Analysis Of Spontaneous Speech Research Articles

On the Relation between Verb Inflection and Verb Position in Dutch Agrammatic Aphasics

This study focuses on the relation between verb position and verb inflection in the speech production of Dutch agrammatic patients. In Dutch, the finite verb is moved to second position in the matrix clause (de jongenleesteen boek: the boyreadsa book), but remains in its base generated, that is final, position in the embedded clause (ik zie dat de jongen een boek leest: lit. I see that the boy a bookreads). Nonfinite verbs (infinitives and participles) are always in clause final position. Spontaneous speech analysis shows that agrammatics are sensitive to this relation between finiteness and structural position, although they are reluctant to produce finite verbs. Experimental data shows that verb inflection as such is not the problem: these patients are perfectly able to produce a finite verb in final position in an embedded clause; this is not more difficult than producing a nonfinite verb in the same position. If the finite verb has to be produced inVerb Secondposition in the matrix clause, however, the patients' performance drops dramatically.

Stimulating sentence production in agrammatic patients: The effect of the Visual Cue Programme on spontaneous speech

The Visual Cue Programme (VCP), a sentence-production programme, is presented and the effect on spontaneous speech in two chronic Broca's aphasia patients is reported. In an A-B-A-B design the effect was measured by the Aachen Aphasia Test, a sentence-processing test battery, and the linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech. The overall aphasia assessment shows no improvement; the sentence-processing test battery and the spontaneous speech analysis show different patterns in the two patients. One moderately impaired Broca patient shows improved production of verbs in isolation, associated with a more complete realization of verbs plus argument structures in spontaneous speech. The other patient, who has a severe Broca's aphasia, is characterized by better production of sentences and morphosyntactic elements in constrained production tasks, and absence of generalization of this morphosyntactic ability to spontaneous speech.

Using spontaneous speech samples to measure change in aphasia

ABSTRACT Assessment of aphasia is an essential component of aphasia therapy. Results from assessment procedures form the baseline by which language change may be measured and provide the rationale for therapy. Assessment results also reveal the nature of aphasia exhibited by the individual client. It is therefore of paramount importance that assessment procedures are robust, reliable and revealing. Assessments should give some way of quantifying the speech produced as well as describing task performance. Published aphasia assessments frequently used in clinical practice focus on language tasks rather than spontaneous language and therefore have little to offer by way of quantifying connected speech. In this paper the case is made for including the analysis of spontaneous speech as part of aphasia assessment. A procedure which can capture grammatical features of connected speech at phrasal, clausal and supra‐sentential level and therefore be applied to a range of aphasic and normal speech will be described. Illustrative results from normal and aphasic speakers will be given and the clinical and theoretical implications of these results will be discussed.

An Analysis of Spontaneous Conversational Speech Fluency in Children with Acquired Aphasia

We report on an instrumental analysis of spontaneous conversational speech (SCS) fluency in acquired childhood aphasia (ACA). Tape-recorded SCS samples of 25 children with ACA (clinical judgment: 12 nonfluent and 13 fluent), of 12 dysarthric and 12 nonaphasic and nondysarthric right hemisphere injured children were analysed in order to: (1) investigate whether a more refined analysis can objectively contribute to the differentiation of patients who were labelled as fluent or nonfluent on the basis of a clinical judgment; (2) verify whether an instrumental analysis of phonation duration does confirm the subjective estimation of verbal rate (i.e. the number of words produced in a unit of time) in groups of children with acquired neurogenic speech/language disorders frequently met in clinical practice. The results are: (1) phonation rate (i.e. the vocalization percentage) seems to represent an adequate variable to distinguish clinically diagnosed nonfluent aphasic children from speech/language impaired children belonging to other clinical groups of acquired neurogenic speech/language disorders; (2) the verbal rate is highly correlated to the phonation rate in all investigated groups except the dysarthric one. We suggest the instrumental method discussed here might contribute to the differential diagnosis between dysarthric and aphasic disturbances in the acute stage of the disease. Concerning the study of ACA, the main issue of the present investigation is that an objective fluency measurement has succeeded in identifying aphasic children who obviously do not fit in with the standard doctrine on ACA, which claims that ACA is invariably nonfluent irrespective of lesion location.

Acoustic analysis of vowels produced by young and elderly women in spontaneous speech.

Recent investigations suggest that analysis of spontaneous speech, rather than citation form speech, may have greater explanatory power for models of speech production and perception. The present study sought to establish a preliminary database of selected acoustic characteristics of vowels produced by women. Acoustic analyses were performed on the spontaneous and citation form speech of five elderly and five young female subjects. Measurements included segment durations and F1 and F2 temporal midpoints for monophthong vowels, and formant trajectory characteristics for selected diphthongs. Vowels were grouped for analysis by syllabic and phrase level stress and by phonemic environment. Acoustic characteristics of vowels will be illustrated by F1–F2 plots and distribution histograms. Results will be discussed relative to speaker characteristics, speaking condition, and how these acoustic measures may relate to speech motor control.

