Speech to Text Software Evaluation Report

CERN Document Server

Martins Santo, Ana Luisa

2017-01-01

This document compares out-of-box performance of three commercially available speech recognition software: Vocapia VoxSigma TM , Google Cloud Speech, and Lime- craft Transcriber. It is defined a set of evaluation criteria and test methods for speech recognition softwares. The evaluation of these softwares in noisy environments are also included for the testing purposes. Recognition accuracy was compared using noisy environments and languages. Testing in ”ideal” non-noisy environment of a quiet room has been also performed for comparison.

BILINGUAL MULTIMODAL SYSTEM FOR TEXT-TO-AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH AND SIGN LANGUAGE SYNTHESIS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. A. Karpov

2014-09-01

Full Text Available We present a conceptual model, architecture and software of a multimodal system for audio-visual speech and sign language synthesis by the input text. The main components of the developed multimodal synthesis system (signing avatar are: automatic text processor for input text analysis; simulation 3D model of human's head; computer text-to-speech synthesizer; a system for audio-visual speech synthesis; simulation 3D model of human’s hands and upper body; multimodal user interface integrating all the components for generation of audio, visual and signed speech. The proposed system performs automatic translation of input textual information into speech (audio information and gestures (video information, information fusion and its output in the form of multimedia information. A user can input any grammatically correct text in Russian or Czech languages to the system; it is analyzed by the text processor to detect sentences, words and characters. Then this textual information is converted into symbols of the sign language notation. We apply international «Hamburg Notation System» - HamNoSys, which describes the main differential features of each manual sign: hand shape, hand orientation, place and type of movement. On their basis the 3D signing avatar displays the elements of the sign language. The virtual 3D model of human’s head and upper body has been created using VRML virtual reality modeling language, and it is controlled by the software based on OpenGL graphical library. The developed multimodal synthesis system is a universal one since it is oriented for both regular users and disabled people (in particular, for the hard-of-hearing and visually impaired, and it serves for multimedia output (by audio and visual modalities of input textual information.

Automatic speech recognition used for evaluation of text-to-speech systems

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Vích, Robert; Nouza, J.; Vondra, Martin

-, č. 5042 (2008), s. 136-148 ISSN 0302-9743 R&D Projects: GA AV ČR 1ET301710509; GA AV ČR 1QS108040569 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z20670512 Keywords : speech recognition * speech processing Subject RIV: JA - Electronics ; Optoelectronics, Electrical Engineering

Indian accent text-to-speech system for web browsing

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

This paper describes a 'web reader' which 'reads out' the textual contents of a selected web page in Hindi or in English with Indian accent. The content of the page is downloaded and parsed into suitable textual form. It is then passed on to an indigenously developed text-to-speech system for Hindi/Indian English, ...

L’unité intonative dans les textes oralisés // Intonation unit in read speech

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Lea Tylečková

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Prosodic phrasing, i.e. division of speech into intonation units, represents a phenomenon which is central to language comprehension. Incorrect prosodic boundary markings may lead to serious misunderstandings and ambiguous interpretations of utterances. The present paper investigates prosodic competencies of Czech students of French in the domain of prosodic phrasing in French read speech. Two texts of different length are examined through a perceptual method to observe how Czech speakers of French (B1–B2 level of CEFR divide read speech into prosodic units compared to French native speakers.

Language and Text-to-Speech Technologies for Highly Accessible Language & Culture Learning

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Anouk Gelan

2011-06-01

Full Text Available This contribution presents the results of the “Speech technology integrated learning modules for Intercultural Dialogue” project. The project objective was to increase the availability and quality of e-learning opportunities for less widely-used and less taught European languages using a user-friendly and highly accessible learning environment. The integration of new Text-to-Speech developments into web-based authoring software for tutorial CALL had a double goal: on the one hand increase the accessibility of e-learning packages, also for learners having difficulty reading (e.g. dyslexic learners or preferring auditory learning; on the other hand exploiting some didactic possibilities of this technology.

Applications in accessibility of text-to-speech synthesis for South African languages: Initial system integration and user engagement

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Schlünz, Georg I

2017-09-01

Full Text Available with little or no functional speech to speak out loud. Screen readers and accessible e-books allow a print-disabled (visually-impaired, partially-sighted or dyslexic) individual to read text material by listening to audio versions. Text-to-speech synthesis...

The Role of Speech Prosody and Text Reading Prosody in Children's Reading Comprehension

Science.gov (United States)

Veenendaal, Nathalie J.; Groen, Margriet A.; Verhoeven, Ludo

2014-01-01

Background: Text reading prosody has been associated with reading comprehension. However, text reading prosody is a reading-dependent measure that relies heavily on decoding skills. Investigation of the contribution of speech prosody--which is independent from reading skills--in addition to text reading prosody, to reading comprehension could…

Use of speech-to-text technology for documentation by healthcare providers.

Science.gov (United States)

Ajami, Sima

2016-01-01

Medical records are a critical component of a patient's treatment. However, documentation of patient-related information is considered a secondary activity in the provision of healthcare services, often leading to incomplete medical records and patient data of low quality. Advances in information technology (IT) in the health system and registration of information in electronic health records (EHR) using speechto- text conversion software have facilitated service delivery. This narrative review is a literature search with the help of libraries, books, conference proceedings, databases of Science Direct, PubMed, Proquest, Springer, SID (Scientific Information Database), and search engines such as Yahoo, and Google. I used the following keywords and their combinations: speech recognition, automatic report documentation, voice to text software, healthcare, information, and voice recognition. Due to lack of knowledge of other languages, I searched all texts in English or Persian with no time limits. Of a total of 70, only 42 articles were selected. Speech-to-text conversion technology offers opportunities to improve the documentation process of medical records, reduce cost and time of recording information, enhance the quality of documentation, improve the quality of services provided to patients, and support healthcare providers in legal matters. Healthcare providers should recognize the impact of this technology on service delivery.

THE UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES OF SUSILO BAMBANG YUDHOYONO‘S THOUGHT PATTERNS IN HIS ENGLISH SPEECH TEXTS

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Sulistya ningsih

2014-10-01

Full Text Available The underlying principles of thought patterns as shown in SBY's English Speeches Texts are made because there are different responses from the public, a part of public praise that SBY is a good president, and others claim and criticize him that  he is slow (Djalal, 2007: forward page. This title so far has not been investigated. This research was aimed at finding out:  the underlying principles of SBY’s thought patterns in his English Speech Texts related to Javanese philosophy. This research is qualitative. The data selected from SBY’s speech Texts were analyzed using semantic and pragmastylistic theory then were related to Javanese philosophy. The findings are the underlying principles of SBY’s thought patterns based on Javanese philosophy manifested in his English Speech Texts are: first is Memayu Hayuning Bawana, Ambrasta dur Hangkara means to reach safety, peace, happiness and well-being of the world and its contents, to keep the world maintained and harmony. Second, Rukun agawe santosa crah agawe bubrah  means to build the condition of harmony, and avoid conflict, because conflict can be harmful to both parties. Third, tepa selira means keep thinking not to offend others or lighten the burdens of others, tolerance. Fourth is ana rembug becik dirembug means thru negotiations can avoid conflict and achieve cooperation, safety, peace and prosperity. In sum, the world peace can be reached thru discussions without war, soft powers.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC FACTORS OF THE WRITTEN SPEECH NORMS APPROXIMATION IN LABOR MIGRANTS’ TEXTS

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Utesheva Altynay Pazylovna

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The article focuses on the features of written Russian speech of labor migrants from different countries considering the norms of written speech. The empirical basis of the research is represented by the handwritten CVs of unemployed migrants from Vietnam and Uzbekistan, that were presented to the departments of the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation in the city of Volgograd. Written speech violations are classified according to the age groups which migrants belong to. The following sociolinguistic characteristics of the migrants are also taken into account: nationality, period of school education, higher education, document writing competence. Group 1 combined informants aged from 20 to 30, without higher education, who studied the Russian language at school in the new period of the collapse of the Soviet Union procedures or on their own. It is an educational institution with no experience compiling official documents and communication skills in Russian. Group 2 combined informants aged from 30 to 50, without higher education, who studied Russian at school by Soviet methods with experience of drawing up official documents and possessing basic communication skills to communicate in Russian. Group 3 combined informants aged 50 and older with secondary special education, who studied Russian at school by Soviet methods and actively developed communicative competence at the expense of everyday communication, reading books, listening to the radio and watching programs in Russian, with experience in drafting official documents. The features of migrants' written speech are manifested in specific language and speech mistakes, particularly in graphic, phonetic and genre rules violations. The general patterns of mistakes are registered. The mistakes are caused not only by language transfer and the Russian language competence, but also by sociolinguistic factors. The particular cross-language differences of migrants writing are

Does Use of Text-to-Speech and Related Read-Aloud Tools Improve Reading Comprehension for Students with Reading Disabilities? A Meta-Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Wood, Sarah G.; Moxley, Jerad H.; Tighe, Elizabeth L.; Wagner, Richard K.

2018-01-01

Text-to-speech and related read-aloud tools are being widely implemented in an attempt to assist students' reading comprehension skills. Read-aloud software, including text-to-speech, is used to translate written text into spoken text, enabling one to listen to written text while reading along. It is not clear how effective text-to-speech is at…

Individually-Personal Peculiarities of Younger Preschoolers’ Speech

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M E Novikova

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Studying the speech of the younger preschoolers is a major factor in designing educational methods and preparing children for school. There exist individual and gender differences in the way children acquire speech skills. Word comprehension and idea interpretation depend on the child’s upbringing, his or her environment, the interaction within the family. This article submits the research data obtained from the study of the individual peculiarities of the younger preschool children’s speech.

When will a stuttering moment occur? The determining role of speech motor preparation.

Science.gov (United States)

Vanhoutte, Sarah; Cosyns, Marjan; van Mierlo, Pieter; Batens, Katja; Corthals, Paul; De Letter, Miet; Van Borsel, John; Santens, Patrick

2016-06-01

The present study aimed to evaluate whether increased activity related to speech motor preparation preceding fluently produced words reflects a successful compensation strategy in stuttering. For this purpose, a contingent negative variation (CNV) was evoked during a picture naming task and measured by use of electro-encephalography. A CNV is a slow, negative event-related potential known to reflect motor preparation generated by the basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical (BGTC) - loop. In a previous analysis, the CNV of 25 adults with developmental stuttering (AWS) was significantly increased, especially over the right hemisphere, compared to the CNV of 35 fluent speakers (FS) when both groups were speaking fluently (Vanhoutte et al., (2015) doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.05.013). To elucidate whether this increase is a compensation strategy enabling fluent speech in AWS, the present analysis evaluated the CNV of 7 AWS who stuttered during this picture naming task. The CNV preceding AWS stuttered words was statistically compared to the CNV preceding AWS fluent words and FS fluent words. Though no difference emerged between the CNV of the AWS stuttered words and the FS fluent words, a significant reduction was observed when comparing the CNV preceding AWS stuttered words to the CNV preceding AWS fluent words. The latter seems to confirm the compensation hypothesis: the increased CNV prior to AWS fluent words is a successful compensation strategy, especially when it occurs over the right hemisphere. The words are produced fluently because of an enlarged activity during speech motor preparation. The left CNV preceding AWS stuttered words correlated negatively with stuttering frequency and severity suggestive for a link between the left BGTC - network and the stuttering pathology. Overall, speech motor preparatory activity generated by the BGTC - loop seems to have a determining role in stuttering. An important divergence between left and right hemisphere is

Orthographic learning and the role of text-to-speech software in Dutch disabled readers.

Science.gov (United States)

Staels, Eva; Van den Broeck, Wim

2015-01-01

In this study, we examined whether orthographic learning can be demonstrated in disabled readers learning to read in a transparent orthography (Dutch). In addition, we tested the effect of the use of text-to-speech software, a new form of direct instruction, on orthographic learning. Both research goals were investigated by replicating Share's self-teaching paradigm. A total of 65 disabled Dutch readers were asked to read eight stories containing embedded homophonic pseudoword targets (e.g., Blot/Blod), with or without the support of text-to-speech software. The amount of orthographic learning was assessed 3 or 7 days later by three measures of orthographic learning. First, the results supported the presence of orthographic learning during independent silent reading by demonstrating that target spellings were correctly identified more often, named more quickly, and spelled more accurately than their homophone foils. Our results support the hypothesis that all readers, even poor readers of transparent orthographies, are capable of developing word-specific knowledge. Second, a negative effect of text-to-speech software on orthographic learning was demonstrated in this study. This negative effect was interpreted as the consequence of passively listening to the auditory presentation of the text. We clarify how these results can be interpreted within current theoretical accounts of orthographic learning and briefly discuss implications for remedial interventions. © Hammill Institute on Disabilities 2013.

Features Speech Signature Image Recognition on Mobile Devices

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Alexander Mikhailovich Alyushin

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The algorithms fordynamic spectrograms images recognition, processing and soundspeech signature (SS weredeveloped. The software for mobile phones, thatcan recognize speech signatureswas prepared. The investigation of the SS recognition speed on its boundarytypes was conducted. Recommendations on the boundary types choice in the optimal ratio of recognitionspeed and required space were given.

Sensorimotor oscillations prior to speech onset reflect altered motor networks in adults who stutter

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Anna-Maria Mersov

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Adults who stutter (AWS have demonstrated atypical coordination of motor and sensory regions during speech production. Yet little is known of the speech-motor network in AWS in the brief time window preceding audible speech onset. The purpose of the current study was to characterize neural oscillations in the speech-motor network during preparation for and execution of overt speech production in AWS using magnetoencephalography (MEG. Twelve AWS and twelve age-matched controls were presented with 220 words, each word embedded in a carrier phrase. Controls were presented with the same word list as their matched AWS participant. Neural oscillatory activity was localized using minimum-variance beamforming during two time periods of interest: speech preparation (prior to speech onset and speech execution (following speech onset. Compared to controls, AWS showed stronger beta (15-25Hz suppression in the speech preparation stage, followed by stronger beta synchronization in the bilateral mouth motor cortex. AWS also recruited the right mouth motor cortex significantly earlier in the speech preparation stage compared to controls. Exaggerated motor preparation is discussed in the context of reduced coordination in the speech-motor network of AWS. It is further proposed that exaggerated beta synchronization may reflect a more strongly inhibited motor system that requires a stronger beta suppression to disengage prior to speech initiation. These novel findings highlight critical differences in the speech-motor network of AWS that occur prior to speech onset and emphasize the need to investigate further the speech-motor assembly in the stuttering population.

Text-to-speech enhanced eBooks for emerging literacy development

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Marais, L

2015-10-01

Full Text Available  with an isiXhosa version is under way. The studies measure the efficacy of the  eBook application to improve the vocabulary and word recognition skills in an Afrikaans  and an isiXhosa speaking group, respectively, of lower socio­economic status of 6­ to 7­  year old children with poor vocabulary.    An... stream_source_info Marais_15668_2015.pdf.txt stream_content_type text/plain stream_size 3124 Content-Encoding UTF-8 stream_name Marais_15668_2015.pdf.txt Content-Type text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Text­to­speech enhanced eBooks...

Speech-Language Pathology: Preparing Early Interventionists

Science.gov (United States)

Prelock, Patricia A.; Deppe, Janet

2015-01-01

The purpose of this article is to explain the role of speech-language pathology in early intervention. The expected credentials of professionals in the field are described, and the current numbers of practitioners serving young children are identified. Several resource documents available from the American Speech-­Language Hearing Association are…

INTEGRATING MACHINE TRANSLATION AND SPEECH SYNTHESIS COMPONENT FOR ENGLISH TO DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGE SPEECH TO SPEECH TRANSLATION SYSTEM

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J. SANGEETHA

2015-02-01

Full Text Available This paper provides an interface between the machine translation and speech synthesis system for converting English speech to Tamil text in English to Tamil speech to speech translation system. The speech translation system consists of three modules: automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text to speech synthesis. Many procedures for incorporation of speech recognition and machine translation have been projected. Still speech synthesis system has not yet been measured. In this paper, we focus on integration of machine translation and speech synthesis, and report a subjective evaluation to investigate the impact of speech synthesis, machine translation and the integration of machine translation and speech synthesis components. Here we implement a hybrid machine translation (combination of rule based and statistical machine translation and concatenative syllable based speech synthesis technique. In order to retain the naturalness and intelligibility of synthesized speech Auto Associative Neural Network (AANN prosody prediction is used in this work. The results of this system investigation demonstrate that the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthesized speech are strongly influenced by the fluency and correctness of the translated text.

Text to Speech Berbasis Natural Language pada Aplikasi Pembelajaran Tenses Bahasa Inggris

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Amak Yunus

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Bahasa adalah sebuah cara berkomunikasi secara sistematis dengan menggunakan suara atau simbol-simbol yang memiliki arti, yang diucapkan melalui mulut. Bahasa juga ditulis dengan mengikuti kaidah yang berlaku. Salah satu bahasa yang banyak digunakan di belahan dunia adalah Bahasa Inggris. Namun ada beberapa kendala apabila kita belajar kepada seorang guru atau instruktur. Waktu yang diberikan seorang guru, terbatas pada jam sekolah atau les saja. Bila siswa pulang sekolah atau les, maka yang bersangkutan harus belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri. Dari permasalahan di atas, muncul sebuah ide tentang bagaimana membuat sebuah penelitian yang berkaitan dengan pembuatan aplikasi yang mampu memberikan pengetahuan kepada siswa tentang bagaimana belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri baik dari perubahan kalimat postif menjadi kalimat negatif dan kalimat tanya. Disamping itu, aplikasi ini juga mampu memberikan pengetahuan tentang bagaimana mengucapkan kalimat dalam bahasa Inggris. Pada intinya kontribusi yang dapat diperoleh dari hasil penelitian ini adalah pihak terkait dari tingkat SMP sampai dengan SMU/SMK, dapat menggunakan aplikasi text to speech berbasis natural language processing untuk mempelajari tenses pada bahasa Inggris. Aplikasi ini dapat memperdengarkan kalimat-kalimat pada bahasa inggris dan dapat menyusun kalimat tanya dan kalimat negatif berdasarkan kalimat positifnya dalam beberapa tenses bahasa Inggris. Kata Kunci : Natural language processing, Text to speech

Eliciting extra prominence in read-speech tasks: The effects of different text-highlighting methods on acoustic cues to perceived prominence

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Berger, Stephanie; Niebuhr, Oliver; Fischer, Kerstin

2018-01-01

The research initiative Innovating Speech EliCitation Techniques (INSPECT) aims to describe and quantify how recording methods, situations and materials influence speech produc-tion in lab-speech experiments. On this basis, INSPECT aims to develop methods that reliably stimulate specific patterns...... and styles of speech, like expressive or conversational speech or different types emphatic accents. The present study investigates if and how different text highlighting methods (yellow background, bold, capital letter, italics, and underlining) make speakers reinforce the level of perceived prominence...

The Effect of Speech-to-Text Technology on Learning a Writing Strategy

Science.gov (United States)

Haug, Katrina N.; Klein, Perry D.

2018-01-01

Previous research has shown that speech-to-text (STT) software can support students in producing a given piece of writing. This is the 1st study to investigate the use of STT to teach a writing strategy. We pretested 45 Grade 5 students on argument writing and trained them to use STT. Students participated in 4 lessons on an argument writing…

Usability Assessment of Text-to-Speech Synthesis for Additional Detail in an Automated Telephone Banking System

OpenAIRE

Morton , Hazel; Gunson , Nancie; Marshall , Diarmid; McInnes , Fergus; Ayres , Andrea; Jack , Mervyn

2010-01-01

Abstract This paper describes a comprehensive usability evaluation of an automated telephone banking system which employs text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in offering additional detail on customers? account transactions. The paper describes a series of four experiments in which TTS was employed to offer an extra level of detail to recent transactions listings within an established banking service which otherwise uses recorded speech from a professional recording artist. Results from ...

REPORTED SPEECH IN FICTIONAL NARRATIVE TEXTS IN TERMS OF SPEECH ACTS THEORY SÖZ EDİMLERİ KURAMI AÇISINDAN KURGUSAL ANLATI METİNLERİNDE SÖZ AKTARIMI

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Soner AKŞEHİRLİ

2011-06-01

Full Text Available Speech or discourse reporting (speech representation is a linguistic phenomenon which is seen both in ordinary communication and fictional narrative texts. In linguistics, speech reporting is differentiated as direct, indirect and free-indirect speech. On the other and, speech acts theory, suggested by J.L.Auistin, can provide a new perspective for speech reporting. According to theory, to say or to produce a statement (locutionary act is to perform an act (illocutionary act.Moreover, one can performed an act ifluenced by an locutionary act. In ordinary communication, reporter and in fictional texts narrator may report one, two or all of the locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act of reported statement. At the same time, these processes must considered in determining point of view that governing narrative texts. So that, we can develop a new typology of speech reporting for fictional texts Söz ya da söylem aktarımı hem günlük iletişimde hem de kurgusal anlatı metinlerinde sıkça görülen dilbilimsel bir olgudur. Dilbilim açısından söz aktarımı doğrudan, dolaylı ve serbest dolaylı olmak üzere üç temel biçimde ele alınır. J.L.Austin tarafından geliştiren söz edimleri kuramı ise, söz aktarımına farklı bir açıdan bakmamızı sağlayabilir. Kurama göre bir söz söylemek (düzsöz, bir iş yapmaktır (edimsöz. Ayrıca söylenen sözün etkisiyle yapılan bir iş de olabilir (etkisöz. Günlük iletişimde aktarıcı, kurgusal metinlerde ise anlatıcı söz aktarımını gerçekleştirirken, aktardığı sözün düzsöz, edimsöz ve etkisöz bileşenlerinden herhangi birini, ikisini ya da üçünü birden aktarabilir. Bu aynı zamanda anlatısal metinleri yöneten bakış açısının belirlenmesinde de dikkate alınması gereken bir süreçtir. Böylece kurgusal metinler için söz edimleri kuramına dayanan yeni bir söz aktarım tipolojisi oluşturulabilir.

Nazareth College: Specialty Preparation for Speech-Language Pathologists to Work with Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Science.gov (United States)

Brown, Paula M.; Quenin, Cathy

2010-01-01

The specialty preparation program within the speech-language pathology master's degree program at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, was designed to train speech-language pathologists to work with children who are deaf and hard of hearing, ages 0 to 21. The program is offered in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology,…

The benefit obtained from visually displayed text from an automatic speech recognizer during listening to speech presented in noise

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Zekveld, A.A.; Kramer, S.E.; Kessens, J.M.; Vlaming, M.S.M.G.; Houtgast, T.

2008-01-01

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to evaluate the benefit that listeners obtain from visually presented output from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system during listening to speech in noise. DESIGN: Auditory-alone and audiovisual speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured. The SRT

Investigating an Application of Speech-to-Text Recognition: A Study on Visual Attention and Learning Behaviour

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Y-M.; Liu, C-J.; Shadiev, Rustam; Shen, M-H.; Hwang, W-Y.

2015-01-01

One major drawback of previous research on speech-to-text recognition (STR) is that most findings showing the effectiveness of STR for learning were based upon subjective evidence. Very few studies have used eye-tracking techniques to investigate visual attention of students on STR-generated text. Furthermore, not much attention was paid to…

Dialogue enabling speech-to-text user assistive agent system for hearing-impaired person.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Seongjae; Kang, Sunmee; Han, David K; Ko, Hanseok

2016-06-01

A novel approach for assisting bidirectional communication between people of normal hearing and hearing-impaired is presented. While the existing hearing-impaired assistive devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants are vulnerable in extreme noise conditions or post-surgery side effects, the proposed concept is an alternative approach wherein spoken dialogue is achieved by means of employing a robust speech recognition technique which takes into consideration of noisy environmental factors without any attachment into human body. The proposed system is a portable device with an acoustic beamformer for directional noise reduction and capable of performing speech-to-text transcription function, which adopts a keyword spotting method. It is also equipped with an optimized user interface for hearing-impaired people, rendering intuitive and natural device usage with diverse domain contexts. The relevant experimental results confirm that the proposed interface design is feasible for realizing an effective and efficient intelligent agent for hearing-impaired.

Using Text-to-Speech Reading Support for an Adult with Mild Aphasia and Cognitive Impairment

Science.gov (United States)

Harvey, Judy; Hux, Karen; Snell, Jeffry

2013-01-01

This single case study served to examine text-to-speech (TTS) effects on reading rate and comprehension in an individual with mild aphasia and cognitive impairment. Findings showed faster reading, given TTS presented at a normal speaking rate, but no significant comprehension changes. TTS may support reading in people with aphasia when time…

College Students' Perceptions of the C-Print Speech-to-Text Transcription System.

Science.gov (United States)

Elliot, L B; Stinson, M S; McKee, B G; Everhart, V S; Francis, P J

2001-01-01

C-Print is a real-time speech-to-text transcription system used as a support service with deaf students in mainstreamed classes. Questionnaires were administered to 36 college students in 32 courses in which the C-Print system was used in addition to interpreting and note taking. Twenty-two of these students were also interviewed. Questionnaire items included student ratings of lecture comprehension. Student ratings indicated good comprehension with C-Print, and the mean rating was significantly higher than that for understanding of the interpreter. Students also rated the hard copy printout provided by C-Print as helpful, and they reported that they used these notes more frequently than the handwritten notes from a paid student note taker. Interview results were consistent with those for the questionnaire. Questionnaire and interview responses regarding use of C-Print as the only support service indicated that this arrangement would be acceptable to many students, but not to others. Communication characteristics were related to responses to the questionnaire. Students who were relatively proficient in reading and writing English, and in speech-reading, responded more favorably to C-Print.

Under-resourced speech recognition based on the speech manifold

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Sahraeian, R

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Conventional acoustic modeling involves estimating many parameters to effectively model feature distributions. The sparseness of speech and text data, however, degrades the reliability of the estimation process and makes speech recognition a...

Speech Compression

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jerry D. Gibson

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Speech compression is a key technology underlying digital cellular communications, VoIP, voicemail, and voice response systems. We trace the evolution of speech coding based on the linear prediction model, highlight the key milestones in speech coding, and outline the structures of the most important speech coding standards. Current challenges, future research directions, fundamental limits on performance, and the critical open problem of speech coding for emergency first responders are all discussed.

Priorities of Dialogic Speech Teaching Methodology at Higher Non-Linguistic School

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Vida Asanavičienė

2011-04-01

Full Text Available The article deals with a number of relevant methodological issues. First of all, the author analyses psychological peculiarities of dialogic speech and states that the dialogue is the product of at least two persons. Therefore, in this view, dialogic speech, unlike monologic speech, happens impromptu and is not prepared in advance. Dialogic speech is mainly of situational character. The linguistic nature of dialogic speech, in the author’s opinion, lies in the process of exchanging replications, which are coherent in structural and functional character. The author classifies dialogue groups by the number of replications and communicative parameters. The basic goal of dialogic speech teaching is developing the abilities and skills which enable to exchange replications. The author distinguishes two basic stages of dialogic speech teaching: 1. Training of abilities to exchange replications during communicative exercises. 2. Development of skills by training the capability to perform exercises of creative nature during a group dialogue, conversation or debate.

Support vector machine and mel frequency Cepstral coefficient based algorithm for hand gestures and bidirectional speech to text device

Science.gov (United States)

Balbin, Jessie R.; Padilla, Dionis A.; Fausto, Janette C.; Vergara, Ernesto M.; Garcia, Ramon G.; Delos Angeles, Bethsedea Joy S.; Dizon, Neil John A.; Mardo, Mark Kevin N.

2017-02-01

This research is about translating series of hand gesture to form a word and produce its equivalent sound on how it is read and said in Filipino accent using Support Vector Machine and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient analysis. The concept is to detect Filipino speech input and translate the spoken words to their text form in Filipino. This study is trying to help the Filipino deaf community to impart their thoughts through the use of hand gestures and be able to communicate to people who do not know how to read hand gestures. This also helps literate deaf to simply read the spoken words relayed to them using the Filipino speech to text system.

Comprehension of synthetic speech and digitized natural speech by adults with aphasia.

Science.gov (United States)

Hux, Karen; Knollman-Porter, Kelly; Brown, Jessica; Wallace, Sarah E

2017-09-01

Using text-to-speech technology to provide simultaneous written and auditory content presentation may help compensate for chronic reading challenges if people with aphasia can understand synthetic speech output; however, inherent auditory comprehension challenges experienced by people with aphasia may make understanding synthetic speech difficult. This study's purpose was to compare the preferences and auditory comprehension accuracy of people with aphasia when listening to sentences generated with digitized natural speech, Alex synthetic speech (i.e., Macintosh platform), or David synthetic speech (i.e., Windows platform). The methodology required each of 20 participants with aphasia to select one of four images corresponding in meaning to each of 60 sentences comprising three stimulus sets. Results revealed significantly better accuracy given digitized natural speech than either synthetic speech option; however, individual participant performance analyses revealed three patterns: (a) comparable accuracy regardless of speech condition for 30% of participants, (b) comparable accuracy between digitized natural speech and one, but not both, synthetic speech option for 45% of participants, and (c) greater accuracy with digitized natural speech than with either synthetic speech option for remaining participants. Ranking and Likert-scale rating data revealed a preference for digitized natural speech and David synthetic speech over Alex synthetic speech. Results suggest many individuals with aphasia can comprehend synthetic speech options available on popular operating systems. Further examination of synthetic speech use to support reading comprehension through text-to-speech technology is thus warranted. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Interventions for Speech Sound Disorders in Children

Science.gov (United States)

Williams, A. Lynn, Ed.; McLeod, Sharynne, Ed.; McCauley, Rebecca J., Ed.

2010-01-01

With detailed discussion and invaluable video footage of 23 treatment interventions for speech sound disorders (SSDs) in children, this textbook and DVD set should be part of every speech-language pathologist's professional preparation. Focusing on children with functional or motor-based speech disorders from early childhood through the early…

A video, text, and speech-driven realistic 3-d virtual head for human-machine interface.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Jun; Wang, Zeng-Fu

2015-05-01

A multiple inputs-driven realistic facial animation system based on 3-D virtual head for human-machine interface is proposed. The system can be driven independently by video, text, and speech, thus can interact with humans through diverse interfaces. The combination of parameterized model and muscular model is used to obtain a tradeoff between computational efficiency and high realism of 3-D facial animation. The online appearance model is used to track 3-D facial motion from video in the framework of particle filtering, and multiple measurements, i.e., pixel color value of input image and Gabor wavelet coefficient of illumination ratio image, are infused to reduce the influence of lighting and person dependence for the construction of online appearance model. The tri-phone model is used to reduce the computational consumption of visual co-articulation in speech synchronized viseme synthesis without sacrificing any performance. The objective and subjective experiments show that the system is suitable for human-machine interaction.

PREPARING TEXTUAL ELEMENTS OF BYOD TECHNOLOGIESIN THE WORD-ONLINE ENVIRONMENT TO SUPPORT ELEMENTARY SKILLS OF RUSSIAN SPEECH OF FOREIGN STUDENTS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Х Э Исмаилова

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The article considers some pedagogical and information technological aspects of the preparation and use of the Russian as a foreign language teacher copyrighted electronic manuals. The purpose of the development is to support the process of formation and development of the foreign students’ basic skills in Russian speech in the form of extracurricular activities with elements of BYOD technologies. As well as to form the basic elements of the intercultural communication in a multi-ethnic environment, tolerance and other components of communicative competence. The manual contains text, dedicated to the national holiday Navruz and a series of exercises. It is designed as the word-online document and hosted on the MS-OneDrive cloud disk. The scheme presented allows foreign students to use their own mobile devices to access the materials via the Internet. The information product was used for the preparation of the study group to attend extracurricular activities. In addition, an electronic document that is hosted on the teacher’s cloud drive can be linked in the e-textbooks and on the teacher’s web sites, for example the MOODLE type systems.

Filled pause refinement based on the pronunciation probability for lecture speech.

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Yan-Hua Long

Full Text Available Nowadays, although automatic speech recognition has become quite proficient in recognizing or transcribing well-prepared fluent speech, the transcription of speech that contains many disfluencies remains problematic, such as spontaneous conversational and lecture speech. Filled pauses (FPs are the most frequently occurring disfluencies in this type of speech. Most recent studies have shown that FPs are widely believed to increase the error rates for state-of-the-art speech transcription, primarily because most FPs are not well annotated or provided in training data transcriptions and because of the similarities in acoustic characteristics between FPs and some common non-content words. To enhance the speech transcription system, we propose a new automatic refinement approach to detect FPs in British English lecture speech transcription. This approach combines the pronunciation probabilities for each word in the dictionary and acoustic language model scores for FP refinement through a modified speech recognition forced-alignment framework. We evaluate the proposed approach on the Reith Lectures speech transcription task, in which only imperfect training transcriptions are available. Successful results are achieved for both the development and evaluation datasets. Acoustic models trained on different styles of speech genres have been investigated with respect to FP refinement. To further validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, speech transcription performance has also been examined using systems built on training data transcriptions with and without FP refinement.

A prepared speech in front of a pre-recorded audience: subjective, physiological, and neuroendocrine responses to the Leiden Public Speaking Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Westenberg, P Michiel; Bokhorst, Caroline L; Miers, Anne C; Sumter, Sindy R; Kallen, Victor L; van Pelt, Johannes; Blöte, Anke W

2009-10-01

This study describes a new public speaking protocol for youth. The main question asked whether a speech prepared at home and given in front of a pre-recorded audience creates a condition of social-evaluative threat. Findings showed that, on average, this task elicits a moderate stress response in a community sample of 83 12- to 15-year-old adolescents. During the speech, participants reported feeling more nervous and having higher heart rate and sweatiness of the hands than at baseline or recovery. Likewise, physiological (heart rate and skin conductance) and neuroendocrine (cortisol) activity were higher during the speech than at baseline or recovery. Additionally, an anticipation effect was observed: baseline levels were higher than recovery levels for most variables. Taking the anticipation and speech response together, a substantial cortisol response was observed for 55% of participants. The findings indicate that the Leiden Public Speaking Task might be particularly suited to investigate individual differences in sensitivity to social-evaluative situations.

FUSING SPEECH SIGNAL AND PALMPRINT FEATURES FOR AN SECURED AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM

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P.K. Mahesh

2011-11-01

Full Text Available In the application of Biometric authentication, personal identification is regarded as an effective method for automatic recognition, with a high confidence, a person’s identity. Using multimodal biometric systems we typically get better performance compare to single biometric modality. This paper proposes the multimodal biometrics system for identity verification using two traits, i.e., speech signal and palmprint. Integrating the palmprint and speech information increases robustness of person authentication. The proposed system is designed for applications where the training data contains a speech signal and palmprint. It is well known that the performance of person authentication using only speech signal or palmprint is deteriorated by feature changes with time. The final decision is made by fusion at matching score level architecture in which feature vectors are created independently for query measures and are then compared to the enrolment templates, which are stored during database preparation.

ACOUSTIC SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR MARATHI LANGUAGE USING SPHINX

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Aman Ankit

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Speech recognition or speech to text processing, is a process of recognizing human speech by the computer and converting into text. In speech recognition, transcripts are created by taking recordings of speech as audio and their text transcriptions. Speech based applications which include Natural Language Processing (NLP techniques are popular and an active area of research. Input to such applications is in natural language and output is obtained in natural language. Speech recognition mostly revolves around three approaches namely Acoustic phonetic approach, Pattern recognition approach and Artificial intelligence approach. Creation of acoustic model requires a large database of speech and training algorithms. The output of an ASR system is recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices. ASR today finds enormous application in tasks that require human machine interfaces like, voice dialing, and etc. Our key contribution in this paper is to create corpora for Marathi language and explore the use of Sphinx engine for automatic speech recognition

Effects of Dictation, Speech to Text, and Handwriting on the Written Composition of Elementary School English Language Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Arcon, Nina; Klein, Perry D.; Dombroski, Jill D.

2017-01-01

Previous research has shown that both dictation and speech-to-text (STT) software can increase the quality of writing for native English speakers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of these modalities on the written composition and cognitive load of elementary school English language learners (ELLs). In a within-subjects…

Speech Timing Deficit of Stuttering: Evidence from Contingent Negative Variations.

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Ning Ning

Full Text Available The aim of the present study was to investigate the speech preparation processes of adults who stutter (AWS. Fifteen AWS and fifteen adults with fluent speech (AFS participated in the experiment. The event-related potentials (ERPs were recorded in a foreperiod paradigm. The warning signal (S1 was a color square, and the following imperative stimulus (S2 was either a white square (the Go signal that required participants to name the color of S1 or a white dot (the NoGo signal that prevents participants from speaking. Three differences were found between AWS and AFS. First, the mean amplitude of the ERP component parietal positivity elicited by S1 (S1-P3 was smaller in AWS than in AFS, which implies that AWS may have deficits in investing working memory on phonological programming. Second, the topographic shift from the early phase to the late phase of contingent negative variation occurred earlier for AWS than for AFS, thus suggesting that the motor preparation process is promoted in AWS. Third, the NoGo effect in the ERP component parietal positivity elicited by S2 (S2-P3 was larger for AFS than for AWS, indicating that AWS have difficulties in inhibiting a planned speech response. These results provide a full picture of the speech preparation and response inhibition processes of AWS. The relationship among these three findings is discussed. However, as stuttering was not manipulated in this study, it is still unclear whether the effects are the causes or the results of stuttering. Further studies are suggested to explore the relationship between stuttering and the effects found in the present study.

The analysis of speech acts patterns in two Egyptian inaugural speeches

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Imad Hayif Sameer

2017-09-01

Full Text Available The theory of speech acts, which clarifies what people do when they speak, is not about individual words or sentences that form the basic elements of human communication, but rather about particular speech acts that are performed when uttering words. A speech act is the attempt at doing something purely by speaking. Many things can be done by speaking.  Speech acts are studied under what is called speech act theory, and belong to the domain of pragmatics. In this paper, two Egyptian inaugural speeches from El-Sadat and El-Sisi, belonging to different periods were analyzed to find out whether there were differences within this genre in the same culture or not. The study showed that there was a very small difference between these two speeches which were analyzed according to Searle’s theory of speech acts. In El Sadat’s speech, commissives came to occupy the first place. Meanwhile, in El–Sisi’s speech, assertives occupied the first place. Within the speeches of one culture, we can find that the differences depended on the circumstances that surrounded the elections of the Presidents at the time. Speech acts were tools they used to convey what they wanted and to obtain support from their audiences.

Speech Synthesis Applied to Language Teaching.

Science.gov (United States)

Sherwood, Bruce

1981-01-01

The experimental addition of speech output to computer-based Esperanto lessons using speech synthesized from text is described. Because of Esperanto's phonetic spelling and simple rhythm, it is particularly easy to describe the mechanisms of Esperanto synthesis. Attention is directed to how the text-to-speech conversion is performed and the ways…

Multisensory integration of speech sounds with letters vs. visual speech : only visual speech induces the mismatch negativity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Stekelenburg, J.J.; Keetels, M.N.; Vroomen, J.H.M.

2018-01-01

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the vision of lip movements can alter the perception of auditory speech syllables (McGurk effect). While there is ample evidence for integration of text and auditory speech, there are only a few studies on the orthographic equivalent of the McGurk effect.

TongueToSpeech (TTS): Wearable wireless assistive device for augmented speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Marjanovic, Nicholas; Piccinini, Giacomo; Kerr, Kevin; Esmailbeigi, Hananeh

2017-07-01

Speech is an important aspect of human communication; individuals with speech impairment are unable to communicate vocally in real time. Our team has developed the TongueToSpeech (TTS) device with the goal of augmenting speech communication for the vocally impaired. The proposed device is a wearable wireless assistive device that incorporates a capacitive touch keyboard interface embedded inside a discrete retainer. This device connects to a computer, tablet or a smartphone via Bluetooth connection. The developed TTS application converts text typed by the tongue into audible speech. Our studies have concluded that an 8-contact point configuration between the tongue and the TTS device would yield the best user precision and speed performance. On average using the TTS device inside the oral cavity takes 2.5 times longer than the pointer finger using a T9 (Text on 9 keys) keyboard configuration to type the same phrase. In conclusion, we have developed a discrete noninvasive wearable device that allows the vocally impaired individuals to communicate in real time.

Speech disorder prevention

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Miladis Fornaris-Méndez

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Language therapy has trafficked from a medical focus until a preventive focus. However, difficulties are evidenced in the development of this last task, because he is devoted bigger space to the correction of the disorders of the language. Because the speech disorders is the dysfunction with more frequently appearance, acquires special importance the preventive work that is developed to avoid its appearance. Speech education since early age of the childhood makes work easier for prevent the appearance of speech disorders in the children. The present work has as objective to offer different activities for the prevention of the speech disorders.

Oscillatory Brain Responses Reflect Anticipation during Comprehension of Speech Acts in Spoken Dialog

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Rosa S. Gisladottir

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Everyday conversation requires listeners to quickly recognize verbal actions, so-called speech acts, from the underspecified linguistic code and prepare a relevant response within the tight time constraints of turn-taking. The goal of this study was to determine the time-course of speech act recognition by investigating oscillatory EEG activity during comprehension of spoken dialog. Participants listened to short, spoken dialogs with target utterances that delivered three distinct speech acts (Answers, Declinations, Pre-offers. The targets were identical across conditions at lexico-syntactic and phonetic/prosodic levels but differed in the pragmatic interpretation of the speech act performed. Speech act comprehension was associated with reduced power in the alpha/beta bands just prior to Declination speech acts, relative to Answers and Pre-offers. In addition, we observed reduced power in the theta band during the beginning of Declinations, relative to Answers. Based on the role of alpha and beta desynchronization in anticipatory processes, the results are taken to indicate that anticipation plays a role in speech act recognition. Anticipation of speech acts could be critical for efficient turn-taking, allowing interactants to quickly recognize speech acts and respond within the tight time frame characteristic of conversation. The results show that anticipatory processes can be triggered by the characteristics of the interaction, including the speech act type.

