Female Speakers Research Articles

Gender Representation Among Foot & Ankle Conference Presenters and Research Authors: A 10-Year Analysis (2012-2022)

Introduction/Purpose: Today women are over 50% of medical school matriculants but remain underrepresented in orthopaedic surgery (~15% of residents and < 6% of practicing surgeons). Moreover, despite different and sometimes controversial reports, the rate of female society memberships and national and international meeting speakers as well as their contribution to leadership positions including moderating sessions, podiums, and symposiums are believed to be low. The objective of this study was to assess whether there is a gap in female representation among invited speakers at American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society (AOFAS) national meetings relative to research productivity as reflected by article authorship in Foot & Ankle International journal (FAI). Methods: Programs for AOFAS specialty days and annual meetings and FAI articles from January 2012 to December 2022 were obtained. Industry-hosted programs were excluded. Gender was identified through personal acquaintance or online search on the biographies of the authors. Presentations and articles were categorized as “technical” or “non-technical”, where technical was defined as relating to basic science or the clinical practice of orthopaedics. Comparisons were done using the Chi-Square Test (significance level= p< 0.05). Results: 1,020 AOFAS presentations and 2,230 FAI articles were analyzed. Gender was unavailable for 0.19% of AOFAS speakers, 4.48% of FAI first authors and 4.13% of FAI senior authors. 11.08% of AOFAS invited national meeting speakers, 15.18% of FAI first authors and 7.40% of FAI senior authors were female. Overall, the proportion of female speakers was significantly lower than female first authors (p= 0.0036), and significantly higher than female senior authors (p < 0.001). In 2018 and 2019, women were more likely to have given “non-technical” AOFAS presentations. There was no significant difference in other years or among FAI articles. The average annual change was +2.00% female AOFAS presenters, +0.31% FAI female first authors and -0.37% FAI female senior authors per year. Conclusion: Women represented 15.16% of first authors in FAI between 2012 and 2022 but 11.08% of invited speakers at AOFAS meetings. Meanwhile, the percentage of female AOFAS membership in the organization as a whole increased from 7.5% to 13%. Thus, despite historically low rates of representation, female Foot & Ankle surgeons were proportionally represented in 2021 and 2022 among invited national conference presentations and research compared to female society membership and female research publications in FAI. There is still room to increase representation of deserving historically under-represented groups, however the increase in female AOFAS presenters demonstrates a positive trend. Figure 1. Percentage of AOFAS Female Podium Speakers and FAI Female 1st Authors, 2012 - 2022

Ideational Grammatical Metaphor of Gender Variation in Central Kurdish Media Discourse

The purpose of this study is to analyze media spoken discourse in Central Kurdish, investigating gender variation, using Halliday's grammatical metaphor as a lens. Halliday identified the ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphor within the SFG. This study relates to the study of SFG in that it examines the linguistic parallels in two interviewees, one male and one female TV interview. The author compiled the findings using a mixed-methods approach and Halliday's grammatical metaphor. The following research concerns are addressed: What is the most common form of nominalized process type of ideational grammatical metaphor in Central Kurdish media discourse? What is the area of similarities and differences in the selection of nominalized process types in Central Kurdish spoken media discourse of male and female speakers? How is reality expressed through ideational grammatical metaphor in Central Kurdish media discourse? During the speeches, 175 distinct nominalized processes were identified. Four of the six nominalized process categories were implemented. The total number of nominalized material process selections is 115, or 65.71% of the total, with verbal process types representing 48 events, or 27.42% of the total, relational process types representing only 5 selections, or 2.85% of the total. Three forms of each behavioral and existential were employed, accounting for 1.71%. And lastly, there is only one selection of mental process, accounting for 0.57%. Both interviewees select material and verbal processes as their most preferred choices. In addition, the author discovered that both political figures attempt to convey their political beliefs through nominalized process types.

