Schwa realisation in verbal inflection in two dialogue registers of German spontaneous speech

The aim of the paper is to describe a variety of different registers of spoken Lithuanian and to discuss and compare their lexical and grammatical characteristics. Thus, in this article we: (1) characterize different registers and genres of spoken Lithuanian; (2) present a distribution of different parts of speech in the Corpus; (3) discuss the lexical diversity; (4) present the most typical inverted order of words; (5) when possible, compare our results with those obtained in written Lithuanian, Quantitative and statistical methods and a methodology of corpus linguistics were employed for the study. The study was based on the data of the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian. During the study, all the conversations stored in the corpus were classified into five registers: academic, mass-media, casual, intimate, and consultative. An analysis of the distribution of different parts of speech revealed that the registers of spontaneous speech (namely, the casual, the intimate, and the consultative registers) did not differ among each other. However, significant differences were revealed between spontaneous and prepared speech: nouns and adjectives were more frequent in academic and mass-media discourse (both of which might be characterized as prepared speech), while adverbs, pronouns, and particles were more often used in spontaneous speech. A comparative analysis confirmed that from the perspective of the distribution of parts of speech the academic and the mass-media registers are the most similar to written language, especially to fictional texts. This might be explained by such characteristics of a fictional text as its stylistic flexibility and a presence of conversations among the personages. An analysis of lexical diversity revealed the only difference among the registers: namely, the index of noun lexical diversity distinguished among the registers, while the indices of adjective and verb lexical diversity were rather similar. Independently of the register, the most frequent verbs were sakyti ‘to say’, žinoti ‘to know’, reikėti ‘to need’, norėti ‘to want’, turėti ‘to have’, galėti ‘to be able’, and būti ‘to be’; the most frequent adjectives were didelis ‘big’, įdomus ‘interesting’, naujas ‘new’, mažas ‘small’, svarbus ‘important’, and įvairus ‘various’; and the most frequent nouns were diena ‘a day’, laikas ‘time’, žmogus ‘a man/human’, and metai ‘a year’. An analysis of the inverted word order revealed that in spontaneous speech (especially in the consultative register) the attributes quite often follow the agreement controllers; subordinate clauses precede the head nouns; and the objects are used at the onset of the clauses. However, the inverted word order was also observed in the prepared speech, that is, the academic and the mass-media registers.

The production of verbs in an action naming test and in spontaneous speech was evaluated in 16 aphasic patients: eight agrammatics and eight anomics. Action naming was also compared to object naming. The action naming test was controlled for factors known to be relevant for verb retrieval (i.e. word frequency, instrumentality, name-relation to a noun, transitivity and argument structure) and the objects were related to the verbs and chosen to match the verbs as precisely as possible on word frequency. For both aphasic subgroups object naming was better than action naming and there was no difference between agrammatics and anomics, neither in object naming, nor in action naming. In spontaneous speech, both agrammatics and anomics differed from normal controls on ‘verb diversity’ furthermore the agrammatics were significantly worse than normal speakers (and the anomics) in verb inflection and the proportion of verbs produced without internal argument was higher than in normal speakers (and in anomics). There was no significant correlation between the scores on the action naming tests and the diversity of verbs produced in spontaneous speech. It is suggested that for the anomics, this is due to the fact that for some patients it is more difficult to retrieve verbs in spontaneous speech than in isolation. For the agrammatics, the interference between verb retrieval and verb inflection seems responsible for the lack of a significant correlation.

The main goal of this research is to investigate whether the Principle of Contrastive Usage holds for the linguistic input that young children receive from their parents. This principle predicts that words which are used contrastively are not only different but also similar in meaning. That is, contrasted words will tend (a) to be semantically related, and (b) the semantic relation will tend to be the coordinate relation, since coordinates are conceptually similar (e.g., cat and dog both refer to a kind of animal). Related research questions are what forms of 'contrasting' and/or 'correcting' can be distinguished in the input to children, and what role individual and situational variables play in the occurrence of these forms. The spontaneous speech produced by two mother-child dyads, in natural interaction at home, was analysed. Speech samples had been collected at regular intervals over the second half of the children's third year. Only nouns were examined. Two communicative situations were distinguished, 'free conversation' and 'visually guided conversation' (book reading, making a jig-saw puzzle). Several subcatego-ries of contrast and correction were discriminated. Subcategories shared by both are corrective explicit contrast and corrective implicit contrast. A contrast-specific subcategory is descriptive contrast, correction-specific subcategories are global negation, specific negation, correction by demonstration, and correction by acknowledging similarity. It was found that contrast and correction are strongly correlated in the input, and tend to go together. However, it was also found that contrast but not correction is sensitive to aspects of communicative situation, whereas correction but not contrast is sensitive to individual differences. As to the character of the relationships between the contrasted terms, it was found that the coordinate relation is indeed predominant, most notably in descriptive contrast. Additionally, it was found that parents, when correcting their children, have a clear preference for explicit over implicit contrast when there is any kind of similarity between referents involved, i.e., when the relation between contrasted terms is either coordinate (conceptual similarity) or is based on perceptual or functional similarity.