Speech emotion recognition methods: A literature review

Science.gov (United States)

Basharirad, Babak; Moradhaseli, Mohammadreza

2017-10-01

Recently, attention of the emotional speech signals research has been boosted in human machine interfaces due to availability of high computation capability. There are many systems proposed in the literature to identify the emotional state through speech. Selection of suitable feature sets, design of a proper classifications methods and prepare an appropriate dataset are the main key issues of speech emotion recognition systems. This paper critically analyzed the current available approaches of speech emotion recognition methods based on the three evaluating parameters (feature set, classification of features, accurately usage). In addition, this paper also evaluates the performance and limitations of available methods. Furthermore, it highlights the current promising direction for improvement of speech emotion recognition systems.

A Comparison of Inter-Professional Education Programs in Preparing Prospective Teachers and Speech and Language Pathologists for Collaborative Language-Literacy Instruction

Science.gov (United States)

Wilson, Leanne; McNeill, Brigid; Gillon, Gail T.

2016-01-01

Ensuring teacher and speech and language pathology graduates are prepared to work collaboratively together to meet the diverse language literacy learning needs of children is an important goal. This study investigated the efficacy of a 3-h inter-professional education program focused on explicit instruction in the language skills that underpin…

Hate speech

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Anne Birgitta Nilsen

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The manifesto of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is based on the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory. This theory is a key starting point for hate speech amongst many right-wing extremists in Europe, but also has ramifications beyond these environments. In brief, proponents of the Eurabia theory claim that Muslims are occupying Europe and destroying Western culture, with the assistance of the EU and European governments. By contrast, members of Al-Qaeda and other extreme Islamists promote the conspiracy theory “the Crusade” in their hate speech directed against the West. Proponents of the latter theory argue that the West is leading a crusade to eradicate Islam and Muslims, a crusade that is similarly facilitated by their governments. This article presents analyses of texts written by right-wing extremists and Muslim extremists in an effort to shed light on how hate speech promulgates conspiracy theories in order to spread hatred and intolerance.The aim of the article is to contribute to a more thorough understanding of hate speech’s nature by applying rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis is chosen because it offers a means of understanding the persuasive power of speech. It is thus a suitable tool to describe how hate speech works to convince and persuade. The concepts from rhetorical theory used in this article are ethos, logos and pathos. The concept of ethos is used to pinpoint factors that contributed to Osama bin Laden's impact, namely factors that lent credibility to his promotion of the conspiracy theory of the Crusade. In particular, Bin Laden projected common sense, good morals and good will towards his audience. He seemed to have coherent and relevant arguments; he appeared to possess moral credibility; and his use of language demonstrated that he wanted the best for his audience.The concept of pathos is used to define hate speech, since hate speech targets its audience's emotions. In hate speech it is the

Illustrated Speech Anatomy.

Science.gov (United States)

Shearer, William M.

Written for students in the fields of speech correction and audiology, the text deals with the following: structures involved in respiration; the skeleton and the processes of inhalation and exhalation; phonation and pitch, the larynx, and esophageal speech; muscles involved in articulation; muscles involved in resonance; and the anatomy of the…

78 FR 49693 - Speech-to-Speech and Internet Protocol (IP) Speech-to-Speech Telecommunications Relay Services...

Science.gov (United States)

2013-08-15

...-Speech Services for Individuals with Hearing and Speech Disabilities, Report and Order (Order), document...] Speech-to-Speech and Internet Protocol (IP) Speech-to-Speech Telecommunications Relay Services; Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and Speech Disabilities...

Ordering Operations in Square Root Extractions, Analyzing Some Early Medieval Sanskrit Mathematical Texts with the Help of Speech Act Theory

Science.gov (United States)

Keller, Agathe

Procedures for extracting square roots written in Sanskrit in two treatises and their commentaries from the fifth to the twelfth centuries are explored with the help of Textology and Speech Act Theory. An analysis of the number and order of the steps presented in these texts is used to show that their aims were not limited to only describing how to carry out the algorithm. The intentions of authors of these Sanskrit mathematical texts are questioned by taking into account the expressivity of relationships established between the world and the text.1

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) based approach for speech therapy of aphasic patients: A review

Science.gov (United States)

Jamal, Norezmi; Shanta, Shahnoor; Mahmud, Farhanahani; Sha'abani, MNAH

2017-09-01

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art an automatic speech recognition (ASR) based approach for speech therapy of aphasic patients. Aphasia is a condition in which the affected person suffers from speech and language disorder resulting from a stroke or brain injury. Since there is a growing body of evidence indicating the possibility of improving the symptoms at an early stage, ASR based solutions are increasingly being researched for speech and language therapy. ASR is a technology that transfers human speech into transcript text by matching with the system's library. This is particularly useful in speech rehabilitation therapies as they provide accurate, real-time evaluation for speech input from an individual with speech disorder. ASR based approaches for speech therapy recognize the speech input from the aphasic patient and provide real-time feedback response to their mistakes. However, the accuracy of ASR is dependent on many factors such as, phoneme recognition, speech continuity, speaker and environmental differences as well as our depth of knowledge on human language understanding. Hence, the review examines recent development of ASR technologies and its performance for individuals with speech and language disorders.

Effect of speech rate variation on acoustic phone stability in Afrikaans speech recognition

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Badenhorst, JAC

2007-11-01

Full Text Available The authors analyse the effect of speech rate variation on Afrikaans phone stability from an acoustic perspective. Specifically they introduce two techniques for the acoustic analysis of speech rate variation, apply these techniques to an Afrikaans...

Study Guide for Teacher Certification Test in Speech and Language Pathology.

Science.gov (United States)

Umberger, Forrest G.

This study guide is designed for individuals preparing to take the Georgia Teacher Certification Test (TCT) in speech and language pathology. The test covers five subareas: (1) fundamentals of speech and language; (2) speech and language disorders; (3) related handicapping conditions; (4) hearing impairment; and (5) program management and…

Speech Enhancement by MAP Spectral Amplitude Estimation Using a Super-Gaussian Speech Model

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Lotter Thomas

2005-01-01

Full Text Available This contribution presents two spectral amplitude estimators for acoustical background noise suppression based on maximum a posteriori estimation and super-Gaussian statistical modelling of the speech DFT amplitudes. The probability density function of the speech spectral amplitude is modelled with a simple parametric function, which allows a high approximation accuracy for Laplace- or Gamma-distributed real and imaginary parts of the speech DFT coefficients. Also, the statistical model can be adapted to optimally fit the distribution of the speech spectral amplitudes for a specific noise reduction system. Based on the super-Gaussian statistical model, computationally efficient maximum a posteriori speech estimators are derived, which outperform the commonly applied Ephraim-Malah algorithm.

PRACTICING SPEECH THERAPY INTERVENTION FOR SOCIAL INTEGRATION OF CHILDREN WITH SPEECH DISORDERS

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Martin Ofelia POPESCU

2016-11-01

Full Text Available The article presents a concise speech correction intervention program in of dyslalia in conjunction with capacity development of intra, interpersonal and social integration of children with speech disorders. The program main objectives represent: the potential increasing of individual social integration by correcting speech disorders in conjunction with intra- and interpersonal capacity, the potential growth of children and community groups for social integration by optimizing the socio-relational context of children with speech disorder. In the program were included 60 children / students with dyslalia speech disorders (monomorphic and polymorphic dyslalia, from 11 educational institutions - 6 kindergartens and 5 schools / secondary schools, joined with inter-school logopedic centre (CLI from Targu Jiu city and areas of Gorj district. The program was implemented under the assumption that therapeutic-formative intervention to correct speech disorders and facilitate the social integration will lead, in combination with correct pronunciation disorders, to social integration optimization of children with speech disorders. The results conirm the hypothesis and gives facts about the intervention program eficiency.

Speech recognition: impact on workflow and report availability

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Glaser, C.; Trumm, C.; Nissen-Meyer, S.; Francke, M.; Kuettner, B.; Reiser, M.

2005-01-01

With ongoing technical refinements speech recognition systems (SRS) are becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to traditional methods of preparing and transcribing medical reports. The two main components of any SRS are the acoustic model and the language model. Features of modern SRS with continuous speech recognition are macros with individually definable texts and report templates as well as the option to navigate in a text or to control SRS or RIS functions by speech recognition. The best benefit from SRS can be obtained if it is integrated into a RIS/RIS-PACS installation. Report availability and time efficiency of the reporting process (related to recognition rate, time expenditure for editing and correcting a report) are the principal determinants of the clinical performance of any SRS. For practical purposes the recognition rate is estimated by the error rate (unit ''word''). Error rates range from 4 to 28%. Roughly 20% of them are errors in the vocabulary which may result in clinically relevant misinterpretation. It is thus mandatory to thoroughly correct any transcribed text as well as to continuously train and adapt the SRS vocabulary. The implementation of SRS dramatically improves report availability. This is most pronounced for CT and CR. However, the individual time expenditure for (SRS-based) reporting increased by 20-25% (CR) and according to literature data there is an increase by 30% for CT and MRI. The extent to which the transcription staff profits from SRS depends largely on its qualification. Online dictation implies a workload shift from the transcription staff to the reporting radiologist. (orig.) [de

Speech-to-Speech Relay Service

Science.gov (United States)

Consumer Guide Speech to Speech Relay Service Speech-to-Speech (STS) is one form of Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS). TRS is a service that allows persons with hearing and speech disabilities ...

Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for the Evaluation of Voice and Speech Disorders in Head and Neck Cancer

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Andreas Maier

2010-01-01

Full Text Available In patients suffering from head and neck cancer, speech intelligibility is often restricted. For assessment and outcome measurements, automatic speech recognition systems have previously been shown to be appropriate for objective and quick evaluation of intelligibility. In this study we investigate the applicability of the method to speech disorders caused by head and neck cancer. Intelligibility was quantified by speech recognition on recordings of a standard text read by 41 German laryngectomized patients with cancer of the larynx or hypopharynx and 49 German patients who had suffered from oral cancer. The speech recognition provides the percentage of correctly recognized words of a sequence, that is, the word recognition rate. Automatic evaluation was compared to perceptual ratings by a panel of experts and to an age-matched control group. Both patient groups showed significantly lower word recognition rates than the control group. Automatic speech recognition yielded word recognition rates which complied with experts' evaluation of intelligibility on a significant level. Automatic speech recognition serves as a good means with low effort to objectify and quantify the most important aspect of pathologic speech—the intelligibility. The system was successfully applied to voice and speech disorders.

The expressive potential in a dramatic text: Brecht's A Respectable Wedding

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Katarina Podbevšek

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The article discusses the linguistic shaping of a dramatic text and its influence on the text’s stage speech realisation, using the Slovenian translation of Brecht’s one-act play Malomeščanska svatba as an example. A dramatic text typically has a specific – and also graphically visible – textual and linguistic structure that indicates its speech intention. A linguistic analysis of Brecht’s text reveals a great speech potential, both in the stage directions (especially the stage directions for pauses, silence, spoken execution and in the dialogue (characteristic linguistic elements for spontaneous speech. A short comparison of the text with the stage speech performance shows that the actor used not only prosody (especially pauses to semantically enrich and rhythmically organise the written language, but also linguistic interventions into the lexical and syntactic structure (repetition, addition, omission, etc.. The great speech potential of the text thus stimulated the actor’s speech and interpretive creativity.

Human factors engineering of interfaces for speech and text in the office

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nes, van F.L.

1986-01-01

Current data-processing equipment almost exclusively uses one input medium: the keyboard, and one output medium: the visual display unit. An alternative to typing would be welcome in view of the effort needed to become proficient in typing; speech may provide this alternative if a proper spee

HMM adaptation for child speech synthesis using ASR data

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Govender, N

2015-11-01

Full Text Available . This paper reports on a feasibility study that was conducted to determine whether it is possible to synthesize good quality child voices using child speech data that was recorded for automatic speech recognition (ASR) purposes. A text-to-speech system...

Contrast in concept-to-speech generation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Theune, Mariet; Walker, M.; Rambow, O.

2002-01-01

In concept-to-speech systems, spoken output is generated on the basis of a text that has been produced by the system itself. In such systems, linguistic information from the text generation component may be exploited to achieve a higher prosodic quality of the speech output than can be obtained in a

Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for the Evaluation of Voice and Speech Disorders in Head and Neck Cancer

OpenAIRE

Andreas Maier; Tino Haderlein; Florian Stelzle; Elmar Nöth; Emeka Nkenke; Frank Rosanowski; Anne Schützenberger; Maria Schuster

2010-01-01

In patients suffering from head and neck cancer, speech intelligibility is often restricted. For assessment and outcome measurements, automatic speech recognition systems have previously been shown to be appropriate for objective and quick evaluation of intelligibility. In this study we investigate the applicability of the method to speech disorders caused by head and neck cancer. Intelligibility was quantified by speech recognition on recordings of a standard text read by 41 German laryngect...

Music expertise shapes audiovisual temporal integration windows for speech, sinewave speech and music

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Hwee Ling eLee

2014-08-01

Full Text Available This psychophysics study used musicians as a model to investigate whether musical expertise shapes the temporal integration window for audiovisual speech, sinewave speech or music. Musicians and non-musicians judged the audiovisual synchrony of speech, sinewave analogues of speech, and music stimuli at 13 audiovisual stimulus onset asynchronies (±360, ±300 ±240, ±180, ±120, ±60, and 0 ms. Further, we manipulated the duration of the stimuli by presenting sentences/melodies or syllables/tones. Critically, musicians relative to non-musicians exhibited significantly narrower temporal integration windows for both music and sinewave speech. Further, the temporal integration window for music decreased with the amount of music practice, but not with age of acquisition. In other words, the more musicians practiced piano in the past three years, the more sensitive they became to the temporal misalignment of visual and auditory signals. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that music practicing fine-tunes the audiovisual temporal integration window to various extents depending on the stimulus class. While the effect of piano practicing was most pronounced for music, it also generalized to other stimulus classes such as sinewave speech and to a marginally significant degree to natural speech.

A NOVEL APPROACH TO STUTTERED SPEECH CORRECTION

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Alim Sabur Ajibola

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Stuttered speech is a dysfluency rich speech, more prevalent in males than females. It has been associated with insufficient air pressure or poor articulation, even though the root causes are more complex. The primary features include prolonged speech and repetitive speech, while some of its secondary features include, anxiety, fear, and shame. This study used LPC analysis and synthesis algorithms to reconstruct the stuttered speech. The results were evaluated using cepstral distance, Itakura-Saito distance, mean square error, and likelihood ratio. These measures implied perfect speech reconstruction quality. ASR was used for further testing, and the results showed that all the reconstructed speech samples were perfectly recognized while only three samples of the original speech were perfectly recognized.

DEVELOPMENT AND DISORDERS OF SPEECH IN CHILDHOOD.

Science.gov (United States)

KARLIN, ISAAC W.; AND OTHERS

THE GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT, AND ABNORMALITIES OF SPEECH IN CHILDHOOD ARE DESCRIBED IN THIS TEXT DESIGNED FOR PEDIATRICIANS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, EDUCATORS, MEDICAL STUDENTS, THERAPISTS, PATHOLOGISTS, AND PARENTS. THE NORMAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE IS DISCUSSED, INCLUDING THEORIES ON THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH IN MAN AND FACTORS INFLUENCING THE NORMAL…

Perceived Speech Quality Estimation Using DTW Algorithm

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S. Arsenovski

2009-06-01

Full Text Available In this paper a method for speech quality estimation is evaluated by simulating the transfer of speech over packet switched and mobile networks. The proposed system uses Dynamic Time Warping algorithm for test and received speech comparison. Several tests have been made on a test speech sample of a single speaker with simulated packet (frame loss effects on the perceived speech. The achieved results have been compared with measured PESQ values on the used transmission channel and their correlation has been observed.

Non-linear frequency scale mapping for voice conversion in text-to-speech system with cepstral description

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Přibilová, Anna; Přibil, Jiří

2006-01-01

Roč. 48, č. 12 (2006), s. 1691-1703 ISSN 0167-6393 R&D Projects: GA MŠk(CZ) OC 277.001; GA AV ČR(CZ) 1QS108040569 Grant - others:MŠk(SK) 102/VTP/2000; MŠk(SK) 1/3107/06 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z20670512 Keywords : signal processing * speech processing * speech synthesis Subject RIV: JA - Electronics ; Optoelectronics, Electrical Engineering Impact factor: 0.678, year: 2006

An analysis of machine translation and speech synthesis in speech-to-speech translation system

OpenAIRE

Hashimoto, K.; Yamagishi, J.; Byrne, W.; King, S.; Tokuda, K.

2011-01-01

This paper provides an analysis of the impacts of machine translation and speech synthesis on speech-to-speech translation systems. The speech-to-speech translation system consists of three components: speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. Many techniques for integration of speech recognition and machine translation have been proposed. However, speech synthesis has not yet been considered. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on machine translation and speech synthesis, ...

Applications of Speech-to-Text Recognition and Computer-Aided Translation for Facilitating Cross-Cultural Learning through a Learning Activity: Issues and Their Solutions

Science.gov (United States)

Shadiev, Rustam; Wu, Ting-Ting; Sun, Ai; Huang, Yueh-Min

2018-01-01

In this study, 21 university students, who represented thirteen nationalities, participated in an online cross-cultural learning activity. The participants were engaged in interactions and exchanges carried out on Facebook® and Skype® platforms, and their multilingual communications were supported by speech-to-text recognition (STR) and…

APPRECIATING SPEECH THROUGH GAMING

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Mario T Carreon

2014-06-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses the Speech and Phoneme Recognition as an Educational Aid for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired (SPREAD application and the ongoing research on its deployment as a tool for motivating deaf and hearing impaired students to learn and appreciate speech. This application uses the Sphinx-4 voice recognition system to analyze the vocalization of the student and provide prompt feedback on their pronunciation. The packaging of the application as an interactive game aims to provide additional motivation for the deaf and hearing impaired student through visual motivation for them to learn and appreciate speech.

Exploring the role of brain oscillations in speech perception in noise: Intelligibility of isochronously retimed speech

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Vincent Aubanel

2016-08-01

Full Text Available A growing body of evidence shows that brain oscillations track speech. This mechanism is thought to maximise processing efficiency by allocating resources to important speech information, effectively parsing speech into units of appropriate granularity for further decoding. However, some aspects of this mechanism remain unclear. First, while periodicity is an intrinsic property of this physiological mechanism, speech is only quasi-periodic, so it is not clear whether periodicity would present an advantage in processing. Second, it is still a matter of debate which aspect of speech triggers or maintains cortical entrainment, from bottom-up cues such as fluctuations of the amplitude envelope of speech to higher level linguistic cues such as syntactic structure. We present data from a behavioural experiment assessing the effect of isochronous retiming of speech on speech perception in noise. Two types of anchor points were defined for retiming speech, namely syllable onsets and amplitude envelope peaks. For each anchor point type, retiming was implemented at two hierarchical levels, a slow time scale around 2.5 Hz and a fast time scale around 4 Hz. Results show that while any temporal distortion resulted in reduced speech intelligibility, isochronous speech anchored to P-centers (approximated by stressed syllable vowel onsets was significantly more intelligible than a matched anisochronous retiming, suggesting a facilitative role of periodicity defined on linguistically motivated units in processing speech in noise.

Didactic speech synthesizer – acoustic module, formants model

OpenAIRE

Teixeira, João Paulo; Fernandes, Anildo

2013-01-01

Text-to-speech synthesis is the main subject treated in this work. It will be presented the constitution of a generic text-to-speech system conversion, explained the functions of the various modules and described the development techniques using the formants model. The development of a didactic formant synthesiser under Matlab environment will also be described. This didactic synthesiser is intended for a didactic understanding of the formant model of speech production.

SynFace—Speech-Driven Facial Animation for Virtual Speech-Reading Support

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Giampiero Salvi

2009-01-01

Full Text Available This paper describes SynFace, a supportive technology that aims at enhancing audio-based spoken communication in adverse acoustic conditions by providing the missing visual information in the form of an animated talking head. Firstly, we describe the system architecture, consisting of a 3D animated face model controlled from the speech input by a specifically optimised phonetic recogniser. Secondly, we report on speech intelligibility experiments with focus on multilinguality and robustness to audio quality. The system, already available for Swedish, English, and Flemish, was optimised for German and for Swedish wide-band speech quality available in TV, radio, and Internet communication. Lastly, the paper covers experiments with nonverbal motions driven from the speech signal. It is shown that turn-taking gestures can be used to affect the flow of human-human dialogues. We have focused specifically on two categories of cues that may be extracted from the acoustic signal: prominence/emphasis and interactional cues (turn-taking/back-channelling.

HMM Adaptation for child speech synthesis

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Govender, Avashna

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based synthesis in combination with speaker adaptation has proven to be an approach that is well-suited for child speech synthesis. This paper describes the development and evaluation of different HMM-based child speech...

Neural pathways for visual speech perception

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Lynne E Bernstein

2014-12-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the questions, what levels of speech can be perceived visually, and how is visual speech represented by the brain? Review of the literature leads to the conclusions that every level of psycholinguistic speech structure (i.e., phonetic features, phonemes, syllables, words, and prosody can be perceived visually, although individuals differ in their abilities to do so; and that there are visual modality-specific representations of speech qua speech in higher-level vision brain areas. That is, the visual system represents the modal patterns of visual speech. The suggestion that the auditory speech pathway receives and represents visual speech is examined in light of neuroimaging evidence on the auditory speech pathways. We outline the generally agreed-upon organization of the visual ventral and dorsal pathways and examine several types of visual processing that might be related to speech through those pathways, specifically, face and body, orthography, and sign language processing. In this context, we examine the visual speech processing literature, which reveals widespread diverse patterns activity in posterior temporal cortices in response to visual speech stimuli. We outline a model of the visual and auditory speech pathways and make several suggestions: (1 The visual perception of speech relies on visual pathway representations of speech qua speech. (2 A proposed site of these representations, the temporal visual speech area (TVSA has been demonstrated in posterior temporal cortex, ventral and posterior to multisensory posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS. (3 Given that visual speech has dynamic and configural features, its representations in feedforward visual pathways are expected to integrate these features, possibly in TVSA.

Audiovisual Speech Synchrony Measure: Application to Biometrics

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Gérard Chollet

2007-01-01

Full Text Available Speech is a means of communication which is intrinsically bimodal: the audio signal originates from the dynamics of the articulators. This paper reviews recent works in the field of audiovisual speech, and more specifically techniques developed to measure the level of correspondence between audio and visual speech. It overviews the most common audio and visual speech front-end processing, transformations performed on audio, visual, or joint audiovisual feature spaces, and the actual measure of correspondence between audio and visual speech. Finally, the use of synchrony measure for biometric identity verification based on talking faces is experimented on the BANCA database.

Neural Entrainment to Speech Modulates Speech Intelligibility

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Riecke, Lars; Formisano, Elia; Sorger, Bettina; Baskent, Deniz; Gaudrain, Etienne

2018-01-01

Speech is crucial for communication in everyday life. Speech-brain entrainment, the alignment of neural activity to the slow temporal fluctuations (envelope) of acoustic speech input, is a ubiquitous element of current theories of speech processing. Associations between speech-brain entrainment and

Commencement Speech as a Hybrid Polydiscursive Practice

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Светлана Викторовна Иванова

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Discourse and media communication researchers pay attention to the fact that popular discursive and communicative practices have a tendency to hybridization and convergence. Discourse which is understood as language in use is flexible. Consequently, it turns out that one and the same text can represent several types of discourses. A vivid example of this tendency is revealed in American commencement speech / commencement address / graduation speech. A commencement speech is a speech university graduates are addressed with which in compliance with the modern trend is delivered by outstanding media personalities (politicians, athletes, actors, etc.. The objective of this study is to define the specificity of the realization of polydiscursive practices within commencement speech. The research involves discursive, contextual, stylistic and definitive analyses. Methodologically the study is based on the discourse analysis theory, in particular the notion of a discursive practice as a verbalized social practice makes up the conceptual basis of the research. This research draws upon a hundred commencement speeches delivered by prominent representatives of American society since 1980s till now. In brief, commencement speech belongs to institutional discourse public speech embodies. Commencement speech institutional parameters are well represented in speeches delivered by people in power like American and university presidents. Nevertheless, as the results of the research indicate commencement speech institutional character is not its only feature. Conceptual information analysis enables to refer commencement speech to didactic discourse as it is aimed at teaching university graduates how to deal with challenges life is rich in. Discursive practices of personal discourse are also actively integrated into the commencement speech discourse. More than that, existential discursive practices also find their way into the discourse under study. Commencement

Information of the public in an emergency and preparation of text blocks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Miska, H.

1997-01-01

In addition to the advance information, the EU also demands and regulates the information in an emergency. A prompt dissemination of the required news is facilitated by text blocks which can be prepared and harmonised with neighbouring administrations. Not before a press Center has been established, detailed texts may be compiled. (orig.) [de

Automatic Speech Recognition from Neural Signals: A Focused Review

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Christian Herff

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Speech interfaces have become widely accepted and are nowadays integrated in various real-life applications and devices. They have become a part of our daily life. However, speech interfaces presume the ability to produce intelligible speech, which might be impossible due to either loud environments, bothering bystanders or incapabilities to produce speech (i.e.~patients suffering from locked-in syndrome. For these reasons it would be highly desirable to not speak but to simply envision oneself to say words or sentences. Interfaces based on imagined speech would enable fast and natural communication without the need for audible speech and would give a voice to otherwise mute people.This focused review analyzes the potential of different brain imaging techniques to recognize speech from neural signals by applying Automatic Speech Recognition technology. We argue that modalities based on metabolic processes, such as functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, are less suited for Automatic Speech Recognition from neural signals due to low temporal resolution but are very useful for the investigation of the underlying neural mechanisms involved in speech processes. In contrast, electrophysiologic activity is fast enough to capture speech processes and is therefor better suited for ASR. Our experimental results indicate the potential of these signals for speech recognition from neural data with a focus on invasively measured brain activity (electrocorticography. As a first example of Automatic Speech Recognition techniques used from neural signals, we discuss the emph{Brain-to-text} system.

Speech Acquisition and Automatic Speech Recognition for Integrated Spacesuit Audio Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Yiteng; Chen, Jingdong; Chen, Shaoyan

2010-01-01

A voice-command human-machine interface system has been developed for spacesuit extravehicular activity (EVA) missions. A multichannel acoustic signal processing method has been created for distant speech acquisition in noisy and reverberant environments. This technology reduces noise by exploiting differences in the statistical nature of signal (i.e., speech) and noise that exists in the spatial and temporal domains. As a result, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy can be improved to the level at which crewmembers would find the speech interface useful. The developed speech human/machine interface will enable both crewmember usability and operational efficiency. It can enjoy a fast rate of data/text entry, small overall size, and can be lightweight. In addition, this design will free the hands and eyes of a suited crewmember. The system components and steps include beam forming/multi-channel noise reduction, single-channel noise reduction, speech feature extraction, feature transformation and normalization, feature compression, model adaption, ASR HMM (Hidden Markov Model) training, and ASR decoding. A state-of-the-art phoneme recognizer can obtain an accuracy rate of 65 percent when the training and testing data are free of noise. When it is used in spacesuits, the rate drops to about 33 percent. With the developed microphone array speech-processing technologies, the performance is improved and the phoneme recognition accuracy rate rises to 44 percent. The recognizer can be further improved by combining the microphone array and HMM model adaptation techniques and using speech samples collected from inside spacesuits. In addition, arithmetic complexity models for the major HMMbased ASR components were developed. They can help real-time ASR system designers select proper tasks when in the face of constraints in computational resources.

CAR2 - Czech Database of Car Speech

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P. Sovka

1999-12-01

Full Text Available This paper presents new Czech language two-channel (stereo speech database recorded in car environment. The created database was designed for experiments with speech enhancement for communication purposes and for the study and the design of a robust speech recognition systems. Tools for automated phoneme labelling based on Baum-Welch re-estimation were realised. The noise analysis of the car background environment was done.

E-text

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Finnemann, Niels Ole

2018-01-01

text can be defined by taking as point of departure the digital format in which everything is represented in the binary alphabet. While the notion of text, in most cases, lends itself to be independent of medium and embodiment, it is also often tacitly assumed that it is, in fact, modeled around...... the print medium, rather than written text or speech. In late 20th century, the notion of text was subject to increasing criticism as in the question raised within literary text theory: is there a text in this class? At the same time, the notion was expanded by including extra linguistic sign modalities...

THE MEANING OF THE PREVENTION WITH SPEECH THERAPY AS A IMPORTANT FAC-TOR FOR THE PROPER DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILDREN SPEECH

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S. FILIPOVA

1999-11-01

Full Text Available The paper presented some conscientious and results from the finished research which showing the meaning of the prevention with speech therapy in the development of the speech. The research was done at Negotino and with that are shown the most frequent speech deficiency of the children at preschool age.

Objective voice and speech analysis of persons with chronic hoarseness by prosodic analysis of speech samples.

Science.gov (United States)

Haderlein, Tino; Döllinger, Michael; Matoušek, Václav; Nöth, Elmar

2016-10-01

Automatic voice assessment is often performed using sustained vowels. In contrast, speech analysis of read-out texts can be applied to voice and speech assessment. Automatic speech recognition and prosodic analysis were used to find regression formulae between automatic and perceptual assessment of four voice and four speech criteria. The regression was trained with 21 men and 62 women (average age 49.2 years) and tested with another set of 24 men and 49 women (48.3 years), all suffering from chronic hoarseness. They read the text 'Der Nordwind und die Sonne' ('The North Wind and the Sun'). Five voice and speech therapists evaluated the data on 5-point Likert scales. Ten prosodic and recognition accuracy measures (features) were identified which describe all the examined criteria. Inter-rater correlation within the expert group was between r = 0.63 for the criterion 'match of breath and sense units' and r = 0.87 for the overall voice quality. Human-machine correlation was between r = 0.40 for the match of breath and sense units and r = 0.82 for intelligibility. The perceptual ratings of different criteria were highly correlated with each other. Likewise, the feature sets modeling the criteria were very similar. The automatic method is suitable for assessing chronic hoarseness in general and for subgroups of functional and organic dysphonia. In its current version, it is almost as reliable as a randomly picked rater from a group of voice and speech therapists.

Speech Act Theory and the Concept of Intention in Literary Criticism

OpenAIRE

García Landa, José Angel

2011-01-01

The aim of this paper is to trace the outline of a speech act theory of literature, taking into account the work of critics who react against the prevailing anti-intentionalist schools of criticism, such as the New Criticism, some versions of structuralism, and deconstruction. The intentionalist critics prepare the ground for a theory of literary discourse considered as a speech act, since it is known that the concept of intention is central to the analysis of speech acts. Such a theory of li...

Inner Speech's Relationship With Overt Speech in Poststroke Aphasia.

Science.gov (United States)

Stark, Brielle C; Geva, Sharon; Warburton, Elizabeth A

2017-09-18

Relatively preserved inner speech alongside poor overt speech has been documented in some persons with aphasia (PWA), but the relationship of overt speech with inner speech is still largely unclear, as few studies have directly investigated these factors. The present study investigates the relationship of relatively preserved inner speech in aphasia with selected measures of language and cognition. Thirty-eight persons with chronic aphasia (27 men, 11 women; average age 64.53 ± 13.29 years, time since stroke 8-111 months) were classified as having relatively preserved inner and overt speech (n = 21), relatively preserved inner speech with poor overt speech (n = 8), or not classified due to insufficient measurements of inner and/or overt speech (n = 9). Inner speech scores (by group) were correlated with selected measures of language and cognition from the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (Swinburn, Porter, & Al, 2004). The group with poor overt speech showed a significant relationship of inner speech with overt naming (r = .95, p speech and language and cognition factors were not significant for the group with relatively good overt speech. As in previous research, we show that relatively preserved inner speech is found alongside otherwise severe production deficits in PWA. PWA with poor overt speech may rely more on preserved inner speech for overt picture naming (perhaps due to shared resources with verbal working memory) and for written picture description (perhaps due to reliance on inner speech due to perceived task difficulty). Assessments of inner speech may be useful as a standard component of aphasia screening, and therapy focused on improving and using inner speech may prove clinically worthwhile. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5303542.

Chinese legal texts – Quantitative Description

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Ľuboš GAJDOŠ

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The aim of the paper is to provide a quantitative description of legal Chinese. This study adopts the approach of corpus-based analyses and it shows basic statistical parameters of legal texts in Chinese, namely the length of a sentence, the proportion of part of speech etc. The research is conducted on the Chinese monolingual corpus Hanku. The paper also discusses the issues of statistical data processing from various corpora, e.g. the tokenisation and part of speech tagging and their relevance to study of registers variation.

Digitized Ethnic Hate Speech: Understanding Effects of Digital Media Hate Speech on Citizen Journalism in Kenya

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Stephen Gichuhi Kimotho

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Ethnicity in Kenya permeates all spheres of life. However, it is in politics that ethnicity is most visible. Election time in Kenya often leads to ethnic competition and hatred, often expressed through various media. Ethnic hate speech characterized the 2007 general elections in party rallies and through text messages, emails, posters and leaflets. This resulted in widespread skirmishes that left over 1200 people dead, and many displaced (KNHRC, 2008. In 2013, however, the new battle zone was the war of words on social media platform. More than any other time in Kenyan history, Kenyans poured vitriolic ethnic hate speech through digital media like Facebook, tweeter and blogs. Although scholars have studied the role and effects of the mainstream media like television and radio in proliferating the ethnic hate speech in Kenya (Michael Chege, 2008; Goldstein & Rotich, 2008a; Ismail & Deane, 2008; Jacqueline Klopp & Prisca Kamungi, 2007, little has been done in regard to social media.  This paper investigated the nature of digitized hate speech by: describing the forms of ethnic hate speech on social media in Kenya; the effects of ethnic hate speech on Kenyan’s perception of ethnic entities; ethnic conflict and ethics of citizen journalism. This study adopted a descriptive interpretive design, and utilized Austin’s Speech Act Theory, which explains use of language to achieve desired purposes and direct behaviour (Tarhom & Miracle, 2013. Content published between January and April 2013 from six purposefully identified blogs was analysed. Questionnaires were used to collect data from university students as they form a good sample of Kenyan population, are most active on social media and are drawn from all parts of the country. Qualitative data were analysed using NVIVO 10 software, while responses from the questionnaire were analysed using IBM SPSS version 21. The findings indicated that Facebook and Twitter were the main platforms used to

Informational Text and the CCSS

Science.gov (United States)

Aspen Institute, 2012

2012-01-01

What constitutes an informational text covers a broad swath of different types of texts. Biographies & memoirs, speeches, opinion pieces & argumentative essays, and historical, scientific or technical accounts of a non-narrative nature are all included in what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) envisions as informational text. Also included…

SPEECH VISUALIZATION SISTEM AS A BASIS FOR SPEECH TRAINING AND COMMUNICATION AIDS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Oliana KRSTEVA

1997-09-01

Full Text Available One receives much more information through a visual sense than through a tactile one. However, most visual aids for hearing-impaired persons are not wearable because it is difficult to make them compact and it is not a best way to mask always their vision.Generally it is difficult to get the integrated patterns by a single mathematical transform of signals, such as a Foruier transform. In order to obtain the integrated pattern speech parameters should be carefully extracted by an analysis according as each parameter, and a visual pattern, which can intuitively be understood by anyone, must be synthesized from them. Successful integration of speech parameters will never disturb understanding of individual features, so that the system can be used for speech training and communication.

Speech pathology in ancient India--a review of Sanskrit literature.

Science.gov (United States)

Savithri, S R

1987-12-01

This paper aims at highlighting the knowledge of the Sanskrit scholars of ancient times in the field of speech and language pathology. The information collected here is mainly from the Sanskrit texts written between 2000 B.C. and 1633 A.D. Some aspects of speech and language that have been dealt with in this review have been elaborately described in the original Sanskrit texts. The present paper, however, being limited in its scope, reviews only the essential facts, but not the details. The purpose is only to give a glimpse of the knowledge that the Sanskrit scholars of those times possessed. In brief, this paper is a review of Sanskrit literature for information on the origin and development of speech and language, speech production, normality of speech and language, and disorders of speech and language and their treatment.

Musician advantage for speech-on-speech perception

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Başkent, Deniz; Gaudrain, Etienne

Evidence for transfer of musical training to better perception of speech in noise has been mixed. Unlike speech-in-noise, speech-on-speech perception utilizes many of the skills that musical training improves, such as better pitch perception and stream segregation, as well as use of higher-level

The software for automatic creation of the formal grammars used by speech recognition, computer vision, editable text conversion systems, and some new functions

Science.gov (United States)

Kardava, Irakli; Tadyszak, Krzysztof; Gulua, Nana; Jurga, Stefan

2017-02-01

For more flexibility of environmental perception by artificial intelligence it is needed to exist the supporting software modules, which will be able to automate the creation of specific language syntax and to make a further analysis for relevant decisions based on semantic functions. According of our proposed approach, of which implementation it is possible to create the couples of formal rules of given sentences (in case of natural languages) or statements (in case of special languages) by helping of computer vision, speech recognition or editable text conversion system for further automatic improvement. In other words, we have developed an approach, by which it can be achieved to significantly improve the training process automation of artificial intelligence, which as a result will give us a higher level of self-developing skills independently from us (from users). At the base of our approach we have developed a software demo version, which includes the algorithm and software code for the entire above mentioned component's implementation (computer vision, speech recognition and editable text conversion system). The program has the ability to work in a multi - stream mode and simultaneously create a syntax based on receiving information from several sources.

Development and Testing of an Automated 4-Day Text Messaging Guidance as an Aid for Improving Colonoscopy Preparation.

Science.gov (United States)

Walter, Benjamin Michael; Klare, Peter; Neu, Bruno; Schmid, Roland M; von Delius, Stefan

2016-06-21

In gastroenterology a sufficient colon cleansing improves adenoma detection rate and prevents the need for preterm repeat colonoscopies due to invalid preparation. It has been shown that patient education is of major importance for improvement of colon cleansing. Objective of this study was to assess the function of an automated text messaging (short message service, SMS)-supported colonoscopy preparation starting 4 days before colonoscopy appointment. After preevaluation to assess mobile phone usage in the patient population for relevance of this approach, a Web-based, automated SMS text messaging system was developed, following which a single-center feasibility study at a tertiary care center was performed. Patients scheduled for outpatient colonoscopy were invited to participate. Patients enrolled in the study group received automated information about dietary recommendations and bowel cleansing during colonoscopy preparation. Data of outpatient colonoscopies with regular preparation procedure were used for pair matching and served as control. Primary end point was feasibility of SMS text messaging support in colonoscopy preparation assessed as stable and satisfactory function of the system. Secondary end points were quality of bowel preparation according to the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale (BBPS) and patient satisfaction with SMS text messaging-provided information assessed by a questionnaire. Web-based SMS text messaging-supported colonoscopy preparation was successful and feasible in 19 of 20 patients. Mean (standard error of the mean, SEM) total BBPS score was slightly higher in the SMS group than in the control group (7.3, SEM 0.3 vs 6.4, SEM 0.2) and for each colonic region (left, transverse, and right colon). Patient satisfaction regarding SMS text messaging-based information was high. Using SMS for colonoscopy preparation with 4 days' guidance including dietary recommendation is a new approach to improve colonoscopy preparation. Quality of colonoscopy

The speech signal segmentation algorithm using pitch synchronous analysis

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Amirgaliyev Yedilkhan

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Parameterization of the speech signal using the algorithms of analysis synchronized with the pitch frequency is discussed. Speech parameterization is performed by the average number of zero transitions function and the signal energy function. Parameterization results are used to segment the speech signal and to isolate the segments with stable spectral characteristics. Segmentation results can be used to generate a digital voice pattern of a person or be applied in the automatic speech recognition. Stages needed for continuous speech segmentation are described.

The Effect of English Verbal Songs on Connected Speech Aspects of Adult English Learners’ Speech Production

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Farshid Tayari Ashtiani

2015-02-01

Full Text Available The present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of English verbal songs on connected speech aspects of adult English learners’ speech production. 40 participants were selected based on the results of their performance in a piloted and validated version of NELSON test given to 60 intermediate English learners in a language institute in Tehran. Then they were equally distributed in two control and experimental groups and received a validated pretest of reading aloud and speaking in English. Afterward, the treatment was performed in 18 sessions by singing preselected songs culled based on some criteria such as popularity, familiarity, amount, and speed of speech delivery, etc. In the end, the posttests of reading aloud and speaking in English were administered. The results revealed that the treatment had statistically positive effects on the connected speech aspects of English learners’ speech production at statistical .05 level of significance. Meanwhile, the results represented that there was not any significant difference between the experimental group’s mean scores on the posttests of reading aloud and speaking. It was thus concluded that providing the EFL learners with English verbal songs could positively affect connected speech aspects of both modes of speech production, reading aloud and speaking. The Findings of this study have pedagogical implications for language teachers to be more aware and knowledgeable of the benefits of verbal songs to promote speech production of language learners in terms of naturalness and fluency. Keywords: English Verbal Songs, Connected Speech, Speech Production, Reading Aloud, Speaking

Combined Audience and Video Feedback With Cognitive Review Improves State Anxiety and Self-Perceptions During Speech Tasks in Socially Anxious Individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Junwen; McLean, Jordan E; Kemps, Eva

2018-03-01

This study investigated the effects of combined audience feedback with video feedback plus cognitive preparation, and cognitive review (enabling deeper processing of feedback) on state anxiety and self-perceptions including perception of performance and perceived probability of negative evaluation in socially anxious individuals during a speech performance. One hundred and forty socially anxious students were randomly assigned to four conditions: Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback + Audience Feedback + Cognitive Review (CP+VF+AF+CR), Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback + Cognitive Review (CP+VF+CR), Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback only (CP+VF), and Control. They were asked to deliver two impromptu speeches that were evaluated by confederates. Participants' levels of anxiety and self-perceptions pertaining to the speech task were assessed before and after feedback, and after the second speech. Compared to participants in the other conditions, participants in the CP+VF+AF+CR condition reported a significant decrease in their state anxiety and perceived probability of negative evaluation scores, and a significant increase in their positive perception of speech performance from before to after the feedback. These effects generalized to the second speech. Our results suggest that adding audience feedback to video feedback plus cognitive preparation and cognitive review may improve the effects of existing video feedback procedures in reducing anxiety symptoms and distorted self-representations in socially anxious individuals. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Robust digital processing of speech signals

CERN Document Server

Kovacevic, Branko; Veinović, Mladen; Marković, Milan

2017-01-01

This book focuses on speech signal phenomena, presenting a robustification of the usual speech generation models with regard to the presumed types of excitation signals, which is equivalent to the introduction of a class of nonlinear models and the corresponding criterion functions for parameter estimation. Compared to the general class of nonlinear models, such as various neural networks, these models possess good properties of controlled complexity, the option of working in “online” mode, as well as a low information volume for efficient speech encoding and transmission. Providing comprehensive insights, the book is based on the authors’ research, which has already been published, supplemented by additional texts discussing general considerations of speech modeling, linear predictive analysis and robust parameter estimation.

