Acoustic Duration Research Articles

Comparisons of Temporal Characteristics of Respiration and Swallowing Coordination between Young and Elderly

Objectives: The relationship between breathing and swallowing is very dynamic during swallowing and these are highly temporally coordinated to protect the airway. The ability to protect airways during swallowing deteriorates with aging. In this study, we attempted to compare the breathing-swallowing pattern and temporal change in the respiration and swallowing coordination between young and elderly adults in Korea.Methods: A total of 80 normal people, including 40 young and 40 elderly people participated in this study. For measurement of breathing and swallowing coordination, Digital Swallowing Workstation<sup>TM</sup> was used during a 5 mL water swallowing task. Temporal parameters related to breathing-swallowing including AS (acoustic start), AP (acoustic peak), AD (acoustic duration), SAS (swallowing apnea or respiration pause start), SAD (swallowing apena duration), sES (submental sEMG start), sEP (submental sEMG peak), sED (submental sEMG duration). Additionally, DHI (Dysphagia Handicap Index) was evaluated for self-assessment of the degree of difficulty swallowing.Results: Older adults displayed delayed swallowing-related acoustic signal measurements, swallowing apnea measurements, surface EMG measurements, and delayed sequential coordination time of swallowing-related structures during swallowing. There were no significant differences according to gender. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation was observed between the total K-DHI scores and as well as swallowing apnea duration in the elderly.Conclusion: In the older population, the different breathing-swallowing pattern from that of young adults may increase the risk of dysphagia. In addition, swallowing delays due to aging can be an indicator of elderly swallowing disorders. Moreover, an increase in apnea time during swallowing may be a phenomenon that appears as a mechanism for airway protection in the elderly. However, the high correlation between apnea time and K-DHI score in the elderly may make it difficult to maintain respiration for a long time during swallowing as the respiratory function decreases due to aging, which may increase the risk of experiencing symptoms such as choking and affect the degree of subjective swallowing disorder. This suggests that even if classified as a normal elderly person without a pathological swallowing disorder, swallowing training is needed to prevent swallowing disorders and to enhance swallowing ability for older people with degraded swallowing-related abilities.

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning.

Recent evidence for the influence of morphological structure on the phonetic output goes unexplained by established models of speech production and by theories of the morphology-phonology interaction. Linear discriminative learning (LDL) is a recent computational approach in which such effects can be expected. We predict the acoustic duration of 4,530 English derivative tokens with the morphological functions DIS, NESS, LESS, ATION, and IZE in natural speech data by using predictors derived from a linear discriminative learning network. We find that the network is accurate in learning speech production and comprehension, and that the measures derived from it are successful in predicting duration. For example, words are lengthened when the semantic support of the word's predicted articulatory path is stronger. Importantly, differences between morphological categories emerge naturally from the network, even when no morphological information is provided. The results imply that morphological effects on duration can be explained without postulating theoretical units like the morpheme, and they provide further evidence that LDL is a promising alternative for modeling speech production.

Digital Speech Analysis in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Corticobasal Syndromes.

Progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPS) and corticobasal syndrome (CBS) as well as non-fluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia (naPPA) are often associated with misfolded 4-repeat tau pathology, but the diversity of the associated speech features is poorly understood. Investigate the full range of acoustic and lexical properties of speech to test the hypothesis that PSPS-CBS show a subset of speech impairments found in naPPA. Acoustic and lexical measures, extracted from natural, digitized semi-structured speech samples using novel, automated methods, were compared in PSPS-CBS (n = 87), naPPA (n = 25), and healthy controls (HC, n = 41). We related these measures to grammatical performance and speech fluency, core features of naPPA, to neuropsychological measures of naming, executive, memory and visuoconstructional functioning, and to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) phosphorylated tau (pTau) levels in patients with available biofluid analytes. Both naPPA and PSPS-CBS speech produced shorter speech segments, longer pauses, higher pause rates, reduced fundamental frequency (f0) pitch ranges, and slower speech rate compared to HC. naPPA speech was distinct from PSPS-CBS with shorter speech segments, more frequent pauses, slower speech rate, reduced verb production, and higher partial word production. In both groups, acoustic duration measures generally correlated with speech fluency, measured as words per minute, and grammatical performance. Speech measures did not correlate with standard neuropsychological measures. CSF pTau levels correlated with f0 range in PSPS-CBS and naPPA. Lexical and acoustic speech features of PSPS-CBS overlaps those of naPPA and are related to CSF pTau levels.

Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound Effect on MIO-M1 Cell Viability: Setup Validation and Standing Waves Analysis

Low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) has been proposed for novel therapies still under study, where similar parameters and protocols have been used for producing opposite effects that range from increasing cell viability to provoking cell death. Those divergent outcomes make the generalization of expected effects difficult for cell models not yet studied. This paper presents the effect of LIPUS on the viability of the MIO-M1 cell line for two well-established setups and different protocols; the acoustic intensities, duty factors, and treatment duration were varied. Measurements and models for acoustic and thermal analysis are included for proposing a solution to improve the reproducibility of this kind of experiments. Results indicate that MIO-M1 viability is less affected for the cells treated through a dish that is partially immersed in water; in these conditions, the cells neither show detrimental nor proliferative effects at intensities lower than 0.4 W/cm2 at 20% duty factor. However, cell viability was reduced when LIPUS was followed by cell subculturing. Treating the cells through a gel, with the culture dish placed on the transducer, increases cell mortality by the production of standing waves and mixed vibration-acoustical effects. Using the water-based setup with a 1° dish inclination reduces the effects of standing waves.

The processing of pseudoword form and meaning in production and comprehension: A computational modeling approach using linear discriminative learning

Pseudowords have long served as key tools in psycholinguistic investigations of the lexicon. A common assumption underlying the use of pseudowords is that they are devoid of meaning: Comparing words and pseudowords may then shed light on how meaningful linguistic elements are processed differently from meaningless sound strings. However, pseudowords may in fact carry meaning. On the basis of a computational model of lexical processing, linear discriminative learning (LDL Baayen et al., Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), we compute numeric vectors representing the semantics of pseudowords. We demonstrate that quantitative measures gauging the semantic neighborhoods of pseudowords predict reaction times in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database (Tucker et al., 2018). We also show that the model successfully predicts the acoustic durations of pseudowords. Importantly, model predictions hinge on the hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact. Thus, pseudowords emerge as an outstanding tool for gauging the resonance between production and comprehension. Many pseudowords in the MALD database contain inflectional suffixes. Unlike many contemporary models, LDL captures the semantic commonalities of forms sharing inflectional exponents without using the linguistic construct of morphemes. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications for models of lexical processing and morphological theory. The results of this study, complementing those on real words reported in Baayen et al., (Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), thus provide further evidence for the usefulness of LDL both as a cognitive model of the mental lexicon, and as a tool for generating new quantitative measures that are predictive for human lexical processing.

Monophthongisation and Vowel Lengthening in Educated Ibibio English

The major preoccupation of this paper is to study monophthongisation and vowel lengthening in Educated Ibibio English with a view to explaining the lengthening of vowels in final open stressed syllables. Educated Ibibio English (here after EIE) is an ethnic variety of Nigerian English spoken by literate home-grown Ibibio people in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Monophthongisation is a phonological process whereby one of two vowel elements of a diphthong, usually the second (offset) element, is deleted, leaving the stranded stressed (onset) to be lengthened, if found in final open, stressed syllable. Related works on EIE segments indicate that some Standard British English (SBE) closing diphthongs /?u/ and /ei/ tend to monophthongise to /e/ and /o/, respectively. The study employs the Moraic Theory of Hyman and Hayes which main argument is that the syllable contains neither onset or a rhyme. Rather, every syllable contains one or more Mora. Also, a Speech Filling System (SFS/WASP) Computerized Speech Laboratory was used to interpret Fo curve structure and acoustic duration in order to corroborate findings from perceptual analysis. The study establishes the fact that the monophthongised diphthongs were lengthened becuaseof the need to preserve the weight of the deleted /u/ and /i/ in SBE /ei/ and /??/ diphthongs and also to reflect components of the failing fundamental frequency (Fo) contour of English fnal open syllable.