Characteristics of Swahili–English bilingual agrammatic spontaneous speech and the consequences for understanding agrammatic aphasia

Language learners' actual speech performances constitute an essential aspect of studies on second language learning and teaching. Although there is ample research on fluency and pauses in English, current literature does not touch on this issue from a multilingual perspective by comparing both read and spontaneous speech performances. In this descriptive study, the researchers investigated pausing patterns with 40 Turkish, Swahili, Hausa, and Arabic speakers of English. For the read speech fragments' elicitation, the participants read out a short story, and for spontaneous speech, the data was gathered through structured interviews. In total, 4007 pauses were measured through Praat, and the findings obtained from the data were analyzed using multiple regression and several multivariate analyses of variance. The findings revealed crucial insights into the nature of fluency research in terms of (a) speech registers, (b) positions, (c) conjunctions, and (d) mother tongues.

In recent years, studies on the use of natural language processing (NLP) approaches to identify dementia have been reported. Most of these studies used picture description tasks or other similar tasks to encourage spontaneous speech, but the use of free conversation without requiring a task might be easier to perform in a clinical setting. Moreover, free conversation is unlikely to induce a learning effect. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a machine learning model to discriminate subjects with and without dementia by extracting features from unstructured free conversation data using NLP. We recruited patients who visited a specialized outpatient clinic for dementia and healthy volunteers. Participants’ conversation was transcribed and the text data was decomposed from natural sentences into morphemes by performing a morphological analysis using NLP, and then converted into real-valued vectors that were used as features for machine learning. A total of 432 datasets were used, and the resulting machine learning model classified the data for dementia and non-dementia subjects with an accuracy of 0.900, sensitivity of 0.881, and a specificity of 0.916. Using sentence vector information, it was possible to develop a machine-learning algorithm capable of discriminating dementia from non-dementia subjects with a high accuracy based on free conversation.

Background: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of case‐assigning constituents. The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Aims: Since verbs and verb inflections are case assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects the production of determiners and case markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism. Methods & Procedures: A total of 11 Hebrew‐speaking and 8 Dutch‐speaking individuals with agrammatism participated in picture description and sentence elicitation tasks, and their spontaneous speech was analysed. Outcomes & Results: The production of case‐related morphemes was closely connected to the presence of a case assigner in the sentence. In Hebrew, object case was produced correctly 98% of the time, and always when a transitive verb was present in the sentence. In Dutch the production of determiners on the subject was related to the presence of a finite verb. The production of complete object noun phrases related to the presence of a transitive verb. Conclusions: The results indicate that case itself, as well as determiners and case markers, which depend on case, are not impaired in agrammatic production. The apparent deficit is rather tightly related to the deficit in verbs and verb inflection. This suggests that the production of determiners and pronouns should be treated within sentence context, in which a special emphasis should be given to the production of correctly inflected verbs.

In this paper, preliminary longitudinal data on the effects of first language loss on verb inflection and use by two Spanish-speaking siblings who were in an English-speaking environment were gathered. Both children were followed for approximately two years and were video-recorded while interacting with a familiar Spanish-speaking adult. Spontaneous Spanish speech samples were used to monitor patterns of L1 loss in the children's use of verbal lexemes and inflections. Bybee's (1985,1995) lexical morphology model was followed to predict the course of L1 loss. In particular, the concepts of semantic relevancy and input frequency, and their effects on verbal inflection in a child L1 loss context were examined. Results in general follow the predictions made by Bybee's model. Specifically, less semantically relevant distinctions, such as person/number inflection, appear to be more vulnerable to loss. Frequency of use also appears to impact the relative strength of verbal schemas. Nevertheless, individual differences were noted in the degree of loss observed. Directions for future research in the area of verbal morphology and language loss in children are suggested.

Spontaneous speech: Quantifying daily communication in Spanish-speaking individuals with aphasia.

