Fast Speech Rate Research Articles

Two or three lines: a mixed-methods study on subtitle processing and preferences

ABSTRACTThe typically recommended maximum number of lines in a subtitle is two. Yet, three-line subtitles are often used in intralingual English-to-English subtitling on television programmes with high information density and fast speech rates. To the best of our knowledge, no prior empirical work has contrasted the processing of three-line with two-line subtitles. In this study, we showed participants one video with two-line subtitles and one with three-line subtitles. We measured the impact of the number of lines on subtitle processing using eye tracking as well as comprehension, cognitive load, enjoyment and preferences. We conducted two experiments with different types of viewers: hearing native speakers of English, Polish and Spanish as well as British hard of hearing and deaf viewers. Three-line subtitles induced higher cognitive load than two-line subtitles. The number of lines did not affect comprehension. Viewers generally preferred two-line over three-line subtitles. The results provide empirical evidence on the processing of two- and three-line subtitles and can be used to inform current subtitling practices.

Acoustics and emotion in tonal and non-tonal languages: Findings from individuals with typical hearing and with cochlear implants

Talkers of tonal language, such as Mandarin, use the acoustic cues of fundamental frequency (F0), amplitude, and duration to indicate lexical meaning as well as to express linguistic and emotional prosody. It has therefore been hypothesized that tonal language talkers have less prosodic “space” to signal emotional prosody using F0, compared to non-tonal language talkers, and that these differences in prosodic processing should be evident in speech perception and production tasks. In addition, for talkers of both tonal and non-tonal languages, speaking rate interacts with emotional expression, with “sad” mood generally expressed with slower speech, while “happy” and “angry” moods are marked with faster speech rates. Despite the overall importance of speaking rate in signaling particular emotional moods, few data exist for speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin, in which lexical tones are typically specified for length. These issues can be addressed by analyzing and modelling data for individuals with cochlear implants, electronic hearing systems that provide relatively good temporal resolution but poor spectral resolution. Findings from our laboratory will be used to address models of prosody perception and production.

Developing Listening Fluency through Supported Extensive Listening Practice

Although second language listening has become a rather active area of research in the past ten years, some topics such as listening fluency development and extensive listening (EL) have not received much attention. The purpose of the present study is to examine the levels of listening support that might be needed to facilitate L2 learners’ listening fluency development. Sixty-nine EFL college students completed a full intervention through one of the three modes: (1) listening only (LO), (2) reading only (RO), and (3) reading while listening plus listening only (RLL). Ten level-1, 10 level-2 and 8 level-3 (audio) graded readers were used as the study materials within three 13-week periods. Listening tests were given before the intervention (pre-test) and after they finished each level of the texts (post-tests 1, 2 and 3). The research questions addressed effect sizes of the scores’ changes from the pre-test to each of the post-tests in each group on their comprehension of practised and unpractised texts. The results show that in comprehending the practised texts, the LO and RLL groups could comprehend the more complicated texts at faster speech rates and also maintain higher levels of comprehension. When listening to the unpractised texts, the RLL group could do as well as they did on the practised texts, but the LO group could process the more difficult texts at faster speech rates without decreasing their comprehension levels. As predicted, the RO group performed poorly on the tests. Pedagogical implications for facilitating the effectiveness of extensive listening practice are discussed.

Coupling relations underlying the production of speech articulator movements and their invariance to speech rate.

Since the seminal works of Bernstein (The coordination and regulation of movements. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1967) several authors have supported the idea that, to produce a goal-oriented movement in general, and a movement of the organs responsible for the production of speech sounds in particular, individuals activate a set of coupling relations that coordinate the behavior of the elements of the motor system involved in the production of the target movement or sound. In order to characterize the configurations of the coupling relations underlying speech production articulator movements, we introduce an original method based on recurrence analysis. The method is validated through the analysis of simulated dynamical systems adapted to reproduce the features of speech gesture kinematics and it is applied to the analysis of speech articulator movements recorded in five German speakers during the production of labial and coronal plosive and fricative consonants at variable speech rates. We were able to show that the underlying coupling relations change systematically between labial and coronal consonants, but are not affected by speech rate, despite the presence of qualitative changes observed in the trajectory of the jaw at fast speech rate.

