Female English Speakers Research Articles

Recognizing Inequity: A Critical Step of Health Literacy for People With Disability.

Receiving accommodations may require a person with physical disability (PWPD) to recognize and address disparate care when it occurs. To explore whether PWPDs recognize disparate health care and how their experiences contribute to the development of strategies to access care. In this qualitative study, we used grounded theory methods to explore perceptions of PWPDs regarding access to health care. Ten PWPDs participated in three semistructured focus group interviews. The analysis used multiple phases of analysis and methods to ensure rigor. Focus groups were held at an urban university campus. Four male and six female English speakers who identified as a PWPD in need of a mobility aid and who attended a primary health care visit in the past year. Seven thematic categories emerged, representing a continuum of stages for recognizing health care as disparate and strategies to receiving equitable health care for PWPDs: (1) unrecognized experiences of normalization of disability discrimination (NODD), with a subtheme of medicalization; (2) knowing what you need; (3) noticing differences; (4) emerging understanding; (5) learning to take personal action; (6) NODD is systemic; and (7) taking control. The findings of this study can be used on micro, meso, and macro levels to work toward equitable health care access and outcomes for clients. What This Article Adds: Occupational therapy practitioners can use these findings to understand the health literacy demands of PWPDs in efforts to access equitable health care and, when necessary, educate clients on their potential need for accommodation, rights to care, and development of strategies for requesting accommodations.

A study of vowel nasalization using instantaneous spectra

Nasalization of vowels is a phenomenon where the oral and nasal tracts participate simultaneously in the production of speech. Acoustic coupling of the oral and nasal tracts, together with the glottal activity, results in a complex dynamic production system. The extent of coupling determines the degree of nasalization in vowels. Changes in the instantaneous response of the vocal tract system are used to study the effects of co-articulatory load of nasals on vowels. Dominant resonance frequency (DRF) contour is extracted from the instantaneous response of the system to determine the duration of the vowel nasalization. The extent of coupling determines the relative dominance of the oral and nasal resonances during the open and closed phases of a glottal cycle. Larger coupling leads to more decay of the energy of the oral resonances, and hence the vowel spectra exhibit predominantly the nasal resonances characteristics. Comparison with the existing measures show the effectiveness of the proposed measures for determining vowel nasalization. Segments of vowels in the context of nasal consonants from utterances of both male and female speakers of English are used to illustrate different aspects of this study on vowel nasalization.

Adaptation of the Connected Speech Test: Rerecording and Passage Equivalency.

Purpose The original Connected Speech Test (CST; Cox et al., 1987) is a well-regarded and often utilized speech perception test. The aim of this study was to develop a new version of the CST using a neutral North American accent and to assess the use of this updated CST on participants with normal hearing. Method A female English speaker was recruited to read the original CST passages, which were recorded as the new CST stimuli. A study was designed to assess the newly recorded CST passages' equivalence and conduct normalization. The study included 19 Western University students (11 females and eight males) with normal hearing and with English as a first language. Results Raw scores for the 48 tested passages were converted to rationalized arcsine units, and average passage scores more than 1 rationalized arcsine unit standard deviation from the mean were excluded. The internal reliability of the 32 remaining passages was assessed, and the two-way random effects intraclass correlation was .944. Conclusion The aim of our study was to create new CST stimuli with a more general North American accent in order to minimize accent effects on the speech perception scores. The study resulted in 32 passages of equivalent difficulty for listeners with normal hearing.

Analysis of vowel production in Mandarin/Hindi/American- accented English for accent recognition systems

With globalization and emerging voice-activated systems, accent recognition systems have gained more importance. Foreign-accented English shows different acoustical characteristics from native English pronunciation. It varies based on native language of speakers. This work investigated the similarities and differences between spectral and time-domain characteristics of vowel production for English /hvd/ words spoken by native Mandarin, Hindi, and American English speakers. Fundamental frequency, the first four formants, mel-cepstral coefficients, linear predictive coefficients, harmonicity, spectral centroid, spectral spread, tonality, spectral flatness, pitch range coefficients, and zero crossings rate were examined for male and female speakers of English. One-way ANOVA was performed to find the significant correlations. Lindblom’s perceptual distance of the corner vowels was calculated for further analysis. Our preliminary findings indicated that the vowel spaces of the male L2 speakers were smaller than the male L1 speakers’ vowel space. The F1-F2 space of the corner vowel /ɑ/ presented the most variance among L1 and L2 speakers. The vowel space of the female Hindi-accented English was found to be nearly triangular shaped. For the vowels /i/ and /ɪ/, Mandarin- and Hindi-accented English showed similar characteristics. Short-time energy had significant means between L1 and L2 speakers (p < 0.001) for the vowels /i/ as in ‘heed’ and /ɪ/ as in ‘hid’. Higher F1 frequencies were calculated for the vowels /ӕ/ as in ‘had’, /ε/ as in ‘head’ and /ʌ/ as in ‘hud’ spoken by Mandarin-accented speakers. Time-domain based features provided noteworthy differences between the female L1 and L2 speakers of English. The baseline classification system showed that spectral features had higher impacts on recognizing Mandarin- and Hindi-accented English.

