Explicit Voice Research Articles

The effect of explicit and implicit voice training on speech-on-speech intelligibility and listening effort

Listening to familiar voices might improve intelligibility of target speech in multiple-talker situations. In addition to personally familiar voices, voice training—through implicit exposure or explicit learning of a previously unheard voice—can improve speech intelligibility. However, there is no consensus on which method is more effective. We investigated the effect of explicit and implicit voice training on speech-on-speech perception and listening effort (pupillometry), among normal hearing listeners. There was no significant difference in speech intelligibility performance between trained and untrained voices, with either voice training method. However, an interaction between voice training method and target-to-masker ratio (TMR) on accuracy scores showed that the benefit of increased TMR on accuracy scores was significantly larger when voice training was implicit compared to explicit. Pupillometry results showed that explicit voice training significantly reduced listening effort for most disadvantageous TMR (−6dB), but not for more advantageous TMRs (0 and + 6 dB), and not for implicitly trained voices. Our results may imply that explicit voice training is more effective than implicit voice training in reducing listening effort. Still, implicit voice training, perhaps via procedural learning, might be more beneficial on the performance level when TMR becomes more advantageous.

IMATE-Intelligent Mobility Assistance Technology for Visually Challenged

Visually impaired people's mobility is limited within their surroundings, preventing them from living independently because of their inability to see. This project aims at providing an efficient solution by providing a virtual assistant to them. This assistant is a gadget which consists of a Bluetooth headset (wearable) and a camera installed in spectacles. It helps them to navigate around places, read texts and detect obstacles through voice commands generated by the gadget. The navigation from user’s current position to their destination is done using GPS (Global Positioning System). The obstacle detection can be done by getting information from surrounding area through mounted ultrasonic sensors. The user can gain information such as expiry date of a product or name of a nearby shop by giving explicit voice commands which is achieved using text to speech conversion.

A Review on Voice Assistants in Our Daily Life

A voice assistants is a computerized right hand that utilizations voice acknowledgment, language handling calculations and voice blend to pay attention to explicit voice orders and return significant data or fill explicit roles as expected by the client. Lately Artificial Intelligence(AI) has shown critical advancement and its true capacity is growing.AI has turned into an impression in this day and age. Individuals of this world has accepted AI as their piece of life, and it is filling quickly in the present period. One of the utilization of AI is Natural Language Processing(NLP).Voice aides join AI by utilizing distributed computing and can speak with client in Natural language. This paper assists with concentrating on the job of voice assistants and furthermore to concentrate on how they are valuable in everyday life.

Assessing the Ethos of Anglican Primary Schools in Wales: The Student Voice Project

AbstractSince the Anglican Church in England and Wales began to build schools long before the state developed machinery to do so, around a quarter of all primary schools remain connected with the Anglican Church. The church school inspection system maintains that Anglican schools have a distinctive ethos. The Student Voice Project argues that school ethos is generated by the implicit collective values, beliefs and behaviours of the students, and was designed to give explicit voice to the students in response to six specific areas of school life identified by the Anglican school inspection criteria as relevant to school ethos. Drawing on data provide by 8,111 year-five and year-six students attending Church in Wales primary schools, the present study reports on the six ethos measures and on significant differences reported by female and male students, and by year-five and year-six students.

Influence of emotional prosody, content, and repetition on memory recognition of speaker identity.

Recognising individuals through their voice requires listeners to form an invariant representation of the speaker's identity, immune to episodic changes that may occur between encounters. We conducted two experiments to investigate to what extent within-speaker stimulus variability influences different behavioural indices of implicit and explicit identity recognition memory, using short sentences with semantically neutral content. In Experiment 1, we assessed how speaker recognition was affected by changes in prosody (fearful to neutral, and vice versa in a between-group design) and speech content. Results revealed that, regardless of encoding prosody, changes in prosody, independent of content, or changes in content, when prosody was kept unchanged, led to a reduced accuracy in explicit voice recognition. In contrast, both groups exhibited the same pattern of response times (RTs) for correctly recognised speakers: faster responses to fearful than neutral stimuli, and a facilitating effect for same-content stimuli only for neutral sentences. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether an invariant representation of a speaker's identity benefitted from exposure to different exemplars varying in emotional prosody (fearful and happy) and content (Multi condition), compared to repeated presentations of a single sentence (Uni condition). We found a significant repetition priming effect (i.e., reduced RTs over repetitions of the same voice identity) only for speakers in the Uni condition during encoding, but faster RTs when correctly recognising old speakers from the Multi, compared to the Uni, condition. Overall, our findings confirm that changes in emotional prosody and/or speech content can affect listeners' implicit and explicit recognition of newly familiarised speakers.