Articulatory and acoustic correlates of prominence in French: Comparing L1 and L2 speakers

This study investigates how L1 and L2 speakers of French produce phonetic correlates of French prosodic structure, specifically the properties of Accentual Phrases that are evidenced in dimensions other than f0. The L2 speakers had English L1, with varying levels of proficiency in French. We also examined the same individuals’ productions of sentences in English. Differences in prosodic structure between English and French lead us to expect differences between the two groups of speakers. Our study measured jaw displacement in electromagnetic articulography, as well as acoustic duration and vowel formant values. Patterns of variation across the syllables of the stimulus sentences were evaluated by comparing normalized values for individual syllables; significance testing was not used as it could not capture the relatively small syllable-to-syllable differences. In French, we found that despite substantial individual variation, the L1 speakers generally show a tendency for expanded articulation (greater jaw displacement, and F1 values corresponding to this), and longer durations on syllables that are final in an Accentual Phrase (identified using f0 cues). The most obvious differences in the L2 speakers’ productions were seen in polysyllabic words, particularly cognates, where less advanced speakers tended to produce expanded articulations on syllables that would receive lexical stress in English but no accentuation in French. For English, limited data show greater consistency among the L2 (native French) speakers, possibly due to them feeling less able to exploit the variability in prominence placement that English allows.

Syllable-internal corrective focus in Korean

In producing linguistic prominence, certain linguistic elements are highlighted relative to others in a given domain; focus is an instance of prominence in which speakers highlight new or important information. This study investigates prominence modulation at the sub-syllable level using a corrective focus task, examining acoustic duration and pitch with particular attention to the gestural composition of Korean tense and lax consonants. The results indicate that focus effects are manifested with systematic variations depending on the gestural structures, i.e. consonants, active during the domain of a focus gesture, but that the patterns of focus modulation do not differ as a function of elicited focus positions within the syllable. The findings generally support the premise that the scope of the focus gesture is not (much) smaller than the interval of (CVC) syllable. Lastly, there is also some support for an interaction among prosodic gestures—focus gestures and pitch accentual gestures—at the phrase level. Overall, the current findings support the hypothesis that focus, implemented as a prosodic prominence gesture, modulates temporal characteristics of articulatory gestures, as well as possibly other prosodic gestures that are co-active in its the domain.

PENERAPAN FONETIK AKUSTIK DALAM BACAAN MAD ALQURAN (STUDI KASUS PADA QIRAAT QARI INTERNASIONAL)

The time duration is one of the important acoustic features discussed among the researchers. This article presents the results of a study of variation and duration of madd (long vowel). The data were obtained by downloading of two Quran reciterswho are Muammar Zainal Asyiqin and Maria Ulfahfrom the website.To investigate the duration of the types of madd, it uses an acoustic phonetics approach andto measure the acoustic duration of these madd, it employs the computer program ‘Praat’.Among the most important results, it is noted that Maria has the longer duration than Muammar does. Furthermore, the investigation of madd duration is addressed well, followed by the analysis for each madd.

Um estudo sobre o acento gráfico na aquisição da escrita: ortografia e fonologia

This paper discusses the criteria used by third and fifth graders who attend a public school, in Pelotas, RS, Brazil, regarding the function of diacritical marks in the writing system. Considering the close relationship between prosodic stress and the rules of use of diacritical marks, the study reported in this paper aimed at investigating children's hypotheses concerningthese orthographic devices. Data were collected by a controlled writing instrument, which was especially designed for this research, and by clinical interviews guided by the Piagetian method (Carraher, 1989). After completing awriting task, children were induced to explain the reasons that led them to usediacritics in their spelling. The analysis of data on their written production showed that children got the diacritical mark right, mainly in contexts in which alternation of vowel timbre could occur, that is, in medium and low medium vowels. Results of the interviews highlighted the emergence of criteria based on acoustic and graphic aspects. The analysis allowed us to define a hierarchy of acoustic criteria, i. e., vocalic timbre, vowel duration and prominence.

Acoustic Emission Signals of Pull-Off Test for Concrete Slab Strengthened with CFRP Using Various Surface Preparations

This study investigates the acoustic emission signals of concrete slab strengthened with carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) under pull-off test. Three types of surface preparations were prepared namely without surface preparation, normal surface preparation and boring surface preparation. The slabs were then tested under pull-off test in conjunction with acoustic emission technique. The pull-off strength, acoustic signal strength, amplitude, duration and rise time were analysed and discussed. It was found that the boring surface preparation produced the highest pull-off strength compared to other surface preparations, indicating good bonding between the CFRP and the concrete interface. This study is useful in identifying the bonding between CFRP and concrete using acoustic emission technique.

