiple tasks with multiple types of bilinguals demonstrates that in spite of very similar discrimination capacity, French-Basque versus Spanish-Basque simultaneous bilinguals' performance on lexical access significantly differed. Similarly, results of the early and late groups show that the mapping of phonetic-phonological information onto lexical representations is a more demanding process that accentuates non-native processing difficulties. L1 and AoA effects were more readily overcome in semantic processing; accented variants regularly created priming effects in the different groups of bilinguals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Spectral Coefficient Analyses of Word-Initial Stop Consonant Productions Suggest Similar Anticipatory Coarticulation for Stuttering and Nonstuttering Adults.

PubMed

Maruthy, Santosh; Feng, Yongqiang; Max, Ludo

2018-03-01

A longstanding hypothesis about the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying stuttering suggests that stuttered speech dysfluencies result from a lack of coarticulation. Formant-based measures of either the stuttered or fluent speech of children and adults who stutter have generally failed to obtain compelling evidence in support of the hypothesis that these individuals differ in the timing or degree of coarticulation. Here, we used a sensitive acoustic technique-spectral coefficient analyses-that allowed us to compare stuttering and nonstuttering speakers with regard to vowel-dependent anticipatory influences as early as the onset burst of a preceding voiceless stop consonant. Eight adults who stutter and eight matched adults who do not stutter produced C 1 VC 2 words, and the first four spectral coefficients were calculated for one analysis window centered on the burst of C 1 and two subsequent windows covering the beginning of the aspiration phase. Findings confirmed that the combined use of four spectral coefficients is an effective method for detecting the anticipatory influence of a vowel on the initial burst of a preceding voiceless stop consonant. However, the observed patterns of anticipatory coarticulation showed no statistically significant differences, or trends toward such differences, between the stuttering and nonstuttering groups. Combining the present results for fluent speech in one given phonetic context with prior findings from both stuttered and fluent speech in a variety of other contexts, we conclude that there is currently no support for the hypothesis that the fluent speech of individuals who stutter is characterized by limited coarticulation.

The Study of Tone and Related Phenomena in an Amazonian Tone Language: Gavião of Rondônia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, Denny; Meyer, Julien

2014-01-01

This paper describes the methods used to study the tone and some related phenomena of the language of the Gavião of Rondônia, Brazil, which is part of the Mondé branch of the Tupi family. Whistling of words by indigenous informants was discovered to be a very effective method for obtaining phonetic accuracy in tone and length. Methods were devised…

Speech Research

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Several articles addressing topics in speech research are presented. The topics include: exploring the functional significance of physiological tremor: A biospectroscopic approach; differences between experienced and inexperienced listeners to deaf speech; a language-oriented view of reading and its disabilities; Phonetic factors in letter detection; categorical perception; Short-term recall by deaf signers of American sign language; a common basis for auditory sensory storage in perception and immediate memory; phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory; initiation versus execution time during manual and oral counting by stutterers; trading relations in the perception of speech by five-year-old children; the role of the strap muscles in pitch lowering; phonetic validation of distinctive features; consonants and syllable boundaires; and vowel information in postvocalic frictions.

Automatic detection of articulation disorders in children with cleft lip and palate.

PubMed

Maier, Andreas; Hönig, Florian; Bocklet, Tobias; Nöth, Elmar; Stelzle, Florian; Nkenke, Emeka; Schuster, Maria

2009-11-01

Speech of children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) is sometimes still disordered even after adequate surgical and nonsurgical therapies. Such speech shows complex articulation disorders, which are usually assessed perceptually, consuming time and manpower. Hence, there is a need for an easy to apply and reliable automatic method. To create a reference for an automatic system, speech data of 58 children with CLP were assessed perceptually by experienced speech therapists for characteristic phonetic disorders at the phoneme level. The first part of the article aims to detect such characteristics by a semiautomatic procedure and the second to evaluate a fully automatic, thus simple, procedure. The methods are based on a combination of speech processing algorithms. The semiautomatic method achieves moderate to good agreement (kappa approximately 0.6) for the detection of all phonetic disorders. On a speaker level, significant correlations between the perceptual evaluation and the automatic system of 0.89 are obtained. The fully automatic system yields a correlation on the speaker level of 0.81 to the perceptual evaluation. This correlation is in the range of the inter-rater correlation of the listeners. The automatic speech evaluation is able to detect phonetic disorders at an experts'level without any additional human postprocessing.

Status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation and practical applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liberman, A. M.

1983-09-01

This report is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Manuscripts cover the following topics: The association between comprehension of spoken sentences and early reading ability: The role of phonetic representation; Phonetic coding and order memory in relation to reading proficiency: A comparison of short-term memory for temporal and spatial order information; Exploring the oral and written language errors made by language disabled children; Perceiving phonetic events; Converging evidence in support of common dynamical principles for speech and movement coordination; Phase transitions and critical behavior in human bimanual coordination; Timing and coarticulation for alveolo-palatals and sequences of alveolar +J in Catalan; V-to-C coarticulation in Catalan VCV sequences: An articulatory and acoustical study; Prosody and the /S/-/c/ distinction; Intersections of tone and intonation in Thai; Simultaneous measurements of vowels produced by a hearing-impaired speaker; Extending format transitions may not improve aphasics' perception of stop consonant place of articulation; Against a role of chirp identification in duplex perception; Further evidence for the role of relative timing in speech: A reply to Barry; Review (Phonological intervention: Concepts and procedures); and Review (Temporal variables in speech).

Typological Asymmetries in Round Vowel Harmony: Support from Artificial Grammar Learning

PubMed Central

Finley, Sara

2012-01-01

Providing evidence for the universal tendencies of patterns in the world’s languages can be difficult, as it is impossible to sample all possible languages, and linguistic samples are subject to interpretation. However, experimental techniques such as artificial grammar learning paradigms make it possible to uncover the psychological reality of claimed universal tendencies. This paper addresses learning of phonological patterns (systematic tendencies in the sounds in language). Specifically, I explore the role of phonetic grounding in learning round harmony, a phonological process in which words must contain either all round vowels ([o, u]) or all unround vowels ([i, e]). The phonetic precursors to round harmony are such that mid vowels ([o, e]), which receive the greatest perceptual benefit from harmony, are most likely to trigger harmony. High vowels ([i, u]), however, are cross-linguistically less likely to trigger round harmony. Adult participants were exposed to a miniature language that contained a round harmony pattern in which the harmony source triggers were either high vowels ([i, u]) (poor harmony source triggers) or mid vowels ([o, e]) (ideal harmony source triggers). Only participants who were exposed to the ideal mid vowel harmony source triggers were successfully able to generalize the harmony pattern to novel instances, suggesting that perception and phonetic naturalness play a role in learning. PMID:23264713

Individual differences in phonetic cue use in production and perception of a non-native sound contrast

PubMed Central

Schertz, Jessamyn; Cho, Taehong; Lotto, Andrew; Warner, Natasha

2015-01-01

The current work examines native Korean speakers’ perception and production of stop contrasts in their native language (L1, Korean) and second language (L2, English), focusing on three acoustic dimensions that are all used, albeit to different extents, in both languages: voice onset time (VOT), f0 at vowel onset, and closure duration. Participants used all three cues to distinguish the L1 Korean three-way stop distinction in both production and perception. Speakers’ productions of the L2 English contrasts were reliably distinguished using both VOT and f0 (even though f0 is only a very weak cue to the English contrast), and, to a lesser extent, closure duration. In contrast to the relative homogeneity of the L2 productions, group patterns on a forced-choice perception task were less clear-cut, due to considerable individual differences in perceptual categorization strategies, with listeners using either primarily VOT duration, primarily f0, or both dimensions equally to distinguish the L2 English contrast. Differences in perception, which were stable across experimental sessions, were not predicted by individual variation in production patterns. This work suggests that reliance on multiple cues in representation of a phonetic contrast can form the basis for distinct individual cue-weighting strategies in phonetic categorization. PMID:26644630

Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency

PubMed Central

Creel, Sarah C.

2017-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin–English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method We tested 72 Mandarin–English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of acquisition of English. Participants viewed 2 photographs at a time while hearing a familiar Mandarin word referring to 1 photograph. The names of the 2 photographs diverged in tone, vowels, or both. Word recognition was evaluated using clicking accuracy, reaction times, and an online recognition measure (gaze) and was compared in the 3 conditions. Results Relative proficiency in English was correlated with reduced word recognition success in tone-disambiguated trials, but not in vowel-disambiguated trials, across all 3 dependent measures. This selective attrition for tone content emerged even though all bilinguals had learned Mandarin from birth. Lengthy experience with English thus weakened tone use. Conclusions This finding has implications for the question of the extent to which bilinguals' 2 phonetic systems interact. It suggests that bilinguals may not process pitch information language-specifically and that processing strategies from the dominant language may affect phonetic processing in the nondominant language—even when the latter was learned natively. PMID:28124064

Speaker compensation for local perturbation of fricative acoustic feedback.

PubMed

Casserly, Elizabeth D

2011-04-01

Feedback perturbation studies of speech acoustics have revealed a great deal about how speakers monitor and control their productions of segmental (e.g., formant frequencies) and non-segmental (e.g., pitch) linguistic elements. The majority of previous work, however, overlooks the role of acoustic feedback in consonant production and makes use of acoustic manipulations that effect either entire utterances or the entire acoustic signal, rather than more temporally and phonetically restricted alterations. This study, therefore, seeks to expand the feedback perturbation literature by examining perturbation of consonant acoustics that is applied in a time-restricted and phonetically specific manner. The spectral center of the alveopalatal fricative [∫] produced in vowel-fricative-vowel nonwords was incrementally raised until it reached the potential for [s]-like frequencies, but the characteristics of high-frequency energy outside the target fricative remained unaltered. An "offline," more widely accessible signal processing method was developed to perform this manipulation. The local feedback perturbation resulted in changes to speakers' fricative production that were more variable, idiosyncratic, and restricted than the compensation seen in more global acoustic manipulations reported in the literature. Implications and interpretations of the results, as well as future directions for research based on the findings, are discussed.