Syntactic error modeling and scoring normalization in speech recognition: Error modeling and scoring normalization in the speech recognition task for adult literacy training

Science.gov (United States)

Olorenshaw, Lex; Trawick, David

1991-01-01

The purpose was to develop a speech recognition system to be able to detect speech which is pronounced incorrectly, given that the text of the spoken speech is known to the recognizer. Better mechanisms are provided for using speech recognition in a literacy tutor application. Using a combination of scoring normalization techniques and cheater-mode decoding, a reasonable acceptance/rejection threshold was provided. In continuous speech, the system was tested to be able to provide above 80 pct. correct acceptance of words, while correctly rejecting over 80 pct. of incorrectly pronounced words.

Re-Presenting Subversive Songs: Applying Strategies for Invention and Arrangement to Nontraditional Speech Texts

Science.gov (United States)

Charlesworth, Dacia

2010-01-01

Invention deals with the content of a speech, arrangement involves placing the content in an order that is most strategic, style focuses on selecting linguistic devices, such as metaphor, to make the message more appealing, memory assists the speaker in delivering the message correctly, and delivery ideally enables great reception of the message.…

Speech endpoint detection with non-language speech sounds for generic speech processing applications

Science.gov (United States)

McClain, Matthew; Romanowski, Brian

2009-05-01

Non-language speech sounds (NLSS) are sounds produced by humans that do not carry linguistic information. Examples of these sounds are coughs, clicks, breaths, and filled pauses such as "uh" and "um" in English. NLSS are prominent in conversational speech, but can be a significant source of errors in speech processing applications. Traditionally, these sounds are ignored by speech endpoint detection algorithms, where speech regions are identified in the audio signal prior to processing. The ability to filter NLSS as a pre-processing step can significantly enhance the performance of many speech processing applications, such as speaker identification, language identification, and automatic speech recognition. In order to be used in all such applications, NLSS detection must be performed without the use of language models that provide knowledge of the phonology and lexical structure of speech. This is especially relevant to situations where the languages used in the audio are not known apriori. We present the results of preliminary experiments using data from American and British English speakers, in which segments of audio are classified as language speech sounds (LSS) or NLSS using a set of acoustic features designed for language-agnostic NLSS detection and a hidden-Markov model (HMM) to model speech generation. The results of these experiments indicate that the features and model used are capable of detection certain types of NLSS, such as breaths and clicks, while detection of other types of NLSS such as filled pauses will require future research.

Song and speech: examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability

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Markus eChristiner

2013-11-01

Full Text Available In previous research on speech imitation, musicality and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Fourty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64 % of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66 % of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi could be explained by working memory together with a singer’s sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and sound memory with singing fitting better into the category of "speech" on the productive level and "music" on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways. 1. Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. 2. Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. 3. The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory short term memory.

Brain-to-text: Decoding spoken phrases from phone representations in the brain

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Christian eHerff

2015-06-01

Full Text Available It has long been speculated whether communication between humans and machines based on natural speech related cortical activity is possible. Over the past decade, studies have suggested that it is feasible to recognize isolated aspects of speech from neural signals, such as auditory features, phones or one of a few isolated words. However, until now it remained an unsolved challenge to decode continuously spoken speech from the neural substrate associated with speech and language processing. Here, we show for the first time that continuously spoken speech can be decoded into the expressed words from intracranial electrocorticographic (ECoG recordings. Specifically, we implemented a system, which we call Brain-To-Text that models single phones, employs techniques from automatic speech recognition (ASR, and thereby transforms brain activity while speaking into the corresponding textual representation. Our results demonstrate that our system achieved word error rates as low as 25% and phone error rates below 50%. Additionally, our approach contributes to the current understanding of the neural basis of continuous speech production by identifying those cortical regions that hold substantial information about individual phones. In conclusion, the Brain-To-Text system described in this paper represents an important step towards human-machine communication based on imagined speech.

Tutorial: Speech Assessment for Multilingual Children Who Do Not Speak the Same Language(s) as the Speech-Language Pathologist.

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McLeod, Sharynne; Verdon, Sarah

2017-08-15

The aim of this tutorial is to support speech-language pathologists (SLPs) undertaking assessments of multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders, particularly children who speak languages that are not shared with their SLP. The tutorial was written by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech, which comprises 46 researchers (SLPs, linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists) who have worked in 43 countries and used 27 languages in professional practice. Seventeen panel members met for a 1-day workshop to identify key points for inclusion in the tutorial, 26 panel members contributed to writing this tutorial, and 34 members contributed to revising this tutorial online (some members contributed to more than 1 task). This tutorial draws on international research evidence and professional expertise to provide a comprehensive overview of working with multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders. This overview addresses referral, case history, assessment, analysis, diagnosis, and goal setting and the SLP's cultural competence and preparation for working with interpreters and multicultural support workers and dealing with organizational and government barriers to and facilitators of culturally competent practice. The issues raised in this tutorial are applied in a hypothetical case study of an English-speaking SLP's assessment of a multilingual Cantonese- and English-speaking 4-year-old boy. Resources are listed throughout the tutorial.

Development of a System for Automatic Recognition of Speech

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Roman Jarina

2003-01-01

Full Text Available The article gives a review of a research on processing and automatic recognition of speech signals (ARR at the Department of Telecommunications of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of iilina. On-going research is oriented to speech parametrization using 2-dimensional cepstral analysis, and to an application of HMMs and neural networks for speech recognition in Slovak language. The article summarizes achieved results and outlines future orientation of our research in automatic speech recognition.

Current Policies and New Directions for Speech-Language Pathology Assistants.

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Paul-Brown, Diane; Goldberg, Lynette R

2001-01-01

This article provides an overview of current American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) policies for the appropriate use and supervision of speech-language pathology assistants with an emphasis on the need to preserve the role of fully qualified speech-language pathologists in the service delivery system. Seven challenging issues surrounding the appropriate use of speech-language pathology assistants are considered. These include registering assistants and approving training programs; membership in ASHA; discrepancies between state requirements and ASHA policies; preparation for serving diverse multicultural, bilingual, and international populations; supervision considerations; funding and reimbursement for assistants; and perspectives on career-ladder/bachelor-level personnel. The formation of a National Leadership Council is proposed to develop a coordinated strategic plan for addressing these controversial and potentially divisive issues related to speech-language pathology assistants. This council would implement strategies for future development in the areas of professional education pertaining to assistant-level supervision, instruction of assistants, communication networks, policy development, research, and the dissemination/promotion of information regarding assistants.

Speech versus singing: Infants choose happier sounds

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Marieve eCorbeil

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Infants prefer speech to non-vocal sounds and to non-human vocalizations, and they prefer happy-sounding speech to neutral speech. They also exhibit an interest in singing, but there is little knowledge of their relative interest in speech and singing. The present study explored infants’ attention to unfamiliar audio samples of speech and singing. In Experiment 1, infants 4-13 months of age were exposed to happy-sounding infant-directed speech versus hummed lullabies by the same woman. They listened significantly longer to the speech, which had considerably greater acoustic variability and expressiveness, than to the lullabies. In Experiment 2, infants of comparable age who heard the lyrics of a Turkish children’s song spoken versus sung in a joyful/happy manner did not exhibit differential listening. Infants in Experiment 3 heard the happily sung lyrics of the Turkish children’s song versus a version that was spoken in an adult-directed or affectively neutral manner. They listened significantly longer to the sung version. Overall, happy voice quality rather than vocal mode (speech or singing was the principal contributor to infant attention, regardless of age.

Automatic detection of hate speech in text: an overview of the topic and dataset annotation with hierarchical classes

OpenAIRE

Paula Cristina Teixeira Fortuna

2017-01-01

Nowadays people are using more and more social networks to communicate their opinions, share information and experiences. In social networks people have the feeling of being deindividualized and can incur more frequently in aggressive communication. In this context, it is important that government and social networks platforms have tools to detect hate speech because it is harmful to its targets. In our work we investigate the problem of detecting hate speech online. Our first goal is to make...

Atypical speech versus non-speech detection and discrimination in 4- to 6- yr old children with autism spectrum disorder: An ERP study.

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Alena Galilee

Full Text Available Previous event-related potential (ERP research utilizing oddball stimulus paradigms suggests diminished processing of speech versus non-speech sounds in children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD. However, brain mechanisms underlying these speech processing abnormalities, and to what extent they are related to poor language abilities in this population remain unknown. In the current study, we utilized a novel paired repetition paradigm in order to investigate ERP responses associated with the detection and discrimination of speech and non-speech sounds in 4- to 6-year old children with ASD, compared with gender and verbal age matched controls. ERPs were recorded while children passively listened to pairs of stimuli that were either both speech sounds, both non-speech sounds, speech followed by non-speech, or non-speech followed by speech. Control participants exhibited N330 match/mismatch responses measured from temporal electrodes, reflecting speech versus non-speech detection, bilaterally, whereas children with ASD exhibited this effect only over temporal electrodes in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, while the control groups exhibited match/mismatch effects at approximately 600 ms (central N600, temporal P600 when a non-speech sound was followed by a speech sound, these effects were absent in the ASD group. These findings suggest that children with ASD fail to activate right hemisphere mechanisms, likely associated with social or emotional aspects of speech detection, when distinguishing non-speech from speech stimuli. Together, these results demonstrate the presence of atypical speech versus non-speech processing in children with ASD when compared with typically developing children matched on verbal age.

Dysarthric Bengali speech: A neurolinguistic study

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Chakraborty N

2008-01-01

Full Text Available Background and Aims: Dysarthria affects linguistic domains such as respiration, phonation, articulation, resonance and prosody due to upper motor neuron, lower motor neuron, cerebellar or extrapyramidal tract lesions. Although Bengali is one of the major languages globally, dysarthric Bengali speech has not been subjected to neurolinguistic analysis. We attempted such an analysis with the goal of identifying the speech defects in native Bengali speakers in various types of dysarthria encountered in neurological disorders. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted with 66 dysarthric subjects, predominantly middle-aged males, attending the Neuromedicine OPD of a tertiary care teaching hospital in Kolkata. Materials and Methods: After neurological examination, an instrument comprising commonly used Bengali words and a text block covering all Bengali vowels and consonants were used to carry out perceptual analysis of dysarthric speech. From recorded speech, 24 parameters pertaining to five linguistic domains were assessed. The Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance, Chi-square test and Fisher′s exact test were used for analysis. Results: The dysarthria types were spastic (15 subjects, flaccid (10, mixed (12, hypokinetic (12, hyperkinetic (9 and ataxic (8. Of the 24 parameters assessed, 15 were found to occur in one or more types with a prevalence of at least 25%. Imprecise consonant was the most frequently occurring defect in most dysarthrias. The spectrum of defects in each type was identified. Some parameters were capable of distinguishing between types. Conclusions: This perceptual analysis has defined linguistic defects likely to be encountered in dysarthric Bengali speech in neurological disorders. The speech distortion can be described and distinguished by a limited number of parameters. This may be of importance to the speech therapist and neurologist in planning rehabilitation and further management.

Passion and Preparation in the Basic Course: The Influence of Students' Ego-Involvement with Speech Topics and Preparation Time on Public-Speaking Grades

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Mazer, Joseph P.; Titsworth, Scott

2012-01-01

Authors of basic public-speaking course textbooks frequently encourage students to select speech topics in which they have vested interest, care deeply about, and hold strong opinions and beliefs. This study explores students' level of ego-involvement with informative and persuasive speech topics, examines possible ego-involvement predictors of…

Collecting and evaluating speech recognition corpora for nine Southern Bantu languages

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Badenhorst, JAC

2009-03-01

Full Text Available The authors describes the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is relatively...

Music and Speech Perception in Children Using Sung Speech.

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Nie, Yingjiu; Galvin, John J; Morikawa, Michael; André, Victoria; Wheeler, Harley; Fu, Qian-Jie

2018-01-01

This study examined music and speech perception in normal-hearing children with some or no musical training. Thirty children (mean age = 11.3 years), 15 with and 15 without formal music training participated in the study. Music perception was measured using a melodic contour identification (MCI) task; stimuli were a piano sample or sung speech with a fixed timbre (same word for each note) or a mixed timbre (different words for each note). Speech perception was measured in quiet and in steady noise using a matrix-styled sentence recognition task; stimuli were naturally intonated speech or sung speech with a fixed pitch (same note for each word) or a mixed pitch (different notes for each word). Significant musician advantages were observed for MCI and speech in noise but not for speech in quiet. MCI performance was significantly poorer with the mixed timbre stimuli. Speech performance in noise was significantly poorer with the fixed or mixed pitch stimuli than with spoken speech. Across all subjects, age at testing and MCI performance were significantly correlated with speech performance in noise. MCI and speech performance in quiet was significantly poorer for children than for adults from a related study using the same stimuli and tasks; speech performance in noise was significantly poorer for young than for older children. Long-term music training appeared to benefit melodic pitch perception and speech understanding in noise in these pediatric listeners.

Building Searchable Collections of Enterprise Speech Data.

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Cooper, James W.; Viswanathan, Mahesh; Byron, Donna; Chan, Margaret

The study has applied speech recognition and text-mining technologies to a set of recorded outbound marketing calls and analyzed the results. Since speaker-independent speech recognition technology results in a significantly lower recognition rate than that found when the recognizer is trained for a particular speaker, a number of post-processing…

Unvoiced Speech Recognition Using Tissue-Conductive Acoustic Sensor

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Heracleous Panikos

2007-01-01

Full Text Available We present the use of stethoscope and silicon NAM (nonaudible murmur microphones in automatic speech recognition. NAM microphones are special acoustic sensors, which are attached behind the talker's ear and can capture not only normal (audible speech, but also very quietly uttered speech (nonaudible murmur. As a result, NAM microphones can be applied in automatic speech recognition systems when privacy is desired in human-machine communication. Moreover, NAM microphones show robustness against noise and they might be used in special systems (speech recognition, speech transform, etc. for sound-impaired people. Using adaptation techniques and a small amount of training data, we achieved for a 20 k dictation task a word accuracy for nonaudible murmur recognition in a clean environment. In this paper, we also investigate nonaudible murmur recognition in noisy environments and the effect of the Lombard reflex on nonaudible murmur recognition. We also propose three methods to integrate audible speech and nonaudible murmur recognition using a stethoscope NAM microphone with very promising results.

Apraxia of Speech

Science.gov (United States)

... Health Info » Voice, Speech, and Language Apraxia of Speech On this page: What is apraxia of speech? ... about apraxia of speech? What is apraxia of speech? Apraxia of speech (AOS)—also known as acquired ...

Nobel peace speech

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Joshua FRYE

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The Nobel Peace Prize has long been considered the premier peace prize in the world. According to Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Nobel Committee, of the 300 some peace prizes awarded worldwide, “none is in any way as well known and as highly respected as the Nobel Peace Prize” (Lundestad, 2001. Nobel peace speech is a unique and significant international site of public discourse committed to articulating the universal grammar of peace. Spanning over 100 years of sociopolitical history on the world stage, Nobel Peace Laureates richly represent an important cross-section of domestic and international issues increasingly germane to many publics. Communication scholars’ interest in this rhetorical genre has increased in the past decade. Yet, the norm has been to analyze a single speech artifact from a prestigious or controversial winner rather than examine the collection of speeches for generic commonalities of import. In this essay, we analyze the discourse of Nobel peace speech inductively and argue that the organizing principle of the Nobel peace speech genre is the repetitive form of normative liberal principles and values that function as rhetorical topoi. These topoi include freedom and justice and appeal to the inviolable, inborn right of human beings to exercise certain political and civil liberties and the expectation of equality of protection from totalitarian and tyrannical abuses. The significance of this essay to contemporary communication theory is to expand our theoretical understanding of rhetoric’s role in the maintenance and development of an international and cross-cultural vocabulary for the grammar of peace.

SUSTAINABILITY IN THE BOWELS OF SPEECHES

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Jadir Mauro Galvao

2012-10-01

Full Text Available The theme of sustainability has not yet achieved the feat of make up as an integral part the theoretical medley that brings out our most everyday actions, often visits some of our thoughts and permeates many of our speeches. The big event of 2012, the meeting gathered Rio +20 glances from all corners of the planet around that theme as burning, but we still see forward timidly. Although we have no very clear what the term sustainability closes it does not sound quite strange. Associate with things like ecology, planet, wastes emitted by smokestacks of factories, deforestation, recycling and global warming must be related, but our goal in this article is the least of clarifying the term conceptually and more try to observe as it appears in speeches of such conference. When the competent authorities talk about sustainability relate to what? We intend to investigate the lines and between the lines of these speeches, any assumptions associated with the term. Therefore we will analyze the speech of the People´s Summit, the opening speech of President Dilma and emblematic speech of the President of Uruguay, José Pepe Mujica.

The politeness prosody of the Javanese directive speech

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F.X. Rahyono

2009-10-01

Full Text Available This experimental phonetic research deals with the prosodies of directive speech in Javanese. The research procedures were: (1 speech production, (2 acoustic analysis, and (3 perception test. The data investigated are three directive utterances, in the form of statements, commands, and questions. The data were obtained by recording dialogues that present polite as well as impolite speech. Three acoustic experiments were conducted for statements, commands, and questions in directive speech: (1 modifications of duration, (2 modifications of contour, and (3 modifications of fundamental frequency. The result of the subsequent perception tests to 90 stimuli with 24 subjects were analysed statistically with ANOVA (Analysis of Variant. Based on this statistic analysis, the prosodic characteristics of polite and impolite speech were identified.

Segmental intelligibility of synthetic speech produced by rule.

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Logan, J S; Greene, B G; Pisoni, D B

1989-08-01

This paper reports the results of an investigation that employed the modified rhyme test (MRT) to measure the segmental intelligibility of synthetic speech generated automatically by rule. Synthetic speech produced by ten text-to-speech systems was studied and compared to natural speech. A variation of the standard MRT was also used to study the effects of response set size on perceptual confusions. Results indicated that the segmental intelligibility scores formed a continuum. Several systems displayed very high levels of performance that were close to or equal to scores obtained with natural speech; other systems displayed substantially worse performance compared to natural speech. The overall performance of the best system, DECtalk--Paul, was equivalent to the data obtained with natural speech for consonants in syllable-initial position. The findings from this study are discussed in terms of the use of a set of standardized procedures for measuring intelligibility of synthetic speech under controlled laboratory conditions. Recent work investigating the perception of synthetic speech under more severe conditions in which greater demands are made on the listener's processing resources is also considered. The wide range of intelligibility scores obtained in the present study demonstrates important differences in perception and suggests that not all synthetic speech is perceptually equivalent to the listener.

Segmental intelligibility of synthetic speech produced by rule

Science.gov (United States)

Logan, John S.; Greene, Beth G.; Pisoni, David B.

2012-01-01

This paper reports the results of an investigation that employed the modified rhyme test (MRT) to measure the segmental intelligibility of synthetic speech generated automatically by rule. Synthetic speech produced by ten text-to-speech systems was studied and compared to natural speech. A variation of the standard MRT was also used to study the effects of response set size on perceptual confusions. Results indicated that the segmental intelligibility scores formed a continuum. Several systems displayed very high levels of performance that were close to or equal to scores obtained with natural speech; other systems displayed substantially worse performance compared to natural speech. The overall performance of the best system, DECtalk—Paul, was equivalent to the data obtained with natural speech for consonants in syllable-initial position. The findings from this study are discussed in terms of the use of a set of standardized procedures for measuring intelligibility of synthetic speech under controlled laboratory conditions. Recent work investigating the perception of synthetic speech under more severe conditions in which greater demands are made on the listener’s processing resources is also considered. The wide range of intelligibility scores obtained in the present study demonstrates important differences in perception and suggests that not all synthetic speech is perceptually equivalent to the listener. PMID:2527884

Common neural substrates support speech and non-speech vocal tract gestures.

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Chang, Soo-Eun; Kenney, Mary Kay; Loucks, Torrey M J; Poletto, Christopher J; Ludlow, Christy L

2009-08-01

The issue of whether speech is supported by the same neural substrates as non-speech vocal tract gestures has been contentious. In this fMRI study we tested whether producing non-speech vocal tract gestures in humans shares the same functional neuroanatomy as non-sense speech syllables. Production of non-speech vocal tract gestures, devoid of phonological content but similar to speech in that they had familiar acoustic and somatosensory targets, was compared to the production of speech syllables without meaning. Brain activation related to overt production was captured with BOLD fMRI using a sparse sampling design for both conditions. Speech and non-speech were compared using voxel-wise whole brain analyses, and ROI analyses focused on frontal and temporoparietal structures previously reported to support speech production. Results showed substantial activation overlap between speech and non-speech function in regions. Although non-speech gesture production showed greater extent and amplitude of activation in the regions examined, both speech and non-speech showed comparable left laterality in activation for both target perception and production. These findings posit a more general role of the previously proposed "auditory dorsal stream" in the left hemisphere--to support the production of vocal tract gestures that are not limited to speech processing.

Characterization of authorship speeches in classroom

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Daniella de Almeida Santos

2007-08-01

Full Text Available Our paper intends to discuss how the teacher's speech can interfere in the construction of arguments on the part of the students, when they are involved with the task of solving an experimental problem in sciences classes. Thus, we wanted to understand how teacher and students relate to each other in a discursive movement for the senses structuring of the obtained experimental data. With that concern, our focus is in the processes of the speeches authorship, both students' and teachers', in the episodes in which the actors of the teaching and learning process organize their speeches, mediated by the experimental activity.

Speech and non-speech processing in children with phonological disorders: an electrophysiological study

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Isabela Crivellaro Gonçalves

2011-01-01

Full Text Available OBJECTIVE: To determine whether neurophysiological auditory brainstem responses to clicks and repeated speech stimuli differ between typically developing children and children with phonological disorders. INTRODUCTION: Phonological disorders are language impairments resulting from inadequate use of adult phonological language rules and are among the most common speech and language disorders in children (prevalence: 8 - 9%. Our hypothesis is that children with phonological disorders have basic differences in the way that their brains encode acoustic signals at brainstem level when compared to normal counterparts. METHODS: We recorded click and speech evoked auditory brainstem responses in 18 typically developing children (control group and in 18 children who were clinically diagnosed with phonological disorders (research group. The age range of the children was from 7-11 years. RESULTS: The research group exhibited significantly longer latency responses to click stimuli (waves I, III and V and speech stimuli (waves V and A when compared to the control group. DISCUSSION: These results suggest that the abnormal encoding of speech sounds may be a biological marker of phonological disorders. However, these results cannot define the biological origins of phonological problems. We also observed that speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses had a higher specificity/sensitivity for identifying phonological disorders than click-evoked auditory brainstem responses. CONCLUSIONS: Early stages of the auditory pathway processing of an acoustic stimulus are not similar in typically developing children and those with phonological disorders. These findings suggest that there are brainstem auditory pathway abnormalities in children with phonological disorders.

FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook

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Benjamin Abraham

2014-12-01

Full Text Available This article makes a case study of ‘flarfing’ (a creative Facebook user practice with roots in found-text poetry in order to contribute to an understanding of the potentials and limitations facing users of online social networking sites who wish to address the issue of online hate speech. The practice of ‘flarfing’ involves users posting ‘blue text’ hyperlinked Facebook page names into status updates and comment threads. Facebook flarf sends a visible, though often non-literal, message to offenders and onlookers about what kinds of speech the responding activist(s find (unacceptable in online discussion, belonging to a category of agonistic online activism that repurposes the tools of internet trolling for activist ends. I argue this practice represents users attempting to ‘take responsibility’ for the culture of online spaces they inhabit, promoting intolerance to hate speech online. Careful consideration of the limits of flarf's efficacy within Facebook’s specific regulatory environment shows the extent to which this practice and similar responses to online hate speech are constrained by the platforms on which they exist.

SPEECH TACTICS IN MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

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Olena Kaptiurova

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the basic speech tactics used in mass media discourse. It has been stated that such tactics as contact establishment and speech interaction termination, yielding up initiative or its preserving are compulsory for the communicative situation of a talk show. Language personalities of television talk shows anchors and linguistic ways of the interview organisation are stressed. The material is amply illustrated with relevant examples.

Multi-thread Parallel Speech Recognition for Mobile Applications

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LOJKA Martin

2014-05-01

Full Text Available In this paper, the server based solution of the multi-thread large vocabulary automatic speech recognition engine is described along with the Android OS and HTML5 practical application examples. The basic idea was to bring speech recognition available for full variety of applications for computers and especially for mobile devices. The speech recognition engine should be independent of commercial products and services (where the dictionary could not be modified. Using of third-party services could be also a security and privacy problem in specific applications, when the unsecured audio data could not be sent to uncontrolled environments (voice data transferred to servers around the globe. Using our experience with speech recognition applications, we have been able to construct a multi-thread speech recognition serverbased solution designed for simple applications interface (API to speech recognition engine modified to specific needs of particular application.

Speech, language and swallowing in Huntington’ Disease

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Maryluz Camargo-Mendoza

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Huntington’s disease (HD has been described as a genetic condition caused by a mutation in the CAG (cytosine-adenine-guanine nucleotide sequence. Depending on the stage of the disease, people may have difficulties in speech, language and swallowing. The purpose of this paper is to describe these difficulties in detail, as well as to provide an account on speech and language therapy approach to this condition. Regarding speech, it is worth noticing that characteristics typical of hyperkinetic dysarthria can be found due to underlying choreic movements. The speech of people with HD tends to show shorter sentences, with much simpler syntactic structures, and difficulties in tasks that require complex cognitive processing. Moreover, swallowing may present dysphagia that progresses as the disease develops. A timely, comprehensive and effective speech-language intervention is essential to improve the quality of life of people and contribute to their communicative welfare.

Resourcing speech-language pathologists to work with multilingual children.

Science.gov (United States)

McLeod, Sharynne

2014-06-01

Speech-language pathologists play important roles in supporting people to be competent communicators in the languages of their communities. However, with over 7000 languages spoken throughout the world and the majority of the global population being multilingual, there is often a mismatch between the languages spoken by children and families and their speech-language pathologists. This paper provides insights into service provision for multilingual children within an English-dominant country by viewing Australia's multilingual population as a microcosm of ethnolinguistic minorities. Recent population studies of Australian pre-school children show that their most common languages other than English are: Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, and Greek. Although 20.2% of services by Speech Pathology Australia members are offered in languages other than English, there is a mismatch between the language of the services and the languages of children within similar geographical communities. Australian speech-language pathologists typically use informal or English-based assessments and intervention tools with multilingual children. Thus, there is a need for accessible culturally and linguistically appropriate resources for working with multilingual children. Recent international collaborations have resulted in practical strategies to support speech-language pathologists during assessment, intervention, and collaboration with families, communities, and other professionals. The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech was assembled to prepare a position paper to address issues faced by speech-language pathologists when working with multilingual populations. The Multilingual Children's Speech website ( http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech ) addresses one of the aims of the position paper by providing free resources and information for speech-language pathologists about more than 45 languages. These international

Speech rhythms and multiplexed oscillatory sensory coding in the human brain.

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Joachim Gross

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Cortical oscillations are likely candidates for segmentation and coding of continuous speech. Here, we monitored continuous speech processing with magnetoencephalography (MEG to unravel the principles of speech segmentation and coding. We demonstrate that speech entrains the phase of low-frequency (delta, theta and the amplitude of high-frequency (gamma oscillations in the auditory cortex. Phase entrainment is stronger in the right and amplitude entrainment is stronger in the left auditory cortex. Furthermore, edges in the speech envelope phase reset auditory cortex oscillations thereby enhancing their entrainment to speech. This mechanism adapts to the changing physical features of the speech envelope and enables efficient, stimulus-specific speech sampling. Finally, we show that within the auditory cortex, coupling between delta, theta, and gamma oscillations increases following speech edges. Importantly, all couplings (i.e., brain-speech and also within the cortex attenuate for backward-presented speech, suggesting top-down control. We conclude that segmentation and coding of speech relies on a nested hierarchy of entrained cortical oscillations.

Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech

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Carlos eRomero-Rivas

2015-03-01

Full Text Available This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker.

Gender and Speech in a Disney Princess Movie

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Azmi N.J.

2016-11-01

Full Text Available One of the latest Disney princess movies is Frozen which was released in 2013. Female characters in Frozen differ from the female characters in previous Disney movies, such as The Little Mermaid and Tangled. In comparison, female characters in Frozen are portrayed as having more heroic values and norms, which makes it interesting to examine their speech characteristics. Do they use typical female speech despite having more heroic characteristics? This paper aims to provide insights into the female speech characteristics in this movie based on Lakoff’s (1975 model of female speech.  Data analysis shows that female and male characters in the movie used almost equal number of female speech elements in their dialogues. Interestingly, although female characters in the movie do not behave stereotypically, their speech still contain the elements of female speech, such as the use empty adjectives, questions, hedges and intensifier. This paper argues that the blurring of boundaries between male and female speech characteristics in this movie is an attempt to break gender stereotyping by showing that female characters share similar characteristics with heroic male characters thus they should not be seen as inferior to the male  characters.

Unvoiced Speech Recognition Using Tissue-Conductive Acoustic Sensor

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Hiroshi Saruwatari

2007-01-01

Full Text Available We present the use of stethoscope and silicon NAM (nonaudible murmur microphones in automatic speech recognition. NAM microphones are special acoustic sensors, which are attached behind the talker's ear and can capture not only normal (audible speech, but also very quietly uttered speech (nonaudible murmur. As a result, NAM microphones can be applied in automatic speech recognition systems when privacy is desired in human-machine communication. Moreover, NAM microphones show robustness against noise and they might be used in special systems (speech recognition, speech transform, etc. for sound-impaired people. Using adaptation techniques and a small amount of training data, we achieved for a 20 k dictation task a 93.9% word accuracy for nonaudible murmur recognition in a clean environment. In this paper, we also investigate nonaudible murmur recognition in noisy environments and the effect of the Lombard reflex on nonaudible murmur recognition. We also propose three methods to integrate audible speech and nonaudible murmur recognition using a stethoscope NAM microphone with very promising results.

Attention mechanisms and the mosaic evolution of speech

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Pedro Tiago Martins

2014-12-01

Full Text Available There is still no categorical answer for why humans, and no other species, have speech, or why speech is the way it is. Several purely anatomical arguments have been put forward, but they have been shown to be false, biologically implausible, or of limited scope. This perspective paper supports the idea that evolutionary theories of speech could benefit from a focus on the cognitive mechanisms that make speech possible, for which antecedents in evolutionary history and brain correlates can be found. This type of approach is part of a very recent, but rapidly growing tradition, which has provided crucial insights on the nature of human speech by focusing on the biological bases of vocal learning. Here, we call attention to what might be an important ingredient for speech. We contend that a general mechanism of attention, which manifests itself not only in visual but also auditory (and possibly other modalities, might be one of the key pieces of human speech, in addition to the mechanisms underlying vocal learning, and the pairing of facial gestures with vocalic units.

Speech recognition systems on the Cell Broadband Engine

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Liu, Y; Jones, H; Vaidya, S; Perrone, M; Tydlitat, B; Nanda, A

2007-04-20

In this paper we describe our design, implementation, and first results of a prototype connected-phoneme-based speech recognition system on the Cell Broadband Engine{trademark} (Cell/B.E.). Automatic speech recognition decodes speech samples into plain text (other representations are possible) and must process samples at real-time rates. Fortunately, the computational tasks involved in this pipeline are highly data-parallel and can receive significant hardware acceleration from vector-streaming architectures such as the Cell/B.E. Identifying and exploiting these parallelism opportunities is challenging, but also critical to improving system performance. We observed, from our initial performance timings, that a single Cell/B.E. processor can recognize speech from thousands of simultaneous voice channels in real time--a channel density that is orders-of-magnitude greater than the capacity of existing software speech recognizers based on CPUs (central processing units). This result emphasizes the potential for Cell/B.E.-based speech recognition and will likely lead to the future development of production speech systems using Cell/B.E. clusters.

Speech Production and Speech Discrimination by Hearing-Impaired Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Novelli-Olmstead, Tina; Ling, Daniel

1984-01-01

Seven hearing impaired children (five to seven years old) assigned to the Speakers group made highly significant gains in speech production and auditory discrimination of speech, while Listeners made only slight speech production gains and no gains in auditory discrimination. Combined speech and auditory training was more effective than auditory…

Modern Tools in Patient-Centred Speech Therapy for Romanian Language

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Mirela Danubianu

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The most common way to communicate with those around us is speech. Suffering from a speech disorder can have negative social effects: from leaving the individuals with low confidence and moral to problems with social interaction and the ability to live independently like adults. The speech therapy intervention is a complex process having particular objectives such as: discovery and identification of speech disorder and directing the therapy to correction, recovery, compensation, adaptation and social integration of patients. Computer-based Speech Therapy systems are a real help for therapists by creating a special learning environment. The Romanian language is a phonetic one, with special linguistic particularities. This paper aims to present a few computer-based speech therapy systems developed for the treatment of various speech disorders specific to Romanian language.

Utility of TMS to understand the neurobiology of speech

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Takenobu eMurakami

2013-07-01

Full Text Available According to a traditional view, speech perception and production are processed largely separately in sensory and motor brain areas. Recent psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies provide novel evidence that the sensory and motor systems dynamically interact in speech processing, by demonstrating that speech perception and imitation share regional brain activations. However, the exact nature and mechanisms of these sensorimotor interactions are not completely understood yet.Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS has often been used in the cognitive neurosciences, including speech research, as a complementary technique to behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Here we provide an up-to-date review focusing on TMS studies that explored speech perception and imitation.Single-pulse TMS of the primary motor cortex (M1 demonstrated a speech specific and somatotopically specific increase of excitability of the M1 lip area during speech perception (listening to speech or lip reading. A paired-coil TMS approach showed increases in effective connectivity from brain regions that are involved in speech processing to the M1 lip area when listening to speech. TMS in virtual lesion mode applied to speech processing areas modulated performance of phonological recognition and imitation of perceived speech.In summary, TMS is an innovative tool to investigate processing of speech perception and imitation. TMS studies have provided strong evidence that the sensory system is critically involved in mapping sensory input onto motor output and that the motor system plays an important role in speech perception.

Stuttering Frequency, Speech Rate, Speech Naturalness, and Speech Effort During the Production of Voluntary Stuttering.

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Davidow, Jason H; Grossman, Heather L; Edge, Robin L

2018-05-01

Voluntary stuttering techniques involve persons who stutter purposefully interjecting disfluencies into their speech. Little research has been conducted on the impact of these techniques on the speech pattern of persons who stutter. The present study examined whether changes in the frequency of voluntary stuttering accompanied changes in stuttering frequency, articulation rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort. In total, 12 persons who stutter aged 16-34 years participated. Participants read four 300-syllable passages during a control condition, and three voluntary stuttering conditions that involved attempting to produce purposeful, tension-free repetitions of initial sounds or syllables of a word for two or more repetitions (i.e., bouncing). The three voluntary stuttering conditions included bouncing on 5%, 10%, and 15% of syllables read. Friedman tests and follow-up Wilcoxon signed ranks tests were conducted for the statistical analyses. Stuttering frequency, articulation rate, and speech naturalness were significantly different between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Speech effort did not differ between the voluntary stuttering conditions. Stuttering frequency was significantly lower during the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition, and speech effort was significantly lower during two of the three voluntary stuttering conditions compared to the control condition. Due to changes in articulation rate across the voluntary stuttering conditions, it is difficult to conclude, as has been suggested previously, that voluntary stuttering is the reason for stuttering reductions found when using voluntary stuttering techniques. Additionally, future investigations should examine different types of voluntary stuttering over an extended period of time to determine their impact on stuttering frequency, speech rate, speech naturalness, and speech effort.

A dynamical model of hierarchical selection and coordination in speech planning.

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Sam Tilsen

Full Text Available studies of the control of complex sequential movements have dissociated two aspects of movement planning: control over the sequential selection of movement plans, and control over the precise timing of movement execution. This distinction is particularly relevant in the production of speech: utterances contain sequentially ordered words and syllables, but articulatory movements are often executed in a non-sequential, overlapping manner with precisely coordinated relative timing. This study presents a hybrid dynamical model in which competitive activation controls selection of movement plans and coupled oscillatory systems govern coordination. The model departs from previous approaches by ascribing an important role to competitive selection of articulatory plans within a syllable. Numerical simulations show that the model reproduces a variety of speech production phenomena, such as effects of preparation and utterance composition on reaction time, and asymmetries in patterns of articulatory timing associated with onsets and codas. The model furthermore provides a unified understanding of a diverse group of phonetic and phonological phenomena which have not previously been related.

LIBERDADE DE EXPRESSÃO E DISCURSO DO ÓDIO NO BRASIL / FREE SPEECH AND HATE SPEECH IN BRAZIL

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Nevita Maria Pessoa de Aquino Franca Luna

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this article is to analyze the restriction of free speech when it comes close to hate speech. In this perspective, the aim of this study is to answer the question: what is the understanding adopted by the Brazilian Supreme Court in cases involving the conflict between free speech and hate speech? The methodology combines a bibliographic review on the theoretical assumptions of the research (concept of free speech and hate speech, and understanding of the rights of defense of traditionally discriminated minorities and empirical research (documental and jurisprudential analysis of judged cases of American Court, German Court and Brazilian Court. Firstly, free speech is discussed, defining its meaning, content and purpose. Then, the hate speech is pointed as an inhibitor element of free speech for offending members of traditionally discriminated minorities, who are outnumbered or in a situation of cultural, socioeconomic or political subordination. Subsequently, are discussed some aspects of American (negative freedom and German models (positive freedom, to demonstrate that different cultures adopt different legal solutions. At the end, it is concluded that there is an approximation of the Brazilian understanding with the German doctrine, from the analysis of landmark cases as the publisher Siegfried Ellwanger (2003 and the Samba School Unidos do Viradouro (2008. The Brazilian comprehension, a multicultural country made up of different ethnicities, leads to a new process of defending minorities who, despite of involving the collision of fundamental rights (dignity, equality and freedom, is still restrained by incompatible barriers of a contemporary pluralistic democracy.

Common neural substrates support speech and non-speech vocal tract gestures

OpenAIRE

Chang, Soo-Eun; Kenney, Mary Kay; Loucks, Torrey M.J.; Poletto, Christopher J.; Ludlow, Christy L.

2009-01-01

The issue of whether speech is supported by the same neural substrates as non-speech vocal-tract gestures has been contentious. In this fMRI study we tested whether producing non-speech vocal tract gestures in humans shares the same functional neuroanatomy as non-sense speech syllables. Production of non-speech vocal tract gestures, devoid of phonological content but similar to speech in that they had familiar acoustic and somatosensory targets, were compared to the production of speech sylla...

Speech cues contribute to audiovisual spatial integration.

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Christopher W Bishop

Full Text Available Speech is the most important form of human communication but ambient sounds and competing talkers often degrade its acoustics. Fortunately the brain can use visual information, especially its highly precise spatial information, to improve speech comprehension in noisy environments. Previous studies have demonstrated that audiovisual integration depends strongly on spatiotemporal factors. However, some integrative phenomena such as McGurk interference persist even with gross spatial disparities, suggesting that spatial alignment is not necessary for robust integration of audiovisual place-of-articulation cues. It is therefore unclear how speech-cues interact with audiovisual spatial integration mechanisms. Here, we combine two well established psychophysical phenomena, the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist's illusion, to explore this dependency. Our results demonstrate that conflicting spatial cues may not interfere with audiovisual integration of speech, but conflicting speech-cues can impede integration in space. This suggests a direct but asymmetrical influence between ventral 'what' and dorsal 'where' pathways.

Introductory speeches

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2001-01-01

This CD is multimedia presentation of programme safety upgrading of Bohunice V1 NPP. This chapter consist of introductory commentary and 4 introductory speeches (video records): (1) Introductory speech of Vincent Pillar, Board chairman and director general of Slovak electric, Plc. (SE); (2) Introductory speech of Stefan Schmidt, director of SE - Bohunice Nuclear power plants; (3) Introductory speech of Jan Korec, Board chairman and director general of VUJE Trnava, Inc. - Engineering, Design and Research Organisation, Trnava; Introductory speech of Dietrich Kuschel, Senior vice-president of FRAMATOME ANP Project and Engineering

The influence of age, hearing, and working memory on the speech comprehension benefit derived from an automatic speech recognition system.

