End Of Utterance Research Articles

Research on Realistic Nod with Receptionist Robot SAYA That Has Human-like Appearance

In face-to-face communication, the speaker as well as the listener nods during conversation. We refer to such behavior as “Speaker's nod”. In this paper, a “Speaker's nod” is realized as a natural interpersonal behavior in the receptionist robot SAYA, which has human-like appearance. First, we investigated the timing, angle and angular velocity of the human “Speaker's nod”. Based on the results, we developed a “Speaker's nod” function for SAYA. As a result, we found that “Speaker's nod” appears at the end of utterance frequently and appropriate nod-angle and angular velocity improve the humanness of SAYA. We then confirmed the effectiveness of “Speaker's nod” by a subjective experiment. The results indicate that appropriate nod timing, angle and angular velocity improve not only the humanness but also communicative effectiveness of SAYA in face-to-face communication with humans

Is nonmodal phonation at the end of utterances a cue for speaker recognition by humans?

Many studies of nonmodal phonation report a high rate of interspeaker variation. These experiments also showed that the rate and type of glottalization are characteristic to the speaker. Still, it remains an open question whether human listeners use this information as a cue for recognizing familiar voices. A listening experiment was conducted to investigate this issue, concentrating on utterance-final irregularities. Short utterances produced by four speakers were copy synthesized with the Klatt synthesizer in two conditions: with modal and with nonmodal voice quality in their final regions. Because two of the speakers were reliable ‘‘glottalizers’’ and two seldom ‘‘glottalized,’’ one of the two synthesis conditions reflected the speaker’s usual utterance-final voice quality and the other did not. These pairs of stimuli were used to test the effect of the presence or absence of utterance-final nonmodal phonation on the identification of voices familiar to the subjects. When asked to choose which one of the two variants is the speaker’s voice, listeners preferred the stimuli with the speaker’s typical voice quality at the end. Results will be discussed in comparison with a well-known perceptual cue on speaker identity, the F0 contour. [Work supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.]

Some Physiological Correlates to Regular and Irregular Phonation at the End of an Utterance

This article examines respiratory and acoustic events at the ends of utterances that coincide with the end of a breath. All utterances end with a vowel. Between the start of the final fall in signal amplitude and the end of phonation, the alveolar pressure falls by 1.2-2.6 cm H2O, on average, and glottal area increases by a factor of 4.0 (median). The mean glottal area at the end of phonation ranges from 9.6 to 13.5 mm2 across subjects. Physiological correlates are examined for utterances that end with regular and with irregular phonation. Irregular phonation is usually produced with brief intervals of adduction followed by longer intervals of abduction and/or with incomplete closure of the folds. This physiological correlate to irregular phonation is not consistent with descriptions of vocal fry or creaky voice in which the vocal folds are tightly adducted over most of the cycle. The rise in average glottal area and drop in alveolar pressure were similar for utterances that ended with regular phonation and those that ended with irregular phonation. These data suggest that a similar phonation-ending gesture underlies both groups of utterances. This gesture includes abduction of the vocal folds and a drop in alveolar pressure.

Identification of final fall in subglottal pressure contours of speech utterances

Subglottal pressure (Ps) contours for speech are described as having three phases: initial rise, constant or declining working phase, and final fall. The current work is part of a project to relate characteristics of the Ps contour to prosodic events. To that end, one must identify the three phases in a Ps contour. In past work, it was found that the initial phase is relatively easy to identify, but the transition from the working phase to final fall is less clear [J. Slifka (2000)]. Confounding issues could include segmental impedance, pitch accents, and phrase and boundary tones, all of which can have local effects on Ps. In this work, it is attempted to control tones and segments at the ends of utterances in order to better identify final fall. Lung pressure is estimated from esophageal pressure (corrected for lung volume). Pilot data from one subject indicate that the beginning of final fall is easier to identify when the phrase and boundary tones are low than when they are high. Results will be presented for additional subjects and it will be attempted to relate them to the distribution of pitch accents. [NIH grant DC04331.]