The Impact of Virtual Human Voice on Learner Trust

The current study investigates if a virtual human’s voice can impact the user’s trust in interacting with the virtual human in a learning setting. It was hypothesized that trust is a malleable factor impacted by the quality of the virtual human’s voice. A randomized alternative treatments design with a pretest placed participants in either a low-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine female voice (Microsoft speech engine), a high-quality TTS engine female voice (Neospeech voice engine), or a human voice (native female English speaker) condition. All three treatments were paired with the same female virtual human. Assessments for the study included a self-report pretest on knowledge of meteorology, which occurred before viewing the instructional video, and a measure of system trust. The current study found that voice type impacts a user’s trust ratings, with the human voice resulting in higher ratings compared to the two synthetic voices.

Lack of effects of gender on the reading rate of long texts

Among various linguistic and extralinguistic factors which may affect speech tempo, the gender of the speaker has received considerable attention. In a number of publications it has been reported that women tend to read at a slower rate than men. However, other studies cast doubt on these findings and the issue needs further investigation. This paper attempts to compare the reading rate of male and female speakers of English on the basis of selected chapters from audiobooks. The recordings analysed are considerably longer than the samples used in previous research. The rate of speech has been measured using phonemes per second, syllables per second and words per second. The results consistently indicate that gender does not affect reading tempo. They are directly applicable in text-to-speech (TTS) software development and may be useful in other disciplines, such as forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics or education.

The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

The Use Of Tag Questions with Male and Female Speakers of English and Serbian

The paper is a report on research meant to discover the extent to which the speakers of English and Serbian employ tag questions as communicative strategies for ensuring pragmatic agreement and increasing the tentativeness of a speech act regarding the role of gender therein. This small-scale contrastive research project, largely inspired and founded on the specificities of gendered discourse style as identified by R. Lakoff (1975, 2004), and later discussed by Holmes (1986), Romaine (2003), Talbot (2003), Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2003) and others, is based on analyzing contextualized question-tagging sampled from a corpus of texts within the journalistic register. The corpus encompasses 100 interviews provided by English and Serbian male and female interviewees from on-line newspapers and magazines. The analysis also addresses such issues as how culturally-conditioned or gender-conditioned tag-question usage is, whether a fixed form of question tagging would be less productive a pattern than the variable form, etc.

Pitch affects voice onset time: A cross-linguistic study

Recent research into the acoustics of infant-directed speech (IDS) in English and Korean suggests that voice-onset time (normalized for varying speech rate) in word-initial aspirated stops are shorter than in adult-directed speech. The present study reports results from experiments conducted to explore the source of this VOT variation in IDS. Female English speakers (n = 10) and female Korean speakers (n = 10) recorded sentences with words varying in laryngeal condition (English: voiced/voiceless; Korean: plain, tense, aspirated) at three different pitches (low, normal, and falsetto). Results suggest that as speakers’ pitch increases, the duration of VOT in aspirated stops decreases. Voiced stops (in English) and plain and tense stops) in Korean showed no difference in VOT across varying pitch conditions. Regression models suggest that VOT becomes less predictive of laryngeal state as speaker pitch increases. Results are discussed in terms of the physiological explanation of the pitch-VOT effect as well as the implications for the development of sound systems in infants.

Cross-language differences in fundamental frequency range: A comparison of English and German

This paper presents a systematic comparison of various measures of f0 range in female speakers of English and German. F0 range was analyzed along two dimensions, level (i.e., overall f0 height) and span (extent of f0 modulation within a given speech sample). These were examined using two types of measures, one based on "long-term distributional" (LTD) methods, and the other based on specific landmarks in speech that are linguistic in nature ("linguistic" measures). The various methods were used to identify whether and on what basis or bases speakers of these two languages differ in f0 range. Findings yielded significant cross-language differences in both dimensions of f0 range, but effect sizes were found to be larger for span than for level, and for linguistic than for LTD measures. The linguistic measures also uncovered some differences between the two languages in how f0 range varies through an intonation contour. This helps shed light on the relation between intonational structure and f0 range.