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Zekveld, Adriana A; Kramer, Sophia E; Kessens, Judith M; Vlaming, Marcel S M G; Houtgast, Tammo

2009-04-01

The aim of the current study was to examine whether partly incorrect subtitles that are automatically generated by an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, improve speech comprehension by listeners with hearing impairment. In an earlier study (Zekveld et al. 2008), we showed that speech comprehension in noise by young listeners with normal hearing improves when presenting partly incorrect, automatically generated subtitles. The current study focused on the effects of age, hearing loss, visual working memory capacity, and linguistic skills on the benefit obtained from automatically generated subtitles during listening to speech in noise. In order to investigate the effects of age and hearing loss, three groups of participants were included: 22 young persons with normal hearing (YNH, mean age = 21 years), 22 middle-aged adults with normal hearing (MA-NH, mean age = 55 years) and 30 middle-aged adults with hearing impairment (MA-HI, mean age = 57 years). The benefit from automatic subtitling was measured by Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) tests (Plomp & Mimpen, 1979). Both unimodal auditory and bimodal audiovisual SRT tests were performed. In the audiovisual tests, the subtitles were presented simultaneously with the speech, whereas in the auditory test, only speech was presented. The difference between the auditory and audiovisual SRT was defined as the audiovisual benefit. Participants additionally rated the listening effort. We examined the influences of ASR accuracy level and text delay on the audiovisual benefit and the listening effort using a repeated measures General Linear Model analysis. In a correlation analysis, we evaluated the relationships between age, auditory SRT, visual working memory capacity and the audiovisual benefit and listening effort. The automatically generated subtitles improved speech comprehension in noise for all ASR accuracies and delays covered by the current study. Higher ASR accuracy levels resulted in more benefit obtained

The NCHLT speech corpus of the South African languages

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Barnard, E

2014-05-01

Full Text Available The NCHLT speech corpus contains wide-band speech from approximately 200 speakers per language, in each of the eleven of cial languages of South Africa. We describe the design and development processes that were undertaken in order to develop...

Predicting speech intelligibility in conditions with nonlinearly processed noisy speech

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Søren; Dau, Torsten

2013-01-01

The speech-based envelope power spectrum model (sEPSM; [1]) was proposed in order to overcome the limitations of the classical speech transmission index (STI) and speech intelligibility index (SII). The sEPSM applies the signal-tonoise ratio in the envelope domain (SNRenv), which was demonstrated...... to successfully predict speech intelligibility in conditions with nonlinearly processed noisy speech, such as processing with spectral subtraction. Moreover, a multiresolution version (mr-sEPSM) was demonstrated to account for speech intelligibility in various conditions with stationary and fluctuating...

Speech-in-speech perception and executive function involvement.

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Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti

Full Text Available This present study investigated the link between speech-in-speech perception capacities and four executive function components: response suppression, inhibitory control, switching and working memory. We constructed a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm using a written target word and a spoken prime word, implemented in one of two concurrent auditory sentences (cocktail party situation. The prime and target were semantically related or unrelated. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on visual target words and simultaneously listen to only one of two pronounced sentences. The attention of the participant was manipulated: The prime was in the pronounced sentence listened to by the participant or in the ignored one. In addition, we evaluate the executive function abilities of participants (switching cost, inhibitory-control cost and response-suppression cost and their working memory span. Correlation analyses were performed between the executive and priming measurements. Our results showed a significant interaction effect between attention and semantic priming. We observed a significant priming effect in the attended but not in the ignored condition. Only priming effects obtained in the ignored condition were significantly correlated with some of the executive measurements. However, no correlation between priming effects and working memory capacity was found. Overall, these results confirm, first, the role of attention for semantic priming effect and, second, the implication of executive functions in speech-in-noise understanding capacities.

THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE SPEECH ACTS IN HANNAH MONTANA SESSION 1

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Nur Vita Handayani

2015-07-01

Full Text Available This study aims to describe kinds and forms of expressive speech act in Hannah Montana Session 1. It belongs to descriptive qualitative method. The research object was expressive speech act. The data source was utterances which contain expressive speech acts in the film Hannah Montana Session 1. The researcher used observation method and noting technique in collecting the data. In analyzing the data, descriptive qualitative method was used. The research findings show that there are ten kinds of expressive speech act found in Hannah Montana Session 1, namely expressing apology, expressing thanks, expressing sympathy, expressing attitudes, expressing greeting, expressing wishes, expressing joy, expressing pain, expressing likes, and expressing dislikes. The forms of expressive speech act are direct literal expressive speech act, direct non-literal expressive speech act, indirect literal expressive speech act, and indirect non-literal expressive speech act.

Recognizing emotional speech in Persian: a validated database of Persian emotional speech (Persian ESD).

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Keshtiari, Niloofar; Kuhlmann, Michael; Eslami, Moharram; Klann-Delius, Gisela

2015-03-01

Research on emotional speech often requires valid stimuli for assessing perceived emotion through prosody and lexical content. To date, no comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian is officially available. The present article reports the process of designing, compiling, and evaluating a comprehensive emotional speech database for colloquial Persian. The database contains a set of 90 validated novel Persian sentences classified in five basic emotional categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), as well as a neutral category. These sentences were validated in two experiments by a group of 1,126 native Persian speakers. The sentences were articulated by two native Persian speakers (one male, one female) in three conditions: (1) congruent (emotional lexical content articulated in a congruent emotional voice), (2) incongruent (neutral sentences articulated in an emotional voice), and (3) baseline (all emotional and neutral sentences articulated in neutral voice). The speech materials comprise about 470 sentences. The validity of the database was evaluated by a group of 34 native speakers in a perception test. Utterances recognized better than five times chance performance (71.4 %) were regarded as valid portrayals of the target emotions. Acoustic analysis of the valid emotional utterances revealed differences in pitch, intensity, and duration, attributes that may help listeners to correctly classify the intended emotion. The database is designed to be used as a reliable material source (for both text and speech) in future cross-cultural or cross-linguistic studies of emotional speech, and it is available for academic research purposes free of charge. To access the database, please contact the first author.

Exploring Australian speech-language pathologists' use and perceptions ofnon-speech oral motor exercises.

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Rumbach, Anna F; Rose, Tanya A; Cheah, Mynn

2018-01-29

To explore Australian speech-language pathologists' use of non-speech oral motor exercises, and rationales for using/not using non-speech oral motor exercises in clinical practice. A total of 124 speech-language pathologists practising in Australia, working with paediatric and/or adult clients with speech sound difficulties, completed an online survey. The majority of speech-language pathologists reported that they did not use non-speech oral motor exercises when working with paediatric or adult clients with speech sound difficulties. However, more than half of the speech-language pathologists working with adult clients who have dysarthria reported using non-speech oral motor exercises with this population. The most frequently reported rationale for using non-speech oral motor exercises in speech sound difficulty management was to improve awareness/placement of articulators. The majority of speech-language pathologists agreed there is no clear clinical or research evidence base to support non-speech oral motor exercise use with clients who have speech sound difficulties. This study provides an overview of Australian speech-language pathologists' reported use and perceptions of non-speech oral motor exercises' applicability and efficacy in treating paediatric and adult clients who have speech sound difficulties. The research findings provide speech-language pathologists with insight into how and why non-speech oral motor exercises are currently used, and adds to the knowledge base regarding Australian speech-language pathology practice of non-speech oral motor exercises in the treatment of speech sound difficulties. Implications for Rehabilitation Non-speech oral motor exercises refer to oral motor activities which do not involve speech, but involve the manipulation or stimulation of oral structures including the lips, tongue, jaw, and soft palate. Non-speech oral motor exercises are intended to improve the function (e.g., movement, strength) of oral structures. The

TIMLOGORO - AN INTERACTIVE PLATFORM DESIGN FOR SPEECH THERAPY

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Georgeta PÂNIȘOARĂ

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This article presents some tehnical and pedagogical features of an interactive platforme used for language therapy. Timlogoro project demonstrates that technology is an effective tool in learning and, in particular, a viable solution for improving speech disorders present in different stages of age. A digital platform for different categories of users with speech impairments (children and adults has a good support in pedagogical principles. In speech therapy, the computer was originally used to assess deficiencies. Nowadays it has become a useful tool in language rehabilitation. A few Romanian speech therapists create digital applications that will be used in therapy for recovery.This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific UEFISCDI.

Repetition and Emotive Communication in Music Versus Speech

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Elizabeth Hellmuth eMargulis

2013-04-01

Full Text Available Music and speech are often placed alongside one another as comparative cases. Their relative overlaps and disassociations have been well explored (e.g. Patel, 2010. But one key attribute distinguishing these two domains has often been overlooked: the greater preponderance of repetition in music in comparison to speech. Recent fMRI studies have shown that familiarity – achieved through repetition – is a critical component of emotional engagement with music (Pereira et al., 2011. If repetition is fundamental to emotional responses to music, and repetition is a key distinguisher between the domains of music and speech, then close examination of the phenomenon of repetition might help clarify the ways that music elicits emotion differently than speech.

Lope and the Battle-Speech

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Juan Carlos Iglesias-Zoido

2013-05-01

Full Text Available This article analyzes the way in which Lope de Vega conceives in his theater the pre-battle harangue, the most characteristic speech in ancient and renaissance historiography. Having this aim in mind, I have analyzed the role played by this type of speech in a group of plays dealing with historical and military subjects. These plays were written in a period when Lope was particularly interested in historical issues: La Santa Liga (1598-1603, Arauco domado (1599, El asalto de Mastrique (1595-1606 and Los Guanches de Tenerife (1604-1606.

Speech perception as an active cognitive process

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Shannon eHeald

2014-03-01

Full Text Available One view of speech perception is that acoustic signals are transformed into representations for pattern matching to determine linguistic structure. This process can be taken as a statistical pattern-matching problem, assuming realtively stable linguistic categories are characterized by neural representations related to auditory properties of speech that can be compared to speech input. This kind of pattern matching can be termed a passive process which implies rigidity of processingd with few demands on cognitive processing. An alternative view is that speech recognition, even in early stages, is an active process in which speech analysis is attentionally guided. Note that this does not mean consciously guided but that information-contingent changes in early auditory encoding can occur as a function of context and experience. Active processing assumes that attention, plasticity, and listening goals are important in considering how listeners cope with adverse circumstances that impair hearing by masking noise in the environment or hearing loss. Although theories of speech perception have begun to incorporate some active processing, they seldom treat early speech encoding as plastic and attentionally guided. Recent research has suggested that speech perception is the product of both feedforward and feedback interactions between a number of brain regions that include descending projections perhaps as far downstream as the cochlea. It is important to understand how the ambiguity of the speech signal and constraints of context dynamically determine cognitive resources recruited during perception including focused attention, learning, and working memory. Theories of speech perception need to go beyond the current corticocentric approach in order to account for the intrinsic dynamics of the auditory encoding of speech. In doing so, this may provide new insights into ways in which hearing disorders and loss may be treated either through augementation or

[Improving speech comprehension using a new cochlear implant speech processor].

Science.gov (United States)

Müller-Deile, J; Kortmann, T; Hoppe, U; Hessel, H; Morsnowski, A

2009-06-01

The aim of this multicenter clinical field study was to assess the benefits of the new Freedom 24 sound processor for cochlear implant (CI) users implanted with the Nucleus 24 cochlear implant system. The study included 48 postlingually profoundly deaf experienced CI users who demonstrated speech comprehension performance with their current speech processor on the Oldenburg sentence test (OLSA) in quiet conditions of at least 80% correct scores and who were able to perform adaptive speech threshold testing using the OLSA in noisy conditions. Following baseline measures of speech comprehension performance with their current speech processor, subjects were upgraded to the Freedom 24 speech processor. After a take-home trial period of at least 2 weeks, subject performance was evaluated by measuring the speech reception threshold with the Freiburg multisyllabic word test and speech intelligibility with the Freiburg monosyllabic word test at 50 dB and 70 dB in the sound field. The results demonstrated highly significant benefits for speech comprehension with the new speech processor. Significant benefits for speech comprehension were also demonstrated with the new speech processor when tested in competing background noise.In contrast, use of the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) did not prove to be a suitably sensitive assessment tool for comparative subjective self-assessment of hearing benefits with each processor. Use of the preprocessing algorithm known as adaptive dynamic range optimization (ADRO) in the Freedom 24 led to additional improvements over the standard upgrade map for speech comprehension in quiet and showed equivalent performance in noise. Through use of the preprocessing beam-forming algorithm BEAM, subjects demonstrated a highly significant improved signal-to-noise ratio for speech comprehension thresholds (i.e., signal-to-noise ratio for 50% speech comprehension scores) when tested with an adaptive procedure using the Oldenburg

Speech coding

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Ravishankar, C., Hughes Network Systems, Germantown, MD

1998-05-08

Speech is the predominant means of communication between human beings and since the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, speech services have remained to be the core service in almost all telecommunication systems. Original analog methods of telephony had the disadvantage of speech signal getting corrupted by noise, cross-talk and distortion Long haul transmissions which use repeaters to compensate for the loss in signal strength on transmission links also increase the associated noise and distortion. On the other hand digital transmission is relatively immune to noise, cross-talk and distortion primarily because of the capability to faithfully regenerate digital signal at each repeater purely based on a binary decision. Hence end-to-end performance of the digital link essentially becomes independent of the length and operating frequency bands of the link Hence from a transmission point of view digital transmission has been the preferred approach due to its higher immunity to noise. The need to carry digital speech became extremely important from a service provision point of view as well. Modem requirements have introduced the need for robust, flexible and secure services that can carry a multitude of signal types (such as voice, data and video) without a fundamental change in infrastructure. Such a requirement could not have been easily met without the advent of digital transmission systems, thereby requiring speech to be coded digitally. The term Speech Coding is often referred to techniques that represent or code speech signals either directly as a waveform or as a set of parameters by analyzing the speech signal. In either case, the codes are transmitted to the distant end where speech is reconstructed or synthesized using the received set of codes. A more generic term that is applicable to these techniques that is often interchangeably used with speech coding is the term voice coding. This term is more generic in the sense that the

Histogram Equalization to Model Adaptation for Robust Speech Recognition

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Suh Youngjoo

2010-01-01

Full Text Available We propose a new model adaptation method based on the histogram equalization technique for providing robustness in noisy environments. The trained acoustic mean models of a speech recognizer are adapted into environmentally matched conditions by using the histogram equalization algorithm on a single utterance basis. For more robust speech recognition in the heavily noisy conditions, trained acoustic covariance models are efficiently adapted by the signal-to-noise ratio-dependent linear interpolation between trained covariance models and utterance-level sample covariance models. Speech recognition experiments on both the digit-based Aurora2 task and the large vocabulary-based task showed that the proposed model adaptation approach provides significant performance improvements compared to the baseline speech recognizer trained on the clean speech data.

Internet video telephony allows speech reading by deaf individuals and improves speech perception by cochlear implant users.

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Georgios Mantokoudis

Full Text Available OBJECTIVE: To analyze speech reading through Internet video calls by profoundly hearing-impaired individuals and cochlear implant (CI users. METHODS: Speech reading skills of 14 deaf adults and 21 CI users were assessed using the Hochmair Schulz Moser (HSM sentence test. We presented video simulations using different video resolutions (1280 × 720, 640 × 480, 320 × 240, 160 × 120 px, frame rates (30, 20, 10, 7, 5 frames per second (fps, speech velocities (three different speakers, webcameras (Logitech Pro9000, C600 and C500 and image/sound delays (0-500 ms. All video simulations were presented with and without sound and in two screen sizes. Additionally, scores for live Skype™ video connection and live face-to-face communication were assessed. RESULTS: Higher frame rate (>7 fps, higher camera resolution (>640 × 480 px and shorter picture/sound delay (<100 ms were associated with increased speech perception scores. Scores were strongly dependent on the speaker but were not influenced by physical properties of the camera optics or the full screen mode. There is a significant median gain of +8.5%pts (p = 0.009 in speech perception for all 21 CI-users if visual cues are additionally shown. CI users with poor open set speech perception scores (n = 11 showed the greatest benefit under combined audio-visual presentation (median speech perception +11.8%pts, p = 0.032. CONCLUSION: Webcameras have the potential to improve telecommunication of hearing-impaired individuals.

Polish Phoneme Statistics Obtained On Large Set Of Written Texts

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Bartosz Ziółko

2009-01-01

Full Text Available The phonetical statistics were collected from several Polish corpora. The paper is a summaryof the data which are phoneme n-grams and some phenomena in the statistics. Triphonestatistics apply context-dependent speech units which have an important role in speech recognitionsystems and were never calculated for a large set of Polish written texts. The standardphonetic alphabet for Polish, SAMPA, and methods of providing phonetic transcriptions are described.

Treatment for Apraxia of Speech in Nonfluent Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia

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M. L. Henry

2013-01-01

Full Text Available There is a growing body of literature examining the utility of behavioral treatment in primary progressive aphasia (PPA. There are, however, no studies exploring treatment approaches to improve speech production in individuals with apraxia of speech (AOS associated with the nonfluent variant of PPA. The purpose of this study was to examine a novel approach to treatment of AOS in nonfluent PPA. We implemented a treatment method using structured oral reading as a tool for improving production of multisyllabic words in an individual with mild AOS and nonfluent variant PPA. Our participant showed a reduction in speech errors during reading of novel text that was maintained at one year post-treatment. Generalization of improved speech production was observed on repetition of words and sentences and the participant showed stability of speech production over time in connected speech. Results suggest that oral reading treatment may offer an efficient and effective means of addressing multisyllabic word production in AOS associated with nonfluent PPA, with lasting and generalized treatment effects.

Speech Problems

Science.gov (United States)

... Staying Safe Videos for Educators Search English Español Speech Problems KidsHealth / For Teens / Speech Problems What's in ... a person's ability to speak clearly. Some Common Speech and Language Disorders Stuttering is a problem that ...

Speech-based emotion detection in a resource-scarce environment

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Martirosian, O

2007-11-01

Full Text Available , happiness and frustration; passive emotion encompasses sadness and dis- appointment, and neutral encompasses speech with a negligible amount of emotional content. Because a study on the expression of emotion in speech has not been done in the South... seconds long and the segments labelled with the dominant emotion of the speech contained in them. The fine emotional labels used were angry, frustrated, happy, friendly, neutral, sad and depressed. These fine labels were combined into three broad...

Alternative Speech Communication System for Persons with Severe Speech Disorders

Science.gov (United States)

Selouani, Sid-Ahmed; Sidi Yakoub, Mohammed; O'Shaughnessy, Douglas

2009-12-01

Assistive speech-enabled systems are proposed to help both French and English speaking persons with various speech disorders. The proposed assistive systems use automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis in order to enhance the quality of communication. These systems aim at improving the intelligibility of pathologic speech making it as natural as possible and close to the original voice of the speaker. The resynthesized utterances use new basic units, a new concatenating algorithm and a grafting technique to correct the poorly pronounced phonemes. The ASR responses are uttered by the new speech synthesis system in order to convey an intelligible message to listeners. Experiments involving four American speakers with severe dysarthria and two Acadian French speakers with sound substitution disorders (SSDs) are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods. An improvement of the Perceptual Evaluation of the Speech Quality (PESQ) value of 5% and more than 20% is achieved by the speech synthesis systems that deal with SSD and dysarthria, respectively.

The Functional Connectome of Speech Control.

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Stefan Fuertinger

2015-07-01

Full Text Available In the past few years, several studies have been directed to understanding the complexity of functional interactions between different brain regions during various human behaviors. Among these, neuroimaging research installed the notion that speech and language require an orchestration of brain regions for comprehension, planning, and integration of a heard sound with a spoken word. However, these studies have been largely limited to mapping the neural correlates of separate speech elements and examining distinct cortical or subcortical circuits involved in different aspects of speech control. As a result, the complexity of the brain network machinery controlling speech and language remained largely unknown. Using graph theoretical analysis of functional MRI (fMRI data in healthy subjects, we quantified the large-scale speech network topology by constructing functional brain networks of increasing hierarchy from the resting state to motor output of meaningless syllables to complex production of real-life speech as well as compared to non-speech-related sequential finger tapping and pure tone discrimination networks. We identified a segregated network of highly connected local neural communities (hubs in the primary sensorimotor and parietal regions, which formed a commonly shared core hub network across the examined conditions, with the left area 4p playing an important role in speech network organization. These sensorimotor core hubs exhibited features of flexible hubs based on their participation in several functional domains across different networks and ability to adaptively switch long-range functional connectivity depending on task content, resulting in a distinct community structure of each examined network. Specifically, compared to other tasks, speech production was characterized by the formation of six distinct neural communities with specialized recruitment of the prefrontal cortex, insula, putamen, and thalamus, which collectively

Text-based language identification of multilingual names

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Giwa, O

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Text-based language identification (T-LID) of isolated words has been shown to be useful for various speech processing tasks, including pronunciation modelling and data categorisation. When the words to be categorised are proper names, the task...

A Danish open-set speech corpus for competing-speech studies

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Jens Bo; Dau, Torsten; Neher, Tobias

2014-01-01

Studies investigating speech-on-speech masking effects commonly use closed-set speech materials such as the coordinate response measure [Bolia et al. (2000). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 107, 1065-1066]. However, these studies typically result in very low (i.e., negative) speech recognition thresholds (SRTs......) when the competing speech signals are spatially separated. To achieve higher SRTs that correspond more closely to natural communication situations, an open-set, low-context, multi-talker speech corpus was developed. Three sets of 268 unique Danish sentences were created, and each set was recorded...... with one of three professional female talkers. The intelligibility of each sentence in the presence of speech-shaped noise was measured. For each talker, 200 approximately equally intelligible sentences were then selected and systematically distributed into 10 test lists. Test list homogeneity was assessed...

Speech entrainment enables patients with Broca’s aphasia to produce fluent speech

Science.gov (United States)

Hubbard, H. Isabel; Hudspeth, Sarah Grace; Holland, Audrey L.; Bonilha, Leonardo; Fromm, Davida; Rorden, Chris

2012-01-01

A distinguishing feature of Broca’s aphasia is non-fluent halting speech typically involving one to three words per utterance. Yet, despite such profound impairments, some patients can mimic audio-visual speech stimuli enabling them to produce fluent speech in real time. We call this effect ‘speech entrainment’ and reveal its neural mechanism as well as explore its usefulness as a treatment for speech production in Broca’s aphasia. In Experiment 1, 13 patients with Broca’s aphasia were tested in three conditions: (i) speech entrainment with audio-visual feedback where they attempted to mimic a speaker whose mouth was seen on an iPod screen; (ii) speech entrainment with audio-only feedback where patients mimicked heard speech; and (iii) spontaneous speech where patients spoke freely about assigned topics. The patients produced a greater variety of words using audio-visual feedback compared with audio-only feedback and spontaneous speech. No difference was found between audio-only feedback and spontaneous speech. In Experiment 2, 10 of the 13 patients included in Experiment 1 and 20 control subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural mechanism that supports speech entrainment. Group results with patients and controls revealed greater bilateral cortical activation for speech produced during speech entrainment compared with spontaneous speech at the junction of the anterior insula and Brodmann area 47, in Brodmann area 37, and unilaterally in the left middle temporal gyrus and the dorsal portion of Broca’s area. Probabilistic white matter tracts constructed for these regions in the normal subjects revealed a structural network connected via the corpus callosum and ventral fibres through the extreme capsule. Unilateral areas were connected via the arcuate fasciculus. In Experiment 3, all patients included in Experiment 1 participated in a 6-week treatment phase using speech entrainment to improve speech production

SPEECH DELAY IN THE PRACTICE OF A PAEDIATRICIAN AND CHILD’S NEUROLOGIST

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N. N. Zavadenko

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The article describes the main clinical forms and causes of speech delay in children. It presents modern data on the role of neurobiological factors in the speech delay pathogenesis, including early organic damage to the central nervous system due to the pregnancy and childbirth pathology, as well as genetic mechanisms. For early and accurate diagnosis of speech disorders in children, you need to consider normal patterns of speech development. The article presents indicators of pre-speech and speech development in children and describes the screening method for determining the speech delay. The main areas of complex correction are speech therapy, psycho-pedagogical and psychotherapeutic assistance, as well as pharmaceutical treatment. The capabilities of drug therapy for dysphasia (alalia are shown. 

The Influence of Direct and Indirect Speech on Source Memory

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Anita Eerland

2018-02-01

Full Text Available People perceive the same situation described in direct speech (e.g., John said, “I like the food at this restaurant” as more vivid and perceptually engaging than described in indirect speech (e.g., John said that he likes the food at the restaurant. So, if direct speech enhances the perception of vividness relative to indirect speech, what are the effects of using indirect speech? In four experiments, we examined whether the use of direct and indirect speech influences the comprehender’s memory for the identity of the speaker. Participants read a direct or an indirect speech version of a story and then addressed statements to one of the four protagonists of the story in a memory task. We found better source memory at the level of protagonist gender after indirect than direct speech (Exp. 1–3. When the story was rewritten to make the protagonists more distinctive, we also found an effect of speech type on source memory at the level of the individual, with better memory after indirect than direct speech (Exp. 3–4. Memory for the content of the story, however, was not influenced by speech type (Exp. 4. While previous research showed that direct speech may enhance memory for how something was said, we conclude that indirect speech enhances memory for who said what.

Speech and swallowing outcomes in buccal mucosa carcinoma

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Sunila John

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Buccal carcinoma is one of the most common malignant neoplasms among all oral cancers in India. Understanding the role of speech language pathologists (SLPs in the domains of evaluation and management strategies of this condition is limited, especially in the Indian context. This is a case report of a young adult with recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the buccal mucosa with no deleterious habits usually associated with buccal mucosa carcinoma. Following composite resection, pectoralis major myocutaneous flap reconstruction, he developed severe oral dysphagia and demonstrated unintelligible speech. This case report focuses on the issues of swallowing and speech deficits in buccal mucosa carcinoma that need to be addressed by SLPs, and the outcomes of speech and swallowing rehabilitation and prognostic issues.

Multimodal Speech Capture System for Speech Rehabilitation and Learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Sebkhi, Nordine; Desai, Dhyey; Islam, Mohammad; Lu, Jun; Wilson, Kimberly; Ghovanloo, Maysam

2017-11-01

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are trained to correct articulation of people diagnosed with motor speech disorders by analyzing articulators' motion and assessing speech outcome while patients speak. To assist SLPs in this task, we are presenting the multimodal speech capture system (MSCS) that records and displays kinematics of key speech articulators, the tongue and lips, along with voice, using unobtrusive methods. Collected speech modalities, tongue motion, lips gestures, and voice are visualized not only in real-time to provide patients with instant feedback but also offline to allow SLPs to perform post-analysis of articulators' motion, particularly the tongue, with its prominent but hardly visible role in articulation. We describe the MSCS hardware and software components, and demonstrate its basic visualization capabilities by a healthy individual repeating the words "Hello World." A proof-of-concept prototype has been successfully developed for this purpose, and will be used in future clinical studies to evaluate its potential impact on accelerating speech rehabilitation by enabling patients to speak naturally. Pattern matching algorithms to be applied to the collected data can provide patients with quantitative and objective feedback on their speech performance, unlike current methods that are mostly subjective, and may vary from one SLP to another.

Speech Motor Control in Fluent and Dysfluent Speech Production of an Individual with Apraxia of Speech and Broca's Aphasia

Science.gov (United States)

van Lieshout, Pascal H. H. M.; Bose, Arpita; Square, Paula A.; Steele, Catriona M.

2007-01-01

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is typically described as a motor-speech disorder with clinically well-defined symptoms, but without a clear understanding of the underlying problems in motor control. A number of studies have compared the speech of subjects with AOS to the fluent speech of controls, but only a few have included speech movement data and if…

Multiresolution analysis applied to text-independent phone segmentation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cherniz, AnalIa S; Torres, MarIa E; Rufiner, Hugo L; Esposito, Anna

2007-01-01

Automatic speech segmentation is of fundamental importance in different speech applications. The most common implementations are based on hidden Markov models. They use a statistical modelling of the phonetic units to align the data along a known transcription. This is an expensive and time-consuming process, because of the huge amount of data needed to train the system. Text-independent speech segmentation procedures have been developed to overcome some of these problems. These methods detect transitions in the evolution of the time-varying features that represent the speech signal. Speech representation plays a central role is the segmentation task. In this work, two new speech parameterizations based on the continuous multiresolution entropy, using Shannon entropy, and the continuous multiresolution divergence, using Kullback-Leibler distance, are proposed. These approaches have been compared with the classical Melbank parameterization. The proposed encodings increase significantly the segmentation performance. Parameterization based on the continuous multiresolution divergence shows the best results, increasing the number of correctly detected boundaries and decreasing the amount of erroneously inserted points. This suggests that the parameterization based on multiresolution information measures provide information related to acoustic features that take into account phonemic transitions

Relationship between the stuttering severity index and speech rate

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Claudia Regina Furquim de Andrade

Full Text Available CONTEXT: The speech rate is one of the parameters considered when investigating speech fluency and is an important variable in the assessment of individuals with communication complaints. OBJECTIVE: To correlate the stuttering severity index with one of the indices used for assessing fluency/speech rate. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Fluency and Fluency Disorders Investigation Laboratory, Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo. PARTICIPANTS: Seventy adults with stuttering diagnosis. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: A speech sample from each participant containing at least 200 fluent syllables was videotaped and analyzed according to a stuttering severity index test and speech rate parameters. RESULTS: The results obtained in this study indicate that the stuttering severity and the speech rate present significant variation, i.e., the more severe the stuttering is, the lower the speech rate in words and syllables per minute. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The results suggest that speech rate is an important indicator of fluency levels and should be incorporated in the assessment and treatment of stuttering. This study represents a first attempt to identify the possible subtypes of developmental stuttering. DEFINITION: Objective tests that quantify diseases are important in their diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.

PERSON DEIXIS IN USA PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SPEECHES

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Nanda Anggarani Putri

2015-06-01

Full Text Available This study investigates the use of person deixis in presidential campaign speeches. This study is important because the use of person deixis in political speeches has been proved by many studies to give significant effects to the audience. The study largely employs a descriptive qualitative method. However, it also employs a simple quantitative method in calculating the number of personal pronouns used in the speeches and their percentages. The data for the study were collected from the transcriptions of six presidential campaign speeches of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the campaign rally in various places across the United States of America in July, September, and November 2012. The results of this study show that the presidential candidates make the best use of pronouns as a way to promote themselves and to attack their opponents. The results also suggest that the use of pronouns in the speeches enables the candidates to construct positive identity and reality, which are favorable to them and make them appear more eligible for the position.

Free Speech as a Cultural Value in the United States

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Mauricio J. Alvarez

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Political orientation influences support for free speech, with liberals often reporting greater support for free speech than conservatives. We hypothesized that this effect should be moderated by cultural context: individualist cultures value individual self-expression and self-determination, and collectivist cultures value group harmony and conformity. These different foci should differently influence liberals and conservatives’ support for free speech within these cultures. Two studies evaluated the joint influence of political orientation and cultural context on support for free speech. Study 1, using a multilevel analysis of data from 37 U.S. states (n = 1,001, showed that conservatives report stronger support for free speech in collectivist states, whereas there were no differences between conservatives and liberals in support for free speech in individualist states. Study 2 (n = 90 confirmed this pattern by priming independent and interdependent self-construals in liberals and conservatives. Results demonstrate the importance of cultural context for free speech. Findings suggest that in the U.S. support for free speech might be embraced for different reasons: conservatives’ support for free speech appears to be motivated by a focus on collectively held values favoring free speech, while liberals’ support for free speech might be motivated by a focus on individualist self-expression.

Multimicrophone Speech Dereverberation: Experimental Validation

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Marc Moonen

2007-05-01

Full Text Available Dereverberation is required in various speech processing applications such as handsfree telephony and voice-controlled systems, especially when signals are applied that are recorded in a moderately or highly reverberant environment. In this paper, we compare a number of classical and more recently developed multimicrophone dereverberation algorithms, and validate the different algorithmic settings by means of two performance indices and a speech recognition system. It is found that some of the classical solutions obtain a moderate signal enhancement. More advanced subspace-based dereverberation techniques, on the other hand, fail to enhance the signals despite their high-computational load.

Development an Automatic Speech to Facial Animation Conversion for Improve Deaf Lives

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S. Hamidreza Kasaei

2011-05-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we propose design and initial implementation of a robust system which can automatically translates voice into text and text to sign language animations. Sign Language
Translation Systems could significantly improve deaf lives especially in communications, exchange of information and employment of machine for translation conversations from one language to another has. Therefore, considering these points, it seems necessary to study the speech recognition. Usually, the voice recognition algorithms address three major challenges. The first is extracting feature form speech and the second is when limited sound gallery are available for recognition, and the final challenge is to improve speaker dependent to speaker independent voice recognition. Extracting feature form speech is an important stage in our method. Different procedures are available for extracting feature form speech. One of the commonest of which used in speech
recognition systems is Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs. The algorithm starts with preprocessing and signal conditioning. Next extracting feature form speech using Cepstral coefficients will be done. Then the result of this process sends to segmentation part. Finally recognition part recognizes the words and then converting word recognized to facial animation. The project is still in progress and some new interesting methods are described in the current report.

Speech Silicon: An FPGA Architecture for Real-Time Hidden Markov-Model-Based Speech Recognition

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Schuster Jeffrey

2006-01-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the design of an FPGA-based system-on-a-chip capable of performing continuous speech recognition on medium sized vocabularies in real time. Through the creation of three dedicated pipelines, one for each of the major operations in the system, we were able to maximize the throughput of the system while simultaneously minimizing the number of pipeline stalls in the system. Further, by implementing a token-passing scheme between the later stages of the system, the complexity of the control was greatly reduced and the amount of active data present in the system at any time was minimized. Additionally, through in-depth analysis of the SPHINX 3 large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine, we were able to design models that could be efficiently benchmarked against a known software platform. These results, combined with the ability to reprogram the system for different recognition tasks, serve to create a system capable of performing real-time speech recognition in a vast array of environments.

Speech Silicon: An FPGA Architecture for Real-Time Hidden Markov-Model-Based Speech Recognition

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Alex K. Jones

2006-11-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the design of an FPGA-based system-on-a-chip capable of performing continuous speech recognition on medium sized vocabularies in real time. Through the creation of three dedicated pipelines, one for each of the major operations in the system, we were able to maximize the throughput of the system while simultaneously minimizing the number of pipeline stalls in the system. Further, by implementing a token-passing scheme between the later stages of the system, the complexity of the control was greatly reduced and the amount of active data present in the system at any time was minimized. Additionally, through in-depth analysis of the SPHINX 3 large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine, we were able to design models that could be efficiently benchmarked against a known software platform. These results, combined with the ability to reprogram the system for different recognition tasks, serve to create a system capable of performing real-time speech recognition in a vast array of environments.

Speech Telepractice: Installing a Speech Therapy Upgrade for the 21st Century

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Michael P. Towey

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Much of speech therapy involves the clinician guiding the therapeutic process (e.g., presenting stimuli and eliciting client responses; however, this Brief Communication describes a different approach to speech therapy delivery. Clinicians at Waldo County General Hospital (WCGH use high definition audio and video to engage clients in telepractice using interactive web-based virtual environments. This technology enables clients and their clinicians to co-create salient treatment activities using authentic materials captured via digital cameras, video and/or curricular materials.  Both therapists and clients manipulate the materials and interact online in real-time. The web-based technology engenders highly personalized and engaging activities, such that clients’ interactions with these high interest tasks often continue well beyond the therapy sessions.

Random Deep Belief Networks for Recognizing Emotions from Speech Signals

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Guihua Wen

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Now the human emotions can be recognized from speech signals using machine learning methods; however, they are challenged by the lower recognition accuracies in real applications due to lack of the rich representation ability. Deep belief networks (DBN can automatically discover the multiple levels of representations in speech signals. To make full of its advantages, this paper presents an ensemble of random deep belief networks (RDBN method for speech emotion recognition. It firstly extracts the low level features of the input speech signal and then applies them to construct lots of random subspaces. Each random subspace is then provided for DBN to yield the higher level features as the input of the classifier to output an emotion label. All outputted emotion labels are then fused through the majority voting to decide the final emotion label for the input speech signal. The conducted experimental results on benchmark speech emotion databases show that RDBN has better accuracy than the compared methods for speech emotion recognition.

Aging and Spectro-Temporal Integration of Speech

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John H. Grose

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age on the spectro-temporal integration of speech. The hypothesis was that the integration of speech fragments distributed over frequency, time, and ear of presentation is reduced in older listeners—even for those with good audiometric hearing. Younger, middle-aged, and older listeners (10 per group with good audiometric hearing participated. They were each tested under seven conditions that encompassed combinations of spectral, temporal, and binaural integration. Sentences were filtered into two bands centered at 500 Hz and 2500 Hz, with criterion bandwidth tailored for each participant. In some conditions, the speech bands were individually square wave interrupted at a rate of 10 Hz. Configurations of uninterrupted, synchronously interrupted, and asynchronously interrupted frequency bands were constructed that constituted speech fragments distributed across frequency, time, and ear of presentation. The over-arching finding was that, for most configurations, performance was not differentially affected by listener age. Although speech intelligibility varied across condition, there was no evidence of performance deficits in older listeners in any condition. This study indicates that age, per se, does not necessarily undermine the ability to integrate fragments of speech dispersed across frequency and time.

Designing the Database of Speech Under Stress

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Sabo Róbert

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This study describes the methodology used for designing a database of speech under real stress. Based on limits of existing stress databases, we used a communication task via a computer game to collect speech data. To validate the presence of stress, known psychophysiological indicators such as heart rate and electrodermal activity, as well as subjective self-assessment were used. This paper presents the data from first 5 speakers (3 men, 2 women who participated in initial tests of the proposed design. In 4 out of 5 speakers increases in fundamental frequency and intensity of speech were registered. Similarly, in 4 out of 5 speakers heart rate was significantly increased during the task, when compared with reference measurement from before the task. These first results show that proposed design might be appropriate for building a speech under stress database. However, there are still considerations that need to be addressed.

Speech parts as Poisson processes.

Science.gov (United States)

Badalamenti, A F

2001-09-01

This paper presents evidence that six of the seven parts of speech occur in written text as Poisson processes, simple or recurring. The six major parts are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, with the interjection occurring too infrequently to support a model. The data consist of more than the first 5000 words of works by four major authors coded to label the parts of speech, as well as periods (sentence terminators). Sentence length is measured via the period and found to be normally distributed with no stochastic model identified for its occurrence. The models for all six speech parts but the noun significantly distinguish some pairs of authors and likewise for the joint use of all words types. Any one author is significantly distinguished from any other by at least one word type and sentence length very significantly distinguishes each from all others. The variety of word type use, measured by Shannon entropy, builds to about 90% of its maximum possible value. The rate constants for nouns are close to the fractions of maximum entropy achieved. This finding together with the stochastic models and the relations among them suggest that the noun may be a primitive organizer of written text.

Visual feedback of tongue movement for novel speech sound learning

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William F Katz

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Pronunciation training studies have yielded important information concerning the processing of audiovisual (AV information. Second language (L2 learners show increased reliance on bottom-up, multimodal input for speech perception (compared to monolingual individuals. However, little is known about the role of viewing one’s own speech articulation processes during speech training. The current study investigated whether real-time, visual feedback for tongue movement can improve a speaker’s learning of non-native speech sounds. An interactive 3D tongue visualization system based on electromagnetic articulography (EMA was used in a speech training experiment. Native speakers of American English produced a novel speech sound (/ɖ̠/; a voiced, coronal, palatal stop before, during, and after trials in which they viewed their own speech movements using the 3D model. Talkers’ productions were evaluated using kinematic (tongue-tip spatial positioning and acoustic (burst spectra measures. The results indicated a rapid gain in accuracy associated with visual feedback training. The findings are discussed with respect to neural models for multimodal speech processing.

Hearing speech in music

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Seth-Reino Ekström

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The masking effect of a piano composition, played at different speeds and in different octaves, on speech-perception thresholds was investigated in 15 normal-hearing and 14 moderately-hearing-impaired subjects. Running speech (just follow conversation, JFC testing and use of hearing aids increased the everyday validity of the findings. A comparison was made with standard audiometric noises [International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA noise and speech spectrum-filtered noise (SPN]. All masking sounds, music or noise, were presented at the same equivalent sound level (50 dBA. The results showed a significant effect of piano performance speed and octave (P<.01. Low octave and fast tempo had the largest effect; and high octave and slow tempo, the smallest. Music had a lower masking effect than did ICRA noise with two or six speakers at normal vocal effort (P<.01 and SPN (P<.05. Subjects with hearing loss had higher masked thresholds than the normal-hearing subjects (P<.01, but there were smaller differences between masking conditions (P<.01. It is pointed out that music offers an interesting opportunity for studying masking under realistic conditions, where spectral and temporal features can be varied independently. The results have implications for composing music with vocal parts, designing acoustic environments and creating a balance between speech perception and privacy in social settings.

On the Importance of Audiovisual Coherence for the Perceived Quality of Synthesized Visual Speech

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Wesley Mattheyses

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Audiovisual text-to-speech systems convert a written text into an audiovisual speech signal. Typically, the visual mode of the synthetic speech is synthesized separately from the audio, the latter being either natural or synthesized speech. However, the perception of mismatches between these two information streams requires experimental exploration since it could degrade the quality of the output. In order to increase the intermodal coherence in synthetic 2D photorealistic speech, we extended the well-known unit selection audio synthesis technique to work with multimodal segments containing original combinations of audio and video. Subjective experiments confirm that the audiovisual signals created by our multimodal synthesis strategy are indeed perceived as being more synchronous than those of systems in which both modes are not intrinsically coherent. Furthermore, it is shown that the degree of coherence between the auditory mode and the visual mode has an influence on the perceived quality of the synthetic visual speech fragment. In addition, the audio quality was found to have only a minor influence on the perceived visual signal's quality.

Enhancement of speech signals - with a focus on voiced speech models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nørholm, Sidsel Marie

This thesis deals with speech enhancement, i.e., noise reduction in speech signals. This has applications in, e.g., hearing aids and teleconference systems. We consider a signal-driven approach to speech enhancement where a model of the speech is assumed and filters are generated based...... on this model. The basic model used in this thesis is the harmonic model which is a commonly used model for describing the voiced part of the speech signal. We show that it can be beneficial to extend the model to take inharmonicities or the non-stationarity of speech into account. Extending the model...