Lexical stress in childhood apraxia of speech: acoustic and kinematic findings

Purpose: This study investigated the acoustic and articulatory movement parameters underlying lexical stress production in children with apraxia of speech (CAS), children with articulation/phonological delay (i.e. speech delay, SD), and children with typical speech-language development (TD). We examined whether there were group differences in these instrumental measures of stress production.Method: Participants were 24 children (seven CAS, eight SD, nine TD) between three and seven years of age. Acoustic and kinematic measures, including acoustic duration, peak and average fundamental frequency, and jaw movement duration and displacement, were taken from perceptually accurate productions of a strong-weak form. Relative stress analyses were conducted using the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI).Result: There was a significant difference between the CAS and TD groups in the PVI for movement duration, with the CAS group showing a smaller movement duration contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables. There were no significant group differences for displacement or any of the acoustic variables.Conclusion: The kinematic findings suggest reduced temporal control for lexical stress production in children with CAS. This finding surfaced during analyses of perceptually accurate productions but suggests a possible basis for lexical stress errors in CAS that could be explored in future studies.

Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation

Abstract Many studies report shorter acoustic durations, more coarticulation and reduced articulatory targets for frequent words. This study investigates a factor ignored in discussions on the relation between frequency and phonetic detail, namely, that motor skills improve with experience. Since frequency is a measure of experience, it follows that frequent words should show increased articulatory proficiency. We used EMA to test this prediction on German inflected verbs with [a] as stem vowels. Modeling median vertical tongue positions with quantile regression, we observed significant modulation by frequency of the U-shaped trajectory characterizing the articulation of the [a:]. These modulations reflect two constraints, one favoring smooth trajectories through anticipatory coarticulation, and one favoring clear articulation by realizing lower minima. The predominant pattern across sensors, exponents, and speech rate suggests that the constraint of clarity dominates for lower-frequency words. For medium-frequency words, the smoothness constraint leads to a raising of the trajectory. For the higher-frequency words, both constraints are met simultaneously, resulting in low minima and stronger coarticulation. These consequences of motor practice for articulation challenge both the common view that a higher-frequency of use comes with more articulatory reduction, and cognitive models of speech production positing that articulation is post-lexical.

Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects

Most psycholinguistic models of lexical processing assume that the comprehension and production of inflected forms is mediated by morphemic constituents. Several more recent studies, however, have challenged this assumption by providing empirical evidence that information about individual inflected forms and their paradigmatic relations is available in long-term memory (Baayen et al. 1997; Milin et al. 2009a, 2009b). Here, we investigate how whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size and morphological family size affect production latencies and articulation durations when subjects are asked to read aloud isolated Estonian case-inflected nouns. In Experiment 1, we observed that words with a larger morphological family elicited shorter speech onset latencies, and that forms with higher whole-word frequency had shorter acoustic durations. Experiment 2, for which we increased statistical power by using 2,800 words, revealed that higher whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size, and morphological family size reduced both speech onset times and acoustic durations. These results extend our knowledge of morphological processing in three ways. First, whole-word frequency effects of inflected forms in morphologically rich languages are not restricted to a small number of very high-frequency forms, contrary to previous claims (Niemi et al. 1994; Hankamer 1989; Yang 2016). Second, we replicated the morphological family size effect in a new domain, the acoustic durations of inflected forms. Third, we showed that a novel paradigmatic measure, inflectional paradigm size, predicts word naming latencies and acoustic durations. These results fit well with Word-and-Paradigm morphology (Blevins 2016) and argue against strictly (de)compositional models of lexical processing.