Perceptie van een anderstalig accent: Een experimentele studie naar de perceptieve aanpassing aan een exogeen geaccentueerd Nederlands klinkercontrast

This study examines whether Dutch L1 listeners adapt to Italian accented Dutch vowels, and how short-term experience with one L2 speaker’s accent might help these listeners to understand novel words and other L2 speakers with a similar accent. 100 Belgian Dutch L1 listeners were exposed to 40 Dutch target words, in which the front vowel had been replaced by an ambiguous sound in between /ɪ/ and /i/. These stimuli were produced by a female Italian speaker of Dutch. To assess perceptual adaptation and generalization, participants were asked to identify the vowel in five Dutch /ɪ/-/i/ minimal pairs across two speaker conditions: stimuli were either produced by the same female speaker or by a digitally generated male-sounding speaker. For neither speaker did we find perceptual adaptation, hence no generalization to novel situations could be observed. The results highlight the importance of stimulus selection and the need for a detailed background questionnaire for listeners, including information on their familiarity with L2 accents.

An acoustic study on age-related changes in vowel production of Chinese

This paper investigates the relationship between vowel production and age using speech data from 109 Chinese L1 speakers (61 females and 48 males) covering an age range of 20 to 80 years. Acoustical estimation of vocal tract length (VTL) as well as multiple acoustic metrics are analyzed with generalized additive mixed models (GAMM). The results indicate that: (1) After controlling for VTL, F0 and duration, vowels show a centralization trend with increasing age, with a more significant effect observed in female speakers; (2) VTL does not significantly change with age; (3) The patterns observed in vowel distinctiveness and duration may present evidence contradicting the notion of vowel lengthening as a compensatory mechanism; (4) The patterns of age-related changes in different measurements and different genders are diverse. The U-shaped change patterns are found in the male speakers and the age around 50 may serve as a turning point. Based on these findings, we have explored some possible reasons for inconsistent conclusions in previous studies. The physiological aging phenomena of vowel production and potential compensatory mechanisms on motor control abilities, as well as other possible influencing factors, are also discussed.

Gender inequities in ENT: Insights from women speakers at American Head and Neck Society meetings.

Gender inequity exists across national speakers at American Head and Neck Society (AHNS) conferences. This qualitative study explores potential causes of this disparity by surveying women invited to speak at AHNS between 2007 and 2019 and examining advice, resources, and meaningful actions from "those who made it." An internet search for contact information for the 131 female AHNS was performed. An electronic survey was distributed via email. Deidentified qualitative responses were coded by two independent researchers into themes. Themes characterize barriers that female head and neck (HN) surgeons face and describe ways to mitigate the impact of these for the next generation. Contact information for 73/131 female AHNS speakers was obtained via internet search. Email responses were received from 22/73 (30%). Of those, respondents specialized in otolaryngology (n = 17), medical oncology (n = 2), palliative care (n = 1), vascular surgery (n = 1), and thoracic surgical oncology (n = 1). All speakers worked in academic settings at varying stages of their career with 81.8% (18/22) of respondents fellowship-trained (primarily HN surgery). Concerns about gender disparity in ENT were grouped into the following themes: (1) recruiting women to ENT, (2) removing barriers to career advancement, (3) diversifying ENT's national presence, and (4) improving the broader culture of HN surgery. Respondents emphasized a need for diversifying leadership, early exposure to otolaryngology in medical school, and connecting students with female role models. Outstanding research, involvement at annual meetings, and committee membership were consistently deemed important for establishing a national presence in the field. Implicit bias, "boys clubs" culture, and burdensome childcare responsibilities were described as barriers to career advancement. While encouraging more women to enter otolaryngology residencies, increasing the number female role models and establishing strong mentoring networks may help to mitigate challenges. Meaningful progress requires the efforts of both male and female allies within the specialty. Simple solutions, such as educating on implicit bias, removing demographics from applications, and eliminating hidden penalties for maternity leave, may help improve diversity and mitigate barriers to career progression for underrepresented groups within ENT.

Development of Digit in Noise Test in Hindi.