Automatic Emotion Recognition in Speech: Possibilities and Significance

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Milana Bojanić

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding are crucial steps towards a natural humanmachine interaction. The main task of the speech communication process is the recognition of the word sequence, but the recognition of prosody, emotion and stress tags may be of particular importance as well. This paper discusses thepossibilities of recognition emotion from speech signal in order to improve ASR, and also provides the analysis of acoustic features that can be used for the detection of speaker’s emotion and stress. The paper also provides a short overview of emotion and stress classification techniques. The importance and place of emotional speech recognition is shown in the domain of human-computer interactive systems and transaction communication model. The directions for future work are given at the end of this work.

Integrated Phoneme Subspace Method for Speech Feature Extraction

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Park Hyunsin

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Speech feature extraction has been a key focus in robust speech recognition research. In this work, we discuss data-driven linear feature transformations applied to feature vectors in the logarithmic mel-frequency filter bank domain. Transformations are based on principal component analysis (PCA, independent component analysis (ICA, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA. Furthermore, this paper introduces a new feature extraction technique that collects the correlation information among phoneme subspaces and reconstructs feature space for representing phonemic information efficiently. The proposed speech feature vector is generated by projecting an observed vector onto an integrated phoneme subspace (IPS based on PCA or ICA. The performance of the new feature was evaluated for isolated word speech recognition. The proposed method provided higher recognition accuracy than conventional methods in clean and reverberant environments.

Talker Variability in Audiovisual Speech Perception

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Shannon eHeald

2014-07-01

Full Text Available 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.

Intelligibility for Binaural Speech with Discarded Low-SNR Speech Components.

Science.gov (United States)

Schoenmaker, Esther; van de Par, Steven

2016-01-01

Speech intelligibility in multitalker settings improves when the target speaker is spatially separated from the interfering speakers. A factor that may contribute to this improvement is the improved detectability of target-speech components due to binaural interaction in analogy to the Binaural Masking Level Difference (BMLD). This would allow listeners to hear target speech components within specific time-frequency intervals that have a negative SNR, similar to the improvement in the detectability of a tone in noise when these contain disparate interaural difference cues. To investigate whether these negative-SNR target-speech components indeed contribute to speech intelligibility, a stimulus manipulation was performed where all target components were removed when local SNRs were smaller than a certain criterion value. It can be expected that for sufficiently high criterion values target speech components will be removed that do contribute to speech intelligibility. For spatially separated speakers, assuming that a BMLD-like detection advantage contributes to intelligibility, degradation in intelligibility is expected already at criterion values below 0 dB SNR. However, for collocated speakers it is expected that higher criterion values can be applied without impairing speech intelligibility. Results show that degradation of intelligibility for separated speakers is only seen for criterion values of 0 dB and above, indicating a negligible contribution of a BMLD-like detection advantage in multitalker settings. These results show that the spatial benefit is related to a spatial separation of speech components at positive local SNRs rather than to a BMLD-like detection improvement for speech components at negative local SNRs.

An experimental Dutch keyboard-to-speech system for the speech impaired

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Deliege, R.J.H.

1989-01-01

An experimental Dutch keyboard-to-speech system has been developed to explor the possibilities and limitations of Dutch speech synthesis in a communication aid for the speech impaired. The system uses diphones and a formant synthesizer chip for speech synthesis. Input to the system is in

Prevalence of Speech Disorders in Arak Primary School Students, 2014-2015

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Abdoreza Yavari

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background: The speech disorders may produce irreparable damage to childs speech and language development in the psychosocial view. The voice, speech sound production and fluency disorders are speech disorders, that may result from delay or impairment in speech motor control mechanism, central neuron system disorders, improper language stimulation or voice abuse. Materials and Methods: This study examined the prevalence of speech disorders in 1393 Arakian students at 1 to 6th grades of primary school. After collecting continuous speech samples, picture description, passage reading and phonetic test, we recorded the pathological signs of stuttering, articulation disorder and voice disorders in a special sheet. Results: The prevalence of articulation, voice and stuttering disorders was 8%, 3.5% and%1 and the prevalence of speech disorders was 11.9%. The prevalence of speech disorders was decreasing with increasing of student’s grade. 12.2% of boy students and 11.7% of girl students of primary school in Arak had speech disorders. Conclusion: The prevalence of speech disorders of primary school students in Arak is similar to the prevalence of speech disorders in Kermanshah, but the prevalence of speech disorders in this research is smaller than many similar researches in Iran. It seems that racial and cultural diversity has some effect on increasing the prevalence of speech disorders in Arak city.

Speech Function and Speech Role in Carl Fredricksen's Dialogue on Up Movie

OpenAIRE

Rehana, Ridha; Silitonga, Sortha

2013-01-01

One aim of this article is to show through a concrete example how speech function and speech role used in movie. The illustrative example is taken from the dialogue of Up movie. Central to the analysis proper form of dialogue on Up movie that contain of speech function and speech role; i.e. statement, offer, question, command, giving, and demanding. 269 dialogue were interpreted by actor, and it was found that the use of speech function and speech role.

Machine Translation from Text

Science.gov (United States)

Habash, Nizar; Olive, Joseph; Christianson, Caitlin; McCary, John

Machine translation (MT) from text, the topic of this chapter, is perhaps the heart of the GALE project. Beyond being a well defined application that stands on its own, MT from text is the link between the automatic speech recognition component and the distillation component. The focus of MT in GALE is on translating from Arabic or Chinese to English. The three languages represent a wide range of linguistic diversity and make the GALE MT task rather challenging and exciting.

Experimental comparison between speech transmission index, rapid speech transmission index, and speech intelligibility index.

Science.gov (United States)

Larm, Petra; Hongisto, Valtteri

2006-02-01

During the acoustical design of, e.g., auditoria or open-plan offices, it is important to know how speech can be perceived in various parts of the room. Different objective methods have been developed to measure and predict speech intelligibility, and these have been extensively used in various spaces. In this study, two such methods were compared, the speech transmission index (STI) and the speech intelligibility index (SII). Also the simplification of the STI, the room acoustics speech transmission index (RASTI), was considered. These quantities are all based on determining an apparent speech-to-noise ratio on selected frequency bands and summing them using a specific weighting. For comparison, some data were needed on the possible differences of these methods resulting from the calculation scheme and also measuring equipment. Their prediction accuracy was also of interest. Measurements were made in a laboratory having adjustable noise level and absorption, and in a real auditorium. It was found that the measurement equipment, especially the selection of the loudspeaker, can greatly affect the accuracy of the results. The prediction accuracy of the RASTI was found acceptable, if the input values for the prediction are accurately known, even though the studied space was not ideally diffuse.

Bandwidth Extension of Telephone Speech Aided by Data Embedding

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Sagi Ariel

2007-01-01

Full Text Available A system for bandwidth extension of telephone speech, aided by data embedding, is presented. The proposed system uses the transmitted analog narrowband speech signal as a carrier of the side information needed to carry out the bandwidth extension. The upper band of the wideband speech is reconstructed at the receiving end from two components: a synthetic wideband excitation signal, generated from the narrowband telephone speech and a wideband spectral envelope, parametrically represented and transmitted as embedded data in the telephone speech. We propose a novel data embedding scheme, in which the scalar Costa scheme is combined with an auditory masking model allowing high rate transparent embedding, while maintaining a low bit error rate. The signal is transformed to the frequency domain via the discrete Hartley transform (DHT and is partitioned into subbands. Data is embedded in an adaptively chosen subset of subbands by modifying the DHT coefficients. In our simulations, high quality wideband speech was obtained from speech transmitted over a telephone line (characterized by spectral magnitude distortion, dispersion, and noise, in which side information data is transparently embedded at the rate of 600 information bits/second and with a bit error rate of approximately . In a listening test, the reconstructed wideband speech was preferred (at different degrees over conventional telephone speech in of the test utterances.

Bandwidth Extension of Telephone Speech Aided by Data Embedding

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David Malah

2007-01-01

Full Text Available A system for bandwidth extension of telephone speech, aided by data embedding, is presented. The proposed system uses the transmitted analog narrowband speech signal as a carrier of the side information needed to carry out the bandwidth extension. The upper band of the wideband speech is reconstructed at the receiving end from two components: a synthetic wideband excitation signal, generated from the narrowband telephone speech and a wideband spectral envelope, parametrically represented and transmitted as embedded data in the telephone speech. We propose a novel data embedding scheme, in which the scalar Costa scheme is combined with an auditory masking model allowing high rate transparent embedding, while maintaining a low bit error rate. The signal is transformed to the frequency domain via the discrete Hartley transform (DHT and is partitioned into subbands. Data is embedded in an adaptively chosen subset of subbands by modifying the DHT coefficients. In our simulations, high quality wideband speech was obtained from speech transmitted over a telephone line (characterized by spectral magnitude distortion, dispersion, and noise, in which side information data is transparently embedded at the rate of 600 information bits/second and with a bit error rate of approximately 3⋅10−4. In a listening test, the reconstructed wideband speech was preferred (at different degrees over conventional telephone speech in 92.5% of the test utterances.

Source Separation via Spectral Masking for Speech Recognition Systems

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Gustavo Fernandes Rodrigues

2012-12-01

Full Text Available In this paper we present an insight into the use of spectral masking techniques in time-frequency domain, as a preprocessing step for the speech signal recognition. Speech recognition systems have their performance negatively affected in noisy environments or in the presence of other speech signals. The limits of these masking techniques for different levels of the signal-to-noise ratio are discussed. We show the robustness of the spectral masking techniques against four types of noise: white, pink, brown and human speech noise (bubble noise. The main contribution of this work is to analyze the performance limits of recognition systems  using spectral masking. We obtain an increase of 18% on the speech hit rate, when the speech signals were corrupted by other speech signals or bubble noise, with different signal-to-noise ratio of approximately 1, 10 and 20 dB. On the other hand, applying the ideal binary masks to mixtures corrupted by white, pink and brown noise, results an average growth of 9% on the speech hit rate, with the same different signal-to-noise ratio. The experimental results suggest that the masking spectral techniques are more suitable for the case when it is applied a bubble noise, which is produced by human speech, than for the case of applying white, pink and brown noise.

Thinking soap But Speaking ‘oaps’. The Sound Preparation Period: Backward Calculation From Utterance to Muscle Innervation

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Nora Wiedenmann

2010-04-01

Full Text Available

In this article’s model—on speech and on speech errors, dyscoordinations, and disorders—, the time-course from the muscle innervation impetuses to the utterance of sounds as intended for canonical speech sound sequences is calculated backward. This time-course is shown as the sum of all the known physiological durations of speech sounds and speech gestures that are necessary to produce an utterance. The model introduces two internal clocks, based on positive or negative factors, representing certain physiologically-based time-courses during the sound preparation period (Lautvorspann. The use of these internal clocks show that speech gestures—like other motor activities—work according to a simple serialization principle: Under non-default conditions,
alterations of the time-courses may cause speech errors of sound serialization, dyscoordinations of sounds as observed during first language acquisition, or speech disorders as pathological cases. These alterations of the time-course are modelled by varying the two internal-clock factors. The calculation of time-courses uses as default values the sound durations of the context-dependent Munich PHONDAT Database of Spoken German (see Appendix 4. As a new, human approach, this calculation agrees mathematically with the approach of Linear Programming / Operations Research. This work gives strong support to the fairly old suspicion (of 1908 of the famous Austrian speech error scientist Meringer [15], namely that one mostly thinks and articulates in a different serialization than is audible from one’s uttered sound sequences.

Robust Speech/Non-Speech Classification in Heterogeneous Multimedia Content

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huijbregts, M.A.H.; de Jong, Franciska M.G.

In this paper we present a speech/non-speech classification method that allows high quality classification without the need to know in advance what kinds of audible non-speech events are present in an audio recording and that does not require a single parameter to be tuned on in-domain data. Because

Causes of Speech Disorders in Primary School Students of Zahedan

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Saeed Fakhrerahimi

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Background: Since making communication with others is the most important function of speech, undoubtedly, any type of disorder in speech will affect the human communicability with others. The objective of the study was to investigate reasons behind the [high] prevalence rate of stammer, producing disorders and aglossia.Materials and Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 118 male and female students, who were studying in a primary school in Zahedan; they had referred to the Speech Therapy Centers of Zahedan University of Medical Sciences in a period of seven months. The speech therapist examinations, diagnosis tools common in speech therapy, Spielberg Children Trait and also patients' cases were used to find the reasons behind the [high] prevalence rate of speech disorders. Results: Psychological causes had the highest rate of correlation with the speech disorders among the other factors affecting the speech disorders. After psychological causes, family history and age of the subjects are the other factors which may bring about the speech disorders (P<0.05. Bilingualism and birth order has a negative relationship with the speech disorders. Likewise, another result of this study shows that only psychological causes, social causes, hereditary causes and age of subjects can predict the speech disorders (P<0.05.Conclusion: The present study shows that the speech disorders have a strong and close relationship with the psychological causes at the first step and also history of family and age of individuals at the next steps.

The relationship of speech intelligibility with hearing sensitivity, cognition, and perceived hearing difficulties varies for different speech perception tests

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Antje eHeinrich

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Listeners vary in their ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Hearing sensitivity, as measured by pure-tone audiometry, can only partly explain these results, and cognition has emerged as another key concept. Although cognition relates to speech perception, the exact nature of the relationship remains to be fully understood. This study investigates how different aspects of cognition, particularly working memory and attention, relate to speech intelligibility for various tests.Perceptual accuracy of speech perception represents just one aspect of functioning in a listening environment. Activity and participation limits imposed by hearing loss, in addition to the demands of a listening environment, are also important and may be better captured by self-report questionnaires. Understanding how speech perception relates to self-reported aspects of listening forms the second focus of the study.Forty-four listeners aged between 50-74 years with mild SNHL were tested on speech perception tests differing in complexity from low (phoneme discrimination in quiet, to medium (digit triplet perception in speech-shaped noise to high (sentence perception in modulated noise; cognitive tests of attention, memory, and nonverbal IQ; and self-report questionnaires of general health-related and hearing-specific quality of life.Hearing sensitivity and cognition related to intelligibility differently depending on the speech test: neither was important for phoneme discrimination, hearing sensitivity alone was important for digit triplet perception, and hearing and cognition together played a role in sentence perception. Self-reported aspects of auditory functioning were correlated with speech intelligibility to different degrees, with digit triplets in noise showing the richest pattern. The results suggest that intelligibility tests can vary in their auditory and cognitive demands and their sensitivity to the challenges that auditory environments pose on

Intelligibility of speech of children with speech and sound disorders

OpenAIRE

Ivetac, Tina

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study is to examine speech intelligibility of children with primary speech and sound disorders aged 3 to 6 years in everyday life. The research problem is based on the degree to which parents or guardians, immediate family members (sister, brother, grandparents), extended family members (aunt, uncle, cousin), child's friends, other acquaintances, child's teachers and strangers understand the speech of children with speech sound disorders. We examined whether the level ...

Speech Evoked Auditory Brainstem Response in Stuttering

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Ali Akbar Tahaei

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Auditory processing deficits have been hypothesized as an underlying mechanism for stuttering. Previous studies have demonstrated abnormal responses in subjects with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS at the higher level of the central auditory system using speech stimuli. Recently, the potential usefulness of speech evoked auditory brainstem responses in central auditory processing disorders has been emphasized. The current study used the speech evoked ABR to investigate the hypothesis that subjects with PDS have specific auditory perceptual dysfunction. Objectives. To determine whether brainstem responses to speech stimuli differ between PDS subjects and normal fluent speakers. Methods. Twenty-five subjects with PDS participated in this study. The speech-ABRs were elicited by the 5-formant synthesized syllable/da/, with duration of 40 ms. Results. There were significant group differences for the onset and offset transient peaks. Subjects with PDS had longer latencies for the onset and offset peaks relative to the control group. Conclusions. Subjects with PDS showed a deficient neural timing in the early stages of the auditory pathway consistent with temporal processing deficits and their abnormal timing may underlie to their disfluency.

Speech Recognition for the iCub Platform

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Bertrand Higy

2018-02-01

Full Text Available This paper describes open source software (available at https://github.com/robotology/natural-speech to build automatic speech recognition (ASR systems and run them within the YARP platform. The toolkit is designed (i to allow non-ASR experts to easily create their own ASR system and run it on iCub and (ii to build deep learning-based models specifically addressing the main challenges an ASR system faces in the context of verbal human–iCub interactions. The toolkit mostly consists of Python, C++ code and shell scripts integrated in YARP. As additional contribution, a second codebase (written in Matlab is provided for more expert ASR users who want to experiment with bio-inspired and developmental learning-inspired ASR systems. Specifically, we provide code for two distinct kinds of speech recognition: “articulatory” and “unsupervised” speech recognition. The first is largely inspired by influential neurobiological theories of speech perception which assume speech perception to be mediated by brain motor cortex activities. Our articulatory systems have been shown to outperform strong deep learning-based baselines. The second type of recognition systems, the “unsupervised” systems, do not use any supervised information (contrary to most ASR systems, including our articulatory systems. To some extent, they mimic an infant who has to discover the basic speech units of a language by herself. In addition, we provide resources consisting of pre-trained deep learning models for ASR, and a 2.5-h speech dataset of spoken commands, the VoCub dataset, which can be used to adapt an ASR system to the typical acoustic environments in which iCub operates.

Hybrid methodological approach to context-dependent speech recognition

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Dragiša Mišković

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Although the importance of contextual information in speech recognition has been acknowledged for a long time now, it has remained clearly underutilized even in state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. This article introduces a novel, methodologically hybrid approach to the research question of context-dependent speech recognition in human–machine interaction. To the extent that it is hybrid, the approach integrates aspects of both statistical and representational paradigms. We extend the standard statistical pattern-matching approach with a cognitively inspired and analytically tractable model with explanatory power. This methodological extension allows for accounting for contextual information which is otherwise unavailable in speech recognition systems, and using it to improve post-processing of recognition hypotheses. The article introduces an algorithm for evaluation of recognition hypotheses, illustrates it for concrete interaction domains, and discusses its implementation within two prototype conversational agents.

Speech/Nonspeech Detection Using Minimal Walsh Basis Functions

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Pwint Moe

2007-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a new method to detect speech/nonspeech components of a given noisy signal. Employing the combination of binary Walsh basis functions and an analysis-synthesis scheme, the original noisy speech signal is modified first. From the modified signals, the speech components are distinguished from the nonspeech components by using a simple decision scheme. Minimal number of Walsh basis functions to be applied is determined using singular value decomposition (SVD. The main advantages of the proposed method are low computational complexity, less parameters to be adjusted, and simple implementation. It is observed that the use of Walsh basis functions makes the proposed algorithm efficiently applicable in real-world situations where processing time is crucial. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves high-speech and nonspeech detection rates while maintaining a low error rate for different noisy conditions.

The Speech Act Theory between Linguistics and Language Philosophy

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Liviu-Mihail MARINESCU

2006-10-01

Full Text Available Of all the issues in the general theory of language usage, speech act theory has probably aroused the widest interest. Psychologists, forexample, have suggested that the acquisition of the concepts underlying speech acts may be a prerequisite for the acquisition of language in general,literary critics have looked to speech act theory for an illumination of textual subtleties or for an understanding of the nature of literary genres,anthropologists have hoped to find in the theory some account of the nature of magical incantations, philosophers have seen potential applications to,amongst other things, the status of ethical statements, while linguists have seen the notions of speech act theory as variously applicable to problemsin syntax, semantics, second language learning, and elsewhere.

Speech disorders - children

Science.gov (United States)

... disorder; Voice disorders; Vocal disorders; Disfluency; Communication disorder - speech disorder; Speech disorder - stuttering ... evaluation tools that can help identify and diagnose speech disorders: Denver Articulation Screening Examination Goldman-Fristoe Test of ...

THE DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACTS USED IN ENGLISH SPEAKING CLASS

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Muhammad Khatib Bayanuddin

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This research discusses about an analysis of the directive speech acts used in english speaking class at the third semester of english speaking class of english study program of IAIN STS Jambi. The aims of this research are to describe the types of directive speech acts and politeness strategies that found in English speaking class. This research used descriptive qualitative method. This method used to describe clearly about the types and politeness strategies of directive speech acts based on the data in English speaking class. The result showed that in English speaking class that there are some types and politeness strategies of directive speech acts, such as: requestives, questions, requirements, prohibitives, permissives, and advisores as types, as well as on-record indirect strategies (prediction statement, strong obligation statement, possibility statement, weaker obligation statement, volitional statement, direct strategies (imperative, performative, and nonsentential strategies as politeness strategies. The achievement of this research are hoped can be additional knowledge about linguistics study, especially in directive speech acts and can be developed for future researches. Key words: directive speech acts, types, politeness strategies.

Speech recognition technology: an outlook for human-to-machine interaction.

Science.gov (United States)

Erdel, T; Crooks, S

2000-01-01

Speech recognition, as an enabling technology in healthcare-systems computing, is a topic that has been discussed for quite some time, but is just now coming to fruition. Traditionally, speech-recognition software has been constrained by hardware, but improved processors and increased memory capacities are starting to remove some of these limitations. With these barriers removed, companies that create software for the healthcare setting have the opportunity to write more successful applications. Among the criticisms of speech-recognition applications are the high rates of error and steep training curves. However, even in the face of such negative perceptions, there remains significant opportunities for speech recognition to allow healthcare providers and, more specifically, physicians, to work more efficiently and ultimately spend more time with their patients and less time completing necessary documentation. This article will identify opportunities for inclusion of speech-recognition technology in the healthcare setting and examine major categories of speech-recognition software--continuous speech recognition, command and control, and text-to-speech. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each area, the limitations of the software today, and how future trends might affect them.

Neurophysiology of speech differences in childhood apraxia of speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Preston, Jonathan L; Molfese, Peter J; Gumkowski, Nina; Sorcinelli, Andrea; Harwood, Vanessa; Irwin, Julia R; Landi, Nicole

2014-01-01

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a picture naming task of simple and complex words in children with typical speech and with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Results reveal reduced amplitude prior to speaking complex (multisyllabic) words relative to simple (monosyllabic) words for the CAS group over the right hemisphere during a time window thought to reflect phonological encoding of word forms. Group differences were also observed prior to production of spoken tokens regardless of word complexity during a time window just prior to speech onset (thought to reflect motor planning/programming). Results suggest differences in pre-speech neurolinguistic processes.

Sound frequency affects speech emotion perception: Results from congenital amusia

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Sydney eLolli

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Congenital amusics, or tone-deaf individuals, show difficulty in perceiving and producing small pitch differences. While amusia has marked effects on music perception, its impact on speech perception is less clear. Here we test the hypothesis that individual differences in pitch perception affect judgment of emotion in speech, by applying band-pass filters to spoken statements of emotional speech. A norming study was first conducted on Mechanical Turk to ensure that the intended emotions from the Macquarie Battery for Evaluation of Prosody (MBEP were reliably identifiable by US English speakers. The most reliably identified emotional speech samples were used in in Experiment 1, in which subjects performed a psychophysical pitch discrimination task, and an emotion identification task under band-pass and unfiltered speech conditions. Results showed a significant correlation between pitch discrimination threshold and emotion identification accuracy for band-pass filtered speech, with amusics (defined here as those with a pitch discrimination threshold > 16 Hz performing worse than controls. This relationship with pitch discrimination was not seen in unfiltered speech conditions. Given the dissociation between band-pass filtered and unfiltered speech conditions, we inferred that amusics may be compensating for poorer pitch perception by using speech cues that are filtered out in this manipulation.

Multiengine Speech Processing Using SNR Estimator in Variable Noisy Environments

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Ahmad R. Abu-El-Quran

2012-01-01

Full Text Available We introduce a multiengine speech processing system that can detect the location and the type of audio signal in variable noisy environments. This system detects the location of the audio source using a microphone array; the system examines the audio first, determines if it is speech/nonspeech, then estimates the value of the signal to noise (SNR using a Discrete-Valued SNR Estimator. Using this SNR value, instead of trying to adapt the speech signal to the speech processing system, we adapt the speech processing system to the surrounding environment of the captured speech signal. In this paper, we introduced the Discrete-Valued SNR Estimator and a multiengine classifier, using Multiengine Selection or Multiengine Weighted Fusion. Also we use the SI as example of the speech processing. The Discrete-Valued SNR Estimator achieves an accuracy of 98.4% in characterizing the environment's SNR. Compared to a conventional single engine SI system, the improvement in accuracy was as high as 9.0% and 10.0% for the Multiengine Selection and Multiengine Weighted Fusion, respectively.

THE ONTOGENESIS OF SPEECH DEVELOPMENT

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T. E. Braudo

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this article is to acquaint the specialists, working with children having developmental disorders, with age-related norms for speech development. Many well-known linguists and psychologists studied speech ontogenesis (logogenesis. Speech is a higher mental function, which integrates many functional systems. Speech development in infants during the first months after birth is ensured by the innate hearing and emerging ability to fix the gaze on the face of an adult. Innate emotional reactions are also being developed during this period, turning into nonverbal forms of communication. At about 6 months a baby starts to pronounce some syllables; at 7–9 months – repeats various sounds combinations, pronounced by adults. At 10–11 months a baby begins to react on the words, referred to him/her. The first words usually appear at an age of 1 year; this is the start of the stage of active speech development. At this time it is acceptable, if a child confuses or rearranges sounds, distorts or misses them. By the age of 1.5 years a child begins to understand abstract explanations of adults. Significant vocabulary enlargement occurs between 2 and 3 years; grammatical structures of the language are being formed during this period (a child starts to use phrases and sentences. Preschool age (3–7 y. o. is characterized by incorrect, but steadily improving pronunciation of sounds and phonemic perception. The vocabulary increases; abstract speech and retelling are being formed. Children over 7 y. o. continue to improve grammar, writing and reading skills. The described stages may not have strict age boundaries, as soon as they are dependent not only on environment, but also on the child’s mental constitution, heredity and character.

Texts, Transmissions, Receptions. Modern Approaches to Narratives

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lardinois, A.P.M.H.; Levie, S.A.; Hoeken, H.; Lüthy, C.H.

2015-01-01

The papers collected in this volume study the function and meaning of narrative texts from a variety of perspectives. The word 'text' is used here in the broadest sense of the term: it denotes literary books, but also oral tales, speeches, newspaper articles and comics. One of the purposes of this

A Research of Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Deep Belief Network and SVM

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Chenchen Huang

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Feature extraction is a very important part in speech emotion recognition, and in allusion to feature extraction in speech emotion recognition problems, this paper proposed a new method of feature extraction, using DBNs in DNN to extract emotional features in speech signal automatically. By training a 5 layers depth DBNs, to extract speech emotion feature and incorporate multiple consecutive frames to form a high dimensional feature. The features after training in DBNs were the input of nonlinear SVM classifier, and finally speech emotion recognition multiple classifier system was achieved. The speech emotion recognition rate of the system reached 86.5%, which was 7% higher than the original method.

Speech spectrum's correlation with speakers' Eysenck personality traits.

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Chao Hu

Full Text Available The current study explored the correlation between speakers' Eysenck personality traits and speech spectrum parameters. Forty-six subjects completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. They were instructed to verbally answer the questions shown on a computer screen and their responses were recorded by the computer. Spectrum parameters of /sh/ and /i/ were analyzed by Praat voice software. Formant frequencies of the consonant /sh/ in lying responses were significantly lower than that in truthful responses, whereas no difference existed on the vowel /i/ speech spectrum. The second formant bandwidth of the consonant /sh/ speech spectrum was significantly correlated with the personality traits of Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism, and the correlation differed between truthful and lying responses, whereas the first formant frequency of the vowel /i/ speech spectrum was negatively correlated with Neuroticism in both response types. The results suggest that personality characteristics may be conveyed through the human voice, although the extent to which these effects are due to physiological differences in the organs associated with speech or to a general Pygmalion effect is yet unknown.

Multiple Transcoding Impact on Speech Quality in Ideal Network Conditions

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Martin Mikulec

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This paper deals with the impact of transcoding on the speech quality. We have focused mainly on the transcoding between codecs without the negative influence of the network parameters such as packet loss and delay. It has ensured objective and repeatable results from our measurement. The measurement was performed on the Transcoding Measuring System developed especially for this purpose. The system is based on the open source projects and is useful as a design tool for VoIP system administrators. The paper compares the most used codecs from the transcoding perspective. The multiple transcoding between G711, GSM and G729 codecs were performed and the speech quality of these calls was evaluated. The speech quality was measured by Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality method, which provides results in Mean Opinion Score used to describe the speech quality on a scale from 1 to 5. The obtained results indicate periodical speech quality degradation on every transcoding between two codecs.

Analysis of Feature Extraction Methods for Speaker Dependent Speech Recognition

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Gurpreet Kaur

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Speech recognition is about what is being said, irrespective of who is saying. Speech recognition is a growing field. Major progress is taking place on the technology of automatic speech recognition (ASR. Still, there are lots of barriers in this field in terms of recognition rate, background noise, speaker variability, speaking rate, accent etc. Speech recognition rate mainly depends on the selection of features and feature extraction methods. This paper outlines the feature extraction techniques for speaker dependent speech recognition for isolated words. A brief survey of different feature extraction techniques like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC, Linear Predictive Coding Coefficients (LPCC, Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP, Relative Spectra Perceptual linear Predictive (RASTA-PLP analysis are presented and evaluation is done. Speech recognition has various applications from daily use to commercial use. We have made a speaker dependent system and this system can be useful in many areas like controlling a patient vehicle using simple commands.

Markers of Deception in Italian Speech

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Katelyn eSpence

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Lying is a universal activity and the detection of lying a universal concern. Presently, there is great interest in determining objective measures of deception. The examination of speech, in particular, holds promise in this regard; yet, most of what we know about the relationship between speech and lying is based on the assessment of English-speaking participants. Few studies have examined indicators of deception in languages other than English. The world’s languages differ in significant ways, and cross-linguistic studies of deceptive communications are a research imperative. Here we review some of these differences amongst the world’s languages, and provide an overview of a number of recent studies demonstrating that cross-linguistic research is a worthwhile endeavour. In addition, we report the results of an empirical investigation of pitch, response latency, and speech rate as cues to deception in Italian speech. True and false opinions were elicited in an audio-taped interview. A within subjects analysis revealed no significant difference between the average pitch of the two conditions; however, speech rate was significantly slower, while response latency was longer, during deception compared with truth-telling. We explore the implications of these findings and propose directions for future research, with the aim of expanding the cross-linguistic branch of research on markers of deception.

Acoustic cues identifying phonetic transitions for speech segmentation

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Niekerk, DR

2008-11-01

Full Text Available The quality of corpus-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems depends strongly on the consistency of boundary placements during phonetic alignments. Expert human transcribers use visually represented acoustic cues in order to consistently place...

International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) recommendations for the construction of multilingual speech tests. ICRA Working Group on Multilingual Speech Tests.

Science.gov (United States)

Akeroyd, Michael A; Arlinger, Stig; Bentler, Ruth A; Boothroyd, Arthur; Dillier, Norbert; Dreschler, Wouter A; Gagné, Jean-Pierre; Lutman, Mark; Wouters, Jan; Wong, Lena; Kollmeier, Birger

2015-01-01

To provide guidelines for the development of two types of closed-set speech-perception tests that can be applied and interpreted in the same way across languages. The guidelines cover the digit triplet and the matrix sentence tests that are most commonly used to test speech recognition in noise. They were developed by a working group on Multilingual Speech Tests of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA). The recommendations are based on reviews of existing evaluations of the digit triplet and matrix tests as well as on the research experience of members of the ICRA Working Group. They represent the results of a consensus process. The resulting recommendations deal with: Test design and word selection; Talker characteristics; Audio recording and stimulus preparation; Masking noise; Test administration; and Test validation. By following these guidelines for the development of any new test of this kind, clinicians and researchers working in any language will be able to perform tests whose results can be compared and combined in cross-language studies.

Methods and Application of Phonetic Label Alignment in Speech Processing Tasks

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M. Myslivec

2000-12-01

Full Text Available The paper deals with the problem of automatic phonetic segmentation ofspeech signals, namely for speech analysis and recognition purposes.Several methods and approaches are described and evaluated from thepoint of view of their accuracy. A complete instruction for creating anannotated database for training a Czech speech recognition system isprovided together with the authors' own experience. The results of thework have found practical applications, for example, in developing atool for semi-automatic speech segmentation, building alarge-vocabulary phoneme-based speech recognition system and designingan aid for learning and practicing pronunciation of words or phrases inthe native or a foreign language.

Speech misperception: speaking and seeing interfere differently with hearing.

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Takemi Mochida

Full Text Available Speech perception is thought to be linked to speech motor production. This linkage is considered to mediate multimodal aspects of speech perception, such as audio-visual and audio-tactile integration. However, direct coupling between articulatory movement and auditory perception has been little studied. The present study reveals a clear dissociation between the effects of a listener's own speech action and the effects of viewing another's speech movements on the perception of auditory phonemes. We assessed the intelligibility of the syllables [pa], [ta], and [ka] when listeners silently and simultaneously articulated syllables that were congruent/incongruent with the syllables they heard. The intelligibility was compared with a condition where the listeners simultaneously watched another's mouth producing congruent/incongruent syllables, but did not articulate. The intelligibility of [ta] and [ka] were degraded by articulating [ka] and [ta] respectively, which are associated with the same primary articulator (tongue as the heard syllables. But they were not affected by articulating [pa], which is associated with a different primary articulator (lips from the heard syllables. In contrast, the intelligibility of [ta] and [ka] was degraded by watching the production of [pa]. These results indicate that the articulatory-induced distortion of speech perception occurs in an articulator-specific manner while visually induced distortion does not. The articulator-specific nature of the auditory-motor interaction in speech perception suggests that speech motor processing directly contributes to our ability to hear speech.

Beyond production: Brain responses during speech perception in adults who stutter

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Tali Halag-Milo

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Developmental stuttering is a speech disorder that disrupts the ability to produce speech fluently. While stuttering is typically diagnosed based on one's behavior during speech production, some models suggest that it involves more central representations of language, and thus may affect language perception as well. Here we tested the hypothesis that developmental stuttering implicates neural systems involved in language perception, in a task that manipulates comprehensibility without an overt speech production component. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD signals in adults who do and do not stutter, while they were engaged in an incidental speech perception task. We found that speech perception evokes stronger activation in adults who stutter (AWS compared to controls, specifically in the right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG and in left Heschl's gyrus (LHG. Significant differences were additionally found in the lateralization of response in the inferior frontal cortex: AWS showed bilateral inferior frontal activity, while controls showed a left lateralized pattern of activation. These findings suggest that developmental stuttering is associated with an imbalanced neural network for speech processing, which is not limited to speech production, but also affects cortical responses during speech perception.

Cognitive Spare Capacity and Speech Communication: A Narrative Overview

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Mary Rudner

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Background noise can make speech communication tiring and cognitively taxing, especially for individuals with hearing impairment. It is now well established that better working memory capacity is associated with better ability to understand speech under adverse conditions as well as better ability to benefit from the advanced signal processing in modern hearing aids. Recent work has shown that although such processing cannot overcome hearing handicap, it can increase cognitive spare capacity, that is, the ability to engage in higher level processing of speech. This paper surveys recent work on cognitive spare capacity and suggests new avenues of investigation.

A theory of lexical access in speech production [target paper

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Levelt, W.J.M.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Meyer, A.S.

1999-01-01

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 ms after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly

SPEECH STRATEGIES AND TACTICS IN THE ANNUAL ADDRESSES OF ANGELA MERKEL

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Eysfeld Evgeniy Aleksandrovich

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to studying speech strategies and tactics on the material of annual addresses of Angela Merkel. The author carries out the systematic linguistic analysis of her speeches in the period from 2005 to 2015 and reveals the dynamics of the speaker's stratagem and tactic complex development. The peculiarities of speech strategies and tactics used byAngela Merkel are investigated by the methods of continuous sampling and contextual analysis. As the research shows, the main speech strategies used by Angela Merkel in the analyzed texts are the following: the self-presentation strategy, the interpretation strategy, the argumentation strategy, the strategy of forming the addressee's emotional state, and the agitation strategy. Consequently, the implementation of these strategies through the set of speech tactics lets the speaker fulfil certain communicative objectives. In one of her annual speeches Angela Merkel aims to inform the audience, to interpret some facts or data, to assume confidence-building measures, to consolidate the people, to determine common tasks, to make audience believe in correctness of their political choice, to discredit political competitors, to stimulate recipients to take some actions etc. Moreover, the process of combining strategies and tactics promotes optimal achievement of communicative targets. The conclusions of this article may result in further academic research. Therefore the comparative analysis of speech strategies and tactics in Russian and German political discourse can be perspective of this study.

Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients in Noisy Conditions

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M. Bashirpour

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Automatic recognition of speech emotional states in noisy conditions has become an important research topic in the emotional speech recognition area, in recent years. This paper considers the recognition of emotional states via speech in real environments. For this task, we employ the power normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCC in a speech emotion recognition system. We investigate its performance in emotion recognition using clean and noisy speech materials and compare it with the performances of the well-known MFCC, LPCC, RASTA-PLP, and also TEMFCC features. Speech samples are extracted from the Berlin emotional speech database (Emo DB and Persian emotional speech database (Persian ESD which are corrupted with 4 different noise types under various SNR levels. The experiments are conducted in clean train/noisy test scenarios to simulate practical conditions with noise sources. Simulation results show that higher recognition rates are achieved for PNCC as compared with the conventional features under noisy conditions.

Listeners Experience Linguistic Masking Release in Noise-Vocoded Speech-in-Speech Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Viswanathan, Navin; Kokkinakis, Kostas; Williams, Brittany T.

2018-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether listeners with normal hearing perceiving noise-vocoded speech-in-speech demonstrate better intelligibility of target speech when the background speech was mismatched in language (linguistic release from masking [LRM]) and/or location (spatial release from masking [SRM]) relative to the…

Recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition for Vietnamese

OpenAIRE

Le , Viet-Bac; Besacier , Laurent; Seng , Sopheap; Bigi , Brigitte; Do , Thi-Ngoc-Diep

2008-01-01

International audience; This paper presents our recent activities for automatic speech recognition for Vietnamese. First, our text data collection and processing methods and tools are described. For language modeling, we investigate word, sub-word and also hybrid word/sub-word models. For acoustic modeling, when only limited speech data are available for Vietnamese, we propose some crosslingual acoustic modeling techniques. Furthermore, since the use of sub-word units can reduce the high out-...

Speech-activated Myoclonus Mimicking Stuttering in a Patient with Myoclonus–Dystonia Syndrome

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Peter Hedera

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Background: Acquired neurogenic stuttering has been considered a fairly uncommon clinical occurrence; speech-activated myoclonus is a rare entity that can mimic stuttering and is caused by a wide array of etiologies.Case Report: Here we report a patient with myoclonus–dystonia syndrome (MDS, due to an identified disease-causing mutation, who displayed speech-activated myoclonus mimicking stuttering.Discussion: In MDS, myoclonus has only infrequently been reported to affect speech. This case further expands the spectrum of conditions causing the rare clinical phenomenon of speech-activated myoclonus. 

Detecting Parkinson's disease from sustained phonation and speech signals.

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Evaldas Vaiciukynas

Full Text Available This study investigates signals from sustained phonation and text-dependent speech modalities for Parkinson's disease screening. Phonation corresponds to the vowel /a/ voicing task and speech to the pronunciation of a short sentence in Lithuanian language. Signals were recorded through two channels simultaneously, namely, acoustic cardioid (AC and smart phone (SP microphones. Additional modalities were obtained by splitting speech recording into voiced and unvoiced parts. Information in each modality is summarized by 18 well-known audio feature sets. Random forest (RF is used as a machine learning algorithm, both for individual feature sets and for decision-level fusion. Detection performance is measured by the out-of-bag equal error rate (EER and the cost of log-likelihood-ratio. Essentia audio feature set was the best using the AC speech modality and YAAFE audio feature set was the best using the SP unvoiced modality, achieving EER of 20.30% and 25.57%, respectively. Fusion of all feature sets and modalities resulted in EER of 19.27% for the AC and 23.00% for the SP channel. Non-linear projection of a RF-based proximity matrix into the 2D space enriched medical decision support by visualization.

Perceptual evaluation of corpus-based speech synthesis techniques in under-resourced environments

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Niekerk, DR

2009-11-01

Full Text Available With the increasing prominence and maturity of corpus-based techniques for speech synthesis, the process of system development has in some ways been simplified considerably. However, the dependence on sufficient amounts of relevant speech data...

Auditory and Cognitive Factors Underlying Individual Differences in Aided Speech-Understanding among Older Adults

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Larry E. Humes

2013-10-01

Full Text Available This study was designed to address individual differences in aided speech understanding among a relatively large group of older adults. The group of older adults consisted of 98 adults (50 female and 48 male ranging in age from 60 to 86 (mean = 69.2. Hearing loss was typical for this age group and about 90% had not worn hearing aids. All subjects completed a battery of tests, including cognitive (6 measures, psychophysical (17 measures, and speech-understanding (9 measures, as well as the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing (SSQ self-report scale. Most of the speech-understanding measures made use of competing speech and the non-speech psychophysical measures were designed to tap phenomena thought to be relevant for the perception of speech in competing speech (e.g., stream segregation, modulation-detection interference. All measures of speech understanding were administered with spectral shaping applied to the speech stimuli to fully restore audibility through at least 4000 Hz. The measures used were demonstrated to be reliable in older adults and, when compared to a reference group of 28 young normal-hearing adults, age-group differences were observed on many of the measures. Principal-components factor analysis was applied successfully to reduce the number of independent and dependent (speech understanding measures for a multiple-regression analysis. Doing so yielded one global cognitive-processing factor and five non-speech psychoacoustic factors (hearing loss, dichotic signal detection, multi-burst masking, stream segregation, and modulation detection as potential predictors. To this set of six potential predictor variables were added subject age, Environmental Sound Identification (ESI, and performance on the text-recognition-threshold (TRT task (a visual analog of interrupted speech recognition. These variables were used to successfully predict one global aided speech-understanding factor, accounting for about 60% of the variance.