Effect of gap detection threshold on consistency of speech in children with speech sound disorder.

PubMed

Sayyahi, Fateme; Soleymani, Zahra; Akbari, Mohammad; Bijankhan, Mahmood; Dolatshahi, Behrooz

2017-02-01

The present study examined the relationship between gap detection threshold and speech error consistency in children with speech sound disorder. The participants were children five to six years of age who were categorized into three groups of typical speech, consistent speech disorder (CSD) and inconsistent speech disorder (ISD).The phonetic gap detection threshold test was used for this study, which is a valid test comprised six syllables with inter-stimulus intervals between 20-300ms. The participants were asked to listen to the recorded stimuli three times and indicate whether they heard one or two sounds. There was no significant difference between the typical and CSD groups (p=0.55), but there were significant differences in performance between the ISD and CSD groups and the ISD and typical groups (p=0.00). The ISD group discriminated between speech sounds at a higher threshold. Children with inconsistent speech errors could not distinguish speech sounds during time-limited phonetic discrimination. It is suggested that inconsistency in speech is a representation of inconsistency in auditory perception, which causes by high gap detection threshold. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

PubMed Central

Schluter, Kevin T.; Politzer-Ahles, Stephen; Al Kaabi, Meera; Almeida, Diogo

2017-01-01

Many theories of phonology assume that the sound structure of language is made up of distinctive features, but there is considerable debate about how much articulatory detail distinctive features encode in long-term memory. Laryngeal features such as voicing provide a unique window into this question: while many languages have two-way contrasts that can be given a simple binary feature account [±VOICE], the precise articulatory details underlying these contrasts can vary significantly across languages. Here, we investigate a series of two-way voicing contrasts in English, Arabic, and Russian, three languages that implement their voicing contrasts very differently at the articulatory-phonetic level. In three event-related potential experiments contrasting English, Arabic, and Russian fricatives along with Russian stops, we observe a consistent pattern of asymmetric mismatch negativity (MMN) effects that is compatible with an articulatorily abstract and cross-linguistically uniform way of marking two-way voicing contrasts, as opposed to an articulatorily precise and cross-linguistically diverse way of encoding them. Regardless of whether a language is theorized to encode [VOICE] over [SPREAD GLOTTIS], the data is consistent with a universal marking of the [SPREAD GLOTTIS] feature. PMID:28555118

Late positive slow waves as markers of chunking during encoding

PubMed Central

Nogueira, Ana M. L.; Bueno, Orlando F. A.; Manzano, Gilberto M.; Kohn, André F.; Pompéia, Sabine

2015-01-01

Electrophysiological markers of chunking of words during encoding have mostly been shown in studies that present pairs of related stimuli. In these cases it is difficult to disentangle cognitive processes that reflect distinctiveness (i.e., conspicuous items because they are related), perceived association between related items and unified representations of various items, or chunking. Here, we propose a paradigm that enables the determination of a separate Event-related Potential (ERP) marker of these cognitive processes using sequentially related word triads. Twenty-three young healthy individuals viewed 80 15-word lists composed of unrelated items except for the three words in the middle serial positions (triads), which could be either unrelated (control list), related perceptually, phonetically or semantically. ERP amplitudes were measured at encoding of each one of the words in the triads. We analyzed two latency intervals (350–400 and 400–800 ms) at midline locations. Behaviorally, we observed a progressive facilitation in the immediate free recall of the words in the triads depending on the relations between their items (control < perceptual < phonetic < semantic), but only semantically related items were recalled as chunks. P300-like deflections were observed for perceptually deviant stimuli. A reduction of amplitude of a component akin to the N400 was found for words that were phonetically and semantically associated with prior items and therefore were not associated to chunking. Positive slow wave (PSW) amplitudes increased as successive phonetically and semantically related items were presented, but they were observed earlier and were more prominent at Fz for semantic associates. PSWs at Fz and Cz also correlated with recall of semantic word chunks. This confirms prior claims that PSWs at Fz are potential markers of chunking which, in the proposed paradigm, were modulated differently from the detection of deviant stimuli and of relations between stimuli. PMID:26283984

Overall intelligibility, articulation, resonance, voice and language in a child with Nager syndrome.

PubMed

Van Lierde, Kristiane M; Luyten, Anke; Mortier, Geert; Tijskens, Anouk; Bettens, Kim; Vermeersch, Hubert

2011-02-01

The purpose of this study was to provide a description of the language and speech (intelligibility, voice, resonance, articulation) in a 7-year-old Dutch speaking boy with Nager syndrome. To reveal these features comparison was made with an age and gender related child with a similar palatal or hearing problem. Language was tested with an age appropriate language test namely the Dutch version of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals. Regarding articulation a phonetic inventory, phonetic analysis and phonological process analysis was performed. A nominal scale with four categories was used to judge the overall speech intelligibility. A voice and resonance assessment included a videolaryngostroboscopy, a perceptual evaluation, acoustic analysis and nasometry. The most striking communication problems in this child were expressive and receptive language delay, moderately impaired speech intelligibility, the presence of phonetic and phonological disorders, resonance disorders and a high-pitched voice. The explanation for this pattern of communication is not completely straightforward. The language and the phonological impairment, only present in the child with the Nager syndrome, are not part of a more general developmental delay. The resonance disorders can be related to the cleft palate, but were not present in the child with the isolated cleft palate. One might assume that the cul-de-sac resonance and the much decreased mandibular movement and the restricted tongue lifting are caused by the restricted jaw mobility and micrognathia. To what extent the suggested mandibular distraction osteogenesis in early childhood allows increased mandibular movement and better speech outcome with increased oral resonance is subject for further research. According to the results of this study the speech and language management must be focused on receptive and expressive language skills and linguistic conceptualization, correct phonetic placement and the modification of hypernasality and nasal emission. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

“When Music Speaks”: Auditory Cortex Morphology as a Neuroanatomical Marker of Language Aptitude and Musicality

PubMed Central

Turker, Sabrina; Reiterer, Susanne M.; Seither-Preisler, Annemarie; Schneider, Peter

2017-01-01

Recent research has shown that the morphology of certain brain regions may indeed correlate with a number of cognitive skills such as musicality or language ability. The main aim of the present study was to explore the extent to which foreign language aptitude, in particular phonetic coding ability, is influenced by the morphology of Heschl’s gyrus (HG; auditory cortex), working memory capacity, and musical ability. In this study, the auditory cortices of German-speaking individuals (N = 30; 13 males/17 females; aged 20–40 years) with high and low scores in a number of language aptitude tests were compared. The subjects’ language aptitude was measured by three different tests, namely a Hindi speech imitation task (phonetic coding ability), an English pronunciation assessment, and the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT). Furthermore, working memory capacity and musical ability were assessed to reveal their relationship with foreign language aptitude. On the behavioral level, significant correlations were found between phonetic coding ability, English pronunciation skills, musical experience, and language aptitude as measured by the MLAT. Parts of all three tests measuring language aptitude correlated positively and significantly with each other, supporting their validity for measuring components of language aptitude. Remarkably, the number of instruments played by subjects showed significant correlations with all language aptitude measures and musicality, whereas, the number of foreign languages did not show any correlations. With regard to the neuroanatomy of auditory cortex, adults with very high scores in the Hindi testing and the musicality test (AMMA) demonstrated a clear predominance of complete posterior HG duplications in the right hemisphere. This may reignite the discussion of the importance of the right hemisphere for language processing, especially when linked or common resources are involved, such as the inter-dependency between phonetic and musical aptitude. PMID:29250017

Dynamic Encoding of Acoustic Features in Neural Responses to Continuous Speech.

PubMed

Khalighinejad, Bahar; Cruzatto da Silva, Guilherme; Mesgarani, Nima

2017-02-22

Humans are unique in their ability to communicate using spoken language. However, it remains unclear how the speech signal is transformed and represented in the brain at different stages of the auditory pathway. In this study, we characterized electroencephalography responses to continuous speech by obtaining the time-locked responses to phoneme instances (phoneme-related potential). We showed that responses to different phoneme categories are organized by phonetic features. We found that each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces multiple distinguishable neural responses occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Comparing the patterns of phoneme similarity in the neural responses and the acoustic signals confirms a repetitive appearance of acoustic distinctions of phonemes in the neural data. Analysis of the phonetic and speaker information in neural activations revealed that different time intervals jointly encode the acoustic similarity of both phonetic and speaker categories. These findings provide evidence for a dynamic neural transformation of low-level speech features as they propagate along the auditory pathway, and form an empirical framework to study the representational changes in learning, attention, and speech disorders. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We characterized the properties of evoked neural responses to phoneme instances in continuous speech. We show that each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces several observable neural responses at different times occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Each temporal event explicitly encodes the acoustic similarity of phonemes, and linguistic and nonlinguistic information are best represented at different time intervals. Finally, we show a joint encoding of phonetic and speaker information, where the neural representation of speakers is dependent on phoneme category. These findings provide compelling new evidence for dynamic processing of speech sounds in the auditory pathway. Copyright © 2017 Khalighinejad et al.

Experience with speech sounds is not necessary for cue trading by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus)

PubMed Central

Flaherty, Mary; Dent, Micheal L.; Sawusch, James R.

2017-01-01

The influence of experience with human speech sounds on speech perception in budgerigars, vocal mimics whose speech exposure can be tightly controlled in a laboratory setting, was measured. Budgerigars were divided into groups that differed in auditory exposure and then tested on a cue-trading identification paradigm with synthetic speech. Phonetic cue trading is a perceptual phenomenon observed when changes on one cue dimension are offset by changes in another cue dimension while still maintaining the same phonetic percept. The current study examined whether budgerigars would trade the cues of voice onset time (VOT) and the first formant onset frequency when identifying syllable initial stop consonants and if this would be influenced by exposure to speech sounds. There were a total of four different exposure groups: No speech exposure (completely isolated), Passive speech exposure (regular exposure to human speech), and two Speech-trained groups. After the exposure period, all budgerigars were tested for phonetic cue trading using operant conditioning procedures. Birds were trained to peck keys in response to different synthetic speech sounds that began with “d” or “t” and varied in VOT and frequency of the first formant at voicing onset. Once training performance criteria were met, budgerigars were presented with the entire intermediate series, including ambiguous sounds. Responses on these trials were used to determine which speech cues were used, if a trading relation between VOT and the onset frequency of the first formant was present, and whether speech exposure had an influence on perception. Cue trading was found in all birds and these results were largely similar to those of a group of humans. Results indicated that prior speech experience was not a requirement for cue trading by budgerigars. The results are consistent with theories that explain phonetic cue trading in terms of a rich auditory encoding of the speech signal. PMID:28562597

Experience with speech sounds is not necessary for cue trading by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).

