Because of restrictions on in-person research due to COVID-19, researchers are now relying on remotely recorded data to a much greater extent than in the past. Given the change in methodology, it is ...important to know how remote recording might affect acoustic measurements, either because of different recording devices used by participants and consultants or because of the software used to make recordings. This study investigates audio signal fidelity across different inperson recording equipment and remote recording software when compared to solid-state digital audio. We show that equipment choice and software can have a large effect on acoustic measurements, including those of frequency, duration, and noise. The issues do not just reflect decreased reliability; some measurements are systematically shifted in particular recording conditions. These results show the importance of carefully considering and documenting equipment choices, particularly for crosslinguistic or cross-speaker comparisons. We close with a framework for researchers to use in deciding what types of recording may be most appropriate.
Voices in reading literature Nordbø Kristiansen, Dag-Tore; Kukkonen, Karin; Eriksen, Stefka G. ...
Language sciences (Oxford),
November 2024, 2024-11-00, Letnik:
106
Journal Article
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Building upon recent studies of historical reading practices and their insights into the bodily and cognitive nature of reading, this article explores the impact of silent and voiced reading on the ...diverse bodily, cognitive, and emotional engagements with a text. Our starting point is that language is not merely a tool for translating mental content but emerges from and shapes embodied ways of interacting with the world, in this case, a reading-world. First, we present a phonetic analysis based on a pilot study of university students' voiced and silent reading. The overall cognitive act of articulating phonemes based on perception of graphemes is portrayed as an embodied process, particularly evident in instances where readers modify their pronunciation of unfamiliar words or grapheme clusters. Moreover, we observe how readers embody emotions and differentiate between narrators or voices in the text by creatively and dynamically modulating their oral cavity to produce subtle, yet cognitively significant changes in speech sounds. Second, drawing on interview data from the same study, we explore how the two reading conditions influence experiential factors, including perceptions of time, qualities of imagery, and the multiplicity of voices enacted by the reader. Together, these aspects provide insights into the function and value of readers' practices of reading silently and aloud. While, in our study, reading aloud helps modulating local sensitivity to prosodic features that are important for e.g. emotion regulation and comprehension, readers more easily orient themselves in a text when reading silently, strengthening the in-depth experience of settings, characters, and narrators. While the attributes of silent and voiced reading may vary based on expertise, norms, and personal preferences, each mode appears to offer distinctive advantages. We thus conclude by proposing that readers could benefit from alternating between both reading modes, adapting to the specific task at hand. This approach allows for the full realisation of the embodied potential in alignment with the requirements of the task. Additionally, historical practices of reading aloud can inform the study of reading modes, providing a repertoire of possibilities absent in today's reading ecologies dominated by silent reading.
•Reading aloud and reading silently both offer useful advantages for a reader.•Reading aloud may result in readers paying more attention to prosodic features of the text and to the emotive content.•Reading silently may allow readers to follow the text more freely.•Historical practices of reading can and should inform our current understanding of reading.
In this article, the concept (i.e., the mathematical model and methods) of computational phonetic analysis of speech with an analytical description of the phenomenon of phonetic fusion is proposed. ...In this concept, in contrast to the existing methods, the problem of multicriteria of the process of cognitive perception of speech by a person is strictly formally presented using the theoretical and analytical apparatus of information (entropy) theory, pattern recognition theory and acoustic theory of speech formation. The obtained concept allows for determining reliably the individual phonetic alphabet inherent in a person, taking into account their inherent dialect of speech and individual features of phonation, as well as detecting and correcting errors in the recognition of language units. The experiments prove the superiority of the proposed scientific result over such common Bayesian concepts of decision making using the Euclidean-type mismatch metric as a method of maximum likelihood and a method of an ideal observer. The analysis of the speech signal carried out in the metric based on the proposed concept allows, in particular, for establishing reliably the phonetic saturation of speech, which objectively characterizes the environment of speech signal propagation and its source.