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

Background: As agrammatism is, at least partly, an adaptive behaviour, we investigated how compensation strategies manifest themselves in agrammatic performance. Aims: Within a functional theoretical framework of language use we conducted an in-depth exploration of across-task variability in agrammatic patients' oral production, submitting the morphosyntactic properties of their utterances to quantitative and qualitative analyses. Methods & Procedures: We designed an original data collection protocol comprising four tasks with increasing situational constraints (gradual manipulation of two external factors: use of instructions and presence or absence of pictures), in order to prompt the production of (i) spontaneous speech, (ii) narrative speech, (iii) descriptive speech and, finally, (iv) isolated sentences. We administered the tasks to six French-speaking agrammatic patients and nine normal controls, yielding the equivalent of 9 hours of speech data. We then conducted a multi-level and fine-grained analysis of the agrammatic and control corpora to assess oral production, entailing both morphological (open- vs closed-class word distribution, frequency of determiners, verb inflections) and syntactic aspects (sententials, non-sententials, well-formedness). Outcomes & Results: Results revealed across-task variability, suggesting that participants tended to adjust the morphosyntactic aspects of their speech according to task-dependent factors. Moreover, trade-offs were observed between morphosyntactic accuracy and oral fluency (i.e., speech rate), further pointing to the agrammatic patients' ability to gradually vary grammatical accuracy according to task constraints, rather than as a function of the limited online processing resources available to them. Results showed that agrammatic speakers used a variety of strategies to improve or reduce their grammatical accuracy according to task constraints. Conclusions: Agrammatic speakers rely excessively on ellipsis in spontaneous speech, and on corrective or monitoring strategies in elicited speech. Thus adaptation strategies vary from one task to another, depending on the type of speech to be produced (connected vs disconnected) and monitoring factors (attention allocated to formal encoding). Finally this study confirms the usefulness of functional and compensation-oriented therapies in aiding recovery from agrammatic aphasia.

Background The production of verb inflection, especially tense marking, is commonly impaired in persons with agrammatic aphasia. In Persian, verbs are inflected in three tenses the past, present, and future, and play a key role in the sentence.A group of theories attributes verb inflection errors to syntactic or semantic deficits in sentence formulation. Aims The present study intends to investigate the effect of morphosemantic treatment on the inflection of regular and irregular verbs in the past, present, and future tenses in Persian-speaking agrammatic participants. Methods & Procedure A single-subject study with an ABA design was performed to evaluate the effect of morphosemantic treatment on four Persian-speaking agrammatic participants. In the current study, in addition to presenting descriptive statistics and visual analysis, percent of non-overlapping data (PND) was used to determine whether there was an effect of intervention during the treatment phase, and d1 statistics of effect size analysis was used to determine whether there was a maintenance effect during the withdrawal phase. Outcomes & Results All participants demonstrated significant improvement in the trained regular and irregular tenses and generalized to the production of tense morphology on untrained regular and irregular verbs. The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up. Also, the morphosemantic intervention was associated with an increase in most narrative measures and language tests scores. Conclusions Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic intervention could be successfully used for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking participants with aphasia and agrammatism.

Background: One of the relatively common symptoms in non-fluent aphasia is agrammatism. Agrammatism is characterized with low syntactic complexity and deficits in verb inflection, especially tense markers. Verbs as the main core of sentences in the Persian language have vital functions for people to have effective communication. Objectives: The current study aimed at evaluating the effect of morphosemantic method on verb-tense inflection in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism. Methods: Morphosemantic treatment was conducted in five stages in a case report study. The material was 46 black and white line-drawing pictures related to 23 verbs including 10 training, 10 expansion, and three exemplar verbs drawn in present and past tenses. In three phases, the percentage of correct verb inflection in the training and expansion verbs was measured and also the graph examination of level, slope of trend, and C statistic, 2-standard deviation band, effect size (percentage of non-overlapping data), and d statistic were used to analyze the data. Results: Both participants demonstrated significant changes in training and expansion verbs during therapeutic sessions in comparison with the baseline. The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up. Conclusions: Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic method can be successfully used for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism.

Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The children with SLI showed high levels of accuracy on present tense and past tense (preterite) verb inflections. However, their use of definite articles and direct object clitics was significantly more problematic than for either the TD-MLU or the TD-A children. Substitutions and omissions were observed, especially in contexts requiring plural articles and clitics. Many of the details of the observed Spanish SLI profile were predicted by Wexler's (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) proposal. Remaining details in the data could be accommodated by making additional assumptions within the same general linguistic framework as the EUCC. Some of the differences between the findings from Spanish and those from previous studies on related languages such as Italian suggest the need for clinical assessment and intervention procedures that are shaped as much by language-specific details as by the language's typology.

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of the intonational patterns of declarative questions andwh-questions produced by a group of young adults residing in a rural town of south-central Spain. Question intonation has been reported as highly variable across and within Spanish dialects; recent sociophonetic research on multiple languages suggests that intonational variation may be accounted for by speaking condition (i.e. speech style) in addition to other linguistic and social factors. This study is an initial attempt to examine the potential interactions between speaking condition (read speech vs. task-based dialogue) and social characteristics (speaker sex) on intonational variation. First, it is shown that 12 of the 16 speakers undergo at least one style-shift between speaking conditions; these data are captured in variationist terms, providing empirical assessments about formal and vernacular variants for the two sentence types in question. Second, it is shown that speaker sex differences play a role in style-shifting, and this leads to the hypothesis that variation in declarative questions may have developed as a marker of local identity for Manchego men. All in all, this study offers empirical support that the findings on sociophonetic variation warrant consideration in current models of speech production.