PubMed

Flaherty, Mary; Dent, Micheal L; Sawusch, James R

2017-01-01

The influence of experience with human speech sounds on speech perception in budgerigars, vocal mimics whose speech exposure can be tightly controlled in a laboratory setting, was measured. Budgerigars were divided into groups that differed in auditory exposure and then tested on a cue-trading identification paradigm with synthetic speech. Phonetic cue trading is a perceptual phenomenon observed when changes on one cue dimension are offset by changes in another cue dimension while still maintaining the same phonetic percept. The current study examined whether budgerigars would trade the cues of voice onset time (VOT) and the first formant onset frequency when identifying syllable initial stop consonants and if this would be influenced by exposure to speech sounds. There were a total of four different exposure groups: No speech exposure (completely isolated), Passive speech exposure (regular exposure to human speech), and two Speech-trained groups. After the exposure period, all budgerigars were tested for phonetic cue trading using operant conditioning procedures. Birds were trained to peck keys in response to different synthetic speech sounds that began with "d" or "t" and varied in VOT and frequency of the first formant at voicing onset. Once training performance criteria were met, budgerigars were presented with the entire intermediate series, including ambiguous sounds. Responses on these trials were used to determine which speech cues were used, if a trading relation between VOT and the onset frequency of the first formant was present, and whether speech exposure had an influence on perception. Cue trading was found in all birds and these results were largely similar to those of a group of humans. Results indicated that prior speech experience was not a requirement for cue trading by budgerigars. The results are consistent with theories that explain phonetic cue trading in terms of a rich auditory encoding of the speech signal.

Status Report on Speech Research, 1 April-30 June 1982.

DTIC Science & Technology

1982-01-01

Peter J. Alfonso* Margo Carter Andr6 Cooper Cinzia Avesanil Elizabeth P. Clark Tova Clayman Thomas Baer Vincent Gulisano Steven Eady Alan Bell2 Donald...similar to that proposed earlier by LaBerge and Samuels (1974). In the present study, we examined phonetic effects at the syllable level as well as at...present-day American English. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1967. LaBerge , D., & Samuels, S. J. Toward a theory of automatic information

Differential use of temporal cues to the /s/-/z/ contrast by native and non-native speakers of English.

PubMed

Flege, J E; Hillenbrand, J

1986-02-01

This study examined the effect of linguistic experience on perception of the English /s/-/z/ contrast in word-final position. The durations of the periodic ("vowel") and aperiodic ("fricative") portions of stimuli, ranging from peas to peace, were varied in a 5 X 5 factorial design. Forced-choice identification judgments were elicited from two groups of native speakers of American English differing in dialect, and from two groups each of native speakers of French, Swedish, and Finnish differing in English-language experience. The results suggested that the non-native subjects used cues established for the perception of phonetic contrasts in their native language to identify fricatives as /s/ or /z/. Lengthening vowel duration increased /z/ judgments in all eight subject groups, although the effect was smaller for native speakers of French than for native speakers of the other languages. Shortening fricative duration, on the other hand, significantly decreased /z/ judgments only by the English and French subjects. It did not influence voicing judgments by the Swedish and Finnish subjects, even those who had lived for a year or more in an English-speaking environment. These findings raise the question of whether adults who learn a foreign language can acquire the ability to integrate multiple acoustic cues to a phonetic contrast which does not exist in their native language.

Linking the shapes of alphabet letters to their sounds: the case of Hebrew

PubMed Central

Levin, Iris; Kessler, Brett

2011-01-01

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning a writing system. Most previous studies of this process have examined English, focusing on variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names as a reason why some letter sounds (such as that of b, where the sound is at the beginning of the letter’s name) are easier to learn than others (such as that of w, where the sound is not in the name). The present study examined Hebrew, where variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names are minimal. In a study of 391 Israeli children with a mean age of 5 years, 10 months, we used multilevel models to examine the factors that are associated with knowledge of letter sounds. One set of factors involved letter names: Children sometimes attributed to a letter a consonant–vowel sound consisting of the first phonemes of the letter’s name. A second set of factors involved contrast: Children had difficulty when there was relatively little contrast in shape between one letter and others. Frequency was also important, encompassing both child-specific effects, such as a benefit for the first letter of a child’s forename, and effects that held true across children, such as a benefit for the first letters of the alphabet. These factors reflect general properties of human learning. PMID:22345901

Acoustic and perceptual effects of overall F0 range in a lexical pitch accent distinction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wade, Travis

2002-05-01

A speaker's overall fundamental frequency range is generally considered a variable, nonlinguistic element of intonation. This study examined the precision with which overall F0 is predictable based on previous intonational context and the extent to which it may be perceptually significant. Speakers of Tokyo Japanese produced pairs of sentences differing lexically only in the presence or absence of a single pitch accent as responses to visual and prerecorded speech cues presented in an interactive manner. F0 placement of high tones (previously observed to be relatively variable in pitch contours) was found to be consistent across speakers and uniformly dependent on the intonation of the different sentences used as cues. In a subsequent perception experiment, continuous manipulation of these same sentences between typical accented and typical non-accent-containing versions were presented to Japanese listeners for lexical identification. Results showed that listeners' perception was not significantly altered in compensation for artificial manipulation of preceding intonation. Implications are discussed within an autosegmental analysis of tone. The current results are consistent with the notion that pitch range (i.e., specific vertical locations of tonal peaks) does not simply vary gradiently across speakers and situations but constitutes a predictable part of the phonetic specification of tones.

Cross-dialectal variation in formant dynamics of American English vowels

PubMed Central

Fox, Robert Allen; Jacewicz, Ewa

2009-01-01

This study aims to characterize the nature of the dynamic spectral change in vowels in three distinct regional varieties of American English spoken in the Western North Carolina, in Central Ohio, and in Southern Wisconsin. The vowels ∕ɪ, ε, e, æ, aɪ∕ were produced by 48 women for a total of 1920 utterances and were contained in words of the structure ∕bVts∕ and ∕bVdz∕ in sentences which elicited nonemphatic and emphatic vowels. Measurements made at the vowel target (i.e., the central 60% of the vowel) produced a set of acoustic parameters which included position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, amount of spectral change [measured as vector length (VL) and trajectory length (TL)], and spectral rate of change. Results revealed expected variation in formant dynamics as a function of phonetic factors (vowel emphasis and consonantal context). However, for each vowel and for each measure employed, dialect was a strong source of variation in vowel-inherent spectral change. In general, the dialect-specific nature and amount of spectral change can be characterized quite effectively by position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, TL (but not VL which underestimates formant movement), and spectral rate of change. PMID:19894839

Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: 'trail-off' conjunctions.

PubMed

Walker, Gareth

2012-03-01

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted face-to-face interactions involving native speakers of US English, yielding 28 'trail-off' conjunctions. Detailed sequential analysis of talk is combined with analysis of visible features (including gaze, posture, gesture and involvement with material objects) and technical phonetic analysis. A range of phonetic and visible features are shown to regularly co-occur in the production of 'trail-off' conjunctions. These features distinguish them from other conjunctions followed by the cessation of talk.

Analysis of speech sounds is left-hemisphere predominant at 100-150ms after sound onset.

PubMed

Rinne, T; Alho, K; Alku, P; Holi, M; Sinkkonen, J; Virtanen, J; Bertrand, O; Näätänen, R

1999-04-06

Hemispheric specialization of human speech processing has been found in brain imaging studies using fMRI and PET. Due to the restricted time resolution, these methods cannot, however, determine the stage of auditory processing at which this specialization first emerges. We used a dense electrode array covering the whole scalp to record the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) automatically elicited by occasional changes in sounds, which ranged from non-phonetic (tones) to phonetic (vowels). MMN can be used to probe auditory central processing on a millisecond scale with no attention-dependent task requirements. Our results indicate that speech processing occurs predominantly in the left hemisphere at the early, pre-attentive level of auditory analysis.

Identification of emotional intonation evaluated by fMRI.

PubMed

Wildgruber, D; Riecker, A; Hertrich, I; Erb, M; Grodd, W; Ethofer, T; Ackermann, H

2005-02-15

During acoustic communication among human beings, emotional information can be expressed both by the propositional content of verbal utterances and by the modulation of speech melody (affective prosody). It is well established that linguistic processing is bound predominantly to the left hemisphere of the brain. By contrast, the encoding of emotional intonation has been assumed to depend specifically upon right-sided cerebral structures. However, prior clinical and functional imaging studies yielded discrepant data with respect to interhemispheric lateralization and intrahemispheric localization of brain regions contributing to processing of affective prosody. In order to delineate the cerebral network engaged in the perception of emotional tone, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed during recognition of prosodic expressions of five different basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, fearful, and disgusted) and during phonetic monitoring of the same stimuli. As compared to baseline at rest, both tasks yielded widespread bilateral hemodynamic responses within frontal, temporal, and parietal areas, the thalamus, and the cerebellum. A comparison of the respective activation maps, however, revealed comprehension of affective prosody to be bound to a distinct right-hemisphere pattern of activation, encompassing posterior superior temporal sulcus (Brodmann Area [BA] 22), dorsolateral (BA 44/45), and orbitobasal (BA 47) frontal areas. Activation within left-sided speech areas, in contrast, was observed during the phonetic task. These findings indicate that partially distinct cerebral networks subserve processing of phonetic and intonational information during speech perception.