The digit in the noise test is a simple hearing screening tool that can identify hearing loss at the early stage. This screening tool takes less time than traditional pure-tone audiometry. There is a scarcity of hearing health professionals with few resources for carrying out hearing screening on a large scale in India. Hence, a hearing screening tool for the Hindi-speaking population is needed. The study aimed to develop and validate the Digit in Noise test in Hindi (DIN-H). A native Hindi female speaker recorded single digits from 1 to 9 made into triplet combinations, which were binaurally presented to 20 normal hearing subjects having hearing thresholds less than 25 dBHL from 250 to 8000Hz in the presence of broadband speech-shaped noise. The digit triplets were homogenized using speech intelligibility function for similar difficulty levels across stimuli. The homogenized stimuli were evaluated by obtaining the Speech Recognition Threshold (SRT) of 20 normal hearing subjects. The Mean SRT was - 10.4 and - 11.3 dB before and after homogenization. A strong positive correlation existed between test and retest SRTs (0.78). Mean SRT and slope obtained before and after optimization were comparable to other languages like Korean and English. This test can act as a reliable screening tool for assessing individuals. The test was administered to 106 normal hearing participants. The 95th percentile of the SRT value obtained was - 5.6 dB, which was kept as a cut-off score for the screening test. DIN-H can be used as a screening tool for assessing the integrity of the auditory system on a large scale in less time for the Hindi-speaking population.

Improving End-to-End Models for Children’s Speech Recognition

Children’s Speech Recognition (CSR) is a challenging task due to the high variability in children’s speech patterns and limited amount of available annotated children’s speech data. We aim to improve CSR in the often-occurring scenario that no children’s speech data is available for training the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Traditionally, Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN) has been widely used in hybrid ASR systems to address acoustic mismatch and variability in children’s speech when training models on adults’ speech. Meanwhile, End-to-End (E2E) systems often use data augmentation methods to create child-like speech from adults’ speech. For adult speech-trained ASRs, we investigate the effectiveness of augmentation methods; speed perturbations and spectral augmentation, along with VTLN, in an E2E framework for the CSR task, comparing these across Dutch, German, and Mandarin. We applied VTLN at different stages (training/test) of the ASR and conducted age and gender analyses. Our experiments showed highly similar patterns across the languages: Speed Perturbations and Spectral Augmentation yield significant performance improvements, while VTLN provided further improvements while maintaining recognition performance on adults’ speech (depending on when it is applied). Additionally, VTLN showed performance improvement for both male and female speakers and was particularly effective for younger children.

Mapping acoustic characteristics of emotional prosody in Mandarin disyllabic words: A machine-learning approach

This study conducted an acoustic-prosodic mapping analysis of emotional prosody in Mandarin Chinese. It utilized a validated audiometry corpus with 450 disyllabic words. The spoken words covered five basic emotions produced by a female speaker: angry, sad, happy, fearful, and neutral. A machine-learning approach was adopted to map key acoustic-prosodic features for Mandarin emotional vocalization. The results revealed distinctive acoustic profiles for each emotion, highlighting variations in fundamental frequency, intensity, speaking rate, and voice quality. Emotional utterances consistently exhibited higher mean F0 values than neutral expressions. Fear displayed the highest crest in F0. Angry and happy utterances showed greater vocal intensity and a faster speaking rate compared to fearful and sad expressions. While anger was associated with a creaky voice quality, sadness corresponded with a breathier voice quality. The current findings are limited with the use of the single-speaker corpus. Ongoing efforts aim to expand the corpus with more speakers to test the generalizability and scalability of the analysis approach for subsequent investigations.

How rhythmic cues influence perception of accent distance across L1 and L2 English speakers

Segmental and suprasegmental cues can both contribute to listeners’ accent strength and distance judgments. This study examined the influence of a suprasegmental cue—rhythm—on listeners’ judgments of accent distance. Rhythm was quantified using two measures of variability in vocalic interval duration: normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and VarcoV. Thirty adults ranked productions from female and male speakers from six L1 and six L2 English varieties (24 speakers) across six sentences based on their perceived distance from Midland American English (the local dialect). Linear mixed effect models predicted accent distance ratings from rhythm measures—specifically, differences in nPVI and VarcoV between the L1/L2 speakers and Midland speakers, with speaking rate and sentence length as covariates. Differences between L1/L2 speakers’ and Midland speakers’ nPVI and VarcoV scores did not significantly predict accent distance rankings. However, significant interactions between nPVI and certain accents (e.g., Irish, Southern American, Cantonese-accented English) suggest that rhythmic properties may significantly impact accent distance judgements for some accent varieties. These results provide further insight into how rhythmic cues contribute to accent perception. [Work supported by NSF grants 1941691 and 1941662].