Usporedba brzine govora u materinskome hrvatskome (L1) i stranome engleskome (L2) jeziku

This paper aims at investigating the differences regarding speech rate between the Croatian (L1) and the English language (L2). The selected tasks include descriptions of dynamic entities which require careful planning and a chronological sequence of speech acts in real time, as well as the description of static spatial arrangements and their relations. The speech tasks were first performed in the native language, followed by the performance of the same tasks in the foreign language. A significantly faster speech rate was hypothesized in the foreign language condition for each investigated speech task due to the unautomated nature of L2 speech production mechanisms. The obtained results point to the conclusion that the speech rate is significantly slower in L2 in narrative tasks due to the conceptual complexity of the task. However, no significant differences in the speech rate were found between the two languages in the case of highly structured tasks with shorter duration, or in the case of repeated tasks. Due to the fact that the tasks have already been performed in the native language, the processing demands on the level of conceptualization decrease, freeing up the attentional resources, which, in turn, assist the formulation and articulation stage by reducing the processing pressure. Also, the fact that no significant differences were found might be explained by the existence of strong associative links between L1 and L2, as well as by the occurrence of highly frequent words which can be easily retrieved from the mental lexicon, especially if they have previously been activated in the native language. Introduction of new topics, on the other hand, implies higher cognitive demands in the conceptualization stage, resulting in a slower speech rate in both languages.

Effects of Speech Rate and Background Noise on EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension of Different Types of Materials

The present study examined the effects of speech rate and background noise on EFL learners’ listening comprehension of film and textbook materials. The participants listened to eight different types of dialogues with different conditions in the speech rate, the background noise, and the types of learning materials, and their listening comprehensibility was measured. For the speech rate factor, either a fast or a slow speech rate was used. The background noise effect was executed by adding crowd talking noise to the dialogue. The script was adapted from either textbook materials or film materials. The results showed that each factor had an influence on learners’ listening comprehension. Though the readability, word levels, and the number of words were at the same level, the scores when textbook materials were used were significantly higher than that of the film materials. Regarding the textbook materials, they had higher scores with the slow speech than the fast speech, and also the scores in the silent condition were higher than that of the noise condition. The students’ listening comprehension score was the lowest where there was background noise and a fast speech rate.

The influence of the assimilation operator, speech rate and linguistic boundary on the production of /z/ in Croatian

It is widely accepted that invariant and discrete phonological units at the linguistic level are transformed into variable and continuous movements of speech organs, which in turn results in equally continuous acoustical results. The variability of phonemic units depends on neighbouring phonetic units, but also on the various linguistic, communicational and pragmatic contexts of a particular speech act. The influence of phonetic units upon each other results in adaptations, coarticulations and assimilations. By means of assimilation at least one distinctive feature of a phoneme is changed, so the observed phoneme becomes similar to its neighbouring sound – the assimilation operator. This paper is aimed at analysing the influence of speech rate on assimilation processes in the voiced fricative /z/, when it is preceded by sounds /s, z, ʃ, ʒ / in four different types of articulatory joint: sentence, clausal, lexemic and proclitical. The articulatory joint refers to the production of two phonemes separated by different types of linguistic boundaries. Twenty female native speakers of Croatian with no history of speech or hearing impairments read a text at both natural and fast speech rates. The acoustical recording was performed in a sound-treated room. The Praat software was used to analyse six variables in all occurrences of the sound /z/: duration, spectrum centre of gravity, standard deviation of the centre of gravity, spectral skewness, spectral kurtosis, and harmonic to noise ratio. The results showed that various linguistic boundaries, speech rates and sounds as assimilation operators influence the degree of assimilation of the phoneme /z/, as measured by the acoustic variables.

Investigating the effects of speech rate and accent on simultaneous interpretation: A mixed-methods approach

The issue addressed in this study is effects of speakers’ fast speech rate (FSR) and strong accent (StrA) on simultaneous interpretation (SI) quality. Although it is perceived that FSR and StrA negatively affect overall SI quality, such effects have been mostly derived from small-sample quantitative studies and have not been consistently borne out by empirical evidence. The present mixed-methods study therefore draws upon a sample of 32 professional interpreters to shed both quantitative and qualitative insights into the issue. In particular, a parallel mixed design was used in Phase I of the study to explore the effects of FSR and StrA on three measures of SI performance (i.e., fidelity, fluency and expression), followed by Phase II where data quantitizing was performed to verify an emerging finding from Phase I. Overall, FSR produced differential effects on the three measures, while StrA exerted a consistent detrimental effect across the measures.

Effects of hearing loss on speech recognition under distracting conditions and working memory in the elderly.