“Not only hard to make but also hard to take:” Team leaders’ reactions to voice

Voicing concerns and suggestions is a central aspect of effective team communication. Engaging in voice has been shown to be an important factor for improving team performance and preventing errors. But voice can only make a beneficial contribution, if it does not fall on deaf ears. Little is known about the interplay of sending and receiving voice in teams. This is problematic because the recipient of voice bears much of the responsibility for the voice message’s outcome and will contribute to the decision if voice is implemented. This study investigates the team leaders’ reactions (i. e., implementation vs. rejection) to three different voice verbalizations (i. e., respectful, explicit, and oblique). We hypothesized that team leaders will implement respectful and explicit voice more likely than oblique voice. Building on the concept of rudeness, we also hypothesized that explicit voice will be perceived as ruder than respectful voice. We tested the hypotheses in 39 teams performing a tower building task. Our results indicate that, compared with oblique voice, both respectful and explicit voice increased the likelihood of voice implementation. Further, explicit voice was perceived as ruder than oblique and marginally ruder than respectful voice. In an exploratory analysis, we also considered the content of voice (i. e., promotive vs. prohibitive). Results revealed that the implementation of voice was related to an interplay between the type of voice verbalization and voice content. Our findings suggest an important link between voice verbalization and voice implementation and contribute to a better understanding of the complex dynamics of team communication.

Does Implicit Voice Learning Improve Spoken Language Processing? Implications for Clinical Practice.

In typical interactions with other speakers, including a clinical environment, listeners become familiar with voices through implicit learning. Previous studies have found evidence for a Familiar Talker Advantage (better speech perception and spoken language processing for familiar voices) following explicit voice learning. The current study examined whether a Familiar Talker Advantage would result from implicit voice learning. Thirty-three adults and 16 second graders were familiarized with 1 of 2 talkers' voices over 2 days through live interactions as 1 of 2 experimenters administered standardized tests and interacted with the listeners. To assess whether this implicit voice learning would generate a Familiar Talker Advantage, listeners completed a baseline sentence recognition task and a post-learning sentence recognition task with both the familiar talker and the unfamiliar talker. No significant effect of voice familiarity was found for either the children or the adults following implicit voice learning. Effect size estimates suggest that familiarity with the voice may benefit some listeners, despite the lack of an overall effect of familiarity. We discuss possible clinical implications of this finding and directions for future research.

Narratology as a Means of Revealing Irish Traditions in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

Narratology as a Means of Revealing Irish Traditions in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World Wajdi Fahmi Alminri, Hardev Kaur Abstract This paper studies J.M. Synge‘s The Playboy of the Western World (1911) from a narrative perspective. It will concentrate on the play‘s discourse. In essence, the play‘s literary discourse conveys the author‘s point of view regarding the contemporary social affairs in Ireland. The study will focus on the imaginary aspects of the Irish society depicted in the play. Therefore, two narrative elements will be interpreted. They are the characters and the settings. On the one hand, the characters will be analyzed as fictional replica of the Synge‘s implied voice in the text. That is, the characters‘ discourse is a literary manifestation of the author‘s abstract conceptualization of the Irish social disposition that undergone radical changes. On the other hand, the play‘s setting is going to be analyzed as a quasi-real appropriation of the authentic Irish society portrayed by Synge. These elements are going to be analyzed by applying Mikail Bakhtin‘s concept of polyphony. The concept of polyphony refers to the author‘s implicit voice that is carried out by literary characters‘ explicit voice in literary texts. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jflcc.v6n2a2

Implicit Talker Training Improves Comprehension of Auditory Speech in Noise.

Previous studies have shown that listeners are better able to understand speech when they are familiar with the talker’s voice. In most of these studies, talker familiarity was ensured by explicit voice training; that is, listeners learned to identify the familiar talkers. In the real world, however, the characteristics of familiar talkers are learned incidentally, through communication. The present study investigated whether speech comprehension benefits from implicit voice training; that is, through exposure to talkers’ voices without listeners explicitly trying to identify them. During four training sessions, listeners heard short sentences containing a single verb (e.g., “he writes”), spoken by one talker. The sentences were mixed with noise, and listeners identified the verb within each sentence while their speech-reception thresholds (SRT) were measured. In a final test session, listeners performed the same task, but this time they heard different sentences spoken by the familiar talker and three unfamiliar talkers. Familiar and unfamiliar talkers were counterbalanced across listeners. Half of the listeners performed a test session in which the four talkers were presented in separate blocks (blocked paradigm). For the other half, talkers varied randomly from trial to trial (interleaved paradigm). The results showed that listeners had lower SRT when the speech was produced by the familiar talker than the unfamiliar talkers. The type of talker presentation (blocked vs. interleaved) had no effect on this familiarity benefit. These findings suggest that listeners implicitly learn talker-specific information during a speech-comprehension task, and exploit this information to improve the comprehension of novel speech material from familiar talkers.