Differences in phonetic discrimination stem from differences in psychoacoustic abilities in learning the sounds of a second language: Evidence from ERP research

PubMed Central

Mo, Lei

2017-01-01

The scientific community has been divided as to the origin of individual differences in perceiving the sounds of a second language (L2). There are two alternative explanations: a general psychoacoustic origin vs. a speech-specific one. A previous study showed that such individual variability is linked to the perceivers’ speech-specific capabilities, rather than the perceivers’ psychoacoustic abilities. However, we assume that the selection of participants and parameters of sound stimuli might not appropriate. Therefore, we adjusted the sound stimuli and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from two groups of early, proficient Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) bilinguals who differed in their mastery of the Mandarin (L2) phonetic contrast /in-ing/, to explore whether the individual differences in perceiving L2 stem from participants’ ability to discriminate various pure tones (frequency, duration and pattern). To precisely measure the participants’ acoustic discrimination, mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by the oddball paradigm was recorded in the experiment. The results showed that significant differences between good perceivers (GPs) and poor perceivers (PPs) were found in the three general acoustic conditions (frequency, duration and pattern), and the MMN amplitude for GP was significantly larger than for PP. Therefore, our results support a general psychoacoustic origin of individual variability in L2 phonetic mastery. PMID:29176886

Differences in phonetic discrimination stem from differences in psychoacoustic abilities in learning the sounds of a second language: Evidence from ERP research.

PubMed

Lin, Yi; Fan, Ruolin; Mo, Lei

2017-01-01

The scientific community has been divided as to the origin of individual differences in perceiving the sounds of a second language (L2). There are two alternative explanations: a general psychoacoustic origin vs. a speech-specific one. A previous study showed that such individual variability is linked to the perceivers' speech-specific capabilities, rather than the perceivers' psychoacoustic abilities. However, we assume that the selection of participants and parameters of sound stimuli might not appropriate. Therefore, we adjusted the sound stimuli and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from two groups of early, proficient Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) bilinguals who differed in their mastery of the Mandarin (L2) phonetic contrast /in-ing/, to explore whether the individual differences in perceiving L2 stem from participants' ability to discriminate various pure tones (frequency, duration and pattern). To precisely measure the participants' acoustic discrimination, mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by the oddball paradigm was recorded in the experiment. The results showed that significant differences between good perceivers (GPs) and poor perceivers (PPs) were found in the three general acoustic conditions (frequency, duration and pattern), and the MMN amplitude for GP was significantly larger than for PP. Therefore, our results support a general psychoacoustic origin of individual variability in L2 phonetic mastery.

The speech perception skills of children with and without speech sound disorder.

PubMed

Hearnshaw, Stephanie; Baker, Elise; Munro, Natalie

To investigate whether Australian-English speaking children with and without speech sound disorder (SSD) differ in their overall speech perception accuracy. Additionally, to investigate differences in the perception of specific phonemes and the association between speech perception and speech production skills. Twenty-five Australian-English speaking children aged 48-60 months participated in this study. The SSD group included 12 children and the typically developing (TD) group included 13 children. Children completed routine speech and language assessments in addition to an experimental Australian-English lexical and phonetic judgement task based on Rvachew's Speech Assessment and Interactive Learning System (SAILS) program (Rvachew, 2009). This task included eight words across four word-initial phonemes-/k, ɹ, ʃ, s/. Children with SSD showed significantly poorer perceptual accuracy on the lexical and phonetic judgement task compared with TD peers. The phonemes /ɹ/ and /s/ were most frequently perceived in error across both groups. Additionally, the phoneme /ɹ/ was most commonly produced in error. There was also a positive correlation between overall speech perception and speech production scores. Children with SSD perceived speech less accurately than their typically developing peers. The findings suggest that an Australian-English variation of a lexical and phonetic judgement task similar to the SAILS program is promising and worthy of a larger scale study. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

When a hit sounds like a kiss: An electrophysiological exploration of semantic processing in visual narrative.

PubMed

Manfredi, Mirella; Cohn, Neil; Kutas, Marta

2017-06-01

Researchers have long questioned whether information presented through different sensory modalities involves distinct or shared semantic systems. We investigated uni-sensory cross-modal processing by recording event-related brain potentials to words replacing the climactic event in a visual narrative sequence (comics). We compared Onomatopoeic words, which phonetically imitate action sounds (Pow!), with Descriptive words, which describe an action (Punch!), that were (in)congruent within their sequence contexts. Across two experiments, larger N400s appeared to Anomalous Onomatopoeic or Descriptive critical panels than to their congruent counterparts, reflecting a difficulty in semantic access/retrieval. Also, Descriptive words evinced a greater late frontal positivity compared to Onomatopoetic words, suggesting that, though plausible, they may be less predictable/expected in visual narratives. Our results indicate that uni-sensory cross-model integration of word/letter-symbol strings within visual narratives elicit ERP patterns typically observed for written sentence processing, thereby suggesting the engagement of similar domain-independent integration/interpretation mechanisms. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sociolinguistic variables and cognition.

PubMed

Thomas, Erik R

2011-11-01

Sociolinguistics has examined mental organization of language only sporadically. Meanwhile, areas of linguistics that deal with cognitive organization seldom delve deeply into language variation. Variation is essential for understanding how language is structured cognitively, however. Three kinds of evidence are discussed to illustrate this point. First, style shifting demonstrates that language users develop detailed associations of when to produce specific linguistic forms, depending on the pragmatic context. Second, variation in fine-grained phonetic cues shows that cognitive organization applies to linguistic forms not otherwise known to be under speakers' control. Finally, experiments on dialect comprehension and identification demonstrate that listeners have detailed cognitive associations of language variants with groups of people, whether or not they can produce the same variants themselves. A model is presented for how sociolinguistic knowledge can be viewed in relation to other parts of language with regard to cognitive and neural representations. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 701-716 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.152 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Speaking with a mirror: engagement of mirror neurons via choral speech and its derivatives induces stuttering inhibition.

PubMed

Kalinowski, Joseph; Saltuklaroglu, Tim

2003-04-01

'Choral speech', 'unison speech', or 'imitation speech' has long been known to immediately induce reflexive, spontaneous, and natural sounding fluency, even the most severe cases of stuttering. Unlike typical post-therapeutic speech, a hallmark characteristic of choral speech is the sense of 'invulnerability' to stuttering, regardless of phonetic context, situational environment, or audience size. We suggest that choral speech immediately inhibits stuttering by engaging mirror systems of neurons, innate primitive neuronal substrates that dominate the initial phases of language development due to their predisposition to reflexively imitate gestural action sequences in a fluent manner. Since mirror systems are primordial in nature, they take precedence over the much later developing stuttering pathology. We suggest that stuttering may best be ameliorated by reengaging mirror neurons via choral speech or one of its derivatives (using digital signal processing technology) to provide gestural mirrors, that are nature's way of immediately overriding the central stuttering block. Copyright 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd.

When a hit sounds like a kiss: an electrophysiological exploration of semantic processing in visual narrative

PubMed Central

Manfredi, Mirella; Cohn, Neil; Kutas, Marta

2017-01-01

Researchers have long questioned whether information presented through different sensory modalities involves distinct or shared semantic systems. We investigated uni-sensory cross-modal processing by recording event-related brain potentials to words replacing the climactic event in a visual narrative sequence (comics). We compared Onomatopoeic words, which phonetically imitate action sounds (Pow!), with Descriptive words, which describe an action (Punch!), that were (in)congruent within their sequence contexts. Across two experiments, larger N400s appeared to Anomalous Onomatopoeic or Descriptive critical panels than to their congruent counterparts, reflecting a difficulty in semantic access/retrieval. Also, Descriptive words evinced a greater late frontal positivity compared to Onomatopoetic words, suggesting that, though plausible, they may be less predictable/expected in visual narratives. Our results indicate that uni-sensory cross-model integration of word/letter-symbol strings within visual narratives elicit ERP patterns typically observed for written sentence processing, thereby suggesting the engagement of similar domain-independent integration/interpretation mechanisms. PMID:28242517

Embodied, Embedded Language Use

PubMed Central

Fowler, Carol A.

2011-01-01

Language use has a public face that is as important to study as the private faces under intensive psycholinguistic study. In the domain of phonology, public use of speech must meet an interpersonal “parity” constraint if it is to serve to communicate. That is, spoken language forms must reliably be identified by listeners. To that end, language forms are embodied, at the lowest level of description, as phonetic gestures of the vocal tract that lawfully structure informational media such as air and light. Over time, under the parity constraint, sound inventories emerge over communicative exchanges that have the property of sufficient identifiability. Communicative activities involve more than vocal tract actions. Talkers gesture and use facial expressions and eye gaze to communicate. Listeners embody their language understandings, exhibiting dispositions to behave in ways related to language understanding. Moreover, linguistic interchanges are embedded in the larger context of language use. Talkers recruit the environment in their communicative activities, for example, in using deictic points. Moreover, in using language as a “coordination device,” interlocutors mutually entrain. PMID:21243080

Measures of native and non-native rhythm in a quantity language.

PubMed

Stockmal, Verna; Markus, Dace; Bond, Dzintra

2005-01-01

The traditional phonetic classification of language rhythm as stress-timed or syllable-timed is attributed to Pike. Recently, two different proposals have been offered for describing the rhythmic structure of languages from acoustic-phonetic measurements. Ramus has suggested a metric based on the proportion of vocalic intervals and the variability (SD) of consonantal intervals. Grabe has proposed Pairwise Variability Indices (nPVI, rPVI) calculated from the differences in vocalic and consonantal durations between successive syllables. We have calculated both the Ramus and Grabe metrics for Latvian, traditionally considered a syllable rhythm language, and for Latvian as spoken by Russian learners. Native speakers and proficient learners were very similar whereas low-proficiency learners showed high variability on some properties. The metrics did not provide an unambiguous classification of Latvian.