This paper questions the phonetic bases of the theories dealing with segments' internal structure. It takes a look at the rise and the development of the idea that the phoneme is not the ultimate ...constituent of the speech stream which cannot be broken down into smaller units, but the association product of a finite inventory of universal parameters called differently by different frameworks: features, elements, gestures. The break with the "atomic" conception of the phoneme and the elaboration of the phonological primitives theories go, however, hand in hand with a complicated formalism and with the hermetization of phonology by its estrangement from phonetics.
Prosodic structure has been assumed to serve as a frame for articulation, so that phonetic shaping of phonological representations is fine‐tuned as a function of the prosodic system of the language. ...The intricate relationship between phonetics and prosodic structure has been explored in the literature under the rubric of the phonetics–prosody interface. This paper reviews various aspects of the phonetics–prosody interface and discusses how prosodic structure modulates phonetic realization within and across languages. A particular attention is paid to boundary‐related prosodic strengthening (i.e., spatial and/or temporal expansion of articulation that arises in the vicinity of prosodic junctures), especially in association with domain‐initial positions (also known as domain‐initial strengthening, DIS, effects). Prosodic boundary strengthening is further discussed in terms of how it is language‐specifically fine‐tuned, how it is understood in dynamical terms, and how it relates to linguistic functions (as syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic contrast enhancement) that are all further conditioned by other factors of the linguistic sound system of individual languages such as the prominence system and the phonetic feature system.
The phonetic footprint of Parkinson’s disease Klumpp, Philipp; Arias-Vergara, Tomás; Vásquez-Correa, Juan Camilo ...
Computer speech & language,
March 2022, 2022-03-00, Letnik:
72
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders, Parkinson’s disease (PD) has a significant impact on the fine motor skills of patients. The complex interplay of different articulators ...during speech production and realization of required muscle tension become increasingly difficult, thus leading to a dysarthric speech. Characteristic patterns such as vowel instability, slurred pronunciation and slow speech can often be observed in the affected individuals and were analyzed in previous studies to determine the presence and progression of PD. In this work, we used a phonetic recognizer trained exclusively on healthy speech data to investigate how PD affected the phonetic footprint of patients. We rediscovered numerous patterns that had been described in previous contributions although our system had never seen any pathological speech previously. Furthermore, we could show that intermediate activations from the neural network could serve as feature vectors encoding information related to the disease state of individuals. We were also able to directly correlate the expert-rated intelligibility of a speaker with the mean confidence of phonetic predictions. Our results support the assumption that pathological data is not necessarily required to train systems that are capable of analyzing PD speech.
•Deep acoustic models enable phonetic profiling of Parkinson’s Disease patients.•Distinct differences in phonetic footprints between speaker groups.•Intermediate model activations encode information about disease progression.•Perceived intelligibility and recognition confidences are correlated in free speech.
Speech enhancement (SE) is a widely used technology to improve the quality and intelligibility of noisy speech. So far, SE algorithms were designed and evaluated on native listeners only, but not on ...non-native listeners who are known to be more disadvantaged when listening in noisy environments. This paper investigates the performance of five widely used single-channel SE algorithms on early-immersed New Zealand English (NZE) listeners and native Mandarin listeners with different immersion conditions in NZE under negative input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by conducting a subjective listening test in NZE sentences. The performance of the SE algorithms in terms of speech intelligibility in the three participant groups was investigated. The result showed that the early-immersed group always achieved the highest intelligibility. The late-immersed group outperformed the non-immersed group for higher input SNR conditions, possibly due to the increasing familiarity with the NZE accent, whereas this advantage disappeared at the lowest tested input SNR conditions. The SE algorithms tested in this study failed to improve and rather degraded the speech intelligibility, indicating that these SE algorithms may not be able to reduce the perception gap between early-, late- and non-immersed listeners, nor able to improve the speech intelligibility under negative input SNR in general. These findings have implications for the future development of SE algorithms tailored to Mandarin listeners, and for understanding the impact of language immersion on speech perception in noise.