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

It is known that acoustic variation is influenced by the predictability of words and the information that they represent. What is unknown is whether acoustic reduction is also influenced by the referential predictability of thematic roles. We tested this question in two production experiments, where speakers heard a sentence with goal/source arguments, e.g., “Lady Mannerly [source] gave a painting to Sir Barnes [goal],” and described a picture of a subsequent action, e.g., “Sir Barnes threw it in the closet.” We analyzed the duration of full NP descriptions used to refer to the pictured character. We found that duration was shorter for references to the goal than the source, but only in Experiment 2, where the timing of the stimuli encouraged the participant to plan their response incrementally, and not Experiment 1, where participants could pre-plan their responses. The strongest finding across both experiments was that response latency predicted duration, and latency was influenced by the predictability of thematic roles: Goal continuations had significantly shorter latencies. Together, these findings suggest that thematic role predictability does affect acoustic duration, and may be related to the time needed for utterance planning.

The Impact of Feedback Frequency on Performance in a Novel Speech Motor Learning Task.

This study investigated whether whole nonword accuracy, phoneme accuracy, and acoustic duration measures were influenced by the amount of feedback speakers without impairment received during a novel speech motor learning task. Thirty-two native English speakers completed a nonword production task across 3 time points: practice, short-term retention, and long-term retention. During practice, participants received knowledge of results feedback according to a randomly assigned schedule (100%, 50%, 20%, or 0%). Changes in nonword accuracy, phoneme accuracy, nonword duration, and initial-cluster duration were compared among feedback groups, sessions, and stimulus properties. All participants improved phoneme and whole nonword accuracy at short-term and long-term retention time points. Participants also refined productions of nonwords, as indicated by a decrease in nonword duration across sessions. The 50% group exhibited the largest reduction in duration between practice and long-term retention for nonwords with native and nonnative clusters. All speakers, regardless of feedback schedule, learned new speech motor behaviors quickly with a high degree of accuracy and refined their speech motor skills for perceptually accurate productions. Acoustic measurements may capture more subtle, subperceptual changes that may occur during speech motor learning. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5116324.

Quantifying kinematic aspects of reduction in a contrasting rate production task

Electromagnetic articulometry (EMA) was used to record the 720 phonetically balanced Harvard sentences (IEEE, 1969) from multiple speakers at normal and fast production rates. Participants produced each sentence twice, first at their preferred “normal” speaking rate followed by a “fast” production (for a subset of the sentences two normal rate productions were elicited). They were instructed to produce the “fast” repetition as quickly as possible without making errors. EMA trajectories were obtained at 100 Hz from sensors placed on the tongue, lips, and mandible, corrected for head movement and aligned to the occlusal plane. Synchronized audio was recorded at 22050 Hz. Comparison of normal to fast acoustic durations for paired utterances showed a mean 67% length reduction, and assessed using Mermelstein's method (1975), two fewer syllables on average. A comparison of inflections in vertical jaw movement between paired utterances showed an average of 2.3 fewer syllables. Cross-recurrence analysis of distance maps computed on paired sensor trajectories comparing corresponding normal:normal to normal:fast utterances showed systematically lower determinism and entropy for the cross-rate comparisons, indicating that rate effects on articulator trajectories are not uniform. Examples of rate-related differences in gestural overlap that might account for these differences in predictability will be presented. [Work supported by NSF.]

Automatic Emphatic Information Extraction from Aligned Acoustic Data and Its Application on Sentence Compression

We introduce a novel method to extract and utilize the semantic information from acoustic data. By automatic Speech-To-Text alignment techniques, we are able to detect word-based acoustic durations that can prosodically emphasize specific words in an utterance. We model and analyze the sentence-based emphatic patterns by predicting the emphatic levels using only the lexical features, and demonstrate the potential ability of emphatic information produced by such an unsupervised method to improve the performance of NLP tasks, such as sentence compression, by providing weak supervision on multi-task learning based on LSTMs.

The Effects of Acoustic Intensity, Spectrum, and Duration on Global Loudness Change

The Effects of Acoustic Intensity, Spectrum, and Duration on Global Loudness Change

On the resolution of phonological constraints in spoken production: Acoustic and response time evidence.

This study examines the production of words the pronunciation of which depends on the phonological context. Participants produced adjective-noun phrases starting with the French determiner un. The pronunciation of this determiner requires a liaison consonant before vowels. Naming latencies and determiner acoustic durations were shorter when the adjective and the noun both started with vowels or both with consonants, than when they had different onsets. These results suggest that the liaison process is not governed by the application of a local contextual phonological rule; they rather favor the hypothesis that pronunciation variants with and without the liaison consonant are stored in memory.