Effect of Context and Hearing Loss on Time-Gated Word Recognition in Children

PubMed Central

Lewis, Dawna E.; Kopun, Judy; McCreery, Ryan; Brennan, Marc; Nishi, Kanae; Cordrey, Evan; Stelmachowicz, Pat; Moeller, Mary Pat

2016-01-01

Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine word recognition in children who are hard of hearing (CHH) and children with normal hearing (CNH) in response to time-gated words presented in high- vs. low-predictability sentences (HP, LP), where semantic cues were manipulated. Findings inform our understanding of how CHH combine cognitive-linguistic and acoustic-phonetic cues to support spoken word recognition. It was hypothesized that both groups of children would be able to make use of linguistic cues provided by HP sentences to support word recognition. CHH were expected to require greater acoustic information (more gates) than CNH to correctly identify words in the LP condition. In addition, it was hypothesized that error patterns would differ across groups. Design Sixteen CHH with mild-to-moderate hearing loss and 16 age-matched CNH participated (5–12 yrs). Test stimuli included 15 LP and 15 HP age-appropriate sentences. The final word of each sentence was divided into segments and recombined with the sentence frame to create series of sentences in which the final word was progressively longer by the gated increments. Stimuli were presented monaurally through headphones and children were asked to identify the target word at each successive gate. They also were asked to rate their confidence in their word choice using a 5- or 3-point scale. For CHH, the signals were processed through a hearing aid simulator. Standardized language measures were used to assess the contribution of linguistic skills. Results Analysis of language measures revealed that the CNH and CHH performed within the average range on language abilities. Both groups correctly recognized a significantly higher percentage of words in the HP condition than in the LP condition. Although CHH performed comparably to CNH in terms of successfully recognizing the majority of words, differences were observed in the amount of acoustic-phonetic information needed to achieve accurate word recognition. CHH needed more gates than CNH to identify words in the LP condition. CNH were significantly lower in rating their confidence in the LP condition than in the HP condition. CHH, however, were not significantly different in confidence between the conditions. Error patterns for incorrect word responses across gates and predictability varied depending on hearing status. Conclusions The results of this study suggest that CHH with age-appropriate language abilities took advantage of context cues in the HP sentences to guide word recognition in a manner similar to CNH. However, in the LP condition, they required more acoustic information (more gates) than CNH for word recognition. Differences in the structure of incorrect word responses and their nomination patterns across gates for CHH compared to their peers with normal hearing suggest variations in how these groups use limited acoustic information to select word candidates. PMID:28045838

Phonetic training with acoustic cue manipulations: A comparison of methods for teaching English /r/-/l/ to Japanese adults

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Iverson, Paul; Hazan, Valerie; Bannister, Kerry

2005-11-01

Recent work [Iverson et al. (2003) Cognition, 87, B47-57] has suggested that Japanese adults have difficulty learning English /r/ and /l/ because they are overly sensitive to acoustic cues that are not reliable for /r/-/l/ categorization (e.g., F2 frequency). This study investigated whether cue weightings are altered by auditory training, and compared the effectiveness of different training techniques. Separate groups of subjects received High Variability Phonetic Training (natural words from multiple talkers), and 3 techniques in which the natural recordings were altered via signal processing (All Enhancement, with F3 contrast maximized and closure duration lengthened; Perceptual Fading, with F3 enhancement reduced during training; and Secondary Cue Variability, with variation in F2 and durations increased during training). The results demonstrated that all of the training techniques improved /r/-/l/ identification by Japanese listeners, but there were no differences between the techniques. Training also altered the use of secondary acoustic cues; listeners became biased to identify stimuli as English /l/ when the cues made them similar to the Japanese /r/ category, and reduced their use of secondary acoustic cues for stimuli that were dissimilar to Japanese /r/. The results suggest that both category assimilation and perceptual interference affect English /r/ and /l/ acquisition.

Noise on, voicing off: Speech perception deficits in children with specific language impairment.

PubMed

Ziegler, Johannes C; Pech-Georgel, Catherine; George, Florence; Lorenzi, Christian

2011-11-01

Speech perception of four phonetic categories (voicing, place, manner, and nasality) was investigated in children with specific language impairment (SLI) (n=20) and age-matched controls (n=19) in quiet and various noise conditions using an AXB two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Children with SLI exhibited robust speech perception deficits in silence, stationary noise, and amplitude-modulated noise. Comparable deficits were obtained for fast, intermediate, and slow modulation rates, and this speaks against the various temporal processing accounts of SLI. Children with SLI exhibited normal "masking release" effects (i.e., better performance in fluctuating noise than in stationary noise), again suggesting relatively spared spectral and temporal auditory resolution. In terms of phonetic categories, voicing was more affected than place, manner, or nasality. The specific nature of this voicing deficit is hard to explain with general processing impairments in attention or memory. Finally, speech perception in noise correlated with an oral language component but not with either a memory or IQ component, and it accounted for unique variance beyond IQ and low-level auditory perception. In sum, poor speech perception seems to be one of the primary deficits in children with SLI that might explain poor phonological development, impaired word production, and poor word comprehension. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual field differences in visual word recognition can emerge purely from perceptual learning: evidence from modeling Chinese character pronunciation.

PubMed

Hsiao, Janet Hui-Wen

2011-11-01

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is skewed to the right, whereas in PS characters it is skewed to the left. Through training a computational model for SP and PS character recognition that takes into account of the locations in which the characters appear in the visual field during learning, but does not assume any fundamental hemispheric processing difference, we show that visual field differences can emerge as a consequence of the fundamental structural differences in information between SP and PS characters, as opposed to the fundamental processing differences between the two hemispheres. This modeling result is also consistent with behavioral naming performance. This work provides strong evidence that perceptual learning, i.e., the information structure of word stimuli to which the readers have long been exposed, is one of the factors that accounts for hemispheric asymmetry effects in visual word recognition. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phrase boundary effects on the temporal kinematics of sequential tongue tip consonants1

PubMed Central

Byrd, Dani; Lee, Sungbok; Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka

2008-01-01

This study evaluates the effects of phrase boundaries on the intra- and intergestural kinematic characteristics of blended gestures, i.e., overlapping gestures produced with a single articulator. The sequences examined are the juncture geminate [d(#)d], the sequence [d(#)z], and, for comparison, the singleton tongue tip gesture in [d(#)b]. This allows the investigation of the process of gestural aggregation [Munhall, K. G., and Löfqvist, A. (1992). “Gestural aggregation in speech: laryngeal gestures,” J. Phonetics 20, 93–110] and the manner in which it is affected by prosodic structure. Juncture geminates are predicted to be affected by prosodic boundaries in the same way as other gestures; that is, they should display prosodic lengthening and lesser overlap across a boundary. Articulatory prosodic lengthening is also investigated using a signal alignment method of the functional data analysis framework [Ramsay, J. O., and Silverman, B. W. (2005). Functional Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (Springer-Verlag, New York)]. This provides the ability to examine a time warping function that characterizes relative timing difference (i.e., lagging or advancing) of a test signal with respect to a given reference, thus offering a way of illuminating local nonlinear deformations at work in prosodic lengthening. These findings are discussed in light of the π-gesture framework of Byrd and Saltzman [(2003) “The elastic phrase: Modeling the dynamics of boundary-adjacent lengthening,” J. Phonetics 31, 149–180]. PMID:18537396

LACUS Forum XXV, [1998].

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Shin Ja J., Ed.; Lommel, Arle R., Ed.

Papers from the conference include: "English and Human Morphology: 'Naturalness' in Counting and Measuring" (Sullivan); "Phonetic and Phonemic Change Revisited" (Lockwood); "Virtual Reality" (Langacker); "Path Directions in ASL Agreement Verbs are Predictable on Semantic Grounds" (Taub); "Temporal…

Masking release due to linguistic and phonetic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech

PubMed Central

Calandruccio, Lauren; Brouwer, Susanne; Van Engen, Kristin J.; Dhar, Sumitrajit; Bradlow, Ann R.

2013-01-01

Purpose To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs. Method Twenty monolingual speakers of English with normal-audiometric thresholds participated. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English, Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment I) and noise maskers (Experiment II) that were matched either to the long-term-average-speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment I. Results Results indicated that listener performance increased as the target-to-masker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin). Conclusions Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role. PMID:23800811

Broad phonetic class definition driven by phone confusions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lopes, Carla; Perdigão, Fernando

2012-12-01

Intermediate representations between the speech signal and phones may be used to improve discrimination among phones that are often confused. These representations are usually found according to broad phonetic classes, which are defined by a phonetician. This article proposes an alternative data-driven method to generate these classes. Phone confusion information from the analysis of the output of a phone recognition system is used to find clusters at high risk of mutual confusion. A metric is defined to compute the distance between phones. The results, using TIMIT data, show that the proposed confusion-driven phone clustering method is an attractive alternative to the approaches based on human knowledge. A hierarchical classification structure to improve phone recognition is also proposed using a discriminative weight training method. Experiments show improvements in phone recognition on the TIMIT database compared to a baseline system.

Neural correlates of phonetic convergence and speech imitation.

PubMed

Garnier, Maëva; Lamalle, Laurent; Sato, Marc

2013-01-01

Speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor's speech during communicative interaction. This study aims at examining the neural correlates of phonetic convergence and deliberate imitation, in order to explore whether imitation of phonetic features, deliberate, or unconscious, might reflect a sensory-motor recalibration process. Sixteen participants listened to vowels with pitch varying around the average pitch of their own voice, and then produced the identified vowels, while their speech was recorded and their brain activity was imaged using fMRI. Three degrees and types of imitation were compared (unconscious, deliberate, and inhibited) using a go-nogo paradigm, which enabled the comparison of brain activations during the whole imitation process, its active perception step, and its production. Speakers followed the pitch of voices they were exposed to, even unconsciously, without being instructed to do so. After being informed about this phenomenon, 14 participants were able to inhibit it, at least partially. The results of whole brain and ROI analyses support the fact that both deliberate and unconscious imitations are based on similar neural mechanisms and networks, involving regions of the dorsal stream, during both perception and production steps of the imitation process. While no significant difference in brain activation was found between unconscious and deliberate imitations, the degree of imitation, however, appears to be determined by processes occurring during the perception step. Four regions of the dorsal stream: bilateral auditory cortex, bilateral supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and left Wernicke's area, indeed showed an activity that correlated significantly with the degree of imitation during the perception step.