Analysis by synthesis of electrolarynx speech

The ability to accurately synthesize electrolarynx (EL) speech may provide a basis for better understanding the acoustic deficits that contribute to its poor quality. Such information could also lead to the development of acoustic enhancement methods that would improve EL speech quality. This effort was initiated with an analysis-by-synthesis approach that used the Klatt formant synthesizer to study vowels at the end of utterances spoken by the same subjects both before and after laryngectomy (normal versus EL speech). The temporal and spectral features of the original speech waveforms were analyzed and the results were used to guide synthesis and to identify parameters for modification. EL speech consistently displayed utterance-final fixed (mono) pitch and normal-like falling amplitude across different vowels and subjects. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that it was possible to closely match the acoustic characteristics and perceptual quality of both normal and EL speech with synthesized replicas. It was also shown that the perceived quality of the synthesized EL speech could be improved by modification of pitch parameters to more closely resemble normal speech. Some potential approaches for modifying the pitch of EL speech in real time will be discussed. [Funded by NIH Grant R01 DC006449.]

PFI事業の提案書作成におけるエスノデザインメソッドの考察 : Private Finance Initiativeの施設計画に関するエスノメソドロジー

In making proposals for PFI project, we can see remarkable conduct as a specialist. Such conduct is quite different from the other design-communication, especially in housing environment design. And it is characteristic in their situated actions as "being the member." Ethno-design-method is inevitably working in such situated process practically. This paper aims to describe the ethno-design-methods which are found in their decision-making for programming, planning and designing facilities by participatory action research and analysis of conversations between members. Making proposals for PFI project develops through the collaborative practice by trial and error. The ethno-design-methods as collaborative practice were found as comprising (a) making agreeable responses to confirm explanation and intention, (b) interrupting except the end of utterance and (c) suggesting ideas or questions euphemistically.

The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman

From approximately 1887 through World War 1, a surge of commentaries were written and circulated in the Japanese print media about the strange and unpleasant (mimizawarina) sounds issuing from the mouths of schoolgirls. Male intellectuals of various affiliations located the source of their dismay in verbending forms such as texo, noxo, dawa that occurred at the end of utterances. They called such forms schoolgirl speech (jogakuseikotoba). It was jarring to their ears; it sounded vulgar and low class; its prosodic features were described as fast, contracting, and bouncing with a rising intonation: and it was condemned as sugary and shallow. Using the newly available modern textual space of reported speech (Voloshinov 1973), male intellectuals cited what they scornfully referred to as teyo-dawa speech (texoduwii kotoba) in an effort to convince parents and educators to discourage it as a corrupt form of speaking. The irony here is that main of the forms then identified as are today associated with s language, or the feminine style, indexing the figure of the generic urban middle-class woman. The contemporary discourse of Japanese women's language erases this historical emergence from social memory to construct women's language as an essential and timeless part of culture and tradition. Public opinion, responding to a perceived social change toward gender equit recurrently deplores what once again is described as linguistic corruption and the cultural loss of an authentic women's language. As a demographic category. the term referred to girls and young women of the elite classes who attended the women's secondary schools that had been instituted as part of the early Meiji modernization project inspired by Western liberal Enlightenment thought. By the late 19th century, women's secondary education had been incorporated into the state s mandatory education system, and schoolgirls became the immediate and direct target of the state s constitution of the (gendered) national subject b> educating them

Syntactic Projectability and Co-Participant Completion in Japanese Conversation

In this paper, I investigate the role of syntax in projecting possible ends of utterances. Research on tum-taking and co-participant completion has concluded that co-participants use many concomitant features of talk-in-interaction in addition to grammatical structure to project the ends of utterances. My purpose is not to refute the contribution of these concomitant features, but rather to refine further the role of grammatical structure in syntactic projectability.

Variation in the realization of glottalization in normal speakers

Glottalized voice quality has been observed consistently in normal utterances in a variety of locations, including as an allophone of voiceless stops (in e.g., Hatfield, butler), in word-initial vowels at intonation phrase onsets and at pitch accents, and at the ends of utterances. In this study of American English, we examine glottalizations at phrase boundaries which are medial or final in an utterance. Tokens are characterized as examples of aperiodicity (irregular periods), creak (lowering of fundamental frequency with near-total damping), diplophonia (alternation in the shape, amplitude, or duration of successive periods) and a fourth category, glottal squeak. Findings include (a) a wide range in the rates of glottalization and in preferred acoustic characteristics across individual speakers, (b) a higher rate of glottalization on words at the ends of utterances than on words at the ends of utterance-medial intonational phrases, and (c) a higher rate of glottalization at the boundaries of full intonational phrases than at intermediate intonational phrases. These patterns will need to be accounted for in any comprehensive treatment of surface phonetic variation in speech.