•Early study explores speech enhancement impact on listeners with varied immersion.•Tested algorithms failed to improve the intelligibility of extremely noisy speech.•Early-immersed group has higher intelligibility than late- and non-immersed groups.•Intelligibility of Mandarin groups at lower SNRs was similar regardless of immersion.•Both Mandarin groups found it difficult to distinguish NZE vowels in noise.
Purpose: We evaluated whether children whose inaccurate /voiced alveolar approximant/ productions showed evidence phonetic differentiation with /w/ at 3.5-4.5 years of age improved in /voiced ...alveolar approximant/ production over the next year more than children whose inaccurate productions did not show evidence of such differentiation. We also examined whether speech perception, inhibitory control, and vocabulary size predicted growth in /voiced alveolar approximant/. Method: A set of typically developing, monolingual English-speaking preschool children (n = 136) produced tokens of /voiced alveolar approximant/- and /w/-initial words at two time points (TPs), at which they were 39-52 and 51-65 months old. Children's productions of /voiced alveolar approximant/ and /w/ were narrowly phonetically transcribed. Children's productions at the earlier time point were rated by naïve listeners using a visual analog scale measure of phoneme goodness; these ratings were used to assess the degree of phonetic differentiation between /voiced alveolar approximant/ and /w/. Results: Accuracy for both phonemes varied considerably at both TPs. The growth in accuracy of /voiced alveolar approximant/ between the two TPs was not predicted by any individual-differences measures, nor by the degree of differentiation between /voiced alveolar approximant/ and /w/at the earlier time point. Conclusion: Low vocabulary size, low inhibitory control, poor speech perception, and the absence of early phonetic differentiation are not necessarily limiting factors in predicting /voiced alveolar approximant/ growth in individual children in the age range we studied.
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Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
•We investigate infants’ tracking of natural infant- and adult-directed speech.•Mothers enhance prosodic stress in infant-directed speech.•Infants track the prosodic stress and syllable rate for ...natural speech.•Infant-directed speech facilitates infants’ tracking of prosodic stress.
Infants prefer to be addressed with infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS benefits language acquisition through amplified low-frequency amplitude modulations. It has been reported that this amplification increases electrophysiological tracking of IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is still unknown which particular frequency band triggers this effect. Here, we compare tracking at the rates of syllables and prosodic stress, which are both critical to word segmentation and recognition. In mother-infant dyads (n=30), mothers described novel objects to their 9-month-olds while infants’ EEG was recorded. For IDS, mothers were instructed to speak to their children as they typically do, while for ADS, mothers described the objects as if speaking with an adult. Phonetic analyses confirmed that pitch features were more prototypically infant-directed in the IDS-condition compared to the ADS-condition. Neural tracking of speech was assessed by speech-brain coherence, which measures the synchronization between speech envelope and EEG. Results revealed significant speech-brain coherence at both syllabic and prosodic stress rates, indicating that infants track speech in IDS and ADS at both rates. We found significantly higher speech-brain coherence for IDS compared to ADS in the prosodic stress rate but not the syllabic rate. This indicates that the IDS benefit arises primarily from enhanced prosodic stress. Thus, neural tracking is sensitive to parents’ speech adaptations during natural interactions, possibly facilitating higher-level inferential processes such as word segmentation from continuous speech.
Abstract Nonhuman great apes have been claimed to be unable to learn human words due to a lack of the necessary neural circuitry. We recovered original footage of two enculturated chimpanzees ...uttering the word “mama” and subjected recordings to phonetic analysis. Our analyses demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable of syllabic production, achieving consonant-to-vowel phonetic contrasts via the simultaneous recruitment and coupling of voice, jaw and lips. In an online experiment, human listeners naive to the recordings’ origins reliably perceived chimpanzee utterances as syllabic utterances, primarily as “ma-ma”, among foil syllables. Our findings demonstrate that in the absence of direct data-driven examination, great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated. Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech.
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