Interracial Panjabi in a British adolescent peer group

ABSTRACTSeveral sociologists have noted the emergence of syncretic multiracial youth cultures in Britain and addressed its political significance. Most discussion has focused on Afro-Caribbean influences, but this article considers Asian involvement by analyzing the use of Panjabi by black and white adolescents in a mixed peer group. Informant reports suggested that Panjabi crossing was common, though assessments varied according to its contexts of occurrence. Analysis of spontaneous speech reduced these to two: agonistic interactions, where Panjabi played an auxiliary role in familiar playground practices (primarily among males); and bhangra, in which predominantly white females looked toward a nascent youth culture with Panjabi at its core. Despite major differences, bilingual sponsors and nonconversational structures were crucial in both settings. Opposition to establishment hierarchy might be more a part of the interracial meaning potential of Creole, but Panjabi was important, both in managing the divisions that cross-cut youth community and in extending horizons beyond the confines of local neighborhood experience. (Ethnography of communication, ethnic relations, adolescent multilingualism, language contact, code-switching, second language learning)

Acquired Childhood Aphasia

The effects of the variables age at onset, cause, severity and bilaterality of lesion, and type of aphasia on course and outcome were investigated in a group of 28 aphasic children. Analysis of spontaneous speech and tests of auditory verbal comprehension were used to determine the presence of aphasia. The severity of the cerebral lesion was assessed using a rating scale for computed tomographic scans. Most of the children had not recovered completely 1 year after onset. Recovery was significantly different according to etiological categories. Complete recovery was seen in the majority of traumatic cases.

An analysis of grammatical deviance occurring in spontaneous schizophrenic speech

It has often been claimed that schizophrenic speech reflects episodic disturbances in utilization of linguistic rules referable to dominant hemisphere dysfunction. These claims, however, have generally been argued on the basis of speech samples gleaned from single case studies. Insofar as normal speech also reflects errors of various sorts, it has been impossible, on the basis of these data, to argue that breakdowns of grammatical structure evinced by some schizophrenics necessarily reflect specific linguistic pathology. In order to more carefully determine the specificity of linguistic deviance produced by schizophrenic speakers, an analysis of spontaneous conversational speech was developed. The analysis was designed to locate and classify grammatical deviance by differentiating “normal dysfluency”, lexical selection problems, and syntactic difficulties. A measure of “severity” of syntactic deviance was generated which reflected the degree that the “target” of the manifest utterance was ambiguous. The analysis was applied blindly to transcribed speech produced by eleven schizophrenic patients and a comparison group of nine nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients. Schizophrenics produced grammatical deviance at a much greater rate than nonschizophrenics, and tended to produce more severe errors. The analysis described may be useful for quantifying and characterizing spontaneously produced paragrammatisms generated by other classes of speakers as well.

Syntactic Preservation in Alzheimer's Disease

Language ability of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) was evaluated. Analysis of spontaneous speech revealed a normal range and frequency of syntactic constructions but poor lexical use. A writing task showed a similar divergence, with the ability to use syntactic cues significantly more intact than the ability to use semantic cues. The results are taken to indicate that syntactic ability is selectively preserved in AD. These findings are consistent with a modular theory of grammar and of mental functions more generally. A tentative explanation of these phenomena is proposed in which the overlearned and automatic nature of syntactic ability helps account for its resilience to cognitive dissolution and cortical degeneration.

Disfluencies at the onset of stuttering.

This study describes disfluencies in rare speech samples obtained from young children in temporal proximity to their stuttering onsets. Ten 2 and 3 year olds diagnosed by parents to have begun stuttering for periods of 2 months or less and 10 matched normally speaking children served as subjects. Analyses of spontaneous speech indicated that stutterers were three times more disfluent than nonstutterers. Part-word repetitions and sound prolongations were found to distinguish the two groups significantly. Stutterers were also found to have significantly more repetition units per instance of disfluency than control subjects. Theoretical and practical conclusions are discussed.

Phonological process analysis from spontaneous speech: The influence of sample size

Phonological process analysis is becoming a popular technique for the evaluation of unintelligible children and adults. Spontaneous speech sampling procedures have been advocated as a representative sampling base for phonological process analysis; however, little research has been reported detailing the parameters of spontaneous samples in reference to this assessment technique. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the influence of increasing sample size on phonological process analyses from spontaneous speech. Results clearly indicated that samples of 50 words provided descriptive information similar to samples of 100 words. Additional studies are called for to investigate other variables that might influence the results of spontaneous speech analysis.

An Instrumental Analysis of the Voicing Contrast in Word-Initial Stops in the Speech of Four-Year-Old English-Speaking Children

This paper reports on an investigation of the voice-onset-time (VOT) characteristics of word-initial stops produced by four four-year-old children. Instrumental analysis of the children's spontaneous speech showed that they had distinct distributions for voiced and voiceless stops at all three places of articulation and that there was very little overlap between voiced and voiceless cognates. Comparison of words uttered in isolation with words uttered in a sentence context revealed that these children had shorter VOT values in running speech. Reanalysis of data from younger children showed evidence of such modification according to context at age 1;9. However, even at age 4 the data were not completely adult-like: Compared with adults, the four-year-olds had longer mean VOT values, there was a greater range of values and there was less modification according to sentence context. The four-year-olds' data were interpreted as further evidence for the position that in producing voiceless stops in terms of mean VOT values, children first overshoot adult values and then only gradually draw them back towards adult values.

The acquisition of agreement in English

The acquisition of subject-verb agreement in number in English was studied in a sample of 46 children between the ages of 3:0 and 4:11. Analysis of the children's spontaneous speech indicated that virtually all of their utterances were grammatically correct with respect to this agreement. Elicited imitations of grammatical sentences were also almost all correct, while there was a significant tendency in imitation to correct sentences that violated the rules of agreement. Nonverbal tests of the children's understanding of the verb number inflection indicated only chance performance. The conclusion was drawn that children of this age possess a syntactic, intralanguage rule for verb number inflection, but have no comprehension of the singular or plural meaning of such an inflection.

Speech, sexuality and the temporal lobe: An analysis of spontaneous speech of thirteen male transsexuals∗

Speech, sexuality and the temporal lobe: An analysis of spontaneous speech of thirteen male transsexuals∗