Entitativity and intergroup bias: How belonging to a cohesive group allows people to express their prejudices.

We propose that people treat prejudice as more legitimate when it seems rationalistic-that is, linked to a group's pursuit of collective interests. Groups that appear to be coherent and unified wholes (entitative groups) are most likely to have such interests. We thus predicted that belonging to an entitative group licenses people to express prejudice against outgroups. Support for this idea came from 3 correlational studies and 5 experiments examining racial, national, and religious prejudice. The first 4 studies found that prejudice and discrimination seemed more socially acceptable to third parties when committed by members of highly entitative groups, because people could more easily explain entitative groups' biases as a defense of collective interests. Moreover, ingroup entitativity only lent legitimacy to outgroup prejudice when an interests-based explanation was plausible-namely, when the outgroup could possibly threaten the ingroup's interests. The last 4 studies found that people were more willing to express private prejudices when they perceived themselves as belonging to an entitative group. Participants' perceptions of their own race's entitativity were associated with a greater tendency to give explicit voice to their implicit prejudice against other races. Furthermore, experimentally raising participants' perceptions of ingroup entitativity increased explicit expressions of outgroup prejudice, particularly among people most likely to privately harbor such prejudices (i.e., highly identified group members). Together, these findings demonstrate that entitativity can lend a veneer of legitimacy to prejudice and disinhibit its expression. We discuss implications for intergroup relations and shifting national demographics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Heirs through Fear

Beginning with nineteenth-century Indian curse rhetoric as a national jeremiad, and continuing into the twentieth century through Puritan-derived landscapes in fiction by Howard Philips Lovecraft and Jay Anson, Indian curses and accursed lands stand apart from other paranormal beliefs in the explicit voice they give to Euro-American anxieties over cultural authority. By imagining themselves as living in Indian terrains, accursed though they are, white Americans lay claim to the land, articulating an indigenized myth of national origin. Since the 1970s, neo-charismatic Protestants have taken a keen interest in Lovecraft-inspired religions and Indian curse lore, engaging in various deliverance ministries to exorcise individuals and landscapes, and to symbolically claim the nation for themselves.

GLOBAL JUSTICE AND THE SPECTER OF LEVIATHAN1

In a recent article on “The Problem of Global Justice,” Thomas Nagel argues that global socioeconomic justice presupposes a sovereign world state. I seek to undermine his arguments, which exemplify and give explicit voice to a widespread tendency in political philosophy to assign what I regard as excessive weight to the idea of the sovereign state with “a monopoly of force” (p. 115)—in other words, Leviathan. Nagel’s reasoning is worthy of attention in its own right and also because it is perhaps the most careful attempt to provide individualistic foundations for Rawls’s Law of Peoples thesis that requirements of distributive justice do not apply to the world as a whole. Nagel advances two main arguments for the claim that global socioeconomic justice is possible only within a sovereign world state. The first of these, which I discuss in section II, generalizes Hobbes’s state of nature argument for the view that “actual justice cannot be achieved except within a sovereign state” (p. 114) to “a wide range of conceptions of justice” (p. 115), including non-Hobbesian “conceptions [. . .] that are based on much more other-regarding motives” (p. 116).

Strategies of Illumination: U.S. Network News, Watergate, and the Clinton Affair

This study examines the metaphors of publicity that structured U.S. network television news coverage of Watergate in 1973-74 and the Clinton affair of 1998. During both Watergate and the Clinton affair, the networks understood publicity to be the light of public inquiry. The two sets of coverage, however, differ substantially in the nature of that light. The Watergate coverage gives explicit voice to the metaphor of publicity as a searchlight, an apersonal and disembodied agent of surveillance that illuminates the political in a rational-institutional light. By contrast, the Clinton coverage implicitly rests upon a metaphor of publicity as a floodlight, a dramaturgical exposure of the political process that celebrates instead an emotional, personal, and narrativistic frame for the political and a subjective, embodied approach to journalism. While the floodlight model is often maligned, this analysis concludes that it is expanding the assumptions and boundaries of public discourse.

The effects of talker familiarity on spoken word identification in younger and older listeners.

The present study was designed to examine age differences in the ability to use voice information acquired intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2) as an aid to spoken word identification. Following both implicit and explicit voice learning, participants were asked to identify novel words spoken either by familiar talkers (ones they had been exposed to in the training phase) or by 4 unfamiliar voices. In both experiments, explicit memory for talkers' voices was significantly lower in older than in young listeners. Despite this age-related decline in voice recognition, however, older adults exhibited equivalent, and in some cases greater, benefit than young listeners from having words spoken by familiar talkers. Implications of the findings for age-related changes in explicit versus implicit memory systems are discussed.