Linguistic Processing of Accented Speech Across the Lifespan

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Alejandrina eCristia

2012-11-01

Full Text Available In most of the world, people have regular exposure to multiple accents. Therefore, learning to quickly process accented speech is a prerequisite to successful communication. In this paper, we examine work on the perception of accented speech across the lifespan, from early infancy to late adulthood. Unfamiliar accents initially impair linguistic processing by infants, children, younger adults, and older adults, but listeners of all ages come to adapt to accented speech. Emergent research also goes beyond these perceptual abilities, by assessing links with production and the relative contributions of linguistic knowledge and general cognitive skills. We conclude by underlining points of convergence across ages, and the gaps left to face in future work.

Speech Perception and Short-Term Memory Deficits in Persistent Developmental Speech Disorder

Science.gov (United States)

Kenney, Mary Kay; Barac-Cikoja, Dragana; Finnegan, Kimberly; Jeffries, Neal; Ludlow, Christy L.

2006-01-01

Children with developmental speech disorders may have additional deficits in speech perception and/or short-term memory. To determine whether these are only transient developmental delays that can accompany the disorder in childhood or persist as part of the speech disorder, adults with a persistent familial speech disorder were tested on speech…

Speech and other modalities in the office environment: Some research results

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nes, van F.L.; Bullinger, H.-J.

1991-01-01

Research was carried out on the application of speech in three areas of man-computer communication: instruction, voice commands for system control and annotation of documents. As to instruction, learning was found to proceed equally fast with speech and written text; a number of subjects preferred

Speech and Language Delay

Science.gov (United States)

... OTC Relief for Diarrhea Home Diseases and Conditions Speech and Language Delay Condition Speech and Language Delay Share Print Table of Contents1. ... Treatment6. Everyday Life7. Questions8. Resources What is a speech and language delay? A speech and language delay ...

Plasticity in the Human Speech Motor System Drives Changes in Speech Perception

Science.gov (United States)

Lametti, Daniel R.; Rochet-Capellan, Amélie; Neufeld, Emily; Shiller, Douglas M.

2014-01-01

Recent studies of human speech motor learning suggest that learning is accompanied by changes in auditory perception. But what drives the perceptual change? Is it a consequence of changes in the motor system? Or is it a result of sensory inflow during learning? Here, subjects participated in a speech motor-learning task involving adaptation to altered auditory feedback and they were subsequently tested for perceptual change. In two separate experiments, involving two different auditory perceptual continua, we show that changes in the speech motor system that accompany learning drive changes in auditory speech perception. Specifically, we obtained changes in speech perception when adaptation to altered auditory feedback led to speech production that fell into the phonetic range of the speech perceptual tests. However, a similar change in perception was not observed when the auditory feedback that subjects' received during learning fell into the phonetic range of the perceptual tests. This indicates that the central motor outflow associated with vocal sensorimotor adaptation drives changes to the perceptual classification of speech sounds. PMID:25080594

Infants' preference for native audiovisual speech dissociated from congruency preference.

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Kathleen Shaw

Full Text Available Although infant speech perception in often studied in isolated modalities, infants' experience with speech is largely multimodal (i.e., speech sounds they hear are accompanied by articulating faces. Across two experiments, we tested infants' sensitivity to the relationship between the auditory and visual components of audiovisual speech in their native (English and non-native (Spanish language. In Experiment 1, infants' looking times were measured during a preferential looking task in which they saw two simultaneous visual speech streams articulating a story, one in English and the other in Spanish, while they heard either the English or the Spanish version of the story. In Experiment 2, looking times from another group of infants were measured as they watched single displays of congruent and incongruent combinations of English and Spanish audio and visual speech streams. Findings demonstrated an age-related increase in looking towards the native relative to non-native visual speech stream when accompanied by the corresponding (native auditory speech. This increase in native language preference did not appear to be driven by a difference in preference for native vs. non-native audiovisual congruence as we observed no difference in looking times at the audiovisual streams in Experiment 2.

An exploratory study of punctuation in bilingual children's texts

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Amparo Clavijo Olarte

2011-06-01

Full Text Available This article describes first and second grade children's writing and focuses on the uses of punctuation as they develop awareness of the orthographic features of texts. This exploratory study was carried out with a group of first and second grade bilingual children in a school in Tucson, Arizona. Our research project focused on observing the process bilingual children followed when writing the story of Caperucita Roja to analyse thje content of their texts in the different episodes of their stories and the use of punctuation around dialogue and narratives. The findings show that the mejority of children were aware of the use of punctuation marks in their writings. We found a direct relation between puntuation and the use of dialogue (indirect speech in children texts. Children used additional (sintactic and lexical forms in their texts that demostrate that they know the use of direct speech. children's texts exhibited very little use of punctuation in their narratives; they only used period and capital letters.

Expression of future prospective in indirect speech

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Bodnaruk Elena Vladimirovna

2015-03-01

Full Text Available The article analyzes the characteristics and use of grammatical semantics and lexical and grammatical means used to create future prospects in double indirect discourse. The material for the study were epic works by contemporary German writers. In the analysis of the empirical material it has been pointed out that indirect discourse has preterial basis and is the kind of most frequent inner speech of characters. The most widely used form with future semantics in preterial indirect speech is conditional I, formally having a conjunctive basis, but is mostly used with the indicative semantics. Competitive to conditional I in indirect speech is preterial indicative. A characteristic feature of the indirect speech is the use of modal verbs, which, thanks to its semantics is usually referred as an action at a later term, creating the prospect of future statements. The most frequent were modal verbs wollen and sollen in the form of the preterite, more rare verbs were m ssen and k nnen. German indirect speech distinguishes the ability to use forms on the basis of conjunctive: preterite and plusquamperfect of conjunctive. Both forms express values similar to those of the indicative. However, conjunctive forms the basis of the data shown in a slightly more pronounced seme of uncertainty that accompanies future uses of these forms in indirect speech. In addition, plusquamperfect conjunctive differs from others by the presence of the seme of completeness.

Childhood apraxia of speech: A survey of praxis and typical speech characteristics.

Science.gov (United States)

Malmenholt, Ann; Lohmander, Anette; McAllister, Anita

2017-07-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate current knowledge of the diagnosis childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) in Sweden and compare speech characteristics and symptoms to those of earlier survey findings in mainly English-speakers. In a web-based questionnaire 178 Swedish speech-language pathologists (SLPs) anonymously answered questions about their perception of typical speech characteristics for CAS. They graded own assessment skills and estimated clinical occurrence. The seven top speech characteristics reported as typical for children with CAS were: inconsistent speech production (85%), sequencing difficulties (71%), oro-motor deficits (63%), vowel errors (62%), voicing errors (61%), consonant cluster deletions (54%), and prosodic disturbance (53%). Motor-programming deficits described as lack of automatization of speech movements were perceived by 82%. All listed characteristics were consistent with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) consensus-based features, Strand's 10-point checklist, and the diagnostic model proposed by Ozanne. The mode for clinical occurrence was 5%. Number of suspected cases of CAS in the clinical caseload was approximately one new patient/year and SLP. The results support and add to findings from studies of CAS in English-speaking children with similar speech characteristics regarded as typical. Possibly, these findings could contribute to cross-linguistic consensus on CAS characteristics.

Speech intelligibility after gingivectomy of excess palatal tissue

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Aruna Balasundaram

2014-01-01

Full Text Available To appreciate any enhancement in speech following gingivectomy of enlarged anterior palatal gingiva. Periodontal literature has documented various conditions, pathophysiology, and treatment modalities of gingival enlargement. Relationship between gingival maladies and speech alteration has received scant attention. This case report describes on altered speech pattern enhancement secondary to the gingivectomy procedure. A systemically healthy 24-year- female patient reported with bilateral anterior gingival enlargement who was provisionally diagnosed as "gingival abscess with inflammatory enlargement" in relation to palatal aspect of the right maxillary canine to left maxillary canine. Bilateral gingivectomy procedure was performed by external bevel incision in relation to anterior palatal gingiva and a large wedge of epithelium and connective tissue was removed. Patient and her close acquaintances noticed a great improvement in her pronunciation and enunciation of sounds like "t", "d", "n", "l", "th", following removal of excess gingival palatal tissue and was also appreciated with visual analog scale score. Exploration of linguistic research documented the significance of tongue-palate contact during speech. Any excess gingival tissue in palatal region brings about disruption in speech by altering tongue-palate contact. Periodontal surgery like gingivectomy may improve disrupted phonetics. Excess gingival palatal tissue impedes on tongue-palate contact and interferes speech. Pronunciation of consonants like "t", "d", "n", "l", "th", are altered with anterior enlarged palatal gingiva. Excision of the enlarged palatal tissue results in improvement of speech.

Speech-Based Human and Service Robot Interaction: An Application for Mexican Dysarthric People

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Santiago Omar Caballero Morales

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder due to weakness or poor coordination of the speech muscles. This condition can be caused by a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or by a degenerative neurological disease. Commonly, people with this disorder also have muscular dystrophy, which restricts their use of switches or keyboards for communication or control of assistive devices (i.e., an electric wheelchair or a service robot. In this case, speech recognition is an attractive alternative for interaction and control of service robots, despite the difficulty of achieving robust recognition performance. In this paper we present a speech recognition system for human and service robot interaction for Mexican Spanish dysarthric speakers. The core of the system consisted of a Speaker Adaptive (SA recognition system trained with normal-speech. Features such as on-line control of the language model perplexity and the adding of vocabulary, contribute to high recognition performance. Others, such as assessment and text-to-speech (TTS synthesis, contribute to a more complete interaction with a service robot. Live tests were performed with two mild dysarthric speakers, achieving recognition accuracies of 90–95% for spontaneous speech and 95–100% of accomplished simulated service robot tasks.

SPEECH ACT OF ILTIFAT AND ITS INDONESIAN TRANSLATION PROBLEMS

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Zaka Al Farisi

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract: Iltifat (shifting speech act is distinctive and considered unique style of Arabic. It has potential errors when it is translated into Indonesian. Therefore, translation of iltifat speech act into another language can be an important issue. The objective of the study is to know translation procedures/techniques and ideology required in dealing with iltifat speech act. This research is directed at translation as a cognitive product of a translator. The data used in the present study were the corpus of Koranic verses that contain iltifat speech act along with their translation. Data analysis typically used descriptive-evaluative method with content analysis model. The data source of this research consisted of the Koran and its translation. The purposive sampling technique was employed, with the sample of the iltifat speech act contained in the Koran. The results showed that more than 60% of iltifat speech act were translated by using literal procedure. The significant number of literal translation of the verses asserts that the Ministry of Religious Affairs tended to use literal method of translation. In other words, the Koran translation made by the Ministry of Religious Affairs tended to be oriented to the source language in dealing with iltifat speech act. The number of the literal procedure used shows a tendency of foreignization ideology. Transitional pronouns contained in the iltifat speech act can be clearly translated when thick translations were used in the form of description in parentheses. In this case, explanation can be a choice in translating iltifat speech act.

Speech-specific audiovisual perception affects identification but not detection of speech

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Eskelund, Kasper; Andersen, Tobias

Speech perception is audiovisual as evidenced by the McGurk effect in which watching incongruent articulatory mouth movements can change the phonetic auditory speech percept. This type of audiovisual integration may be specific to speech or be applied to all stimuli in general. To investigate...... of audiovisual integration specific to speech perception. However, the results of Tuomainen et al. might have been influenced by another effect. When observers were naïve, they had little motivation to look at the face. When informed, they knew that the face was relevant for the task and this could increase...... visual detection task. In our first experiment, observers presented with congruent and incongruent audiovisual sine-wave speech stimuli did only show a McGurk effect when informed of the speech nature of the stimulus. Performance on the secondary visual task was very good, thus supporting the finding...

Multiple Time-Instances Features of Degraded Speech for Single Ended Quality Measurement

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Rajesh Kumar Dubey

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The use of single time-instance features, where entire speech utterance is used for feature computation, is not accurate and adequate in capturing the time localized information of short-time transient distortions and their distinction from plosive sounds of speech, particularly degraded by impulsive noise. Hence, the importance of estimating features at multiple time-instances is sought. In this, only active speech segments of degraded speech are used for features computation at multiple time-instances on per frame basis. Here, active speech means both voiced and unvoiced frames except silence. The features of different combinations of multiple contiguous active speech segments are computed and called multiple time-instances features. The joint GMM training has been done using these features along with the subjective MOS of the corresponding speech utterance to obtain the parameters of GMM. These parameters of GMM and multiple time-instances features of test speech are used to compute the objective MOS values of different combinations of multiple contiguous active speech segments. The overall objective MOS of the test speech utterance is obtained by assigning equal weight to the objective MOS values of the different combinations of multiple contiguous active speech segments. This algorithm outperforms the Recommendation ITU-T P.563 and recently published algorithms.

Distracted While Reading? Changing to A Hard-to-read Font Shields against the Effects of Environmental Noise and Speech on Text Memory

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Niklas Halin

2016-08-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to investigate the distractive effects of background speech, aircraft noise and road traffic noise on text memory and particularly to examine if displaying the texts in a hard-to-read font can shield against the detrimental effects of these types of background sounds. This issue was addressed in an experiment where 56 students read shorter texts about different classes of fictitious creatures (i.e., animals, fishes, birds, and dinosaurs against a background of the aforementioned background sounds respectively and silence. For half of the participants the texts were displayed in an easy-to-read font (i.e., Times New Roman and for the other half in a hard-to-read font (i.e., Haettenschweiler. The dependent measure was the proportion correct answers on the multiple-choice tests that followed each sound condition. Participants’ performance in the easy-to-read font condition was significantly impaired by all three background sound conditions compared to silence. In contrast, there were no effects of the three background sound conditions compared to silence in the hard-to-read font condition. These results suggest that an increase in task demand—by displaying the text in a hard-to-read font—shields against various types of distracting background sounds by promoting a more steadfast locus-of-attention and by reducing the processing of background sound.

Model-Based Synthesis of Visual Speech Movements from 3D Video

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Edge JamesD

2009-01-01

Full Text Available We describe a method for the synthesis of visual speech movements using a hybrid unit selection/model-based approach. Speech lip movements are captured using a 3D stereo face capture system and split up into phonetic units. A dynamic parameterisation of this data is constructed which maintains the relationship between lip shapes and velocities; within this parameterisation a model of how lips move is built and is used in the animation of visual speech movements from speech audio input. The mapping from audio parameters to lip movements is disambiguated by selecting only the most similar stored phonetic units to the target utterance during synthesis. By combining properties of model-based synthesis (e.g., HMMs, neural nets with unit selection we improve the quality of our speech synthesis.

Speech-Language Therapy (For Parents)

Science.gov (United States)

... Staying Safe Videos for Educators Search English Español Speech-Language Therapy KidsHealth / For Parents / Speech-Language Therapy ... most kids with speech and/or language disorders. Speech Disorders, Language Disorders, and Feeding Disorders A speech ...

Digital speech processing using Matlab

CERN Document Server

Gopi, E S

2014-01-01

Digital Speech Processing Using Matlab deals with digital speech pattern recognition, speech production model, speech feature extraction, and speech compression. The book is written in a manner that is suitable for beginners pursuing basic research in digital speech processing. Matlab illustrations are provided for most topics to enable better understanding of concepts. This book also deals with the basic pattern recognition techniques (illustrated with speech signals using Matlab) such as PCA, LDA, ICA, SVM, HMM, GMM, BPN, and KSOM.

DELVING INTO SPEECH ACT A Case Of Indonesian EFL Young Learners

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Swastika Septiani, S.Pd

2017-04-01

Full Text Available This study attempts to describe the use of speech acts applied in primary school. This study is intended to identify the speech acts performed in primary school, to find the most dominant speech acts performed in elementary school, to give brief description of how speech acts applied in primary school, and to know how to apply the result of the study in English teaching learning to young learners. The speech acts performed in primary school is classified based on Searle‘s theory of speech acts. The most dominant speech acts performed in primary school is Directive (41.17%, the second speech act mostly performed is Declarative (33.33%, the third speech act mostly performed is Representative and Expressive (each 11.76%, and the least speech act performed is Commisive (1.9%. The speech acts performed in elementary school is applied on the context of situation determined by the National Education Standards Agency (BSNP. The speech acts performed in fourth grade have to be applied in the context of classroom, and the speech acts performed in fifth grade have to be applied in the context of school, whereas the speech acts performed in sixth grade have to be applied in the context of the students‘ surroundings. The result of this study is highy expected to give significant contribution to English teaching learning to young learners. By acknowledging the characteristics of young learners, the way they learn English as a foreign language, the teachers are expected to have inventive strategies and various techniques to create a fun and condusive atmosphere in English class.

Developmental apraxia of speech in children. Quantitive assessment of speech characteristics

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Thoonen, G.H.J.

1998-01-01

Developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) in children is a speech disorder, supposed to have a neurological origin, which is commonly considered to result from particular deficits in speech processing (i.e., phonological planning, motor programming). However, the label DAS has often been used as

Audiovisual Integration of Speech in a Patient with Broca’s Aphasia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tobias Søren Andersen

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Lesions to Broca’s area cause aphasia characterised by a severe impairment of the ability to speak, with comparatively intact speech perception. However, some studies have found effects on speech perception under adverse listening conditions, indicating that Broca’s area is also involved in speech perception. While these studies have focused on auditory speech perception other studies have shown that Broca’s area is activated by visual speech perception. Furthermore, one preliminary report found that a patient with Broca’s aphasia did not experience the McGurk illusion suggesting that an intact Broca’s area is necessary for audiovisual integration of speech. Here we describe a patient with Broca’s aphasia who experienced the McGurk illusion. This indicates that an intact Broca’s area is not necessary for audiovisual integration of speech. The McGurk illusions this patient experienced were atypical, which could be due to Broca’s area having a more subtle role in audiovisual integration of speech. The McGurk illusions of a control subject with Wernicke’s aphasia were, however, also atypical. This indicates that the atypical McGurk illusions were due to deficits in speech processing that are not specific to Broca’s aphasia.

Motivational Projections of Russian Spontaneous Speech

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Galina M. Shipitsina

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the semantic, pragmatic and structural features of words, phrases, dialogues motivation, in the contemporary Russian popular speech. These structural features are characterized by originality and unconventional use. Language material is the result of authors` direct observation of spontaneous verbal communication between people of different social and age groups. The words and remarks were analyzed in compliance with the communication system of national Russian language and cultural background of popular speech. Studies have discovered that in spoken discourse there are some other ways to increase the expression statement. It is important to note that spontaneous speech identifies lacunae in the nominative language and its vocabulary system. It is proved, prefixation is also effective and regular way of the same action presenting. The most typical forms, ways and means to update language resources as a result of the linguistic creativity of native speakers were identified.

The speech perception skills of children with and without speech sound disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Speech Matters

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hasse Jørgensen, Stina

2011-01-01

About Speech Matters - Katarina Gregos, the Greek curator's exhibition at the Danish Pavillion, the Venice Biannual 2011.......About Speech Matters - Katarina Gregos, the Greek curator's exhibition at the Danish Pavillion, the Venice Biannual 2011....

Rate and rhythm control strategies for apraxia of speech in nonfluent primary progressive aphasia

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Bárbara Costa Beber

Full Text Available ABSTRACT The nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia is characterized by apraxia of speech and agrammatism. Apraxia of speech limits patients' communication due to slow speaking rate, sound substitutions, articulatory groping, false starts and restarts, segmentation of syllables, and increased difficulty with increasing utterance length. Speech and language therapy is known to benefit individuals with apraxia of speech due to stroke, but little is known about its effects in primary progressive aphasia. This is a case report of a 72-year-old, illiterate housewife, who was diagnosed with nonfluent primary progressive aphasia and received speech and language therapy for apraxia of speech. Rate and rhythm control strategies for apraxia of speech were trained to improve initiation of speech. We discuss the importance of these strategies to alleviate apraxia of speech in this condition and the future perspectives in the area.

A case of crossed aphasia with apraxia of speech

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Yogesh Patidar

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Apraxia of speech (AOS is a rare, but well-defined motor speech disorder. It is characterized by irregular articulatory errors, attempts of self-correction and persistent prosodic abnormalities. Similar to aphasia, AOS is also localized to the dominant cerebral hemisphere. We report a case of Crossed Aphasia with AOS in a 48-year-old right-handed man due to an ischemic infarct in right cerebral hemisphere.

Speech activity detection for the automated speaker recognition system of critical use

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M. M. Bykov

2017-06-01

Full Text Available In the article, the authors developed a method for detecting speech activity for an automated system for recognizing critical use of speeches with wavelet parameterization of speech signal and classification at intervals of “language”/“pause” using a curvilinear neural network. The method of wavelet-parametrization proposed by the authors allows choosing the optimal parameters of wavelet transformation in accordance with the user-specified error of presentation of speech signal. Also, the method allows estimating the loss of information depending on the selected parameters of continuous wavelet transformation (NPP, which allowed to reduce the number of scalable coefficients of the LVP of the speech signal in order of magnitude with the allowable degree of distortion of the local spectrum of the LVP. An algorithm for detecting speech activity with a curvilinear neural network classifier is also proposed, which shows the high quality of segmentation of speech signals at intervals "language" / "pause" and is resistant to the presence in the speech signal of narrowband noise and technogenic noise due to the inherent properties of the curvilinear neural network.

Temporal factors affecting somatosensory-auditory interactions in speech processing

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Takayuki eIto

2014-11-01

Full Text Available Speech perception is known to rely on both auditory and visual information. However, sound specific somatosensory input has been shown also to influence speech perceptual processing (Ito et al., 2009. In the present study we addressed further the relationship between somatosensory information and speech perceptual processing by addressing the hypothesis that the temporal relationship between orofacial movement and sound processing contributes to somatosensory-auditory interaction in speech perception. We examined the changes in event-related potentials in response to multisensory synchronous (simultaneous and asynchronous (90 ms lag and lead somatosensory and auditory stimulation compared to individual unisensory auditory and somatosensory stimulation alone. We used a robotic device to apply facial skin somatosensory deformations that were similar in timing and duration to those experienced in speech production. Following synchronous multisensory stimulation the amplitude of the event-related potential was reliably different from the two unisensory potentials. More importantly, the magnitude of the event-related potential difference varied as a function of the relative timing of the somatosensory-auditory stimulation. Event-related activity change due to stimulus timing was seen between 160-220 ms following somatosensory onset, mostly around the parietal area. The results demonstrate a dynamic modulation of somatosensory-auditory convergence and suggest the contribution of somatosensory information for speech processing process is dependent on the specific temporal order of sensory inputs in speech production.

Speech Inconsistency in Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Language Impairment, and Speech Delay: Depends on the Stimuli

Science.gov (United States)

Iuzzini-Seigel, Jenya; Hogan, Tiffany P.; Green, Jordan R.

2017-01-01

Purpose: The current research sought to determine (a) if speech inconsistency is a core feature of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) or if it is driven by comorbid language impairment that affects a large subset of children with CAS and (b) if speech inconsistency is a sensitive and specific diagnostic marker that can differentiate between CAS and…

Studies of Speech Disorders in Schizophrenia. History and State-of-the-art

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Shedovskiy E. F.

2015-08-01

Full Text Available The article reviews studies of speech disorders in schizophrenia. The authors paid attention to a historical course and characterization of studies of areas: the actual psychopathological (speech disorders as a psychopathological symptoms, their description and taxonomy, psychological (isolated neurons and pathopsychological perspective analysis separately analyzed some modern foreign works, covering a variety of approaches to the study of speech disorders in the endogenous mental disorders. Disorders and features of speech are among the most striking manifestations of schizophrenia along with impaired thinking (Savitskaya A. V., Mikirtumov B. E.. With all the variety of symptoms, speech disorders in schizophrenia could be classified and organized. The few clinical psychological studies of speech activity in schizophrenia presented work on the study of generation and standard speech utterance; features verbal associative process, speed parameters of speech utterances. Special attention is given to integrated research in the mainstream of biological psychiatry and genetic trends. It is shown that the topic for more than a half-century history of originality of speech pathology in schizophrenia has received some coverage in the psychiatric and psychological literature and continues to generate interest in the modern integrated multidisciplinary approach

Eigennoise Speech Recovery in Adverse Environments with Joint Compensation of Additive and Convolutive Noise

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Trung-Nghia Phung

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The learning-based speech recovery approach using statistical spectral conversion has been used for some kind of distorted speech as alaryngeal speech and body-conducted speech (or bone-conducted speech. This approach attempts to recover clean speech (undistorted speech from noisy speech (distorted speech by converting the statistical models of noisy speech into that of clean speech without the prior knowledge on characteristics and distributions of noise source. Presently, this approach has still not attracted many researchers to apply in general noisy speech enhancement because of some major problems: those are the difficulties of noise adaptation and the lack of noise robust synthesizable features in different noisy environments. In this paper, we adopted the methods of state-of-the-art voice conversions and speaker adaptation in speech recognition to the proposed speech recovery approach applied in different kinds of noisy environment, especially in adverse environments with joint compensation of additive and convolutive noises. We proposed to use the decorrelated wavelet packet coefficients as a low-dimensional robust synthesizable feature under noisy environments. We also proposed a noise adaptation for speech recovery with the eigennoise similar to the eigenvoice in voice conversion. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach highly outperformed traditional nonlearning-based approaches.

Clear Speech - Mere Speech? How segmental and prosodic speech reduction shape the impression that speakers create on listeners

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Niebuhr, Oliver

2017-01-01

of reduction levels and perceived speaker attributes in which moderate reduction can make a better impression on listeners than no reduction. In addition to its relevance in reduction models and theories, this interplay is instructive for various fields of speech application from social robotics to charisma...... whether variation in the degree of reduction also has a systematic effect on the attributes we ascribe to the speaker who produces the speech signal. A perception experiment was carried out for German in which 46 listeners judged whether or not speakers showing 3 different combinations of segmental...... and prosodic reduction levels (unreduced, moderately reduced, strongly reduced) are appropriately described by 13 physical, social, and cognitive attributes. The experiment shows that clear speech is not mere speech, and less clear speech is not just reduced either. Rather, results revealed a complex interplay...

Collecting and evaluating speech recognition corpora for 11 South African languages

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Badenhorst, J

2011-08-01

Full Text Available . In addition, speech-based access to information may empower illiterate or semi-literate peo- ple, 98% of whom live in the developing world. SDSs can play a useful role in a wide range of applications. Of particular importance in Africa are applications... speech (i.e. appropriate for the recognition task in terms of the language used, the profile of the speakers, speaking style, etc.) This speech generally needs to be curated and transcribed prior to the development of ASR sys- tems, and for most...

Audiovisual Temporal Recalibration for Speech in Synchrony Perception and Speech Identification

Science.gov (United States)

Asakawa, Kaori; Tanaka, Akihiro; Imai, Hisato

We investigated whether audiovisual synchrony perception for speech could change after observation of the audiovisual temporal mismatch. Previous studies have revealed that audiovisual synchrony perception is re-calibrated after exposure to a constant timing difference between auditory and visual signals in non-speech. In the present study, we examined whether this audiovisual temporal recalibration occurs at the perceptual level even for speech (monosyllables). In Experiment 1, participants performed an audiovisual simultaneity judgment task (i.e., a direct measurement of the audiovisual synchrony perception) in terms of the speech signal after observation of the speech stimuli which had a constant audiovisual lag. The results showed that the “simultaneous” responses (i.e., proportion of responses for which participants judged the auditory and visual stimuli to be synchronous) at least partly depended on exposure lag. In Experiment 2, we adopted the McGurk identification task (i.e., an indirect measurement of the audiovisual synchrony perception) to exclude the possibility that this modulation of synchrony perception was solely attributable to the response strategy using stimuli identical to those of Experiment 1. The characteristics of the McGurk effect reported by participants depended on exposure lag. Thus, it was shown that audiovisual synchrony perception for speech could be modulated following exposure to constant lag both in direct and indirect measurement. Our results suggest that temporal recalibration occurs not only in non-speech signals but also in monosyllabic speech at the perceptual level.

The Attention-Getting Capacity of Whines and Child-Directed Speech

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Rosemarie Sokol Chang

2010-04-01

Full Text Available The current study tested the ability of whines and child-directed speech to attract the attention of listeners involved in a story repetition task. Twenty non-parents and 17 parents were presented with two dull stories, each playing to a separate ear, and asked to repeat one of the stories verbatim. The story that participants were instructed to ignore was interrupted occasionally with the reader whining and using child-directed speech. While repeating the passage, participants were monitored for Galvanic skin response, heart rate, and blood pressure. Based on 4 measures, participants tuned in more to whining, and to a lesser extent child-directed speech, than neutral speech segments that served as a control. Participants, regardless of gender or parental status, made more mistakes when presented with the whine or child-directed speech, they recalled hearing those vocalizations, they recognized more words from the whining segment than the neutral control segment, and they exhibited higher Galvanic skin response during the presence of whines and child-directed speech than neutral speech segments. Whines and child-directed speech appear to be integral members of a suite of vocalizations designed to get the attention of attachment partners by playing to an auditory sensitivity among humans. Whines in particular may serve the function of eliciting care at a time when caregivers switch from primarily mothers to greater care from other caregivers.

Perception of words and pitch patterns in song and speech

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Julia eMerrill

2012-03-01

Full Text Available This fMRI study examines shared and distinct cortical areas involved in the auditory perception of song and speech at the level of their underlying constituents: words, pitch and rhythm. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed on the brain activity patterns of six conditions, arranged in a subtractive hierarchy: sung sentences including words, pitch and rhythm; hummed speech prosody and song melody containing only pitch patterns and rhythm; as well as the pure musical or speech rhythm.Systematic contrasts between these balanced conditions following their hierarchical organization showed a great overlap between song and speech at all levels in the bilateral temporal lobe, but suggested a differential role of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG and intraparietal sulcus (IPS in processing song and speech. The left IFG was involved in word- and pitch-related processing in speech, the right IFG in processing pitch in song.Furthermore, the IPS showed sensitivity to discrete pitch relations in song as opposed to the gliding pitch in speech. Finally, the superior temporal gyrus and premotor cortex coded for general differences between words and pitch patterns, irrespective of whether they were sung or spoken. Thus, song and speech share many features which are reflected in a fundamental similarity of brain areas involved in their perception. However, fine-grained acoustic differences on word and pitch level are reflected in the activity of IFG and IPS.

Two speeches that changed the world: from Fulton to Zurich

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Alan John Watson

2016-12-01

Full Text Available In this extract from his new book Churchill’s Legacy: Two Speeches to Save the World (Watson, 2016, Lord Watson of Richmond draws on his own experience of post war British politics, as a television presenter and media commentator and then as a Liberal Peer and Chairman of the English-Speaking Union, to analyse the significance of Churchill’s Zurich speech of 19 September 1946. He argues that, building on Churchill’s earlier speech at Fulton, Missouri, it helped change the perceptions of the West and alter their response to the emerging Cold War and the future of Europe.

Speech Denoising in White Noise Based on Signal Subspace Low-rank Plus Sparse Decomposition

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yuan Shuai

2017-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, a new subspace speech enhancement method using low-rank and sparse decomposition is presented. In the proposed method, we firstly structure the corrupted data as a Toeplitz matrix and estimate its effective rank for the underlying human speech signal. Then the low-rank and sparse decomposition is performed with the guidance of speech rank value to remove the noise. Extensive experiments have been carried out in white Gaussian noise condition, and experimental results show the proposed method performs better than conventional speech enhancement methods, in terms of yielding less residual noise and lower speech distortion.

Statistical analysis of acoustic characteristics of Tibetan Lhasa dialect speech emotion

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Guo Dandan

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The paper makes a quantitative analysis and comparison on the continuous speech emotion of Lhasa Tibetan in the four basic emotional patterns (happy, surprise, sad, neutral pitch, energy and time length by experimental phonetics and the linear statistical research methods, found that there is a positive correlation between the Lhasa Tibetan emotional speech and pitch, energy and duration, etc. And the pitch, energy and duration of negative emotion acoustic parameters are bigger than positive emotion, on this basis, drawing the Lhasa Tibetan speech emotion acoustic feature patterns. Compared with the Chinese language and the Tibetan, even though both have the tone prosodic features, they also have significant differences in the acoustic characteristics of the speech emotion.

Speech Outcomes after Tonsillectomy in Patients with Known Velopharyngeal Insufficiency

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L. M. Paulson

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction. Controversy exists over whether tonsillectomy will affect speech in patients with known velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI, particularly in those with cleft palate. Methods. All patients seen at the OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital VPI clinic between 1997 and 2010 with VPI who underwent tonsillectomy were reviewed. Speech parameters were assessed before and after tonsillectomy. Wilcoxon rank-sum testing was used to evaluate for significance. Results. A total of 46 patients with VPI underwent tonsillectomy during this period. Twenty-three had pre- and postoperative speech evaluation sufficient for analysis. The majority (87% had a history of cleft palate. Indications for tonsillectomy included obstructive sleep apnea in 11 (48% and staged tonsillectomy prior to pharyngoplasty in 10 (43%. There was no significant difference between pre- and postoperative speech intelligibility or velopharyngeal competency in this population. Conclusion. In this study, tonsillectomy in patients with VPI did not significantly alter speech intelligibility or velopharyngeal competence.

Analysis of speech: a reflection on health research

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Laura Christina Macedo

2008-01-01

Full Text Available In this study, we take speech and writing as discursive construction, indicating the reasons for making it the object of analysis and introducing different instruments to achieve this. We highlight the importance of discourse analysis for the development of health research, since this method enables the interpretation of reality from a text or texts, revealing the subjects of production and their interpretation, as well as the context of their production. The historical construction of contradictions, continuities and ruptures that make discourse a social practice is unveiled. Discourse analysis is considered a means of eliciting the implied meaning in speech and writing and, thus, as another approach to the health-disease process. Therefore, this reflection aims to incorporate Discourse Analysis into the health area, emphasizing this method as a significant contribution to Social Sciences.

Delayed speech development in children: Introduction to terminology

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M. Yu. Bobylova

2017-01-01

Full Text Available There has been recently an increase in the number of children diagnosed with delayed speech development. There is delay compensation with age, but mild deficiency often remains for life. Delayed speech development is more common in boys than in girls. Its etiology is unknown in most cases, so a child should be followed up to make an accurate diagnosis. Genetic predisposition or environmental factors frequently influence speech development. The course of its delays is various. In the history of a number of disorders (childhood disintegrative disorder, Landau–Kleffner syndrome, there is evidence for the normal development of speech to a certain period and then stops or even regresses. By way of comparison, there are generally speech developmental changes in autism even during the preverbal stage (a complex of revival fails to form; babbling is poor, low emotional, gibberish; at the same time, the baby recipes whole phrases without using them to communicate. These speech disorders are considered not only as a delay, but also as a developmental abnormality. Speech disorders in children should be diagnosed as early as possible in order to initiative corrective measures in time. In this case, a physician makes a diagnosis and a special education teacher does corrective work. The successful collaboration and mutual understanding of the specialists in these areas will determine quality of life for a child in the future. This paper focusses on the terminology and classification of delays, which are necessary for physicians and teachers to speak the same language.

The natural statistics of audiovisual speech.

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Chandramouli Chandrasekaran

2009-07-01

Full Text Available Humans, like other animals, are exposed to a continuous stream of signals, which are dynamic, multimodal, extended, and time varying in nature. This complex input space must be transduced and sampled by our sensory systems and transmitted to the brain where it can guide the selection of appropriate actions. To simplify this process, it's been suggested that the brain exploits statistical regularities in the stimulus space. Tests of this idea have largely been confined to unimodal signals and natural scenes. One important class of multisensory signals for which a quantitative input space characterization is unavailable is human speech. We do not understand what signals our brain has to actively piece together from an audiovisual speech stream to arrive at a percept versus what is already embedded in the signal structure of the stream itself. In essence, we do not have a clear understanding of the natural statistics of audiovisual speech. In the present study, we identified the following major statistical features of audiovisual speech. First, we observed robust correlations and close temporal correspondence between the area of the mouth opening and the acoustic envelope. Second, we found the strongest correlation between the area of the mouth opening and vocal tract resonances. Third, we observed that both area of the mouth opening and the voice envelope are temporally modulated in the 2-7 Hz frequency range. Finally, we show that the timing of mouth movements relative to the onset of the voice is consistently between 100 and 300 ms. We interpret these data in the context of recent neural theories of speech which suggest that speech communication is a reciprocally coupled, multisensory event, whereby the outputs of the signaler are matched to the neural processes of the receiver.

Speech-Language Pathologists' Preparation, Practices, and Perspectives on Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children

Science.gov (United States)

Guiberson, Mark; Atkins, Jenny

2012-01-01

This study describes the backgrounds, diversity training, and professional perspectives reported by 154 Colorado speech-language pathologists in serving children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. The authors compare the results of the current survey to those of a similar survey collected in 1996. Respondents reported…

Distracted While Reading? Changing to a Hard-to-Read Font Shields against the Effects of Environmental Noise and Speech on Text Memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Halin, Niklas

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the distractive effects of background speech, aircraft noise and road traffic noise on text memory and particularly to examine if displaying the texts in a hard-to-read font can shield against the detrimental effects of these types of background sounds. This issue was addressed in an experiment where 56 students read shorter texts about different classes of fictitious creatures (i.e., animals, fishes, birds, and dinosaurs) against a background of the aforementioned background sounds respectively and silence. For half of the participants the texts were displayed in an easy-to-read font (i.e., Times New Roman) and for the other half in a hard-to-read font (i.e., Haettenschweiler). The dependent measure was the proportion correct answers on the multiple-choice tests that followed each sound condition. Participants' performance in the easy-to-read font condition was significantly impaired by all three background sound conditions compared to silence. In contrast, there were no effects of the three background sound conditions compared to silence in the hard-to-read font condition. These results suggest that an increase in task demand-by displaying the text in a hard-to-read font-shields against various types of distracting background sounds by promoting a more steadfast locus-of-attention and by reducing the processing of background sound.

Schizophrenia alters intra-network functional connectivity in the caudate for detecting speech under informational speech masking conditions.

Science.gov (United States)

Zheng, Yingjun; Wu, Chao; Li, Juanhua; Li, Ruikeng; Peng, Hongjun; She, Shenglin; Ning, Yuping; Li, Liang

2018-04-04

Speech recognition under noisy "cocktail-party" environments involves multiple perceptual/cognitive processes, including target detection, selective attention, irrelevant signal inhibition, sensory/working memory, and speech production. Compared to health listeners, people with schizophrenia are more vulnerable to masking stimuli and perform worse in speech recognition under speech-on-speech masking conditions. Although the schizophrenia-related speech-recognition impairment under "cocktail-party" conditions is associated with deficits of various perceptual/cognitive processes, it is crucial to know whether the brain substrates critically underlying speech detection against informational speech masking are impaired in people with schizophrenia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigated differences between people with schizophrenia (n = 19, mean age = 33 ± 10 years) and their matched healthy controls (n = 15, mean age = 30 ± 9 years) in intra-network functional connectivity (FC) specifically associated with target-speech detection under speech-on-speech-masking conditions. The target-speech detection performance under the speech-on-speech-masking condition in participants with schizophrenia was significantly worse than that in matched healthy participants (healthy controls). Moreover, in healthy controls, but not participants with schizophrenia, the strength of intra-network FC within the bilateral caudate was positively correlated with the speech-detection performance under the speech-masking conditions. Compared to controls, patients showed altered spatial activity pattern and decreased intra-network FC in the caudate. In people with schizophrenia, the declined speech-detection performance under speech-on-speech masking conditions is associated with reduced intra-caudate functional connectivity, which normally contributes to detecting target speech against speech masking via its functions of suppressing masking-speech signals.

Speech and Speech-Related Quality of Life After Late Palate Repair: A Patient's Perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Schönmeyr, Björn; Wendby, Lisa; Sharma, Mitali; Jacobson, Lia; Restrepo, Carolina; Campbell, Alex

2015-07-01

Many patients with cleft palate deformities worldwide receive treatment at a later age than is recommended for normal speech to develop. The outcomes after late palate repairs in terms of speech and quality of life (QOL) still remain largely unstudied. In the current study, questionnaires were used to assess the patients' perception of speech and QOL before and after primary palate repair. All of the patients were operated at a cleft center in northeast India and had a cleft palate with a normal lip or with a cleft lip that had been previously repaired. A total of 134 patients (7-35 years) were interviewed preoperatively and 46 patients (7-32 years) were assessed in the postoperative survey. The survey showed that scores based on the speech handicap index, concerning speech and speech-related QOL, did not improve postoperatively. In fact, the questionnaires indicated that the speech became more unpredictable (P reported that their self-confidence had improved after the operation. Thus, the majority of interviewed patients who underwent late primary palate repair were satisfied with the surgery. At the same time, speech and speech-related QOL did not improve according to the speech handicap index-based survey. Speech predictability may even become worse and nasal regurgitation may increase after late palate repair, according to these results.

Visual Speech Fills in Both Discrimination and Identification of Non-Intact Auditory Speech in Children

Science.gov (United States)

Jerger, Susan; Damian, Markus F.; McAlpine, Rachel P.; Abdi, Herve

2018-01-01

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

Tackling the complexity in speech

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

section includes four carefully selected chapters. They deal with facets of speech production, speech acoustics, and/or speech perception or recognition, place them in an integrated phonetic-phonological perspective, and relate them in more or less explicit ways to aspects of speech technology. Therefore......, we hope that this volume can help speech scientists with traditional training in phonetics and phonology to keep up with the latest developments in speech technology. In the opposite direction, speech researchers starting from a technological perspective will hopefully get inspired by reading about...... the questions, phenomena, and communicative functions that are currently addressed in phonetics and phonology. Either way, the future of speech research lies in international, interdisciplinary collaborations, and our volume is meant to reflect and facilitate such collaborations...