Lóngyóu tones and tone sandhi

This paper is a descriptive and analytic study of the tones and tone sandhi of the Southern Wu dialect of Lóngyóu (龙游), a city of c. 400,000 inhabitants located about 375 km southwest of Shanghai in Western Zhejiang Province, China. It is based on data collected in 2018 from two female native speakers. Our data is analyzed with Praat (Boersma and Weenick in Praat: doing phonetics by computer, 1992–2021) to document the F0 and duration correlates to the tonal categories and their sandhi changes. Evidence is presented for the representation of the tones in terms of Register and Contour (Bao in On the nature of tone, 1990; The structure of tone, Oxford University Press, 1999). One of the sandhis is analyzed as the conjunction of two Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky in Optimality theory, MIT Press, 1993, 2004) markedness constraints. A lexically-determined reflex of the Middle Chinese chiuhsheng metatony is also documented.

Полемика саратовской общественности вокруг пьесы М. П. Арцыбашева «Ревность»

Based on the material published in newspapers Saratovskiy Listok (Saratov Leaflet) and Saratovskiy Vestnik (Saratov Herald) the article analyzes the dispute in Saratov community over a provocative drama about a “wife killer” Jealousy – the first play written by a fashionable and scandalous author, M. P. Artsybashev. The reasons for the popularity of the play’s simplified interpretation of F. Nietzsche’s ideas that influenced the development of gender issues and shaped the shocking libertine image of a “new” female predator in public consciousness are revealed. The article observes 12 invariably full-house performances that were staged in November and December of 1913 in the City Theatre of Saratov. Much attention is paid to the dispute held by Saratov intellectuals on the topic of “women and jealousy” and to a mock public trial that had caused a wide publicity; in the course of this trial the husband who had murdered his wife was acquitted and the wife who had flirted openly with other men was found guilty of “reprehensible conduct”. The speech of the only female speaker taking part in the dispute – a teacher of Saratov refresher courses for women by A. I. Lelkova – stands out. The reaction of Saratov press to the lectures of Moscow speakers (About Women’s Freedom and Men’s Slavery by N. Ya. Abramovich and The Woman Judged by Modern Literature by S. Glagol’) is described. Parodies on Jealousy published in the newspapers of Saratov and therefore indicating the popularity of Artsybashev’s play are also discussed. The study concludes that the reviewers of Saratov newspapers were trying to explain the popularity of Jealousy both in terms of its artistic value (in comparison with L. N. Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and L. N. Andreyev’s dramas) and from the perspective of social issues reflected in the play (women’s rights and social status in the family and society, abusive relationships, domestic violence). The reviewers of Saratovskiy Listok gave overall favorable and sometimes rapturous responses to Jealousy, while Saratovskiy Vestnik printed in general negative, sarcastic reviews.

Acoustic and Spectral Analysis of Adi Triphthongs

Adi, a zero-resource indigenous tribal language of Arunachal Pradesh, originated in Tibeto-Burman. According to the “UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of 2017” report, Adi is critically endangered. In this research, two new Adi triphthongs, /uai/ [uai] and /oai/ [ɔai], are proposed in the phoneme set of the Adi language. Adi has 51 phonemes, including 14 monophthongs (7 short and 7 long vowels), 19 diphthongs, two triphthongs, and 16 consonants. This research analysed Adi triphthongs’ spectral and acoustic properties, including intensity variation, long-term average spectrum (LTAS), and formant distribution. The mean of the first four formant frequencies of male and female Adi speakers is measured, which may be the identification of these two phones in the Adi speech recognition systems. Four different Adi words for each triphthong are recorded from 68 individual native Adi speakers (32 males and 36 females) in Arunachal Pradesh. This study may be helpful for phonetic modelling to build speech recognition applications for the Adi language.