PurposeThe current study aimed to evaluate hearing-related changes in terms of speech-in-noise processing, fast-rate speech processing, and working memory; and to identify which of these three factors is significantly affected by age-related hearing loss.MethodsOne hundred subjects aged 65–84 years participated in the study. They were classified into four groups ranging from normal hearing to moderate-to-severe hearing loss. All the participants were tested for speech perception in quiet and noisy conditions and for speech perception with time alteration in quiet conditions. Forward- and backward-digit span tests were also conducted to measure the participants’ working memory.Results1) As the level of background noise increased, speech perception scores systematically decreased in all the groups. This pattern was more noticeable in the three hearing-impaired groups than in the normal hearing group. 2) As the speech rate increased faster, speech perception scores decreased. A significant interaction was found between speed of speech and hearing loss. In particular, 30% of compressed sentences revealed a clear differentiation between moderate hearing loss and moderate-to-severe hearing loss. 3) Although all the groups showed a longer span on the forward-digit span test than the backward-digit span test, there was no significant difference as a function of hearing loss.ConclusionThe degree of hearing loss strongly affects the speech recognition of babble-masked and time-compressed speech in the elderly but does not affect the working memory. We expect these results to be applied to appropriate rehabilitation strategies for hearing-impaired elderly who experience difficulty in communication.

Drama techniques as part of cluttering therapy according to the verbotonal method

Cluttering is a syndrome characterised by a wide range of symptoms. It always contains one or more key elements such as abnormally fast speech rate, greater than expected number of disfluencies, reduced intelligibility due to over-coarticulation and indistinct articulation, inappropriate brakes in speech pattern, monotone speech, disturbance in language planning, etc. Drama activities and storytelling share a number of features that allow spontaneous use during therapy process and detachment from real-time, concrete place or true identity, and therefore allow unprecedented freedom in choosing and creating speech-language expressions. The use of drama elements and techniques in cluttering therapy enables better focusing of the child during therapeutic process and better integration of acquired speech/language skills and knowledge. During therapy, we should be aware to correct the patient both in speech production and in the perception of his/her own speech. From the aspect of speech pathology, it is important how auditory and visual information during patient’s production influence on his/her overall perception of his/her own speech. For all those reasons, it is especially important to choose the appropriate story or event and to present it in a way that ensures good interaction during therapy. The presentation of dramatisation is the ideal tool for stimulation and development of different speech activities, with focus on fluency, correct articulation and other elements that make up values of spoken language. Drama techniques can be implemented trough drama activities or storytelling. When working with children, storytelling and drama techniques can be integrated and combined in multiple ways in order to provide robust and flexible transition toward a structured language.

Semantic Short-Term Memory Supports Sentence Elaboration, Faster Speech Rate, and Longer Utterance Length in Narrative Production: Evidence from Acute Stroke

Semantic Short-Term Memory Supports Sentence Elaboration, Faster Speech Rate, and Longer Utterance Length in Narrative Production: Evidence from Acute Stroke

Normal-rate to fast-rate speech conversion using non-linear compression maps

This paper presents a new technique to convert normal-rate speech into intelligible fast-rate, speeded speech. Speeded speech has long been recognized for its potential to improve spoken media comprehension; however, current tools to significantly speed playback of non-text media are insufficient due to their reliance on inaccurate phoneme analysis. With the ever increasing amount of non-text media online, a method to speed playback that is agnostic of phonemes is needed. Our technique uses spectral and source components of the acoustics to generate a non-linear compression map that characterizes how conversational-rate speech signals are compressed to achieve analogue fast-rate speech signals. A data set containing conversational- and fast-rate speech pairs was processed to determine compression maps corresponding to each pair. A Recursive Neural Network (RNN) was trained on the set of normal-rate speech and the corresponding compression maps. The RNN was then used to generate compression maps for novel normal-rate speech and ultimately output a fast-rate speech signal. Elicited fast-rate speech and speeded speech conversions technique are now being compared perceptually for intelligibility and naturalness.

VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS IN THE SPEECH OF CHEF

This work is dedicated to the analysis of verbal (terminal tones, scales, speech rate) and nonverbal (movement of hands, eyebrows lifting, eye movement) means, that transmit emotional state of the British chef Lesley Waters while presenting the recipe. The research has been done on the basis of samples of quasi spontaneous monologic statements of British chef Lesley Waters when presenting “Vanilla fruit strudel” recipe. The objectives of the study included identification of the set of tones and scales that make up the main melodic repertoire of the respondent, and determination of kinetic means in the investigated phrases of the chef. The subject of the research is gender-based verbal behavior of the British chef. The main objective of the study is to determine the specificity of gender non-verbal and verbal behavior of chefs. Conducted perceptual research has shown that the informant is very emotional, which is reflected in the use of emphatic tones and scales, fast speech rate and usage of short pauses. The prospective of the research is primarily determined by the need to analyze prosodic characteristics (melody, rate) of British chefs’ speech, as the problem is not widely studied and requires research in connection with non-verbal characteristics of chefs’ speech behavior.