On the Time Course of Vocal Emotion Recognition

How quickly do listeners recognize emotions from a speaker's voice, and does the time course for recognition vary by emotion type? To address these questions, we adapted the auditory gating paradigm to estimate how much vocal information is needed for listeners to categorize five basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness) and neutral utterances produced by male and female speakers of English. Semantically-anomalous pseudo-utterances (e.g., The rivix jolled the silling) conveying each emotion were divided into seven gate intervals according to the number of syllables that listeners heard from sentence onset. Participants (n = 48) judged the emotional meaning of stimuli presented at each gate duration interval, in a successive, blocked presentation format. Analyses looked at how recognition of each emotion evolves as an utterance unfolds and estimated the “identification point” for each emotion. Results showed that anger, sadness, fear, and neutral expressions are recognized more accurately at short gate intervals than happiness, and particularly disgust; however, as speech unfolds, recognition of happiness improves significantly towards the end of the utterance (and fear is recognized more accurately than other emotions). When the gate associated with the emotion identification point of each stimulus was calculated, data indicated that fear (M = 517 ms), sadness (M = 576 ms), and neutral (M = 510 ms) expressions were identified from shorter acoustic events than the other emotions. These data reveal differences in the underlying time course for conscious recognition of basic emotions from vocal expressions, which should be accounted for in studies of emotional speech processing.

Identification of speaker sex from one vowel across a range of fundamental frequencies

To identify a speaker's sex, listeners may rely on sex-based differences in average fundamental frequency (F0), but overlap in male and female F0 ranges undermines such judgments. To test accuracy of sex-identification throughout the F0 range, listeners were asked to judge sex based on audio recordings of /ɑ/ spoken on a number of overlapping steady F0s by 10 male and 10 female English speakers. In general, listeners performed above chance (71.6% correct). However, near range extrema, listeners followed an apparent bias toward hearing high F0s as female and low as male; confidence was high when accuracy was high and vice-versa. At mid-range, listeners identified sex fairly accurately but were not very confident in their judgments. In a forced-choice task, vowels close in F0 (but beyond the difference limen) were presented in male-female or female-male pairs. Listeners weakly identified speaker sex (63.3% correct). Identification of the male voice was considerably above chance only when the male had the lower F0 of the pair. Reliance on stereotypes of speaking F0 may bias listeners to hear low F0s as male and high F0s as female, perhaps with a contribution from vocal-tract length information. No strong evidence for a contribution of voice quality obtained.

Voice quality variation with fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin.

Previous research has shown that F0 is positively related to H1*-H2* across male speakers of English [Iseli et al. (2006)] and to H1-H2 (after inverse filtering) within individual male speakers of Dutch [Swerts and Veldhuis (2001)]. That is, males who have overall higher-pitched voices generally have overall higher values of H1*-H2* (cross-speaker relation), and as an individual male’s F0 goes up, H1-H2 generally also goes up (within-speaker relation). The present study investigates both of these relations, cross-speaker and within-speaker, for male and female speakers of English and Mandarin, and extends them to a large set of voice quality measures. The speech samples consist of repeated rising and falling tone sweeps, in which speakers began at a self-selected comfortable pitch, and then swept either up or down in pitch to their highest or lowest comfortable pitch. The beginnings of the sweeps are tested for cross-speaker relations, while the entire sweeps are tested for within-speaker relations. VOICESAUCE, a new program for voice analysis, is used to extract F0, energy, cepstral peak prominence, formants and bandwidths, and a variety of harmonic amplitude measures. Many measures are shown to be strongly related to F0. [Work supported by NSF.]

Voice onset time differences between adult males and females: Isolated syllables

The purpose of the study was to compare the voice onset times (VOTs) produced by men and women in isolated syllable utterances. Forty male and 40 female speakers of English repeated a series of CV syllables five times each. The syllables were comprised of the plosives /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/ in combination with the vowels /ɑ/, /i/, and /u/. VOTs were measured from the middle three syllables from each series using a combination of sound spectrogram and oscillogram displays on a computer. No significant differences occurred between the VOTs of the men and women. Significant VOT differences occurred across the vowels, with the plosives before /ɑ/ having shorter VOTs than those before /i/ or /u/. In addition, the VOTs varied by place of production with longer VOTs for alveolar and velar plosives than for bilabial ones. The findings indicated that the speaker's sex was not a factor associated with VOT variability.

Decoding speech prosody in five languages

Twenty English-speaking listeners judged the emotive intent of utterances spoken by male and female speakers of English, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog. The verbal content of utterances was neutral but prosodic elements conveyed each of four emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Identification accuracy was above chance performance levels for all emotions in all languages. Across languages, sadness and anger were more accurately recognized than joy and fear. Listeners showed an in-group advantage for decoding emotional prosody, with highest recognition rates for English utterances and lowest recognition rates for Japanese and Chinese utterances. Acoustic properties of stimuli were correlated with the intended emotion expressed. Our results support the view that emotional prosody is decoded by a combination of universal and culture-specific cues.