Utterance–final voice quality variations: Their perceptual structure and acoustic correlates

Voice quality variations can be used to mark prosodic and discourse boundaries in running speech. In order to quantify acoustic events in the signal during the production of these voice qualities, it is necessary to first discover their perceptual structure. The perceptual structure can then inform the acoustic analysis and help to find perceptually salient acoustic correlates. In this study, a perceptual experiment was run in which the stimuli were single words spoken by multiple talkers, which had all been extracted from the ends of utterances. Pairs of stimuli were given similarity ratings by listeners, and the similarity ratings were used in a multidimensional scaling analysis. The dimensions found in the multidimensional scaling analysis were interpreted using acoustic analysis. The voice qualities of the female voices in this study were found to have a primary perceptual split which was interpretable acoustically as laryngealized versus nonlaryngealized, but the voice qualities found in the male voices did not group into categories, and the perceptual dimensions were not as clearly interpretable in acoustic terms.

Surface cues and robust inference as a basis for the early acquisition of subcategorization frames

How could children possibly acquire their first subcategorization frames? The hypothesis that they directly observe the syntactic structures of the utterances they hear raises two questions. First, how can children parse input utterances reliably without already knowing the syntactic properties of all the words in them? Second, how do children survive the ungrammatical or misconstrued utterances they inevitably encounter? This paper suggests a specific inference algorithm that substantially reduces the effects of ungrammatical or misconstrued input. Since children must have some such inference procedure, they can use approximate cues to determine syntactic structure. In particular, they can use string-local surface cues rather than global constraints. Such cues make it possible to discover relevant syntactic structure in an utterance without already knowing all the words in it. This paper suggests a possible set of cues for English subcategorization frames that assumes only the ability to detect the ends of utterances and knowledge of a few function morphemes and proper names. Simulation experiments on naturally occuring, child-directed English show that these cues, combined with the proposed inference mechanism, do surprisingly well at discovering subcategorization frames.

Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults.

Two studies investigated adults' use of emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infants and adults. In Experiment 1,18 mothers told a story to a 14-month-old infant and to an adult, using a picture book in which 6 target items were the focus of attention. Prosodic emphasis was measured both acoustically and subjectively In speech to infants, mothers consistently positioned focused words on exaggerated pitch peaks in utterance-final position, whereas in speech to adults emphasis was more variable. In Experiment 2,12 women taught another adult an assembly procedure involving familiar and novel terminology. In both studies, stressed words in adultdirected speech rarely coincided with pitch peaks. However, in infant-directed speech, mothers regularly used pitch prominence to convey primary stress. The use of exaggerated pitch peaks at the ends of utterances to mark focused words may facilitate speech processing for the infant. Research on features of early linguistic experiences that influence language acquisition has begun to explore the role of prosody in providing the infant with acoustic cues to linguistic structure in the speech waveform. Faced with the problem of discovering the linguistically relevant units in continuous speech, the preverbal infant may take advantage of features that are regularly correlated with such units as words, phrases, and clauses. According to some versions of this prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (e.g., Gleitman & Wanner, 1982; Morgan & Newport, 1981), infants can exploit the cues routinely available in spoken English to infer the correct units of analysis for the language without requiring special modifications in maternal speech. Other evidence suggests that the characteristic exaggeration of cues in infant-directed speech may indeed be useful to the infant in partitioning the speech stream. When speaking to infants, mothers use more exaggerated vowel lengthening to mark both phrase boundaries (Morgan, 1986) and clause boundaries (Bernstein Ratner, 1986) than when speaking to adults. The finding that infants are sensitive to clause boundaries in infantdirected but not in adult-directe d speech (Kemler-Nelson, Hirsh-Pasek, Jusczyk, & Cassidy, 1989) suggests that the exaggerated prosody typical of mothers' speech (e.g., Fernald & Simon, 1984) increases the salience of acoustic cues to linguistic structure for the preverbal infant. This recent interest in the usefulness of prosody to infants who are learning language has focused mainly on how cues reveal phrase and clause structure. The focus on syntactic rather than lexical units is not surprising, given that most current theories of language acquisition take for granted the