Differences in nasalance scores obtained with different Nasometer headsets

ABSTRACT The goal of the present research study was to investigate possible differences in nasalance scores between different Nasometer headgears. Frequency response characteristics of microphone pairs in a Nasometer model 6200, a model 6450 and two model 6500 headsets were compared using long-term average spectra of white noise and multi-speaker babble signals. Prerecorded sound files from a male and a female speaker were used to record nasalance scores with the four Nasometer headsets and to calculate cumulative absolute differences within and between the headsets. The main outcome measures were the cumulative absolute differences between the decibel (dB) values in the frequency bins from 300 to 750 Hz for the nasal and oral channels of each microphone pair. Cumulative absolute differences between nasalance scores of repeated stimuli within and across Nasometer headsets were tabulated. Results showed that cumulative absolute differences for the frequency range 300–750 Hz were between 6.58 and 7.68 dB. Within headsets, 95.6% to 100% of measurements of all four Nasometer headsets were within 3 nasalance points, although test–retest differences of up to 6 nasalance points were found. Between headsets, 56.1% to 98.9% of measurements were within 3 nasalance points, with the single largest difference of 8 nasalance points. In conclusion, differences between repeated nasalance scores obtained with the same and different headsets were noted. Clinicians should allow a margin of error of ±6 to 8 nasalance points when interpreting scores from different Nasometer headsets.

A Contrastive Pragmatics Study of Invitations in British English and Japanese

Abstract This study offers a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective on invitations. It explores invitation seQuences in a symmetrical invitation-refusal situation, performed by 20 female native speakers of British English and 20 female native speakers of Japanese, from a discursive approach using role plays. The qualitative analysis of the data obtained from the adapted version of conversation analysis revealed some similarities and differences in turn designs of the English and the Japanese invitations. Although pre-sequences were highly frequent in the English data, they were more so in the Japanese data. The analysis of the linguistic formats of the invitations in the two sets of data revealed that an approach to handle uncertainty seen in the cases where the invitation was initiated with a preface differed – the English speakers used a syntactic solution whereas the Japanese speakers used a sequential solution. These findings highlight the importance of analysing speech acts in situated interactions.

تأثير نوع الجنس على عملية الإقناع في الخطاب السياسي

The current study aims at speculating the notion of persuasion in relation to gender. Persuasion as a technical term is a process of convincing others rationally to change their state of minds in accordance with a specific purpose.
 The study hypothesizes that persuasion is a process rather than a state of affairs. Also, it hypothesizes that female speakers are more successful in following the persuasion techniques to convince their audience of their points of view than men. Also, it is hypothesized that women rely more on the mode of pathos than the other three modes; logos, ethos and kairos, while men rely more on the logos mode of persuasion.
 The study comes with some conclusions the most important of which is that men use more persuasion techniques than women with the preference of the techniques of evidence, repetition and analogy. Women prefers to use the techniques of inclusion and repletion. It is also found that women rely heavily on the pathos mode of persuasion while men rely on the modes of logos, ethos and kairos. Furthermore, it is found that there is a strong relation between the mode of persuasion the speaker prefers and the techniques followed. Finally, it is found that the technique of repetition is relative to the notion of relativity since it use is successful when it is rational and unsuccessful when used frequently.

A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Stupidity or Stubbornness Expressions in Jordanian Spoken Arabic

The study investigated the impact of age and gender on the use of impoliteness strategies deduced from the use of metaphorical expressions of stupidity and stubbornness in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA). The data has been collected through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which consisted of 20 situations related to stupidity and stubbornness. The participants of the study were 200 Jordanian males and females whose ages ranged between 20-65-year-old. The study adopted Culpeper's (1996) model as a theoretical framework to analyze the data. The findings showed that the most frequently used strategy is positive impoliteness while the least used strategy is sarcasm among male and female speakers. It was also found out that younger speakers outperformed the other age ranges of speakers in the use of impoliteness strategies. Jordanian elderly female speakers used the positive output strategies more than males in JSA, whereas middle age speakers used these strategies the least.