Taxamatch, an Algorithm for Near (‘Fuzzy’) Matching of Scientific Names in Taxonomic Databases

PubMed Central

Rees, Tony

2014-01-01

Misspellings of organism scientific names create barriers to optimal storage and organization of biological data, reconciliation of data stored under different spelling variants of the same name, and appropriate responses from user queries to taxonomic data systems. This study presents an analysis of the nature of the problem from first principles, reviews some available algorithmic approaches, and describes Taxamatch, an improved name matching solution for this information domain. Taxamatch employs a custom Modified Damerau-Levenshtein Distance algorithm in tandem with a phonetic algorithm, together with a rule-based approach incorporating a suite of heuristic filters, to produce improved levels of recall, precision and execution time over the existing dynamic programming algorithms n-grams (as bigrams and trigrams) and standard edit distance. Although entirely phonetic methods are faster than Taxamatch, they are inferior in the area of recall since many real-world errors are non-phonetic in nature. Excellent performance of Taxamatch (as recall, precision and execution time) is demonstrated against a reference database of over 465,000 genus names and 1.6 million species names, as well as against a range of error types as present at both genus and species levels in three sets of sample data for species and four for genera alone. An ancillary authority matching component is included which can be used both for misspelled names and for otherwise matching names where the associated cited authorities are not identical. PMID:25247892

Auditory training improves auditory performance in cochlear implanted children.

PubMed

Roman, Stephane; Rochette, Françoise; Triglia, Jean-Michel; Schön, Daniele; Bigand, Emmanuel

2016-07-01

While the positive benefits of pediatric cochlear implantation on language perception skills are now proven, the heterogeneity of outcomes remains high. The understanding of this heterogeneity and possible strategies to minimize it is of utmost importance. Our scope here is to test the effects of an auditory training strategy, "sound in Hands", using playful tasks grounded on the theoretical and empirical findings of cognitive sciences. Indeed, several basic auditory operations, such as auditory scene analysis (ASA) are not trained in the usual therapeutic interventions in deaf children. However, as they constitute a fundamental basis in auditory cognition, their development should imply general benefit in auditory processing and in turn enhance speech perception. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether cochlear implanted children could improve auditory performances in trained tasks and whether they could develop a transfer of learning to a phonetic discrimination test. Nineteen prelingually unilateral cochlear implanted children without additional handicap (4-10 year-olds) were recruited. The four main auditory cognitive processing (identification, discrimination, ASA and auditory memory) were stimulated and trained in the Experimental Group (EG) using Sound in Hands. The EG followed 20 training weekly sessions of 30 min and the untrained group was the control group (CG). Two measures were taken for both groups: before training (T1) and after training (T2). EG showed a significant improvement in the identification, discrimination and auditory memory tasks. The improvement in the ASA task did not reach significance. CG did not show any significant improvement in any of the tasks assessed. Most importantly, improvement was visible in the phonetic discrimination test for EG only. Moreover, younger children benefited more from the auditory training program to develop their phonetic abilities compared to older children, supporting the idea that rehabilitative care is most efficient when it takes place early on during childhood. These results are important to pinpoint the auditory deficits in CI children, to gather a better understanding of the links between basic auditory skills and speech perception which will in turn allow more efficient rehabilitative programs. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Expansion of Prosodic Abilities at the Transition From Babble to Words: A Comparison Between Children With Cochlear Implants and Normally Hearing Children.

PubMed

Pettinato, Michèle; Clerck, Ilke De; Verhoeven, Jo; Gillis, Steven

This longitudinal study examined the effect of emerging vocabulary production on the ability to produce the phonetic cues to prosodic prominence in babbled and lexical disyllables of infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Current research on typical language acquisition emphasizes the importance of vocabulary development for phonological and phonetic acquisition. Children with CI experience significant difficulties with the perception and production of prosody, and the role of possible top-down effects is, therefore, particularly relevant for this population. Isolated disyllabic babble and first words were identified and segmented in longitudinal audio-video recordings and transcriptions for nine NH infants and nine infants with CI interacting with their parents. Monthly recordings were included from the onset of babbling until children had reached a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words. Three cues to prosodic prominence, fundamental frequency (f0), intensity, and duration, were measured in the vocalic portions of stand-alone disyllables. To represent the degree of prosodic differentiation between two syllables in an utterance, the raw values for intensity and duration were transformed to ratios, and for f0, a measure of the perceptual distance in semitones was derived. The degree of prosodic differentiation for disyllabic babble and words for each cue was compared between groups. In addition, group and individual tendencies on the types of stress patterns for babble and words were also examined. The CI group had overall smaller pitch and intensity distances than the NH group. For the NH group, words had greater pitch and intensity distances than babbled disyllables. Especially for pitch distance, this was accompanied by a shift toward a more clearly expressed stress pattern that reflected the influence of the ambient language. For the CI group, the same expansion in words did not take place for pitch. For intensity, the CI group gave evidence of some increase of prosodic differentiation. The results for the duration measure showed evidence of utterance final lengthening in both groups. In words, the CI group significantly reduced durational differences between syllables so that a more even-timed, less differentiated pattern emerged. The onset of vocabulary production did not have the same facilitatory effect for the CI infants on the production of phonetic cues for prosody, especially for pitch. It was argued that the results for duration may reflect greater articulatory difficulties in words for the CI group than the NH group. It was suggested that the lack of clear top-down effects of the vocabulary in the CI group may be because of a lag in development caused by an initial lack of auditory stimulation, possibly compounded by the absence of auditory feedback during the babble phase.

Neural systems underlying the influence of sound shape properties of the lexicon on spoken word production: do fMRI findings predict effects of lesions in aphasia?

PubMed

Bullock-Rest, Natasha; Cerny, Alissa; Sweeney, Carol; Palumbo, Carole; Kurowski, Kathleen; Blumstein, Sheila E

2013-08-01

Previous behavioral work has shown that the phonetic realization of words in spoken word production is influenced by sound shape properties of the lexicon. A recent fMRI study (Peramunage, Blumstein, Myers, Goldrick, & Baese-Berk, 2011) showed that this influence of lexical structure on phonetic implementation recruited a network of areas that included the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). The current study examined whether lesions in these areas result in a concomitant functional deficit. Ten individuals with aphasia and 8 normal controls read words aloud in which half had a voiced stop consonant minimal pair (e.g. tame; dame), and the other half did not (e.g. tooth; (*)dooth). Voice onset time (VOT) analysis of the initial voiceless stop consonant revealed that aphasic participants with lesions including the IFG and/or the SMG behaved as did normals, showing VOT lengthening effects for minimal pair words compared to non-minimal pair words. The failure to show a functional deficit in the production of VOT as a function of the lexical properties of a word with damage in the IFG or SMG suggests that fMRI findings do not always predict effects of lesions on behavioral deficits in aphasia. Nonetheless, the pattern of production errors made by the aphasic participants did reflect properties of the lexicon, supporting the view that the SMG and IFG are part of a lexical network involved in spoken word production. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Recognizing Spoken Words: The Neighborhood Activation Model

PubMed Central

Luce, Paul A.; Pisoni, David B.

2012-01-01

Objective A fundamental problem in the study of human spoken word recognition concerns the structural relations among the sound patterns of words in memory and the effects these relations have on spoken word recognition. In the present investigation, computational and experimental methods were employed to address a number of fundamental issues related to the representation and structural organization of spoken words in the mental lexicon and to lay the groundwork for a model of spoken word recognition. Design Using a computerized lexicon consisting of transcriptions of 20,000 words, similarity neighborhoods for each of the transcriptions were computed. Among the variables of interest in the computation of the similarity neighborhoods were: 1) the number of words occurring in a neighborhood, 2) the degree of phonetic similarity among the words, and 3) the frequencies of occurrence of the words in the language. The effects of these variables on auditory word recognition were examined in a series of behavioral experiments employing three experimental paradigms: perceptual identification of words in noise, auditory lexical decision, and auditory word naming. Results The results of each of these experiments demonstrated that the number and nature of words in a similarity neighborhood affect the speed and accuracy of word recognition. A neighborhood probability rule was developed that adequately predicted identification performance. This rule, based on Luce's (1959) choice rule, combines stimulus word intelligibility, neighborhood confusability, and frequency into a single expression. Based on this rule, a model of auditory word recognition, the neighborhood activation model, was proposed. This model describes the effects of similarity neighborhood structure on the process of discriminating among the acoustic-phonetic representations of words in memory. The results of these experiments have important implications for current conceptions of auditory word recognition in normal and hearing impaired populations of children and adults. PMID:9504270

York Papers in Linguistics, 16.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harlow, S. J., Ed.; Warner, A. R., Ed.

Articles on diverse areas of linguistics include the following: "Correlative Constructions in Chinese" (Steve Harlow, Connie Cullen); "Xhosa Isinkalakahliso Again" (John Kelly); "Conversational Phonetics: Some Aspects of News Receipts in Everyday Talk" (John Local); "Parametric Interpretation in Yorktalk"…

The Structure of Esperanto.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, John

1980-01-01

Gives a brief description of the features of Esperanto: phonetic spelling, a regular grammar with no exceptions to rules, an international vocabulary with a rule for adding new words, and a word-building system making full use of affixes. (Author/MES)

Advances in real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the vocal tract for speech science and technology research.

PubMed

Toutios, Asterios; Narayanan, Shrikanth S

2016-01-01

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) of the moving vocal tract during running speech production is an important emerging tool for speech production research providing dynamic information of a speaker's upper airway from the entire mid-sagittal plane or any other scan plane of interest. There have been several advances in the development of speech rtMRI and corresponding analysis tools, and their application to domains such as phonetics and phonological theory, articulatory modeling, and speaker characterization. An important recent development has been the open release of a database that includes speech rtMRI data from five male and five female speakers of American English each producing 460 phonetically balanced sentences. The purpose of the present paper is to give an overview and outlook of the advances in rtMRI as a tool for speech research and technology development.