Accent and Intonation of Speech in Adolescents with Severe and Profound Hearing Impairments

The purpose of the present study was to analyze the characteristics of the speech of adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments. This formed part of a broad study on accent and intonation in adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments. The test words consisted of two-mora words in which the first or second mora is high-pitched. Parameters of acoustic analysis were fundamental frequency and intensity. Samples were recorded and analyzed by Phono-Laryngograph (RION SH-01) in experiment 1 and Digital Sona-Graph (KAY7800) in experiment 2. From the results of this study the following findings were observed.The hearing impaired speakers realized accent in the following ways : (1) increase in intensity in the first mora of the test word, (2) increase in pitch in the second mora of the test word. The movements of pitch contour in normal hearing speakers were dynamic. In adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments, dynamics were lower than in the normal speakers. For intonations, pitch movements at the end of utterances were examined. Word-final pitch rise occurred in normal speakers, but did not occur in adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments.

Speech visualization and its application for the hearing impaired

A speech‐visualization system has been developed as an extension of research on a color display system for connected speech [Watanabe et al., IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. ASSP‐33, 164–173 (1985)]. In this newly developed system, normalized spectrographic patterns are overlapped as a change of luminance on a whole pattern that represents voiced segments by colors. The spectrographic patterns are represented with high luminance in unvoiced portions, and with low luminance in voiced ones so as not to disturb the color image. This extension allows unvoiced plosives as well as fricatives and affricates to be clearly visualized by the sharp contrast between their black‐and‐white patterns and the vivid colors of the voiced components. Moreover, in order to generate a visually clear image, a cleaner, which eliminates unnecessary patterns such as aspirates that are often observed at the end of utterances, is introduced. Finally, two applications of this system are described. One is a speech training system in which a personal computer, with a database, controls the speech‐visualization system and provides a hearing aid. The other is a telecommunication system that utilizes a public telephone channel. [This work was supported by TAF.]

The identification of names in maternal speech to infants

Mothers' speech to 14-month-old infants was recorded during a free-play session. The findings suggest that this speech contained a number of characteristics which could facilitate the identification of names from the other words in an utterance; names were frequently the loudest word of an utterance and were highly likely to be positioned at the end of utterances. Thus, infants appear to receive a verbal input which may help them to identify semantically important words.

An Algorithm for Locating the Beginning and End of an Utterance Using ADPCM Coded Speech

We describe a simple algorithm for locating the beginning and end of a speech utterance. The algorithm is based on the fact that the code words for an adaptive differential (ADPCM) representation of speech exhibit considerable variation among all quantization levels during both voiced and unvoiced speech intervals while, because of a constraint on the minimum step size, during silent intervals the code words vary only slightly within the smallest quantization steps. The use of the algorithm is illustrated for automatically locating the beginning and end of vocabulary entries for a computer voice response system.

Palatoglossus Function in Normal Speech Production—Electromyographic Implications

Fine-wire-inserted electrodes were placed in the right and left palatoglossus muscles of 14 subjects. Two to four simultaneous placements were accomplished for each subject. Electromyographic signals were recorded while each subject produced a speech sample designed to consider palatal and lingual movements. The data strongly suggest that, while palatoglossus function for the nonspeech act of swallowing is highly consistent within and between speakers, its specific function in speech production is less consistent. !n some subjects, the palatoglossus appears to function to actively lower the palate for nasals and at the end of utterances, while for other subjects it does not. In some subjects activity appeared related either to tongue movements or to stretch reflex. Finally, within any one subject, function was often variable. The data are discussed primarily with regard to palatoglossus function, although other aspects, i.e., its variability, which will be discussed in detail in subsequent papers, are also mentioned. [Research supported by NIDR, PHS grants.]