Self-perceived and Acoustic Voice Characteristics of Russian-English Bilinguals

The aim of this study was to investigate the vocal characteristics of bilingual individuals speaking in their native language as compared with the English language. The participants consisted of 30 vocally healthy adults, 14 adult male and 16 adult female bilingual subjects, with ages ranging from 23 to 70 years old. The procedures included a demographic questionnaire, a self-perceptual questionnaire, and descriptions of two video clips. The self-assessment included 21 questions that investigated how participants perceived their communication characteristics in each language. For the description of the videos, participants randomly watched two video clips with no audio support. One of the videos was described in English and the other in their native language. Voice samples were recorded to allow for acoustic analysis of selected vocal parameters: pitch, intensity, intonation, and rate of speech. The results indicate that overall, there is no difference in how the individuals perceive their communication characteristics in both languages (all P values > 0.05). The only significant difference was found in speech rate and sentence duration. Individuals had faster speech rate and longer sentences when speaking in English than in Russian. The correlation analysis showed that the younger the participants were when they immigrated to the USA, the more interjections they reported having in their native language. This study showed that language is a contributing factor to varying speech characteristics of Russian-English bilingual individuals. These findings have important implications for clinicians to be aware of cultural-linguistic influence in vocal and speech features.

Compression and truncation: The case of Seoul Korean accentual phrase

Cho, Hyesun and Edward Flemming. 2015. Compression and truncation: The case of Seoul Korean accentual phrase. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.2. 359-382. Compression and truncation are two general strategies adopted by languages in realizing tonal melodies in the face of time pressure. Compression involves adjustment of the phonetic details of tone realization to fit a tone sequence in the time available, while truncation involves deletion of a phonological tone, reducing a melody to fit the segmental material with which it must be associated. Seoul Korean appears to show truncation of tones in response to time pressure resulting from fast speech rate: the Accentual Phrase (AP) is canonically marked by a rise-fall-rise melody (LHLH), but at fast speech rates, APs can be realized with a rising F0 contour. Categorical tone deletion conditioned by speech rate would be theoretically significant because it would imply that a phonological operation can be conditioned by utterance-specific phonetic detail. However, analysis of the realization of the AP melody across a range of speech rates provides evidence that the apparent deletion of tones is actually the end result of compressing the final HLH sequence into such a short interval that the low tone is completely undershot and the two high tones are effectively merged. This analysis illustrates the general point that it is not possible to determine what phonological representation gave rise to a particular phonetic form without explicit analysis of the process of phonetic implementation. (Dankook University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Can you hear my age? Influences of speech rate and speech spontaneity on estimation of speaker age.

Cognitive hearing science is mainly about the study of how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension, but cognitive factors also partake in speech processing to infer non-linguistic information from speech signals, such as the intentions of the talker and the speaker’s age. Here, we report two experiments on age estimation by “naïve” listeners. The aim was to study how speech rate influences estimation of speaker age by comparing the speakers’ natural speech rate with increased or decreased speech rate. In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with audio samples of read speech from three different speaker age groups (young, middle aged, and old adults). They estimated the speakers as younger when speech rate was faster than normal and as older when speech rate was slower than normal. This speech rate effect was slightly greater in magnitude for older (60–65 years) speakers in comparison with younger (20–25 years) speakers, suggesting that speech rate may gain greater importance as a perceptual age cue with increased speaker age. This pattern was more pronounced in Experiment 2, in which listeners estimated age from spontaneous speech. Faster speech rate was associated with lower age estimates, but only for older and middle aged (40–45 years) speakers. Taken together, speakers of all age groups were estimated as older when speech rate decreased, except for the youngest speakers in Experiment 2. The absence of a linear speech rate effect in estimates of younger speakers, for spontaneous speech, implies that listeners use different age estimation strategies or cues (possibly vocabulary) depending on the age of the speaker and the spontaneity of the speech. Potential implications for forensic investigations and other applied domains are discussed.

EFFECT OF DELAYED AUDITORY FEEDBACK, SPEECH RATE, AND SEX ON SPEECH PRODUCTION.