Dataglove measurement of joint angles in sign language handshapes

PubMed Central

Eccarius, Petra; Bour, Rebecca; Scheidt, Robert A.

2012-01-01

In sign language research, we understand little about articulatory factors involved in shaping phonemic boundaries or the amount (and articulatory nature) of acceptable phonetic variation between handshapes. To date, there exists no comprehensive analysis of handshape based on the quantitative measurement of joint angles during sign production. The purpose of our work is to develop a methodology for collecting and visualizing quantitative handshape data in an attempt to better understand how handshapes are produced at a phonetic level. In this pursuit, we seek to quantify the flexion and abduction angles of the finger joints using a commercial data glove (CyberGlove; Immersion Inc.). We present calibration procedures used to convert raw glove signals into joint angles. We then implement those procedures and evaluate their ability to accurately predict joint angle. Finally, we provide examples of how our recording techniques might inform current research questions. PMID:23997644

Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent.

PubMed

Mulak, Karen E; Best, Catherine T; Tyler, Michael D; Kitamura, Christine; Irwin, Julia R

2013-01-01

By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity (phonological distinctiveness). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do not (phonological constancy). To test development of phonological constancy, sixteen 15-month-olds and sixteen 19-month-olds completed an eye-tracking task that tracked their gaze to named versus unnamed images for familiar words spoken in their native (Australian) and an unfamiliar non-native (Jamaican) regional accent of English. Both groups looked longer at named than unnamed images for Australian pronunciations, but only 19-month-olds did so for Jamaican pronunciations, indicating that phonological constancy emerges by 19 months. Vocabulary size predicted 15-month-olds' identifications for the Jamaican pronunciations, suggesting vocabulary growth is a viable predictor for phonological constancy development. © 2013 The Authors. Child Development © 2013 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

The Interaction of Language-Specific and Universal Factors During the Acquisition of Morphophonemic Alternations With Exceptions.

PubMed

Baer-Henney, Dinah; Kügler, Frank; van de Vijver, Ruben

2015-09-01

Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is grounded in substance (phonetic motivation), and this universal phonetic factor bolsters learning a generalization. In the second alternation, tenseness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix vowel. This process is not based in substance, but it reflects a phonotactic property of German and our participants benefit from this language-specific factor. We found that learners use both cues, while substantive bias surfaces mainly in the most unstable situation. We show that language-specific and universal factors interact in learning. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Clinical linguistics: its past, present and future.

PubMed

Perkins, Michael R

2011-11-01

Historiography is a growing area of research within the discipline of linguistics, but so far the subfield of clinical linguistics has received virtually no systematic attention. This article attempts to rectify this by tracing the development of the discipline from its pre-scientific days up to the present time. As part of this, I include the results of a survey of articles published in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics between 1987 and 2008 which shows, for example, a consistent primary focus on phonetics and phonology at the expense of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. I also trace the gradual broadening of the discipline from its roots in structural linguistics to its current reciprocal relationship with speech and language pathology and a range of other academic disciplines. Finally, I consider the scope of clinical linguistic research in 2011 and assess how the discipline seems likely develop in the future.

Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning

PubMed Central

Rost, Gwyneth C.; McMurray, Bob

2010-01-01

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e., word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite the ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them. PMID:19143806

Modelling Errors in Automatic Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Caballero Morales, Santiago Omar; Cox, Stephen J.

2009-12-01

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder characterized by weakness, paralysis, or poor coordination of the muscles responsible for speech. Although automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for disordered speech, factors such as low intelligibility and limited phonemic repertoire decrease speech recognition accuracy, making conventional speaker adaptation algorithms perform poorly on dysarthric speakers. In this work, rather than adapting the acoustic models, we model the errors made by the speaker and attempt to correct them. For this task, two techniques have been developed: (1) a set of "metamodels" that incorporate a model of the speaker's phonetic confusion matrix into the ASR process; (2) a cascade of weighted finite-state transducers at the confusion matrix, word, and language levels. Both techniques attempt to correct the errors made at the phonetic level and make use of a language model to find the best estimate of the correct word sequence. Our experiments show that both techniques outperform standard adaptation techniques.

Cross-Language Distributions of High Frequency and Phonetically Similar Cognates

PubMed Central

Schepens, Job; Dijkstra, Ton; Grootjen, Franc; van Heuven, Walter J. B.

2013-01-01

The coinciding form and meaning similarity of cognates, e.g. ‘flamme’ (French), ‘Flamme’ (German), ‘vlam’ (Dutch), meaning ‘flame’ in English, facilitates learning of additional languages. The cross-language frequency and similarity distributions of cognates vary according to evolutionary change and language contact. We compare frequency and orthographic (O), phonetic (P), and semantic similarity of cognates, automatically identified in semi-complete lexicons of six widely spoken languages. Comparisons of P and O similarity reveal inconsistent mappings in language pairs with deep orthographies. The frequency distributions show that cognate frequency is reduced in less closely related language pairs as compared to more closely related languages (e.g., French-English vs. German-English). These frequency and similarity patterns may support a better understanding of cognate processing in natural and experimental settings. The automatically identified cognates are available in the supplementary materials, including the frequency and similarity measurements. PMID:23675449

Advances in real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the vocal tract for speech science and technology research

PubMed Central

TOUTIOS, ASTERIOS; NARAYANAN, SHRIKANTH S.

2016-01-01

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) of the moving vocal tract during running speech production is an important emerging tool for speech production research providing dynamic information of a speaker's upper airway from the entire mid-sagittal plane or any other scan plane of interest. There have been several advances in the development of speech rtMRI and corresponding analysis tools, and their application to domains such as phonetics and phonological theory, articulatory modeling, and speaker characterization. An important recent development has been the open release of a database that includes speech rtMRI data from five male and five female speakers of American English each producing 460 phonetically balanced sentences. The purpose of the present paper is to give an overview and outlook of the advances in rtMRI as a tool for speech research and technology development. PMID:27833745

Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent

PubMed Central

Mulak, Karen E.; Best, Catherine T.; Tyler, Michael D.; Kitamura, Christine; Irwin, Julia R.

2014-01-01

By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity (phonological distinctiveness). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do not (phonological constancy). To test development of phonological constancy, 16 15-month-olds and 16 19-month-olds completed an eye-tracking task that tracked their gaze to named versus unnamed images for familiar words spoken in their native (Australian) and an unfamiliar non-native (Jamaican) regional accent of English. Both groups looked longer at named than unnamed images for Australian pronunciations, but only 19-month-olds did so for Jamaican pronunciations, indicating that phonological constancy emerges by 19 months. Vocabulary size predicted 15-month-olds' identifications for the Jamaican pronunciations, suggesting vocabulary growth is a viable predictor for phonological constancy development. PMID:23521607

Efficacy of a short cognitive training program in patients with multiple sclerosis

PubMed Central

Pérez-Martín, María Yaiza; González-Platas, Montserrat; Eguía-del Río, Pablo; Croissier-Elías, Cristina; Jiménez Sosa, Alejandro

2017-01-01

Background Cognitive impairment is a common feature in multiple sclerosis (MS) and may have a substantial impact on quality of life. Evidence about the effectiveness of neuropsychological rehabilitation is still limited, but current data suggest that computer-assisted cognitive training improves cognitive performance. Objective The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of combined computer-assisted training supported by home-based neuropsychological training to improve attention, processing speed, memory and executive functions during 3 consecutive months. Methods In this randomized controlled study blinded for the evaluators, 62 MS patients with clinically stable disease and mild-to-moderate levels of cognitive impairment were randomized to receive a computer-assisted neuropsychological training program (n=30) or no intervention (control group [CG]; n=32). The cognitive assessment included the Brief Repeatable Battery of Neuropsychological Test. Other secondary measures included subjective cognitive impairment, anxiety and depression, fatigue and quality of life measures. Results The treatment group (TG) showed significant improvements in measures of verbal memory, working memory and phonetic fluency after intervention, and repeated measures analysis of covariance revealed a positive effect in most of the functions. The control group (CG) did not show changes. The TG showed a significant reduction in anxiety symptoms and significant improvement in quality of life. There were no improvements in fatigue levels and depressive symptoms. Conclusion Cognitive intervention with a computer-assisted training supported by home training between face-to-face sessions is a useful tool to treat patients with MS and improve functions such as verbal memory, working memory and phonetic fluency. PMID:28223806

Associations of acoustically measured tongue/jaw movements and portion of time speaking with negative symptom severity in patients with schizophrenia in Italy and the United States.

PubMed

Bernardini, Francesco; Lunden, Anya; Covington, Michael; Broussard, Beth; Halpern, Brooke; Alolayan, Yazeed; Crisafio, Anthony; Pauselli, Luca; Balducci, Pierfrancesco M; Capulong, Leslie; Attademo, Luigi; Lucarini, Emanuela; Salierno, Gianfranco; Natalicchi, Luca; Quartesan, Roberto; Compton, Michael T

2016-05-30

This is the first cross-language study of the effect of schizophrenia on speech as measured by analyzing phonetic parameters with sound spectrography. We hypothesized that reduced variability in pitch and formants would be correlated with negative symptom severity in two samples of patients with schizophrenia, one from Italy, and one from the United States. Audio recordings of spontaneous speech were available from 40 patients. From each speech sample, a file of F0 (pitch) and formant values (F1 and F2, resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity), and the portion of the recording in which there was speaking ("fraction voiced," FV), was created. Correlations between variability in the phonetic indices and negative symptom severity were tested and further examined using regression analyses. Meaningful negative correlations between Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) total score and standard deviation (SD) of F2, as well as variability in pitch (SD F0) were observed in the Italian sample. We also found meaningful associations of SANS affective flattening and SANS alogia with SD F0, and of SANS avolition/apathy and SD F2 in the Italian sample. In both samples, FV was meaningfully correlated with SANS total score, avolition/apathy, and anhedonia/asociality. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Activation of semantic information at the sublexical level during handwriting production: Evidence from inhibition effects of Chinese semantic radicals in the picture-word interference paradigm.