Exploring (Im)Politeness Strategies in Indirect Reports in Persian across Genders

Politeness and impoliteness strategies create a vital social practice in our daily and professional interactions. Being once an issue in the code of conduct protocols, (im)politeness nowadays marks an interdisciplinary scientific field. Regarding this importance, this study explored the politeness and impoliteness strategies used in changing direct speech to indirect speech among male and female Persian speakers. Eighty Iranian Persian speakers (36 males and 44 females) were given a discourse completion task. Brown and Levinson’s taxonomy of politeness strategies and Culpeper’s impoliteness taxonomy were used to analyze the sample. The findings revealed that the propositional content of a direct speech was maintained in the indirect speech in Persian with different attitudinal manners. The results also demonstrated a significant difference between the male and female participants in terms of impoliteness indirect strategies; however, there was no significant difference between them on the output strategies. Additionally, the results revealed that the most frequent politeness strategies used by Persian speakers included positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record, and bold on-record, respectively. The implications of the current research may lead to a deeper and greater understanding of the role of politeness strategies applied in language learning and teaching in EFL contexts.

Another proposal to the unknown female identity of אמרת in Psalm 16:2

There is a difficulty in determining the subject of אמרת in Psalm 16:2. This problem arises from the context. Psalm 16:1 reveals that the speaker of the whole Psalm 16 is David himself: לְדָוִד and the usage of the first person singular of the verb חסה is to denote that David is the speaker. Psalm 16:2, nevertheless, changes the first person singular from verse 1 to the second person feminine singular. In other words, the subject of verse 1 is David himself or a male speaker, whereas the subject of verse 2 shifts to an unknown female speaker. As a result, this shift creates two difficult questions. Firstly, why does David replace the first person singular in Psalm 16:1 to the second person feminine singular in Psalm 16:2? Secondly, who is this second person feminine singular in Psalm 16:2? This research argues for the influence of Phoenician language to Psalm 16:2; therefore, Phoenician language offers solutions to those difficulties.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is a combination of Biblical Studies and Linguistics. This article attempts to apply a comparative linguistic approach to Psalm 16:2.

Gender Differences in Language Use in Talks at Google

This study examines the linguistic features utilised by male and female native English speakers during their Talks at Google using Lakoff and Lakoff’s framework of women’s language. The analysis is conducted on a sample of 14 videos, consisting of seven for each gender, using a mixed-method approach. The quantitative analysis presents the frequencies of the utterances used by the speakers, while the qualitative analysis identifies the language forms employed by each gender. The findings reveal that both genders employed the linguistic features suggested by Lakoff in their talks. Contrary to Lakoff and Lakoff’s assumptions, the female speakers utilised fewer linguistic features, accounting for only 47.43% of the features present in the corpus. Specifically, female speakers used intensifiers, tag questions and humour more frequently than male speakers, while male speakers employed empty adjectives, hedges, hypercorrect grammar and super polite forms more often than female speakers. The results provide insights into the language usage patterns of each gender and allude to possible changes in women’s use of linguistic patterns.

The Impact of Stimuli Length and Analytic Method on Auditory 'Gaydar' Research.

This research investigates voice-based categorization of speakers' sexual orientation, the so-called 'auditory gaydar', while considering stimuli length and the type of measures assessing gaydar judgments. In Study 1 (N=80), heterosexual individuals listened to gay and heterosexual male speakers in short (single word), medium (single sentence), or long (two sentences) recordings. Next, they guess the speakers' sexual orientation on a Kinsey-like and binary choice. Participants were overall inaccurate in recognizing gay speakers when gaydar judgments were provided on a binary choice. Gay speakers were rated as more gay on a Kinsey-like scale than their heterosexual counterparts, but only when short and medium recordings were listened to. Study 2 (N=149) examined gaydar accuracy for both male and female speakers by using the same procedure. Gaydar judgments were overall inaccurate for gay and lesbian speakers. For male speakers, a difference between the perceived sexual orientation of gay and heterosexual speakers emerged when stimuli were long. For female speakers, such a difference occurred only in the short and medium recording conditions. Study 3 (N=137) examined gaydar judgments for male and female speakers when stimuli length was manipulated as the number of words progressively presented in a sentence: short (article), medium (article+first word), long (sentence) stimulus. Overall, gaydar judgments were inaccurate. Gay and lesbian (vs. heterosexual) speakers tended to be rated as more gay on the Kinsey-like scale in the medium stimulus condition. These findings suggest that gaydar judgments can be influenced by the type of measure and stimuli.