Perturbations in Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) and speech rate were examined as sources of disruptions in speech between men and women. Fluent adult men (n = 16) and women (n = 16) spoke at a normal and an imposed fast rate of speech with 0, 25, 50, 100, and 200 msec. DAF. The syllable rate significantly increased when participants were instructed to speak at a fast rate, and the syllable rate decreased with increasing DAF delays. Men's speech rate was significantly faster during the fast speech rate condition with a 200 msec. DAF. Disfluencies increased with increasing DAF delay. Significantly more disfluency occurred at delays of 25 and 50 msec. at the fast rate condition, while more disfluency occurred at 100 and 200 msec. in normal rate conditions. Men and women did not display differences in the number of disfluencies. These findings demonstrate sex differences in susceptibility to perturbations in DAF and speech rate suggesting feedforward/feedback subsystems that monitor vocalizations may be different between sexes.

Coupling relations underlying complex coordinative patterns in speech production

In studying linguistic behavior, we are often faced to complex dynamical patterns arising from the highly coordinated activity of many partially autonomous processes. In this work, we apply a new approach aimed at studying abstract coupling relations coordinating the behavior of dynamical systems governed by goal oriented behavior. The approach, based on an original version of recurrence analysis, allows to deal with the principal difficulties of this task, which are mainly related to the heterogeneity, the lack of separability and the lack of stationarity of the processes under study. The method is validated trough simulations of theoretical systems and it is adopted to capture (1) invariant abstract coupling structure underlying systematically varying trajectories of the speech articulators involved in the production of labial and coronal plosive and fricative consonants (produced at slow and fast speech rate by five German speakers and recorded via electromagnetic articulography); (2) systematic differences in the coordination between energy modulations observed at different frequency bands in the acoustic signal and showing the interplay between syllable and stress related processes and its relation to rhythmic differences between typologically different languages (pear story narrations were recorded from five speakers per language in German, Italian, French, English, and Polish).

Korean /l/-flapping in an /i/-/i/ context

In this study, we aim to describe kinematic characteristics of Korean /l/-flapping in two speech rates (fast vs. comfortable). Production data was collected from seven native speakers of Seoul Korean (four females and three males) using electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA), which provided two dimensional data on the x-y plane. We examined kinematic properties of the vertical/horizontal tongue tip gesture, the vertical/horizontal (rear) tongue body gesture, and the jaw gesture in an /i/-/i/ context. Gestural landmarks of the vertical tongue tip gesture are directly measured. This serves as the actual anchoring time points to which relevant measures of other trajectories referred. The study focuses on velocity profiles, closing/opening spatiotemporal properties, constriction duration, and constriction minima were analyzed. The results are summarized as follows. First, gradiently distributed spatiotemporal values of the vertical tongue tip gesture were on a continuum. This shows more of a reduction in fast speech rate, but no single instance of categorical reduction (deletion). Second, Korean /l/-flapping predominantly exhibited a backward sliding tongue tip movement, in 83% of production, which is apparently distinguished from forward sliding movement in English. Lastly, there was an indication of vocalic reduction in fast rate, truncating spatial displacement of the jaw and the tongue body, although we did not observe positional variations with speech rate. The present study shows that Korean /l/-flapping is characterized by mixed articulatory properties with respect to flapping sounds of other languages such as English and Xiangxiang Chinese. Korean /l/ flapping demonstrates a language-universal property, such as the gradient nature of its flapping sounds that is compatible with other languages. On the other hand, Korean /l/-flapping also shows a language-particular property, particularly distinguished from English, in that a backward gliding movement occurs during the tongue tip closing movement. Although, there was no vocalic reduction in V2 observed in terms of jaw and tongue body height, spatial displacement of these articulators still suggests truncation in fast speech rate.

말속도와 강도 변조에 따른 경도 마비말장애 환자의 말 용인도 변화

This study examined whether speech acceptability was changed under various conditions of prosodic manipulations. Both speech rate and voice loudness reportedly are associated with acceptability and intelligibility. Speech samples by twelve speakers with mild dysarthria were recorded. Speech rate and loudness changes were made by digitally manipulating habitual sentences. 3 different loudness levels (70, 75, & 80dB) and 4 different speech rates (normal, 20% rapidly, 20% slowly, & 40% slowly) were presented to 12 SLPs (speech language pathologists). SLPs evaluated sentence acceptability by 7-point Likert scale. Repeated ANOVA were conducted to determine if the prosodic type of resynthesized cue resulted in a significant change in speech acceptability. A faster speech rate (20% rapidly) rather than habitual and slower rates (20%, 40% slowly) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.001). An increased vocal loudness (up to 80dB) resulted in significant improvement in acceptability ratings (p <.05). Speech rate and loudness changes in the prosodic properties of speech may contribute to improved acceptability.