PubMed

Chen, Xuqian; Liao, Yuanlan; Chen, Xianzhe

2017-08-01

Using a non-alphabetic language (e.g., Chinese), the present study tested a novel view that semantic information at the sublexical level should be activated during handwriting production. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms, in which semantic radicals represent category information (e.g., 'chair,' 'peach,' 'orange' are related to plants) while phonetic radicals represent phonetic information (e.g., 'wolf,' 'brightness,' 'male,' are all pronounced /lang/). Under different semantic category conditions at the lexical level (semantically related in Experiment 1; semantically unrelated in Experiment 2), the orthographic relatedness and semantic relatedness of semantic radicals in the picture name and its distractor were manipulated under different SOAs (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, the interval between the onset of the picture and the onset of the interference word). Two questions were addressed: (1) Is it possible that semantic information could be activated in the sublexical level conditions? (2) How are semantic and orthographic information dynamically accessed in word production? Results showed that both orthographic and semantic information were activated under the present picture-word interference paradigm, dynamically under different SOAs, which supported our view that discussions on semantic processes in the writing modality should be extended to the sublexical level. The current findings provide possibility for building new orthography-phonology-semantics models in writing. © 2017 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The aprosody of schizophrenia: Computationally derived acoustic phonetic underpinnings of monotone speech.

PubMed

Compton, Michael T; Lunden, Anya; Cleary, Sean D; Pauselli, Luca; Alolayan, Yazeed; Halpern, Brooke; Broussard, Beth; Crisafio, Anthony; Capulong, Leslie; Balducci, Pierfrancesco Maria; Bernardini, Francesco; Covington, Michael A

2018-02-12

Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness. Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5). We compared groups on variation in pitch (F0), formant F1 and F2, and intensity/loudness. Regarding pitch variation, patients with aprosody differed significantly from controls in Task 5 in both unadjusted tests and those adjusted for sociodemographics. For the standard deviation (SD) of F1, no significant differences were found in adjusted tests. Regarding SD of F2, patients with aprosody had lower values than controls in Task 3, 4, and 5. For variation in intensity/loudness, patients with aprosody had lower values than patients without aprosody and controls across the five tasks. Findings could represent a step toward developing new methods for measuring and tracking the severity of this specific negative symptom using acoustic phonetic parameters; such work is relevant to other psychiatric and neurological disorders. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for early and automatic detection of phonological equivalence in variable speech inputs.

PubMed

Kharlamov, Viktor; Campbell, Kenneth; Kazanina, Nina

2011-11-01

Speech sounds are not always perceived in accordance with their acoustic-phonetic content. For example, an early and automatic process of perceptual repair, which ensures conformity of speech inputs to the listener's native language phonology, applies to individual input segments that do not exist in the native inventory or to sound sequences that are illicit according to the native phonotactic restrictions on sound co-occurrences. The present study with Russian and Canadian English speakers shows that listeners may perceive phonetically distinct and licit sound sequences as equivalent when the native language system provides robust evidence for mapping multiple phonetic forms onto a single phonological representation. In Russian, due to an optional but productive t-deletion process that affects /stn/ clusters, the surface forms [sn] and [stn] may be phonologically equivalent and map to a single phonological form /stn/. In contrast, [sn] and [stn] clusters are usually phonologically distinct in (Canadian) English. Behavioral data from identification and discrimination tasks indicated that [sn] and [stn] clusters were more confusable for Russian than for English speakers. The EEG experiment employed an oddball paradigm with nonwords [asna] and [astna] used as the standard and deviant stimuli. A reliable mismatch negativity response was elicited approximately 100 msec postchange in the English group but not in the Russian group. These findings point to a perceptual repair mechanism that is engaged automatically at a prelexical level to ensure immediate encoding of speech inputs in phonological terms, which in turn enables efficient access to the meaning of a spoken utterance.

Neural correlates of phonetic convergence and speech imitation

PubMed Central

Garnier, Maëva; Lamalle, Laurent; Sato, Marc

2013-01-01

Speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor's speech during communicative interaction. This study aims at examining the neural correlates of phonetic convergence and deliberate imitation, in order to explore whether imitation of phonetic features, deliberate, or unconscious, might reflect a sensory-motor recalibration process. Sixteen participants listened to vowels with pitch varying around the average pitch of their own voice, and then produced the identified vowels, while their speech was recorded and their brain activity was imaged using fMRI. Three degrees and types of imitation were compared (unconscious, deliberate, and inhibited) using a go-nogo paradigm, which enabled the comparison of brain activations during the whole imitation process, its active perception step, and its production. Speakers followed the pitch of voices they were exposed to, even unconsciously, without being instructed to do so. After being informed about this phenomenon, 14 participants were able to inhibit it, at least partially. The results of whole brain and ROI analyses support the fact that both deliberate and unconscious imitations are based on similar neural mechanisms and networks, involving regions of the dorsal stream, during both perception and production steps of the imitation process. While no significant difference in brain activation was found between unconscious and deliberate imitations, the degree of imitation, however, appears to be determined by processes occurring during the perception step. Four regions of the dorsal stream: bilateral auditory cortex, bilateral supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and left Wernicke's area, indeed showed an activity that correlated significantly with the degree of imitation during the perception step. PMID:24062704

Symbols for the General British English Vowel Sounds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lewis, J. Windsor

1975-01-01

Deals with the critique of Hans G. Hoffmann saying that the new phonetic symbols contained in A. S. Hornby's "Advanced Learner's Dictionary" (Oxford University Press, London, 1974) are harder to learn than the older system of transcription. (IFS/WGA)

Enlargement of the supraglottal cavity and its relation to stop consonant voicing.

PubMed

Westbury, J R

1983-04-01

Measurements were made of saggital plane movements of the larynx, soft palate, and portions of the tongue, from a high-speed cinefluorographic film of utterances produced by one adult male speaker of American English. These measures were then used to approximate the temporal variations in supraglottal cavity volume during the closures of voiced and voiceless stop consonants. All data were subsequently related to a synchronous acoustic recording of the utterances. Instances of /p,t,k/ were always accompanied by silent closures, and sometimes accompanied by decreases in supraglottal volume. In contrast, instances of /b,d,g/ were always accompanied both by significant intervals of vocal fold vibration during closure, and relatively large increases in supraglottal volume. However, the magnitudes of volume increments during the voiced stops, and the means by which those increments were achieved, differed considerably across place of articulation and phonetic environment. These results are discussed in the context of a well-known model of the breath-stream control mechanism, and their relevance for a general theory of speech motor control is considered.

Repeat what after whom? Exploring variable selectivity in a cross-dialectal shadowing task

PubMed Central

Walker, Abby; Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn

2015-01-01

Twenty women from Christchurch, New Zealand and 16 from Columbus Ohio (dialect region U.S. Midland) participated in a bimodal lexical naming task where they repeated monosyllabic words after four speakers from four regional dialects: New Zealand, Australia, U.S. Inland North and U.S. Midland. The resulting utterances were acoustically analyzed, and presented to listeners on Amazon Mechanical Turk in an AXB task. Convergence is observed, but differs depending on the dialect of the speaker, the dialect of the model, the particular word class being shadowed, and the order in which dialects are presented to participants. We argue that these patterns are generally consistent with findings that convergence is promoted by a large phonetic distance between shadower and model (Babel, 2010, contra Kim et al., 2011), and greater existing variability in a vowel class (Babel, 2012). The results also suggest that more comparisons of accommodation toward different dialects are warranted, and that the investigation of the socio-indexical meaning of specific linguistic forms in context is a promising avenue for understanding variable selectivity in convergence. PMID:26029129

Computer-Mediated Assessment of Intelligibility in Aphasia and Apraxia of Speech

PubMed Central

Haley, Katarina L.; Roth, Heidi; Grindstaff, Enetta; Jacks, Adam

2011-01-01

Background Previous work indicates that single word intelligibility tests developed for dysarthria are sensitive to segmental production errors in aphasic individuals with and without apraxia of speech. However, potential listener learning effects and difficulties adapting elicitation procedures to coexisting language impairments limit their applicability to left hemisphere stroke survivors. Aims The main purpose of this study was to examine basic psychometric properties for a new monosyllabic intelligibility test developed for individuals with aphasia and/or AOS. A related purpose was to examine clinical feasibility and potential to standardize a computer-mediated administration approach. Methods & Procedures A 600-item monosyllabic single word intelligibility test was constructed by assembling sets of phonetically similar words. Custom software was used to select 50 target words from this test in a pseudo-random fashion and to elicit and record production of these words by 23 speakers with aphasia and 20 neurologically healthy participants. To evaluate test-retest reliability, two identical sets of 50-word lists were elicited by requesting repetition after a live speaker model. To examine the effect of a different word set and auditory model, an additional set of 50 different words was elicited with a pre-recorded model. The recorded words were presented to normal-hearing listeners for identification via orthographic and multiple-choice response formats. To examine construct validity, production accuracy for each speaker was estimated via phonetic transcription and rating of overall articulation. Outcomes & Results Recording and listening tasks were completed in less than six minutes for all speakers and listeners. Aphasic speakers were significantly less intelligible than neurologically healthy speakers and displayed a wide range of intelligibility scores. Test-retest and inter-listener reliability estimates were strong. No significant difference was found in scores based on recordings from a live model versus a pre-recorded model, but some individual speakers favored the live model. Intelligibility test scores correlated highly with segmental accuracy derived from broad phonetic transcription of the same speech sample and a motor speech evaluation. Scores correlated moderately with rated articulation difficulty. Conclusions We describe a computerized, single-word intelligibility test that yields clinically feasible, reliable, and valid measures of segmental speech production in adults with aphasia. This tool can be used in clinical research to facilitate appropriate participant selection and to establish matching across comparison groups. For a majority of speakers, elicitation procedures can be standardized by using a pre-recorded auditory model for repetition. This assessment tool has potential utility for both clinical assessment and outcomes research. PMID:22215933