The Perception of Vocal Cues of Emotion by Spanish-Speaking Limited English Proficient Children

There is a paucity of data comparing the abilities of bilingual children to distinguish nonverbal, emotional cues of speech in their first language ( L1) and their second language (L2). This study, conducted with 9 Spanish-speaking bilingual children with limited English proficiency, addressed two questions: (a) is there a difference in the accuracy with which normally-developing bilingual children judge vocal cues of emotion in their L1 and L2, and, (b) is their ability to accurately judge these cues in L2 related to their degree of L2 proficiency? The subjects listened to a tape-recorded sentence, in English and Spanish, which conveyed the emotions of happiness, sadness, and anger. A MANOVA with repeated measures two by two factorial design (language by gender) revealed that there was a significant difference between the children's responses to the English and Spanish sentences. Results yielded higher accurate responses in L1. This result could be attributed to the English-speaking male speaker, who did not convey the amount of emotion that the other three speakers did. The subjects did respond quite accurately to the emotions portrayed by the female English speaker and the male and female Spanish speakers. Implications for distinguishing potential language differences from language-learning disabilities are discussed.

Bimodal Speech Perception by Native and Nonnative Speakers of English: Factors Influencing the McGurk Effect

Two experiments explored factors affecting the influence of visual (lip‐read) information on auditory speech perception, the “McGurk effect”, in 120 advanced ESL learners of 4 L1s (Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Malay) and 50 native speakers (NSs) of English. The audio and video speech signals of a female English speaker producing CV syllables with /p,f,w,r,t,k/ and// were combined on videotape. For nonnative speakers (NNSs), identification accuracy of /f/ and /r/ increased with matched visual cues. Visual nonlabials /t,k/ significantly influenced perception of auditory labials. For NSs, significant effects were noted only in noise. When stimuli involved only /p,t,k/, NSs and NNSs reported significant visual effects. Results demonstrate the influence of first language (L1) and linguistic experience on the relative information value of the cues, assumption of perceptual unity, and thus audiovisual integration. Implications for bimodal speech perception and second language instruction are discussed.

The long-term spectrum and perceived emotion

This study shows systematic links between the long-term spectrum of voice (LTS) and the affective dimensions of control, arousal, and pleasure. Fifteen male and 15 female English speakers of three ethnic backgrounds — Australian, British, and Italian — recorded three spoken passages. A three-mode principal components analysis showed that the passages were differentiated by the LTS. In a second study using MANOVA, the three passages were then shown to be perceived differently on the three affective dimensions. Finally, the LTS was shown to be systematically related to the affective dimensions in the ranges 0–350 Hz (control), 2–2.5 kHz (arousal and pleasure), and 4–10 kHz (control). No significant sex or ethnic group effects were found.

Physical acoustic information for magnitude estimation of rate of speech

Several studies have demonstrated that the phonetic identity of a segment can be altered by the rate of a precursive sequence. While this rate normalization effect has been shown for both consonants and vowels [J. L. Miller, Phonetica 38, 159–180(1981)] it has never been clear what the physical acoustic basis of the rate information is. In these experiments, subjects' magnitude estimations of rate for a short passage are used to assess the physical acoustic parameters used by the listener to perceive rate of speech. From earlier experiments [F. Grosjean and N. Lass, Lang. Speech 20(3), 198–208(1977)] it appears likely that the source of information for rate is not based upon any higher information including words or word boundaries. In the first experiment, subjects give rate estimations for a passage, spoken at five rates by a female English speaker that has been low‐pass filtered at 300 Hz. Estimates for these filtered stimuli, in which energy for F1 and higher formants is deleted leaving only pitch and amplitude information, are indistinguishable from those for intact passages. It appears then that not even phonetic, perception is necessary for perception of rate in this paradigm. Data for estimates of rate for passages with only pitch or only amplitude information will also be presented. [Work supported by NINCDS.]

The voicing contrast between English /p/ and /b/ as a function of stress and position-in-utterance

Normal adult female speakers of English produced nonsense utterances like “Papa papa” and “Baba baba baba” with a tube inserted in the corner of the mouth. Bilabial constriction of /p/ and /b/ was defined by means of variation in supraglottal air pressure; voicing (glottal pulsing) was monitored by means of a throat microphone. The percentage of bilabial closure intervals evidencing signs of glottal activity was calculated from these two signals. In addition, the frequency with which /p/ and /b/ showed a clear break in voicing during the closure interval was tabulated. The stop voicing pair /p-b/ was clearly distinguished by voicing in utterance-medial positions, but less so at the margins of utterances. In utterance-initial position only two of eight speakers produced /b/ with closure voicing (i.e., prevoiced), and in utterance-final words post-stressed /b/ was partially devoiced by half the speakers.