Speech in spinocerebellar ataxia.

Science.gov (United States)

Schalling, Ellika; Hartelius, Lena

2013-12-01

Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) are a heterogeneous group of autosomal dominant cerebellar ataxias clinically characterized by progressive ataxia, dysarthria and a range of other concomitant neurological symptoms. Only a few studies include detailed characterization of speech symptoms in SCA. Speech symptoms in SCA resemble ataxic dysarthria but symptoms related to phonation may be more prominent. One study to date has shown an association between differences in speech and voice symptoms related to genotype. More studies of speech and voice phenotypes are motivated, to possibly aid in clinical diagnosis. In addition, instrumental speech analysis has been demonstrated to be a reliable measure that may be used to monitor disease progression or therapy outcomes in possible future pharmacological treatments. Intervention by speech and language pathologists should go beyond assessment. Clinical guidelines for management of speech, communication and swallowing need to be developed for individuals with progressive cerebellar ataxia. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Speech comprehension difficulties in chronic tinnitus and its relation to hyperacusis

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Veronika Vielsmeier

2016-12-01

Full Text Available AbstractObjectiveMany tinnitus patients complain about difficulties regarding speech comprehension. In spite of the high clinical relevance little is known about underlying mechanisms and predisposing factors. Here, we performed an exploratory investigation in a large sample of tinnitus patients to (1 estimate the prevalence of speech comprehension difficulties among tinnitus patients, to (2 compare subjective reports of speech comprehension difficulties with objective measurements in a standardized speech comprehension test and to (3 explore underlying mechanisms by analyzing the relationship between speech comprehension difficulties and peripheral hearing function (pure tone audiogram, as well as with co-morbid hyperacusis as a central auditory processing disorder. Subjects and MethodsSpeech comprehension was assessed in 361 tinnitus patients presenting between 07/2012 and 08/2014 at the Interdisciplinary Tinnitus Clinic at the University of Regensburg. The assessment included standard audiological assessment (pure tone audiometry, tinnitus pitch and loudness matching, the Goettingen sentence test (in quiet for speech audiometric evaluation, two questions about hyperacusis, and two questions about speech comprehension in quiet and noisy environments (How would you rate your ability to understand speech?; How would you rate your ability to follow a conversation when multiple people are speaking simultaneously?. Results Subjectively reported speech comprehension deficits are frequent among tinnitus patients, especially in noisy environments (cocktail party situation. 74.2% of all investigated patients showed disturbed speech comprehension (indicated by values above 21.5 dB SPL in the Goettingen sentence test. Subjective speech comprehension complaints (both in general and in noisy environment were correlated with hearing level and with audiologically-assessed speech comprehension ability. In contrast, co-morbid hyperacusis was only correlated

Telephone based speech interfaces in the developing world, from the perspective of human-human communication

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Naidoo, S

2005-07-01

Full Text Available recently, before computers systems were able to synthesize or recognize speech, speech was a capability unique to humans. The human brain has developed to differentiate between human speech and other audio occurrences. Therefore, the slowly- evolving... human brain reacts in certain ways to voice stimuli, and has certain expectations regarding communication by voice. Nass affirms that the human brain operates using the same mechanisms when interacting with speech interfaces as when conversing...

Toward Speech and Nonverbal Behaviors Integration for Humanoid Robot

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Wei Wang

2012-09-01

Full Text Available It is essential to integrate speeches and nonverbal behaviors for a humanoid robot in human-robot interaction. This paper presents an approach using multi-object genetic algorithm to match the speeches and behaviors automatically. Firstly, with humanoid robot's emotion status, we construct a hierarchical structure to link voice characteristics and nonverbal behaviors. Secondly, these behaviors corresponding to speeches are matched and integrated into an action sequence based on genetic algorithm, so the robot can consistently speak and perform emotional behaviors. Our approach takes advantage of relevant knowledge described by psychologists and nonverbal communication. And from experiment results, our ultimate goal, implementing an affective robot to act and speak with partners vividly and fluently, could be achieved.

EVOLUTION OF SPEECH: A NEW HYPOTHESIS

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Shishir

2016-03-01

Full Text Available BACKGROUND The first and foremost characteristic of speech is that it is human. Speech is one characteristic feature that has evolved in humans and is by far the most powerful form of communication in the Kingdom Animalia. Today, human has established himself as an alpha species and speech and language evolution has made it possible. But how is speech possible? What anatomical changes have made us possible to speak? A sincere effort has been put in this paper to establish a possible anatomical answer to the riddle. METHODS The prototypes of the cranial skeletons of all the major classes of phylum vertebrata were studied. The materials were studied in museums of Wayanad, Karwar and Museum of Natural History, Imphal. The skeleton of mammal was studied in the Department of Anatomy, K. S. Hegde Medical Academy, Mangalore. RESULTS The curve formed in the base of the skull due to flexion of the splanchnocranium with the neurocranium holds the key to answer of how humans were able to speak. CONCLUSION Of course this may not be the only reason which participated in the evolution of speech like the brain also had to evolve and as a matter of fact the occipital lobes are more prominent in humans when compared to that of the lower mammals. Although, not the only criteria but it is one of the most important thing that has happened in the course of evolution and made us to speak. This small space at the base of the brain is the difference which made us the dominant alpha species.

Mapping Speech Spectra from Throat Microphone to Close-Speaking Microphone: A Neural Network Approach

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B. Yegnanarayana

2007-01-01

Full Text Available Speech recorded from a throat microphone is robust to the surrounding noise, but sounds unnatural unlike the speech recorded from a close-speaking microphone. This paper addresses the issue of improving the perceptual quality of the throat microphone speech by mapping the speech spectra from the throat microphone to the close-speaking microphone. A neural network model is used to capture the speaker-dependent functional relationship between the feature vectors (cepstral coefficients of the two speech signals. A method is proposed to ensure the stability of the all-pole synthesis filter. Objective evaluations indicate the effectiveness of the proposed mapping scheme. The advantage of this method is that the model gives a smooth estimate of the spectra of the close-speaking microphone speech. No distortions are perceived in the reconstructed speech. This mapping technique is also used for bandwidth extension of telephone speech.

Capitalising on North American speech resources for the development of a South African English large vocabulary speech recognition system

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Kamper, H

2014-11-01

Full Text Available -West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa 2Human Language Technologies Research Group, Meraka Institute, CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa {etienne.barnard, marelie.davel, cvheerden}@gmail.com, {fdwet, jbadenhorst}@csir.co.za Abstract The NCHLT speech...

Speech-like rhythm in a voiced and voiceless orangutan call.

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Adriano R Lameira

Full Text Available The evolutionary origins of speech remain obscure. Recently, it was proposed that speech derived from monkey facial signals which exhibit a speech-like rhythm of ∼5 open-close lip cycles per second. In monkeys, these signals may also be vocalized, offering a plausible evolutionary stepping stone towards speech. Three essential predictions remain, however, to be tested to assess this hypothesis' validity; (i Great apes, our closest relatives, should likewise produce 5Hz-rhythm signals, (ii speech-like rhythm should involve calls articulatorily similar to consonants and vowels given that speech rhythm is the direct product of stringing together these two basic elements, and (iii speech-like rhythm should be experience-based. Via cinematic analyses we demonstrate that an ex-entertainment orangutan produces two calls at a speech-like rhythm, coined "clicks" and "faux-speech." Like voiceless consonants, clicks required no vocal fold action, but did involve independent manoeuvring over lips and tongue. In parallel to vowels, faux-speech showed harmonic and formant modulations, implying vocal fold and supralaryngeal action. This rhythm was several times faster than orangutan chewing rates, as observed in monkeys and humans. Critically, this rhythm was seven-fold faster, and contextually distinct, than any other known rhythmic calls described to date in the largest database of the orangutan repertoire ever assembled. The first two predictions advanced by this study are validated and, based on parsimony and exclusion of potential alternative explanations, initial support is given to the third prediction. Irrespectively of the putative origins of these calls and underlying mechanisms, our findings demonstrate irrevocably that great apes are not respiratorily, articulatorilly, or neurologically constrained for the production of consonant- and vowel-like calls at speech rhythm. Orangutan clicks and faux-speech confirm the importance of rhythmic speech

Predicting Speech Intelligibility with a Multiple Speech Subsystems Approach in Children with Cerebral Palsy

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Lee, Jimin; Hustad, Katherine C.; Weismer, Gary

2014-01-01

Purpose: Speech acoustic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were examined with a multiple speech subsystems approach; speech intelligibility was evaluated using a prediction model in which acoustic measures were selected to represent three speech subsystems. Method: Nine acoustic variables reflecting different subsystems, and…

[Design of standard voice sample text for subjective auditory perceptual evaluation of voice disorders].

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Jin-rang; Sun, Yan-yan; Xu, Wen

2010-09-01

To design a speech voice sample text with all phonemes in Mandarin for subjective auditory perceptual evaluation of voice disorders. The principles for design of a speech voice sample text are: The short text should include the 21 initials and 39 finals, this may cover all the phonemes in Mandarin. Also, the short text should have some meanings. A short text was made out. It had 155 Chinese words, and included 21 initials and 38 finals (the final, ê, was not included because it was rarely used in Mandarin). Also, the text covered 17 light tones and one "Erhua". The constituent ratios of the initials and finals presented in this short text were statistically similar as those in Mandarin according to the method of similarity of the sample and population (r = 0.742, P text were statistically not similar as those in Mandarin (r = 0.731, P > 0.05). A speech voice sample text with all phonemes in Mandarin was made out. The constituent ratios of the initials and finals presented in this short text are similar as those in Mandarin. Its value for subjective auditory perceptual evaluation of voice disorders need further study.

A causal test of the motor theory of speech perception: a case of impaired speech production and spared speech perception.

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Stasenko, Alena; Bonn, Cory; Teghipco, Alex; Garcea, Frank E; Sweet, Catherine; Dombovy, Mary; McDonough, Joyce; Mahon, Bradford Z

2015-01-01

The debate about the causal role of the motor system in speech perception has been reignited by demonstrations that motor processes are engaged during the processing of speech sounds. Here, we evaluate which aspects of auditory speech processing are affected, and which are not, in a stroke patient with dysfunction of the speech motor system. We found that the patient showed a normal phonemic categorical boundary when discriminating two non-words that differ by a minimal pair (e.g., ADA-AGA). However, using the same stimuli, the patient was unable to identify or label the non-word stimuli (using a button-press response). A control task showed that he could identify speech sounds by speaker gender, ruling out a general labelling impairment. These data suggest that while the motor system is not causally involved in perception of the speech signal, it may be used when other cues (e.g., meaning, context) are not available.

Training for Auditing (Listening of Foreign Texts: Methodology and Experience

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Anzhelika S. Boutousova

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Auditing is considered systematically as a psychophysiological and cognitive process, on the one hand, and as a type of speech activity, on the other. The levels and stages of learning to listen to foreign language texts with their inherent difficulties are singled out. There are elementary, intermediate and advanced levels of learning listening. The stages of training are divided into pretext, text and post-text. Based on the analysis of scientific literature and personal observations, language, cognitive and socio-cultural difficulties in listening have been discovered. A system of exercises aimed at forming an auditory skills is described. Audience skills include segmentation of speech into parts, anticipation of the meaning of parts of words and sentences, forecasting of form and meaning at the text level, skills related to the development of the mechanism of memory; compression and interpretation of the text. The auditory skills are interpreted as listening recognition and understanding of individual words and expressions and grammatical structures.

THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE ON THE STEPS OF PERSUASIVE KEYNOTE SPEECH

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Alief Noor Farida

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Persuasion in business is important. It can be done by giving information about the products to the customers via advertisements or keynote speech when the company is launching the products. As the function of a keynote speech is important, the speaker of the event should be able to deliver the speech in a clear and concise manner. In this study, discourse analysis was done to find out the moves of persuasive keynote speech in mobile phone launching events. There were four keynote speeches analyzed. They have similar move structure: Introduction^Body^Conclusion, but the steps constructing the moves are different, especially in Move 1 and Move 3. In Move 2, the steps follow Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. The structure of the steps in the move 1 and move 2 of the keynote speeches under study varies. The variation of step structure is highly influenced by the cultural background of both the speakers and the audiences; eastern and western culture have some significant differences. This study shows that basic knowledge on the audience’s cultural background will help the keynote speaker to construct his/her speech to give better persuasive effect on the audience.

Functional lateralization of speech processing in adults and children who stutter

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Yutaka eSato

2011-04-01

Full Text Available Developmental stuttering is a speech disorder in fluency characterized by repetitions, prolongations and silent blocks, especially in the initial parts of utterances. Although their symptoms are motor related, people who stutter show abnormal patterns of cerebral hemispheric dominance in both anterior and posterior language areas. It is unknown whether the abnormal functional lateralization in the posterior language area starts during childhood or emerges as a consequence of many years of stuttering. In order to address this issue, we measured the lateralization of hemodynamic responses in the auditory cortex during auditory speech processing in adults and children who stutter, including preschoolers, with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS. We used the analysis-resynthesis technique to prepare two types of stimuli: (i a phonemic contrast embedded in Japanese spoken words (/itta/ vs. /itte/ and (ii a prosodic contrast (/itta/ vs. /itta?/. In the baseline blocks, only /itta/ tokens were presented. In phonemic contrast blocks, /itta/ and /itte/ tokens were presented pseudo-randomly, and /itta/ and /itta?/ tokens in prosodic contrast blocks. In adults and children who do not stutter, there was a clear left-hemispheric advantage for the phonemic contrast compared to the prosodic contrast. Adults and children who stutter, however, showed no significant difference between the two stimulus conditions. A subject-by-subject analysis revealed that not a single subject who stutters showed a left advantage in the phonemic contrast over the prosodic contrast condition. These results indicate that the functional lateralization for auditory speech processing is in disarray among those who stutter, even at preschool age. These results shed light on the neural pathophysiology of developmental stuttering.

Recognition of Speech of Normal-hearing Individuals with Tinnitus and Hyperacusis

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Hennig, Tais Regina

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Tinnitus and hyperacusis are increasingly frequent audiological symptoms that may occur in the absence of the hearing involvement, but it does not offer a lower impact or bothering to the affected individuals. The Medial Olivocochlear System helps in the speech recognition in noise and may be connected to the presence of tinnitus and hyperacusis. Objective: To evaluate the speech recognition of normal-hearing individual with and without complaints of tinnitus and hyperacusis, and to compare their results. Method: Descriptive, prospective and cross-study in which 19 normal-hearing individuals were evaluated with complaint of tinnitus and hyperacusis of the Study Group (SG, and 23 normal-hearing individuals without audiological complaints of the Control Group (CG. The individuals of both groups were submitted to the test List of Sentences in Portuguese, prepared by Costa (1998 to determine the Sentences Recognition Threshold in Silence (LRSS and the signal to noise ratio (S/N. The SG also answered the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory for tinnitus analysis, and to characterize hyperacusis the discomfort thresholds were set. Results: The CG and SG presented with average LRSS and S/N ratio of 7.34 dB NA and -6.77 dB, and of 7.20 dB NA and -4.89 dB, respectively. Conclusion: The normal-hearing individuals with or without audiological complaints of tinnitus and hyperacusis had a similar performance in the speech recognition in silence, which was not the case when evaluated in the presence of competitive noise, since the SG had a lower performance in this communication scenario, with a statistically significant difference.

The Relationship between Speech Production and Speech Perception Deficits in Parkinson's Disease

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De Keyser, Kim; Santens, Patrick; Bockstael, Annelies; Botteldooren, Dick; Talsma, Durk; De Vos, Stefanie; Van Cauwenberghe, Mieke; Verheugen, Femke; Corthals, Paul; De Letter, Miet

2016-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated the possible relationship between hypokinetic speech production and speech intensity perception in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Participants included 14 patients with idiopathic PD and 14 matched healthy controls (HCs) with normal hearing and cognition. First, speech production was objectified…

Social Robotics in Therapy of Apraxia of Speech

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José Carlos Castillo

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Apraxia of speech is a motor speech disorder in which messages from the brain to the mouth are disrupted, resulting in an inability for moving lips or tongue to the right place to pronounce sounds correctly. Current therapies for this condition involve a therapist that in one-on-one sessions conducts the exercises. Our aim is to work in the line of robotic therapies in which a robot is able to perform partially or autonomously a therapy session, endowing a social robot with the ability of assisting therapists in apraxia of speech rehabilitation exercises. Therefore, we integrate computer vision and machine learning techniques to detect the mouth pose of the user and, on top of that, our social robot performs autonomously the different steps of the therapy using multimodal interaction.

Visual speech information: a help or hindrance in perceptual processing of dysarthric speech.

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Borrie, Stephanie A

2015-03-01

This study investigated the influence of visual speech information on perceptual processing of neurologically degraded speech. Fifty listeners identified spastic dysarthric speech under both audio (A) and audiovisual (AV) conditions. Condition comparisons revealed that the addition of visual speech information enhanced processing of the neurologically degraded input in terms of (a) acuity (percent phonemes correct) of vowels and consonants and (b) recognition (percent words correct) of predictive and nonpredictive phrases. Listeners exploited stress-based segmentation strategies more readily in AV conditions, suggesting that the perceptual benefit associated with adding visual speech information to the auditory signal-the AV advantage-has both segmental and suprasegmental origins. Results also revealed that the magnitude of the AV advantage can be predicted, to some degree, by the extent to which an individual utilizes syllabic stress cues to inform word recognition in AV conditions. Findings inform the development of a listener-specific model of speech perception that applies to processing of dysarthric speech in everyday communication contexts.

The treatment of apraxia of speech : Speech and music therapy, an innovative joint effort

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hurkmans, Josephus Johannes Stephanus

2016-01-01

Apraxia of Speech (AoS) is a neurogenic speech disorder. A wide variety of behavioural methods have been developed to treat AoS. Various therapy programmes use musical elements to improve speech production. A unique therapy programme combining elements of speech therapy and music therapy is called

A Cross-Cultural Approach to Speech-Act-Sets: The Case of Apologies

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Válková Silvie

2014-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to contribute to the validity of recent research into speech act theory by advocating the idea that with some of the traditional speech acts, their overt language manifestations that emerge from corpus data remind us of ritualised scenarios of speech-act-sets rather than single acts, with configurations of core and peripheral units reflecting the socio-cultural norms of the expectations and culture-bound values of a given language community. One of the prototypical manifestations of speech-act-sets, apologies, will be discussed to demonstrate a procedure which can be used to identify, analyse, describe and cross-culturally compare the validity of speech-act-set theory and provide evidence of its relevance for studying the English-Czech interface in this particular domain of human interaction.

A wireless brain-machine interface for real-time speech synthesis.

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Frank H Guenther

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs involving electrodes implanted into the human cerebral cortex have recently been developed in an attempt to restore function to profoundly paralyzed individuals. Current BMIs for restoring communication can provide important capabilities via a typing process, but unfortunately they are only capable of slow communication rates. In the current study we use a novel approach to speech restoration in which we decode continuous auditory parameters for a real-time speech synthesizer from neuronal activity in motor cortex during attempted speech.Neural signals recorded by a Neurotrophic Electrode implanted in a speech-related region of the left precentral gyrus of a human volunteer suffering from locked-in syndrome, characterized by near-total paralysis with spared cognition, were transmitted wirelessly across the scalp and used to drive a speech synthesizer. A Kalman filter-based decoder translated the neural signals generated during attempted speech into continuous parameters for controlling a synthesizer that provided immediate (within 50 ms auditory feedback of the decoded sound. Accuracy of the volunteer's vowel productions with the synthesizer improved quickly with practice, with a 25% improvement in average hit rate (from 45% to 70% and 46% decrease in average endpoint error from the first to the last block of a three-vowel task.Our results support the feasibility of neural prostheses that may have the potential to provide near-conversational synthetic speech output for individuals with severely impaired speech motor control. They also provide an initial glimpse into the functional properties of neurons in speech motor cortical areas.

Concurrent Speech Segregation Problems in Hearing Impaired Children

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Hossein Talebi

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Objective: This study was a basic investigation of the ability of concurrent speech segregation in hearing impaired children. Concurrent segregation is one of the fundamental components of auditory scene analysis and plays an important role in speech perception. In the present study, we compared auditory late responses or ALRs between hearing impaired and normal children. Materials & Methods: Auditory late potentials in response to 12 double vowels were recorded in 10 children with moderate to severe sensory neural hearing loss and 10 normal children. Double vowels (pairs of synthetic vowels were presented concurrently and binaurally. Fundamental frequency (F0 of these vowels and the size of the difference in F0 between vowels was 100 Hz and 0.5 semitones respectively. Results: Comparing N1-P2 amplitude showed statistically significant difference in some stimuli between hearing impaired and normal children (P<0.05. This complex indexing the vowel change detection and reflecting central auditory speech representation without active client participation was decreased in hearing impaired children. Conclusion: This study showed problems in concurrent speech segregation in hearing impaired children evidenced by ALRs. This information indicated deficiencies in bottom-up processing of speech characteristics based on F0 and its differences in these children.

Dissociated Crossed Speech Areas in a Tumour Patient

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Jörg Mauler

2017-05-01

Full Text Available In the past, the eloquent areas could be deliberately localised by the invasive Wada test. The very rare cases of dissociated crossed speech areas were accidentally found based on the clinical symptomatology. Today functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI-based imaging can be employed to non-invasively localise the eloquent areas in brain tumour patients for therapy planning. A 41-year-old, left-handed man with a low-grade glioma in the left frontal operculum extending to the insular cortex, tension headaches, and anomic aphasia over 5 months underwent a pre-operative speech area localisation fMRI measurement, which revealed the evidence of the transhemispheric disposition, where the dominant Wernicke speech area is located on the left and the Broca’s area is strongly lateralised to the right hemisphere. The outcome of the Wada test and the intraoperative cortico-subcortical stimulation mapping were congruent with this finding. After tumour removal, language area function was fully preserved. Upon the occurrence of brain tumours with a risk of impaired speech function, the rare dissociate crossed speech areas disposition may gain a clinically relevant meaning by allowing for more extended tumour removal. Hence, for its identification, diagnostics which take into account both brain hemispheres, such as fMRI, are recommended.

Speech recognition in individuals with sensorineural hearing loss

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Adriana Neves de Andrade

Full Text Available ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION: Hearing loss can negatively influence the communication performance of individuals, who should be evaluated with suitable material and in situations of listening close to those found in everyday life. OBJECTIVE: To analyze and compare the performance of patients with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss in speech recognition tests carried out in silence and with noise, according to the variables ear (right and left and type of stimulus presentation. METHODS: The study included 19 right-handed individuals with mild-to-moderate symmetrical bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, submitted to the speech recognition test with words in different modalities and speech test with white noise and pictures. RESULTS: There was no significant difference between right and left ears in any of the tests. The mean number of correct responses in the speech recognition test with pictures, live voice, and recorded monosyllables was 97.1%, 85.9%, and 76.1%, respectively, whereas after the introduction of noise, the performance decreased to 72.6% accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: The best performances in the Speech Recognition Percentage Index were obtained using monosyllabic stimuli, represented by pictures presented in silence, with no significant differences between the right and left ears. After the introduction of competitive noise, there was a decrease in individuals' performance.

Practical speech user interface design

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Lewis, James R

2010-01-01

Although speech is the most natural form of communication between humans, most people find using speech to communicate with machines anything but natural. Drawing from psychology, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and communication theory, Practical Speech User Interface Design provides a comprehensive yet concise survey of practical speech user interface (SUI) design. It offers practice-based and research-based guidance on how to design effective, efficient, and pleasant speech applications that people can really use. Focusing on the design of speech user interfaces for IVR application

Speech act theory and New Testament exegesis

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J. Botha

1991-01-01

Full Text Available Speech act theory offers New Testament exegesis some additional ways and means of approaching the text of the New Testament. This, the second in a series of two articles that make a plea for the continued utilisation and application of this theory to the text of the New Testament, deals with some of the possibilities and potential this theory holds for reading biblical texts. Advantages are pointed out and a few suggestions for the future proposed.

The Prevalence of Speech Disorder in Primary School Students in Yazd-Iran

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Sedighah Akhavan Karbasi

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Communication disorder is a widespread disabling problems and associated with adverse, long term outcome that impact on individuals, families and academic achievement of children in the school years and affect vocational choices later in adulthood. The aim of this study was to determine prevalence of speech disorders specifically stuttering, voice, and speech-sound disorders in primary school students in Iran-Yazd. In a descriptive study, 7881 primary school students in Yazd evaluated in view from of speech disorders with use of direct and face to face assessment technique in 2005. The prevalence of total speech disorders was 14.8% among whom 13.8% had speech-sound disorder, 1.2% stuttering and 0.47% voice disorder. The prevalence of speech disorders was higher than in males (16.7% as compared to females (12.7%. Pattern of prevalence of the three speech disorders was significantly different according to gender, parental education and by number of family member. There was no significant difference across speech disorders and birth order, religion and paternal consanguinity. These prevalence figures are higher than more studies that using parent or teacher reports.

About training of Kazakh students of not language specialties basis of scientific speech

OpenAIRE

Ospanova D.

2016-01-01

The article discusses the process of written scientific speech training should include two components: teaching understanding and evaluating texts that make the scientific speech in all its substantive and problematic species and learning the rules of creating texts in the chosen specialty. The idea about functional languages develops in the theory vernaculars among which numerous languages of science take essentially important place; studying of these languages represents the theory and prac...

Seimo posėdžių stenogramų tekstynas autorystės nustatymo bei autoriaus profilio sudarymo tyrimams | Corpus of transcribed parliamentary speeches for authorship attribution and author profiling tasks

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Jurgita Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In our paper we present a corpus of transcribed Lithuanian parliamentary speeches. The corpus is prepared in a specific format, appropriate for different authorship identification tasks. The corpus consists of approximately 111 thousand texts (24 million words. Each text matches one parliamentary speech produced during an ordinary session from the period of 7 parliamentary terms starting on March 10, 1990 and ending on December 23, 2013. The texts are grouped into 147 categories corresponding to individual authors, therefore they can be used for authorship attribution tasks; besides, these texts are also grouped according to age, gender and political views, therefore they are also suitable for author profiling tasks. Whereas short texts complicate recognition of author speaking style and are ambiguous in relation to the style of other authors, we incorporated only texts containing not less than 100 words into the corpus. In order to make each category as comprehensive and representative as possible, we included only those authors, who produced speeches at least 200 times. All the texts are lemmatized, morphologically and syntactically annotated, tokenized into the character n-grams. The statistical information of the corpus is also available. We have also demonstrated that the created corpus can be effectively used in authorship attribution and author profiling tasks with supervised machine learning methods. The corpus structure also allows using it with unsupervised machine learning methods and can be used for creation of rule-based methods, as well as in different linguistic analyses.

Motor Speech Phenotypes of Frontotemporal Dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia, and Progressive Apraxia of Speech

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Poole, Matthew L.; Brodtmann, Amy; Darby, David; Vogel, Adam P.

2017-01-01

Purpose: Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging. Method: Speech and…

An analysis of the masking of speech by competing speech using self-report data.

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Agus, Trevor R; Akeroyd, Michael A; Noble, William; Bhullar, Navjot

2009-01-01

Many of the items in the "Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing" scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int. J. Audiol. 43, 85-99 (2004)] are concerned with speech understanding in a variety of backgrounds, both speech and nonspeech. To study if this self-report data reflected informational masking, previously collected data on 414 people were analyzed. The lowest scores (greatest difficulties) were found for the two items in which there were two speech targets, with successively higher scores for competing speech (six items), energetic masking (one item), and no masking (three items). The results suggest significant masking by competing speech in everyday listening situations.

A Psycho – Pragmatic Study of The Speech Act of Obsession

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Ameer Ali Hussein

2017-06-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses a notion in psycho-pragmatics called "obsession". This notion is a specific kind of soliloquy, which is persistent preoccupation ideas or thoughts that tell a person to do something bad or shameful things, however normal soliloquy is a normal speech with oneself to express regret or happiness. It is proved that obsession is an actual speech acts. A comparison is made between obsession and soliloquy in order to distinguish between these two similar notions. By doing this comparison, the paper shows the difference between the normal soliloquy and obsession. Some examples are taken from Arabic, especially from the Holy Qura'an. When analyzing these examples, the paper explains that soliloquy and obsession meet the three levels of speech act. Some verses (Ayas explain the obsessive speeches of Satan to Adam for example and the perlocutionary act of these verses. Other verses (Ayas show that soliloquy is a speech act but the speaker speaks to himself to express his thoughts and feelings or to do some actions as the perlocutionary act of his speech.

Speech Recognition

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Adrian Morariu

2009-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a method of speech recognition by pattern recognition techniques. Learning consists in determining the unique characteristics of a word (cepstral coefficients by eliminating those characteristics that are different from one word to another. For learning and recognition, the system will build a dictionary of words by determining the characteristics of each word to be used in the recognition. Determining the characteristics of an audio signal consists in the following steps: noise removal, sampling it, applying Hamming window, switching to frequency domain through Fourier transform, calculating the magnitude spectrum, filtering data, determining cepstral coefficients.

How may the basal ganglia contribute to auditory categorization and speech perception?

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Sung-Joo eLim

2014-08-01

Full Text Available Listeners must accomplish two complementary perceptual feats in extracting a message from speech. They must discriminate linguistically-relevant acoustic variability and generalize across irrelevant variability. Said another way, they must categorize speech. Since the mapping of acoustic variability is language-specific, these categories must be learned from experience. Thus, understanding how, in general, the auditory system acquires and represents categories can inform us about the toolbox of mechanisms available to speech perception. This perspective invites consideration of findings from cognitive neuroscience literatures outside of the speech domain as a means of constraining models of speech perception. Although neurobiological models of speech perception have mainly focused on cerebral cortex, research outside the speech domain is consistent with the possibility of significant subcortical contributions in category learning. Here, we review the functional role of one such structure, the basal ganglia. We examine research from animal electrophysiology, human neuroimaging, and behavior to consider characteristics of basal ganglia processing that may be advantageous for speech category learning. We also present emerging evidence for a direct role for basal ganglia in learning auditory categories in a complex, naturalistic task intended to model the incidental manner in which speech categories are acquired. To conclude, we highlight new research questions that arise in incorporating the broader neuroscience research literature in modeling speech perception, and suggest how understanding contributions of the basal ganglia can inform attempts to optimize training protocols for learning non-native speech categories in adulthood.

Detecting self-produced speech errors before and after articulation: An ERP investigation

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Kevin Michael Trewartha

2013-11-01

Full Text Available It has been argued that speech production errors are monitored by the same neural system involved in monitoring other types of action errors. Behavioral evidence has shown that speech errors can be detected and corrected prior to articulation, yet the neural basis for such pre-articulatory speech error monitoring is poorly understood. The current study investigated speech error monitoring using a phoneme-substitution task known to elicit speech errors. Stimulus-locked event-related potential (ERP analyses comparing correct and incorrect utterances were used to assess pre-articulatory error monitoring and response-locked ERP analyses were used to assess post-articulatory monitoring. Our novel finding in the stimulus-locked analysis revealed that words that ultimately led to a speech error were associated with a larger P2 component at midline sites (FCz, Cz, and CPz. This early positivity may reflect the detection of an error in speech formulation, or a predictive mechanism to signal the potential for an upcoming speech error. The data also revealed that general conflict monitoring mechanisms are involved during this task as both correct and incorrect responses elicited an anterior N2 component typically associated with conflict monitoring. The response-locked analyses corroborated previous observations that self-produced speech errors led to a fronto-central ERN. These results demonstrate that speech errors can be detected prior to articulation, and that speech error monitoring relies on a central error monitoring mechanism.

Aversive eye gaze during a speech in virtual environment in patients with social anxiety disorder.

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Kim, Haena; Shin, Jung Eun; Hong, Yeon-Ju; Shin, Yu-Bin; Shin, Young Seok; Han, Kiwan; Kim, Jae-Jin; Choi, Soo-Hee

2018-03-01

One of the main characteristics of social anxiety disorder is excessive fear of social evaluation. In such situations, anxiety can influence gaze behaviour. Thus, the current study adopted virtual reality to examine eye gaze pattern of social anxiety disorder patients while presenting different types of speeches. A total of 79 social anxiety disorder patients and 51 healthy controls presented prepared speeches on general topics and impromptu speeches on self-related topics to a virtual audience while their eye gaze was recorded. Their presentation performance was also evaluated. Overall, social anxiety disorder patients showed less eye gaze towards the audience than healthy controls. Types of speech did not influence social anxiety disorder patients' gaze allocation towards the audience. However, patients with social anxiety disorder showed significant correlations between the amount of eye gaze towards the audience while presenting self-related speeches and social anxiety cognitions. The current study confirms that eye gaze behaviour of social anxiety disorder patients is aversive and that their anxiety symptoms are more dependent on the nature of topic.

SOME EXAMPLES OF APPLIED SYSTEMS WITH SPEECH INTERFACE

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V. A. Zhitko

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Three examples of applied systems with a speech interface are considered in the article. The first two of these provide the end user with the opportunity to ask verbally the question and to hear the response from the system, creating an addition to the traditional I / O via the keyboard and computer screen. The third example, the «IntonTrainer» system, provides the user with the possibility of voice interaction and is designed for in-depth self-learning of the intonation of oral speech.

Effects of the Syntactic Complexity on Speech Dysfluency of Stuttering Persian-Speaking Children and Adults in Conversational Speech

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Behrooz Mahmoodi Bakhtiari

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Background and Aim: Recently, researchers have increasingly turned to study the relation between stuttering and syntactic complexity. This study investigates the effect of syntactic complexity on theamount of speech dysfluency in stuttering Persian-speaking children and adults in conversational speech. The obtained results can pave the way to a better understanding of stuttering in children andadults, and finding more appropriate treatments.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the participants were 15 stuttering adult Persian-speakers, older than 15 years, and 15 stuttering child Persian-speakers of 4-6 years of age. In this study, first a 30 minute sample of the spontaneous speech of the participants was provided. Then the utterances of each person were studied in respect to the amount of dysfluency and syntactic complexity. The obtained information was analyzed using paired samples t-test.Results: In both groups of stuttering children and adults, there was a significant difference between the amount of dysfluency of simple and complex sentences (p<0.05.Conclusion: The results of this study showed that an increase in syntactic complexity in conversational speech, increased the amount of dysfluency in stuttering children and adults. Moreover,as a result of increase of syntactic complexity, dysfluency had a greater increase in stuttering children than stuttering adults.

Speech rehabilitation of maxillectomy patients with hollow bulb obturator

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Pravesh Kumar

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Aim: To evaluate the effect of hollow bulb obturator prosthesis on articulation and nasalance in maxillectomy patients. Materials and Methods: A total of 10 patients, who were to undergo maxillectomy, falling under Aramany classes I and II, with normal speech and hearing pattern were selected for the study. They were provided with definitive maxillary obturators after complete healing of the defect. The patients were asked to wear the obturator for six weeks and speech analysis was done to measure changes in articulation and nasalance at four different stages of treatment, namely, preoperative, postoperative (after complete healing, that is, 3-4 months after surgery, after 24 hours, and after six weeks of providing the obturators. Articulation was measured objectively for distortion, addition, substitution, and omission by a speech pathologist, and nasalance was measured by Dr. Speech software. Results: The statistical comparison of preoperative and six weeks post rehabilitation levels showed insignificance in articulation and nasalance. Comparison of post surgery complete healing with six weeks after rehabilitation showed significant differences in both nasalance and articulation. Conclusion: Providing an obturator improves the speech closer to presurgical levels of articulation and there is improvement in nasality also.

Causal inference of asynchronous audiovisual speech

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John F Magnotti

2013-11-01

Full Text Available During speech perception, humans integrate auditory information from the voice with visual information from the face. This multisensory integration increases perceptual precision, but only if the two cues come from the same talker; this requirement has been largely ignored by current models of speech perception. We describe a generative model of multisensory speech perception that includes this critical step of determining the likelihood that the voice and face information have a common cause. A key feature of the model is that it is based on a principled analysis of how an observer should solve this causal inference problem using the asynchrony between two cues and the reliability of the cues. This allows the model to make predictions abut the behavior of subjects performing a synchrony judgment task, predictive power that does not exist in other approaches, such as post hoc fitting of Gaussian curves to behavioral data. We tested the model predictions against the performance of 37 subjects performing a synchrony judgment task viewing audiovisual speech under a variety of manipulations, including varying asynchronies, intelligibility, and visual cue reliability. The causal inference model outperformed the Gaussian model across two experiments, providing a better fit to the behavioral data with fewer parameters. Because the causal inference model is derived from a principled understanding of the task, model parameters are directly interpretable in terms of stimulus and subject properties.

A novel speech prosthesis for mandibular guidance therapy in hemimandibulectomy patient: A clinical report

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Raghavendra Adaki

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Treating diverse maxillofacial patients poses a challenge to the maxillofacial prosthodontist. Rehabilitation of hemimandibulectomy patients must aim at restoring mastication and other functions such as intelligible speech, swallowing, and esthetics. Prosthetic methods such as palatal ramp and mandibular guiding flange reposition the deviated mandible. Such prosthesis can also be used to restore speech in case of patients with debilitating speech following surgical resection. This clinical report gives detail of a hemimandibulectomy patient provided with an interim removable dental speech prosthesis with composite resin flange for mandibular guidance therapy.

75 FR 26701 - Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-05-12

...] Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and Speech Disabilities... proposed compensation rates for Interstate TRS, Speech-to-Speech Services (STS), Captioned Telephone... costs reported in the data submitted to NECA by VRS providers. In this regard, document DA 10-761 also...

Digitized Ethnic Hate Speech: Understanding Effects of Digital Media Hate Speech on Citizen Journalism in Kenya

Science.gov (United States)

Kimotho, Stephen Gichuhi; Nyaga, Rahab Njeri

2016-01-01

Ethnicity in Kenya permeates all spheres of life. However, it is in politics that ethnicity is most visible. Election time in Kenya often leads to ethnic competition and hatred, often expressed through various media. Ethnic hate speech characterized the 2007 general elections in party rallies and through text messages, emails, posters and…

Predicting automatic speech recognition performance over communication channels from instrumental speech quality and intelligibility scores

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gallardo, L.F.; Möller, S.; Beerends, J.

2017-01-01

The performance of automatic speech recognition based on coded-decoded speech heavily depends on the quality of the transmitted signals, determined by channel impairments. This paper examines relationships between speech recognition performance and measurements of speech quality and intelligibility

[Non-speech oral motor treatment efficacy for children with developmental speech sound disorders].

Science.gov (United States)

Ygual-Fernandez, A; Cervera-Merida, J F

2016-01-01

In the treatment of speech disorders by means of speech therapy two antagonistic methodological approaches are applied: non-verbal ones, based on oral motor exercises (OME), and verbal ones, which are based on speech processing tasks with syllables, phonemes and words. In Spain, OME programmes are called 'programas de praxias', and are widely used and valued by speech therapists. To review the studies conducted on the effectiveness of OME-based treatments applied to children with speech disorders and the theoretical arguments that could justify, or not, their usefulness. Over the last few decades evidence has been gathered about the lack of efficacy of this approach to treat developmental speech disorders and pronunciation problems in populations without any neurological alteration of motor functioning. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has advised against its use taking into account the principles of evidence-based practice. The knowledge gathered to date on motor control shows that the pattern of mobility and its corresponding organisation in the brain are different in speech and other non-verbal functions linked to nutrition and breathing. Neither the studies on their effectiveness nor the arguments based on motor control studies recommend the use of OME-based programmes for the treatment of pronunciation problems in children with developmental language disorders.

Gesture facilitates the syntactic analysis of speech

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Henning eHolle

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Recent research suggests that the brain routinely binds together information from gesture and speech. However, most of this research focused on the integration of representational gestures with the semantic content of speech. Much less is known about how other aspects of gesture, such as emphasis, influence the interpretation of the syntactic relations in a spoken message. Here, we investigated whether beat gestures alter which syntactic structure is assigned to ambiguous spoken German sentences. The P600 component of the Event Related Brain Potential indicated that the more complex syntactic structure is easier to process when the speaker emphasizes the subject of a sentence with a beat. Thus, a simple flick of the hand can change our interpretation of who has been doing what to whom in a spoken sentence. We conclude that gestures and speech are an integrated system. Unlike previous studies, which have shown that the brain effortlessly integrates semantic information from gesture and speech, our study is the first to demonstrate that this integration also occurs for syntactic information. Moreover, the effect appears to be gesture-specific and was not found for other stimuli that draw attention to certain parts of speech, including prosodic emphasis, or a moving visual stimulus with the same trajectory as the gesture. This suggests that only visual emphasis produced with a communicative intention in mind (that is, beat gestures influences language comprehension, but not a simple visual movement lacking such an intention.

Music and speech prosody: A common rhythm

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Maija eHausen

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have broadened this view by showing that the deficit is associated with problems in perceiving speech prosody, especially intonation and emotional prosody. In the present study the association between the perception of music and speech prosody was investigated with healthy Finnish adults (n = 61 using an on-line music perception test including the Scale subtest of Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA and Off-Beat and Out-of-key tasks as well as a prosodic verbal task that measures the perception of word stress. Regression analyses showed that there was a clear association between prosody perception and music perception, especially in the domain of rhythm perception. This association was evident after controlling for music education, age, pitch perception, visuospatial perception and working memory. Pitch perception was significantly associated with music perception but not with prosody perception. The association between music perception and visuospatial perception (measured using analogous tasks was less clear. Overall, the pattern of results indicates that there is a robust link between music and speech perception and that this link can be mediated by rhythmic cues (time and stress.

Attentional Demand of Speech in Children and Adolescents with Developmental Stuttering

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Hajar Bahrami

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Background & Objective: Stuttering is a prevalent disorder in children and adolescents. Because attention is the only fuel resource for cognitive functions and the language have high cognitive functions, then it is possible that speech difficulties are related to attention deficit. The purpose of this study was to investigate the attentional demand of speech in children and adolescents with developmental stuttering. Materials & Methods: It is a dependent measurement study though which 30 school students (8-13 yr. were selected by convenience sampling and speech therapist´s detection from Shahriyar. The instruments were used in this research consist of: a text for reading, a device for recording of speech, and stuttering severity instrument-3 (SSI-3. The research was implemented in two conditions: single task (only reading and dual task (reading along finger tapping task. The data were analyzed using T- test. Results: Findings show that stuttering severity increased in dual task condition (divided attention. Conclusion: This result suggests that a decreased attentional capacity in children with developmental stuttering cause an increase in the number of stuttering words. With a better understanding of attentional functions of stuttering people as an important cognitive variables, we can take a step toward recognizing cognitive vulnerability of disorder. Therefore, intervention programs for children with developmental stuttering should pay attention to cognitive deficits and prior to speech interventions, the cognitive deficits should be eliminated with neuropsychological implements. With the improvement of neurological base of speech which is the first point of that in the brain, the considerable improvement may be seen in the stuttering severity.

Behavioural, computational, and neuroimaging studies of acquired apraxia of speech

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Kirrie J Ballard

2014-11-01

Full Text Available A critical examination of speech motor control depends on an in-depth understanding of network connectivity associated with Brodmann areas 44 and 45 and surrounding cortices. Damage to these areas has been associated with two conditions - the speech motor programming disorder apraxia of speech (AOS and the linguistic / grammatical disorder of Broca’s aphasia. Here we focus on AOS, which is most commonly associated with damage to posterior Broca's area and adjacent cortex. We provide an overview of our own studies into the nature of AOS, including behavioral and neuroimaging methods, to explore components of the speech motor network that are associated with normal and disordered speech motor programming in AOS. Behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational modeling studies are indicating that AOS is associated with impairment in learning feedforward models and/or implementing feedback mechanisms and with the functional contribution of BA6. While functional connectivity methods are not yet routinely applied to the study of AOS, we highlight the need for focusing on the functional impact of localised lesions throughout the speech network, as well as larger scale comparative studies to distinguish the unique behavioral and neurological signature of AOS. By coupling these methods with neural network models, we have a powerful set of tools to improve our understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie AOS, and speech production generally.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Using MPEG-4 Compliant Visual Features

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Petar S. Aleksic

2002-11-01

Full Text Available We describe an audio-visual automatic continuous speech recognition system, which significantly improves speech recognition performance over a wide range of acoustic noise levels, as well as under clean audio conditions. The system utilizes facial animation parameters (FAPs supported by the MPEG-4 standard for the visual representation of speech. We also describe a robust and automatic algorithm we have developed to extract FAPs from visual data, which does not require hand labeling or extensive training procedures. The principal component analysis (PCA was performed on the FAPs in order to decrease the dimensionality of the visual feature vectors, and the derived projection weights were used as visual features in the audio-visual automatic speech recognition (ASR experiments. Both single-stream and multistream hidden Markov models (HMMs were used to model the ASR system, integrate audio and visual information, and perform a relatively large vocabulary (approximately 1000 words speech recognition experiments. The experiments performed use clean audio data and audio data corrupted by stationary white Gaussian noise at various SNRs. The proposed system reduces the word error rate (WER by 20% to 23% relatively to audio-only speech recognition WERs, at various SNRs (0–30 dB with additive white Gaussian noise, and by 19% relatively to audio-only speech recognition WER under clean audio conditions.

Oral speech teaching to students of mathematic specialties: a grammatical aspect

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Ibragimov I.I.

2016-08-01

Full Text Available the paper considers teaching features of English speech grammar aspects. The case studies include undergraduates of mathematical specialties. The content of students’ educational activity at the final stage of language teaching is pointed out. Besides the structure of grammar section, a special didactic training unit in which framework mastering grammar phenomena used in oral speech takes place is described.

An Investigation of effective factors on nurses\\' speech errors

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Maryam Tafaroji yeganeh

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Background : Speech errors are a branch of psycholinguistic science. Speech error or slip of tongue is a natural process that happens to everyone. The importance of this research is because of sensitivity and importance of nursing in which the speech errors may be interfere in the treatment of patients, but unfortunately no research has been done yet in this field.This research has been done to study the factors (personality, stress, fatigue and insomnia which cause speech errors happen to nurses of Ilam province. Materials and Methods: The sample of this correlation-descriptive research consists of 50 nurses working in Mustafa Khomeini Hospital of Ilam province who were selected randomly. Our data were collected using The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, NEO-Five Factor Inventory and Expanded Nursing Stress Scale, and were analyzed using SPSS version 20, descriptive, inferential and multivariate linear regression or two-variable statistical methods (with significant level: p≤0. 05. Results: 30 (60% of nurses participating in the study were female and 19 (38% were male. In this study, all three factors (type of personality, stress and fatigue have significant effects on nurses' speech errors Conclusion: 30 (60% of nurses participating in the study were female and 19 (38% were male. In this study, all three factors (type of personality, stress and fatigue have significant effects on nurses' speech errors.

Why the Left Hemisphere Is Dominant for Speech Production: Connecting the Dots

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Harvey Martin Sussman

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Evidence from seemingly disparate areas of speech/language research is reviewed to form a unified theoretical account for why the left hemisphere is specialized for speech production. Research findings from studies investigating hemispheric lateralization of infant babbling, the primacy of the syllable in phonological structure, rhyming performance in split-brain patients, rhyming ability and phonetic categorization in children diagnosed with developmental apraxia of speech, rules governing exchange errors in spoonerisms, organizational principles of neocortical control of learned motor behaviors, and multi-electrode recordings of human neuronal responses to speech sounds are described and common threads highlighted. It is suggested that the emergence, in developmental neurogenesis, of a hard-wired, syllabically-organized, neural substrate representing the phonemic sound elements of one’s language, particularly the vocalic nucleus, is the crucial factor underlying the left hemisphere’s dominance for speech production.

Relative Contributions of the Dorsal vs. Ventral Speech Streams to Speech Perception are Context Dependent: a lesion study

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Corianne Rogalsky

2014-04-01

Full Text Available The neural basis of speech perception has been debated for over a century. While it is generally agreed that the superior temporal lobes are critical for the perceptual analysis of speech, a major current topic is whether the motor system contributes to speech perception, with several conflicting findings attested. In a dorsal-ventral speech stream framework (Hickok & Poeppel 2007, this debate is essentially about the roles of the dorsal versus ventral speech processing streams. A major roadblock in characterizing the neuroanatomy of speech perception is task-specific effects. For example, much of the evidence for dorsal stream involvement comes from syllable discrimination type tasks, which have been found to behaviorally doubly dissociate from auditory comprehension tasks (Baker et al. 1981. Discrimination task deficits could be a result of difficulty perceiving the sounds themselves, which is the typical assumption, or it could be a result of failures in temporary maintenance of the sensory traces, or the comparison and/or the decision process. Similar complications arise in perceiving sentences: the extent of inferior frontal (i.e. dorsal stream activation during listening to sentences increases as a function of increased task demands (Love et al. 2006. Another complication is the stimulus: much evidence for dorsal stream involvement uses speech samples lacking semantic context (CVs, non-words. The present study addresses these issues in a large-scale lesion-symptom mapping study. 158 patients with focal cerebral lesions from the Mutli-site Aphasia Research Consortium underwent a structural MRI or CT scan, as well as an extensive psycholinguistic battery. Voxel-based lesion symptom mapping was used to compare the neuroanatomy involved in the following speech perception tasks with varying phonological, semantic, and task loads: (i two discrimination tasks of syllables (non-words and words, respectively, (ii two auditory comprehension tasks

75 FR 54040 - Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-09-03

...] Telecommunications Relay Services and Speech-to-Speech Services for Individuals With Hearing and Speech Disabilities...; speech-to-speech (STS); pay-per-call (900) calls; types of calls; and equal access to interexchange... of a report, due April 16, 2011, addressing whether it is necessary for the waivers to remain in...

A Pilot Investigation of Speech Sound Disorder Intervention Delivered by Telehealth to School-Age Children

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Sue Grogan-Johnson

2011-05-01

Full Text Available This article describes a school-based telehealth service delivery model and reports outcomes made by school-age students with speech sound disorders in a rural Ohio school district. Speech therapy using computer-based speech sound intervention materials was provided either by live interactive videoconferencing (telehealth, or conventional side-by-side intervention.  Progress was measured using pre- and post-intervention scores on the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 (Goldman & Fristoe, 2002. Students in both service delivery models made significant improvements in speech sound production, with students in the telehealth condition demonstrating greater mastery of their Individual Education Plan (IEP goals. Live interactive videoconferencing thus appears to be a viable method for delivering intervention for speech sound disorders to children in a rural, public school setting. Keywords:  Telehealth, telerehabilitation, videoconferencing, speech sound disorder, speech therapy, speech-language pathology; E-Helper

Environmental Contamination of Normal Speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Harley, Trevor A.

1990-01-01

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

Partially Overlapping Sensorimotor Networks Underlie Speech Praxis and Verbal Short-Term Memory: Evidence from Apraxia of Speech Following Acute Stroke

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Gregory eHickok

2014-08-01

Full Text Available We tested the hypothesis that motor planning and programming of speech articulation and verbal short-term memory (vSTM depend on partially overlapping networks of neural regions. We evaluated this proposal by testing 76 individuals with acute ischemic stroke for impairment in motor planning of speech articulation (apraxia of speech; AOS and vSTM in the first day of stroke, before the opportunity for recovery or reorganization of structure-function relationships. We also evaluate areas of both infarct and low blood flow that might have contributed to AOS or impaired vSTM in each person. We found that AOS was associated with tissue dysfunction in motor-related areas (posterior primary motor cortex, pars opercularis; premotor cortex, insula and sensory-related areas (primary somatosensory cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex, parietal operculum/auditory cortex; while impaired vSTM was associated with primarily motor-related areas (pars opercularis and pars triangularis, premotor cortex, and primary motor cortex. These results are consistent with the hypothesis, also supported by functional imaging data, that both speech praxis and vSTM rely on partially overlapping networks of brain regions.

Emotionally conditioning the target-speech voice enhances recognition of the target speech under "cocktail-party" listening conditions.

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Lingxi; Bao, Xiaohan; Chen, Jing; Qu, Tianshu; Wu, Xihong; Li, Liang

2018-05-01

Under a noisy "cocktail-party" listening condition with multiple people talking, listeners can use various perceptual/cognitive unmasking cues to improve recognition of the target speech against informational speech-on-speech masking. One potential unmasking cue is the emotion expressed in a speech voice, by means of certain acoustical features. However, it was unclear whether emotionally conditioning a target-speech voice that has none of the typical acoustical features of emotions (i.e., an emotionally neutral voice) can be used by listeners for enhancing target-speech recognition under speech-on-speech masking conditions. In this study we examined the recognition of target speech against a two-talker speech masker both before and after the emotionally neutral target voice was paired with a loud female screaming sound that has a marked negative emotional valence. The results showed that recognition of the target speech (especially the first keyword in a target sentence) was significantly improved by emotionally conditioning the target speaker's voice. Moreover, the emotional unmasking effect was independent of the unmasking effect of the perceived spatial separation between the target speech and the masker. Also, (skin conductance) electrodermal responses became stronger after emotional learning when the target speech and masker were perceptually co-located, suggesting an increase of listening efforts when the target speech was informationally masked. These results indicate that emotionally conditioning the target speaker's voice does not change the acoustical parameters of the target-speech stimuli, but the emotionally conditioned vocal features can be used as cues for unmasking target speech.

Neurological manifestations in speech after snake bite: A rare case ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Neurological manifestations in speech after snake bite: A rare case. D Vir, D Gupta, M Modi, N Panda. Abstract. No Abstract. Full Text: EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT · http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/pamj.v4i1.53597 · AJOL African Journals Online. HOW TO ...

Speech and Language Disturbances in Neurology Practice

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Oğuz Tanrıdağ

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Despite the well-known facts discerned from interesting cases of speech and language disturbances over thousands of years, the scientific background and the limitless discussions for nearly 150 years, this field has been considered one of the least important subjects in neurological sciences. In this review, we first analyze the possible causes for this “stepchild” attitude towards this subject and we then summarize the practical aspects concerning speech and language disturbances. Our underlying expectation with this review is to explain the facts concerning those disturbances that might offer us opportunities to better understand the nervous system and the affected patients

Multilevel Analysis in Analyzing Speech Data

Science.gov (United States)

Guddattu, Vasudeva; Krishna, Y.

2011-01-01

The speech produced by human vocal tract is a complex acoustic signal, with diverse applications in phonetics, speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, communication aids, speech pathology, speech perception, machine translation, hearing research, rehabilitation and assessment of communication disorders and many…

FROM TEXT TO STAGE PERFORMANCE (IN SEARCH OF PATHS OF COMMUNICATION

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Dubravka Crnojević-Carić

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This paper explores the acting in an interdisciplinary way, linking the insights that come from theory and pedagogy of acting and theater studies (Branko Gavella, Michail Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Lee Strasberg, Cicely Berry, Antonin Artaud, as well as from contemporary insights of neuroscience (Antonio Damasio, Michel Lacroix, Rosa Alice Branco. By analysing the creative process of the actor, I’ll speak about the nature of speech acts. The actor has the privilege to explore different forms of the communication, as well as speech acts. The creative process of the actor will be analysed through the several work phases (the process of text reading, the individual introduction with the text, the group reading rehearsal, the misenscene rehearsal, tech rehearsal, as well as public performance. During the work processes on a play, communication participants are changing and they adopt the various strategies of communication. An actor is the one who practices how to re-direct his attention, as well as speech act: he pays attention to the partner, to the director, technical staff, imaginary ideal spectators and real present auditorium. The paper thematises so-called “attention circles” which are defining the speech of actor. Nature of “attention circle” is changing during the performance. All of the above (the creative process of the actor is somehow connected with the everydays communication and with the communication during the public presentation of the default topics. A separate part of this paper will be dedicated to those differences. In this paper I will also consider distinction between the speech act which has pragmatic function in the form of so-called “civil honesty” and position which requires “credibility and organic truth” in order to maintain the interplay between the actors/speakers and spectators /listeners.

Perceived Liveliness and Speech Comprehensibility in Aphasia: The Effects of Direct Speech in Auditory Narratives

Science.gov (United States)

Groenewold, Rimke; Bastiaanse, Roelien; Nickels, Lyndsey; Huiskes, Mike

2014-01-01

Background: Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in "healthy" communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to the comprehensibility, of speech.…

Analysis of vocal signal in its amplitude - time representation. speech synthesis-by-rules

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rodet, Xavier

1977-01-01

In the first part of this dissertation, the natural speech production and the resulting acoustic waveform are examined under various aspects: communication, phonetics, frequency and temporal analysis. Our own study of direct signal is compared to other researches in these different fields, and fundamental features of vocal signals are described. The second part deals with the numerous methods already used for automatic text-to-speech synthesis. In the last part, we expose the new speech synthesis-by-rule methods that we have worked out, and we present in details the structure of the real-time speech synthesiser that we have implemented on a mini-computer. (author) [fr

Lovgoi kai; e[rga : Thucydides and His Speeches

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Gregor Pobežin

2006-12-01

Full Text Available The paper deals with some problems posed by the study of speeches in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, especially those that result from seeking the so-called historical truth. The historical value of the speeches, which show the unmistakable influence of forensic oratory, has been subject to various interpretations. The efforts seem to be epitomised by the search for an adequate explanation of the so-called “methodological” chapter 1.22, especially the sentence 1.22.1, which has been identified as the most crucial for a proper understanding of Thucydides' use of speeches: wJ~ dÆ a]n ejdovkoun moi e{kastoi peri; tw`n ajei; parovntwn ta; devonta mavlistÆ eijpei`n, ejcomevnw/ o{ti ejgguvtata th`~ xumpavsh~ gnwvmh~ tw`n ajlhqw`~ lecqevntwn, ou{tw~ ei[rhtai . It seems absolutely imperative that this sentence be understood as an authorial manifesto, a statement of the use and arrangement of speeches in the work. To deny the author even the minimum of historical ambition in the speeches included, thus reducing the entire account to a work of largely fictional value, seems highly inadequate. The paper therefore contends that, while there is no actual proof that the speeches available to the reader were recorded in their spoken form (in fact, judging from the term th`~ xumpavsh~ gnwvmh~ , their length may well have been adapted to the needs of a historical narrative, there is similarly no ground for denying their basic historical substance.

Assertive speech acts as an expressive mean of insincere discourse

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Andryukhina N.V.

2017-03-01

Full Text Available according to the author insincerity is an integral feature of the modern society, that is why nowadays there is a preoccupation in the study of insincerity from the point of view of linguistics. Insincerity externalizes itself in insincere discourse. The aim of the article is to analyze assertive speech acts as an expressive mean of insincere discourse in English political texts. Having analyzed the examples, the author comes to a conclusion, that assertive speech acts are the effective means of expressing an insincere discourse.

Ear, Hearing and Speech

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Torben

2000-01-01

An introduction is given to the the anatomy and the function of the ear, basic psychoacoustic matters (hearing threshold, loudness, masking), the speech signal and speech intelligibility. The lecture note is written for the course: Fundamentals of Acoustics and Noise Control (51001)......An introduction is given to the the anatomy and the function of the ear, basic psychoacoustic matters (hearing threshold, loudness, masking), the speech signal and speech intelligibility. The lecture note is written for the course: Fundamentals of Acoustics and Noise Control (51001)...

THE BASIS FOR SPEECH PREVENTION

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Jordan JORDANOVSKI

1997-06-01

Full Text Available The speech is a tool for accurate communication of ideas. When we talk about speech prevention as a practical realization of the language, we are referring to the fact that it should be comprised of the elements of the criteria as viewed from the perspective of the standards. This criteria, in the broad sense of the word, presupposes an exact realization of the thought expressed between the speaker and the recipient.The absence of this criterion catches the eye through the practical realization of the language and brings forth consequences, often hidden very deeply in the human psyche. Their outer manifestation already represents a delayed reaction of the social environment. The foundation for overcoming and standardization of this phenomenon must be the anatomy-physiological patterns of the body, accomplished through methods in concordance with the nature of the body.

Features of Speech Reactions to Mental State Concepts

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Ekaterina M. Alekseeva

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the problem of mental state associative speech representation. The study involved 31 Russian-speaking subjects (27 females and 4 males at the age of 18 - 22 years old. The experimental procedure using DMDX program allowed to measure the time of speech response to stimuli - the concepts of 25 mental states. The average reaction time to the concepts of mental states, shown on the computer monitor, made 2114.68 milliseconds. The most rapid associative speech response was the response to the following stimuli: "ecstasy" (1452.54 msec, "meditation" (1569.26 msec, "tranquility" (1685.21 msec, the slowest response is the response to "interest" (2517.5 msec and "indecision" (2454.63 msec. In total, 448 associations were given to the concepts of 25 mental states by tested subjects - speech reactions, i.e. 17.9 associations per mental state on the average. The greatest number of speech associations (24 was given to the concept of love. The smallest number was given to the concept of ecstasy (11 associations. Associative fields of mental states (meditation, ecstasy, melancholy, tiredness, loneliness have the most pronounced core. The prospects of the study consist in the performance of a similar associative experiment among the representatives of another culture, as well as in the studying of an estimated and situational associative representation of mental states.

Effect of gap detection threshold on consistency of speech in children with speech sound disorder.

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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.

SPEECH DISORDERS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS OF ISFAHAN (1998-9

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B SHAFIEI

2002-06-01

Full Text Available Introduction. The aim of this study was to describe frequency of speech disorders in primary school students.
Methods. In a cross-sectional study 300 first and second grade primary school students were examined for speech disorders.
Results. From 300 subjects, 280 were normal (without speech disorders, 15 had articulation disorders, 2 had voice disorders, 3 had resonance disorders and no one had fluency disorders.
Discussion. The findings of this study are supported by fomer study in other countries, except frequency of fluency disorders which may due to low sample size of present study.

Speech Perception as a Multimodal Phenomenon

OpenAIRE

Rosenblum, Lawrence D.

2008-01-01

Speech perception is inherently multimodal. Visual speech (lip-reading) information is used by all perceivers and readily integrates with auditory speech. Imaging research suggests that the brain treats auditory and visual speech similarly. These findings have led some researchers to consider that speech perception works by extracting amodal information that takes the same form across modalities. From this perspective, speech integration is a property of the input information itself. Amodal s...

Poor Speech Perception Is Not a Core Deficit of Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Preliminary Findings

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Zuk, Jennifer; Iuzzini-Seigel, Jenya; Cabbage, Kathryn; Green, Jordan R.; Hogan, Tiffany P.

2018-01-01

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is hypothesized to arise from deficits in speech motor planning and programming, but the influence of abnormal speech perception in CAS on these processes is debated. This study examined speech perception abilities among children with CAS with and without language impairment compared to those with…

Adaptation to delayed auditory feedback induces the temporal recalibration effect in both speech perception and production.

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Yamamoto, Kosuke; Kawabata, Hideaki

2014-12-01

We ordinarily speak fluently, even though our perceptions of our own voices are disrupted by various environmental acoustic properties. The underlying mechanism of speech is supposed to monitor the temporal relationship between speech production and the perception of auditory feedback, as suggested by a reduction in speech fluency when the speaker is exposed to delayed auditory feedback (DAF). While many studies have reported that DAF influences speech motor processing, its relationship to the temporal tuning effect on multimodal integration, or temporal recalibration, remains unclear. We investigated whether the temporal aspects of both speech perception and production change due to adaptation to the delay between the motor sensation and the auditory feedback. This is a well-used method of inducing temporal recalibration. Participants continually read texts with specific DAF times in order to adapt to the delay. Then, they judged the simultaneity between the motor sensation and the vocal feedback. We measured the rates of speech with which participants read the texts in both the exposure and re-exposure phases. We found that exposure to DAF changed both the rate of speech and the simultaneity judgment, that is, participants' speech gained fluency. Although we also found that a delay of 200 ms appeared to be most effective in decreasing the rates of speech and shifting the distribution on the simultaneity judgment, there was no correlation between these measurements. These findings suggest that both speech motor production and multimodal perception are adaptive to temporal lag but are processed in distinct ways.

A distributed approach to speech resource collection

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Molapo, R

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The authors describe the integration of several tools to enable the end-to-end development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system in a typical under-resourced language. The authors analyse the data acquired by each of the tools and develop an ASR...

Comparing two developmental applications of speech technology

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Sharma Grover, A

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Over the past decade applications of speech technologies for development (ST4D) have shown much potential for enabling information access and service delivery. In this paper the authors review two deployed ST4D services and posit a set of dimensions...

Indonesian Automatic Speech Recognition For Command Speech Controller Multimedia Player

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Vivien Arief Wardhany

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The purpose of multimedia devices development is controlling through voice. Nowdays voice that can be recognized only in English. To overcome the issue, then recognition using Indonesian language model and accousticc model and dictionary. Automatic Speech Recognizier is build using engine CMU Sphinx with modified english language to Indonesian Language database and XBMC used as the multimedia player. The experiment is using 10 volunteers testing items based on 7 commands. The volunteers is classifiedd by the genders, 5 Male & 5 female. 10 samples is taken in each command, continue with each volunteer perform 10 testing command. Each volunteer also have to try all 7 command that already provided. Based on percentage clarification table, the word “Kanan” had the most recognize with percentage 83% while “pilih” is the lowest one. The word which had the most wrong clarification is “kembali” with percentagee 67%, while the word “kanan” is the lowest one. From the result of Recognition Rate by male there are several command such as “Kembali”, “Utama”, “Atas “ and “Bawah” has the low Recognition Rate. Especially for “kembali” cannot be recognized as the command in the female voices but in male voice that command has 4% of RR this is because the command doesn’t have similar word in english near to “kembali” so the system unrecognize the command. Also for the command “Pilih” using the female voice has 80% of RR but for the male voice has only 4% of RR. This problem is mostly because of the different voice characteristic between adult male and female which male has lower voice frequencies (from 85 to 180 Hz than woman (165 to 255 Hz.The result of the experiment showed that each man had different number of recognition rate caused by the difference tone, pronunciation, and speed of speech. For further work needs to be done in order to improving the accouracy of the Indonesian Automatic Speech Recognition system

Principles of speech coding

CERN Document Server

Ogunfunmi, Tokunbo

2010-01-01

It is becoming increasingly apparent that all forms of communication-including voice-will be transmitted through packet-switched networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the design of modern devices that rely on speech interfaces, such as cell phones and PDAs, requires a complete and up-to-date understanding of the basics of speech coding. Outlines key signal processing algorithms used to mitigate impairments to speech quality in VoIP networksOffering a detailed yet easily accessible introduction to the field, Principles of Speech Coding provides an in-depth examination of the

Computer-based Programs in Speech Therapy of Dyslalia and Dyslexia- Dysgraphia

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Mirela Danubianu

2010-04-01

Full Text Available During the last years, the researchers and therapists in speech therapy have been more and more concerned with the elaboration and use of computer programs in speech disorders therapy. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic effectiveness of computer-based programs for the Romanian language in speech therapy. Along the study, we will present the experimental research through assessing the effectiveness of computer programs in the speech therapy for speech disorders: dyslalia, dyslexia and dysgraphia. Methodologically, the use of the computer in the therapeutic phases was carried out with the help of some computer-based programs (Logomon, Dislex-Test etc. that we elaborated and we experimented with during several years of therapeutic activity. The sample used in our experiments was composed of 120 subjects; two groups of 60 children with speech disorders were selected for both speech disorders: 30 for the experimental ('computer-based' group and 30 for the control ('classical method' group. The study hypotheses verified whether the results, obtained by the subjects within the experimental group, improved significantly after using the computer-based program, compared to the subjects within the control group, who did not use this program but got a classical therapy. The hypotheses were confirmed for the speech disorders included in this research; the conclusions of the study confirm the advantages of using computer-based programs within speech therapy by correcting these disorders, as well as due to the positive influence these programs have on the development of children’s personality.

Comparing Feedback Types in Multimedia Learning of Speech by Young Children With Common Speech Sound Disorders: Research Protocol for a Pretest Posttest Independent Measures Control Trial

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Wendy Doubé

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Children with speech sound disorders benefit from feedback about the accuracy of sounds they make. Home practice can reinforce feedback received from speech pathologists. Games in mobile device applications could encourage home practice, but those currently available are of limited value because they are unlikely to elaborate “Correct”/”Incorrect” feedback with information that can assist in improving the accuracy of the sound. This protocol proposes a “Wizard of Oz” experiment that aims to provide evidence for the provision of effective multimedia feedback for speech sound development. Children with two common speech sound disorders will play a game on a mobile device and make speech sounds when prompted by the game. A human “Wizard” will provide feedback on the accuracy of the sound but the children will perceive the feedback as coming from the game. Groups of 30 young children will be randomly allocated to one of five conditions: four types of feedback and a control which does not play the game. The results of this experiment will inform not only speech sound therapy, but also other types of language learning, both in general, and in multimedia applications. This experiment is a cost-effective precursor to the development of a mobile application that employs pedagogically and clinically sound processes for speech development in young children.

The Neural Bases of Difficult Speech Comprehension and Speech Production: Two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) Meta-Analyses

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Adank, Patti

2012-01-01

The role of speech production mechanisms in difficult speech comprehension is the subject of on-going debate in speech science. Two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses were conducted on neuroimaging studies investigating difficult speech comprehension or speech production. Meta-analysis 1 included 10 studies contrasting comprehension…

Metaheuristic applications to speech enhancement

CERN Document Server

Kunche, Prajna

2016-01-01

This book serves as a basic reference for those interested in the application of metaheuristics to speech enhancement. The major goal of the book is to explain the basic concepts of optimization methods and their use in heuristic optimization in speech enhancement to scientists, practicing engineers, and academic researchers in speech processing. The authors discuss why it has been a challenging problem for researchers to develop new enhancement algorithms that aid in the quality and intelligibility of degraded speech. They present powerful optimization methods to speech enhancement that can help to solve the noise reduction problems. Readers will be able to understand the fundamentals of speech processing as well as the optimization techniques, how the speech enhancement algorithms are implemented by utilizing optimization methods, and will be given the tools to develop new algorithms. The authors also provide a comprehensive literature survey regarding the topic.

Systematic Studies of Modified Vocalization: The Effect of Speech Rate on Speech Production Measures during Metronome-Paced Speech in Persons Who Stutter

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Davidow, Jason H.

2014-01-01

Background: Metronome-paced speech results in the elimination, or substantial reduction, of stuttering moments. The cause of fluency during this fluency-inducing condition is unknown. Several investigations have reported changes in speech pattern characteristics from a control condition to a metronome-paced speech condition, but failure to control…

Social eye gaze modulates processing of speech and co-speech gesture.

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Holler, Judith; Schubotz, Louise; Kelly, Spencer; Hagoort, Peter; Schuetze, Manuela; Özyürek, Aslı

2014-12-01

In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from different modalities during comprehension, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, influence this process. We explored this question by simulating a multi-party communication context in which a speaker alternated her gaze between two recipients. Participants viewed speech-only or speech+gesture object-related messages when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (gaze averted to other participant). They were then asked to choose which of two object images matched the speaker's preceding message. Unaddressed recipients responded significantly more slowly than addressees for speech-only utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped unaddressed recipients up to a level identical to that of addressees. That is, when unaddressed recipients' speech processing suffers, gestures can enhance the comprehension of a speaker's message. We discuss our findings with respect to two hypotheses attempting to account for how social eye gaze may modulate multi-modal language comprehension. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Speech disorders did not correlate with age at onset of Parkinson’s disease

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Alice Estevo Dias

2016-02-01

Full Text Available ABSTRACT Speech disorders are common manifestations of Parkinson´s disease. Objective To compare speech articulation in patients according to age at onset of the disease. Methods Fifty patients was divided into two groups: Group I consisted of 30 patients with age at onset between 40 and 55 years; Group II consisted of 20 patients with age at onset after 65 years. All patients were evaluated based on the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores, Hoehn and Yahr scale and speech evaluation by perceptual and acoustical analysis. Results There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups regarding neurological involvement and speech characteristics. Correlation analysis indicated differences in speech articulation in relation to staging and axial scores of rigidity and bradykinesia for middle and late-onset. Conclusions Impairment of speech articulation did not correlate with age at onset of disease, but was positively related with disease duration and higher scores in both groups.

Electrophysiological evidence for speech-specific audiovisual integration.

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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.

Automated Intelligibility Assessment of Pathological Speech Using Phonological Features

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Catherine Middag

2009-01-01

Full Text Available It is commonly acknowledged that word or phoneme intelligibility is an important criterion in the assessment of the communication efficiency of a pathological speaker. People have therefore put a lot of effort in the design of perceptual intelligibility rating tests. These tests usually have the drawback that they employ unnatural speech material (e.g., nonsense words and that they cannot fully exclude errors due to listener bias. Therefore, there is a growing interest in the application of objective automatic speech recognition technology to automate the intelligibility assessment. Current research is headed towards the design of automated methods which can be shown to produce ratings that correspond well with those emerging from a well-designed and well-performed perceptual test. In this paper, a novel methodology that is built on previous work (Middag et al., 2008 is presented. It utilizes phonological features, automatic speech alignment based on acoustic models that were trained on normal speech, context-dependent speaker feature extraction, and intelligibility prediction based on a small model that can be trained on pathological speech samples. The experimental evaluation of the new system reveals that the root mean squared error of the discrepancies between perceived and computed intelligibilities can be as low as 8 on a scale of 0 to 100.

Marx As Journalist: Revisiting The Free Speech Debate

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Padmaja Shaw

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Marx was a practicing journalist for most of his adult life. He was editor, columnist and special correspondent at different times and his journalistic work provided significant inputs for his later theoretical work. Marx, through his engagement with the political revolutions of 19th century Europe, developed one of the finest arguments in defence of free speech and the need for expanding bourgeois democratic freedoms in the process of transition to socialism. This paper describes the role of the Marxist parties and intellectuals in India in using and expanding the democratic freedoms available in India. The paper concludes that there is a gap between the Marx’s ideological position on free speech and the praxis of Marxist parties. In contemporary India, there is urgent need to protect free speech, fight censorship and strengthen independent constitutional authorities that are governed by democratic principles.

Free Speech Yearbook 1978.

Science.gov (United States)

Phifer, Gregg, Ed.

The 17 articles in this collection deal with theoretical and practical freedom of speech issues. The topics include: freedom of speech in Marquette Park, Illinois; Nazis in Skokie, Illinois; freedom of expression in the Confederate States of America; Robert M. LaFollette's arguments for free speech and the rights of Congress; the United States…

Real-Time Control of an Articulatory-Based Speech Synthesizer for Brain Computer Interfaces.

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Florent Bocquelet

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Restoring natural speech in paralyzed and aphasic people could be achieved using a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI controlling a speech synthesizer in real-time. To reach this goal, a prerequisite is to develop a speech synthesizer producing intelligible speech in real-time with a reasonable number of control parameters. We present here an articulatory-based speech synthesizer that can be controlled in real-time for future BCI applications. This synthesizer converts movements of the main speech articulators (tongue, jaw, velum, and lips into intelligible speech. The articulatory-to-acoustic mapping is performed using a deep neural network (DNN trained on electromagnetic articulography (EMA data recorded on a reference speaker synchronously with the produced speech signal. This DNN is then used in both offline and online modes to map the position of sensors glued on different speech articulators into acoustic parameters that are further converted into an audio signal using a vocoder. In offline mode, highly intelligible speech could be obtained as assessed by perceptual evaluation performed by 12 listeners. Then, to anticipate future BCI applications, we further assessed the real-time control of the synthesizer by both the reference speaker and new speakers, in a closed-loop paradigm using EMA data recorded in real time. A short calibration period was used to compensate for differences in sensor positions and articulatory differences between new speakers and the reference speaker. We found that real-time synthesis of vowels and consonants was possible with good intelligibility. In conclusion, these results open to future speech BCI applications using such articulatory-based speech synthesizer.

THE ROLE OF THE SPEECH THERAPIST AND HIS INFLUENCE IN SPEECH DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN WITH CENTRAL DEFECTS AND INSTRUCTIVE AND ADVISORY WORK OF THE PARENT

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Violeta TORTEVSKA

1997-06-01

Full Text Available The modern way of living in which the communication becomes a basic and upbringing factor and regulator of the relations isolates children with hard individual, family, educative and social problems.The speech and language disorders are the most remarkable symptoms pointing out the complex of defects in the communicative activities, reduced cognitive functions and cerebral dysfunction's.The modern conception in the rehabilitation field leads to a full engagement of the children’s closest environment and especially parents.The study will include the work of the speech therapist with children with a diagnosis tardy speech development (alalia and developing dysphasia in the hearing, speech and voice rehabilitation institute-Skopje, and its role introducing the parents for their right access and the systematic conduction of the rehabilitation proceedings-especially stimulating the motors and speech development.The speech therapist’s task is to find out a way and to apply means by which the children with central damages could build their speech and lingual system and to help the parents through instructive and advisory work into the comprehension of the phases and stages of that system.The conclusion is that the proceedings of the early treatment with the children with central damages are naturally caused by the difference of their early supplementation. The suggestions that are referring to what should be substituted, how much it should be substituted and how it should be done leads to the frames of the early therapeutical access.

Visual context enhanced. The joint contribution of iconic gestures and visible speech to degraded speech comprehension.

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Drijvers, L.; Özyürek, A.

2017-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech

Effect of speech therapy and pharmacological treatment in prosody of parkinsonians

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Luciana Lemos de Azevedo

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Objective Parkinsonian patients usually present speech impairment. The aim of this study was to verify the influence of levodopa and of the adapted Lee Silverman Vocal Treatment® method on prosodic parameters employed by parkinsonian patients. Method Ten patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease using levodopa underwent recording of utterances produced in four stages: expressing attitudes of certainty and doubt and declarative and interrogative modalities. The sentences were recorded under the effect of levodopa (on, without the effect of levodopa (off; before and after speech therapy during the on and off periods. Results The speech therapy and its association with drug treatment promoted the improvement of prosodic parameters: increase of fundamental frequency measures, reduction of measures of duration and greater intensity. Conclusion The association of speech therapy to medication treatment is of great value in improving the communication of parkinsonian patients.

Application of Interpersonal Meaning in Hillary’s and Trump’s Election Speeches

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Kuang Ping

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Presidential election speeches, as one significant part of western political life, deserve people’s attention. This paper focuses on the use of interpersonal meaning in political speeches. The nine texts selected from the Internet are analyzed from the perspectives of mood, modality, personal pronoun and tense system based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It aims to study the way how interpersonal meaning is realized through language by making the contrastive analysis of the speeches given by Hillary and Trump. After making a minute analysis, the paper comes to the following conclusions: (1 As for mood, Trump and Hillary mainly employ the declarative to deliver messages and make statements, and imperative is used to motivate the audiences and narrow the gap between the candidates and the audiences, and interrogative is to make the audiences concentrate on the content of the speeches. (2 With respect to the modality system, the median modal operator holds the dominant position in both Trump’s and Hillary’s speeches to make the speeches less aggressive. In this aspect, Trump does better than Hillary. (3 In regard to personal pronoun, the plural form of first personal pronoun is mainly employed by the two candidates to close the relationship with audiences. (4 Regards to tense system, simple present tense are mostly used to establish the intimacy of the audiences and the candidates. Then two influential factors are discussed. One is their personal background and the other is their language levels. This paper is helpful for people to deeply understand the two candidates’ language differences.

Speech Research

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Represented Speech in Qualitative Health Research

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Musaeus, Peter

2017-01-01

Represented speech refers to speech where we reference somebody. Represented speech is an important phenomenon in everyday conversation, health care communication, and qualitative research. This case will draw first from a case study on physicians’ workplace learning and second from a case study...... on nurses’ apprenticeship learning. The aim of the case is to guide the qualitative researcher to use own and others’ voices in the interview and to be sensitive to represented speech in everyday conversation. Moreover, reported speech matters to health professionals who aim to represent the voice...... of their patients. Qualitative researchers and students might learn to encourage interviewees to elaborate different voices or perspectives. Qualitative researchers working with natural speech might pay attention to how people talk and use represented speech. Finally, represented speech might be relevant...

Prediction and imitation in speech

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Chiara eGambi

2013-06-01

Full Text Available It has been suggested that intra- and inter-speaker variability in speech are correlated. Interlocutors have been shown to converge on various phonetic dimensions. In addition, speakers imitate the phonetic properties of voices they are exposed to in shadowing, repetition, and even passive listening tasks. We review three theoretical accounts of speech imitation and convergence phenomena: (i the Episodic Theory (ET of speech perception and production (Goldinger, 1998; (ii the Motor Theory (MT of speech perception (Liberman and Whalen, 2000;Galantucci et al., 2006 ; (iii Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; Giles et al., 1991;Giles and Coupland, 1991. We argue that no account is able to explain all the available evidence. In particular, there is a need to integrate low-level, mechanistic accounts (like ET and MT and higher-level accounts (like CAT. We propose that this is possible within the framework of an integrated theory of production and comprehension (Pickering & Garrod, in press. Similarly to both ET and MT, this theory assumes parity between production and perception. Uniquely, however, it posits that listeners simulate speakers’ utterances by computing forward-model predictions at many different levels, which are then compared to the incoming phonetic input. In our account phonetic imitation can be achieved via the same mechanism that is responsible for sensorimotor adaptation; i.e. the correction of prediction errors. In addition, the model assumes that the degree to which sensory prediction errors lead to motor adjustments is context-dependent. The notion of context subsumes both the preceding linguistic input and non-linguistic attributes of the situation (e.g., the speaker’s and listener’s social identities, their conversational roles, the listener’s intention to imitate.

Speech and language intervention in bilinguals

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Eliane Ramos

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Increasingly, speech and language pathologists (SLPs around the world are faced with the unique set of issues presented by their bilingual clients. Some professional associations in different countries have presented recommendations when assessing and treating bilingual populations. In children, most of the studies have focused on intervention for language and phonology/ articulation impairments and very few focus on stuttering. In general, studies of language intervention tend to agree that intervention in the first language (L1 either increase performance on L2 or does not hinder it. In bilingual adults, monolingual versus bilingual intervention is especially relevant in cases of aphasia; dysarthria in bilinguals has been barely approached. Most studies of cross-linguistic effects in bilingual aphasics have focused on lexical retrieval training. It has been noted that even though a majority of studies have disclosed a cross-linguistic generalization from one language to the other, some methodological weaknesses are evident. It is concluded that even though speech and language intervention in bilinguals represents a most important clinical area in speech language pathology, much more research using larger samples and controlling for potentially confounding variables is evidently required.

Spectral integration in speech and non-speech sounds

Science.gov (United States)

Jacewicz, Ewa

2005-04-01

Spectral integration (or formant averaging) was proposed in vowel perception research to account for the observation that a reduction of the intensity of one of two closely spaced formants (as in /u/) produced a predictable shift in vowel quality [Delattre et al., Word 8, 195-210 (1952)]. A related observation was reported in psychoacoustics, indicating that when the components of a two-tone periodic complex differ in amplitude and frequency, its perceived pitch is shifted toward that of the more intense tone [Helmholtz, App. XIV (1875/1948)]. Subsequent research in both fields focused on the frequency interval that separates these two spectral components, in an attempt to determine the size of the bandwidth for spectral integration to occur. This talk will review the accumulated evidence for and against spectral integration within the hypothesized limit of 3.5 Bark for static and dynamic signals in speech perception and psychoacoustics. Based on similarities in the processing of speech and non-speech sounds, it is suggested that spectral integration may reflect a general property of the auditory system. A larger frequency bandwidth, possibly close to 3.5 Bark, may be utilized in integrating acoustic information, including speech, complex signals, or sound quality of a violin.

Measurement of speech parameters in casual speech of dementia patients

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