Male Speakers Research Articles

An Acoustic Analysis of Voice Onset Time in the Production of Voiceless Plosives in English and Iraqi Tikrity Arabic

This paper is a study of voice onset time (VOT) in Iraqi Tikrity Arabic and English. The stops /t, k/ were used in initial position and were embedded in words which were presented to ten native speakers of Iraqi Tikrity Arabic and four English native speakers. Recordings were made and analyzed using computer software that generated a spectrogram for each word (prrat). The results prove that stops in Iraqi Tikrity Arabic and in English occur at the same place along the VOT. The study also found that place of articulation has a significant effect on VOT values and asserts the strong relationship between VOT values and place of articulation. Moreover vowel context has its significant effect on VOT values and asserts the strong relationship between VOT values and vowel context. Additionally, it is found that gender impact on VOT values varied from one language group to another, gender has no significant effect in the production of voiceless plosives in Iraqi Tikrity Arabic. Whereas English male speakers produce longer voice onset time than Female speakers.

모방, 창조, 극화

Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) represents an important watershed in the history of the English sonnet. In a situation where the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet had long dominated the English literary scene, Sidney’s attempt to claim originality in his sonnet sequence was faced with a challenging task. He couldn’t help imitating the Petrarchan model to a considerable extent; sonnet writing breaking with the Petrarchan tradition was as yet unimaginable. Hence, his fervent desire for originality often places him in a dilemma. There is a constant tug-of-war between imitation and invention in Astrophil and Stella. However, his work at last turns out to be inventive rather than imitative. What seems instrumental in achieving its originality is dramatization—especially, fashioning the lovers as forceful dramatic characters. They are by no means typical of Petrarchan lovers. In contrast to the woman who remains mostly unresponsive to the male speaker’s courtship in the Petrarchan love sonnet, Stella surprisingly confesses her love for Astrophil in the Eighth Song, which constructs a narrative out of quotations of dialogue between the lovers. As for Astrophil, his failure to renounce carnal desire for Stella—which, being dramatized, calls for “some food”—presents him as a physical presence. In addition, the allegory of Astrophil’s relationship to Cupid (who represents erotic passion) dramatizes his rejection of Platonic love, which embraces an ascetic ideal. Consequently, dramatization serves a crucial role in subverting the ideals of Petrarchan love. To conclude, Sidney’s work paved the way for the English sonnet to evolve uniquely, in a way that makes it independent of the influence of Petrarchanism.

Gender Based Conversation Topics of Japanese Native Speakers on Contact Situations with Japanese Learners of Indonesia: First-Time Meeting Encounter

This study aims to observe the trends in the categories and types of topics raised by male and female Japanese speakers in conversations with contact situations (with Indonesian speakers) at the first meeting. The conversation is conducted via roleplay in the Japanese language with two settings: a conversation at a cultural exchange event at a university in Indonesia (first setting) and a conversation on a train in Indonesia (second setting). The experiment involved 20 groups consisting of 10 male conversation groups and 10 women's conversation groups. Each group consists of one Japanese-speaking student and one Indonesian-speaking student. Conversations were conducted online using ZOOM and were recorded by researchers. Conversation topics were collected using the conversational engagement-free listening technique and the note-taking technique, in which the researcher listened to the recorded conversations and recorded the topics raised by Japanese speakers. From the data obtained, it is known that male and female Japanese speakers, both in the first and second settings, mainly raise topics related to the Indonesian-Japanese situation and culture. Topics in the category of personal information are also often raised by male and female Japanese speakers in both the first and second settings. In addition, judging from the number of types of topics and the number of occurrences of topics, female Japanese speakers tend to focus less on specific topics. In contrast, male Japanese speakers tend to focus on specific topics.

Nonverbal Codes in Interpersonal Communication Between Genders of Japanese Native Speakers

This study aims to describe the response when male and female speakers of the Japanese language perform interpersonal communication, which is indicated by conflict by looking at the nonverbal codes and the nonverbal functions used by the threatened communicant. The reason for choosing this topic is that men and women often experience miscommunication when communicating interpersonally, which causes conflicts between men and women. Understanding each other's nonverbal codes shown by each communicator is a way to establish better intergender communication. The theory used is the theory of 3F (freeze, flight, and fight) from Navarro & Karlins (2008) and the theory of nonverbal functions from Ekman and Friesen (1969). The data collection technique used in this study is the note-taking technique and analyzed using a pragmatic equivalent technique. The results of this study show that men who feel threatened by women more often use the fight response, while women who are threatened use the freeze response more often. Men use 16 gestures, while women use 34 when they feel threatened. Looking at the other person is men's and women's most frequently used gesture. Men showed nonverbal codes 7 times, with the most nonverbal code shown being discomfort. Women showed nonverbal codes 18 times, with the most nonverbal codes shown being discomfort, nervousness, worry, stress and fear, and nervousness. There are 9 nonverbal functions in intergender communication, with repetition being the nonverbal function often shown. Women are more likely to get threats from men. Women use nonverbal communication more often.

How neurotypical listeners recognize emotions expressed through vocal cues by speakers with high-functioning autism.

We conducted an investigation to explore how neurotypical (NT) listeners perceive the emotional tone of voice in sentences spoken by individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and NT speakers. The investigation included both male and female speakers from both groups. In Study 1, NT listeners were asked to identify the emotional prosody (anger, fear, happiness, surprise or neutral) conveyed by the speakers. Results revealed that emotional expressions produced by male ASD speakers were generally less accurately recognized compared to male NT speakers. In contrast, emotions expressed by female ASD speakers were more accurately categorized compared to female NT speakers, except when expressing fear. This suggests that female ASD speakers may not express emotional prosody in the same way as their male counterparts. In Study 2, a subset of produced materials was rated for valence, voice modulation, and voice control to supplement Study 1 results: Female ASD speakers sounded less negative when expressing fear compared to female NT speakers. Male ASD speakers were perceived as less positive than NT speakers when expressing happiness. Voice modulation also differed between groups, showing a tendency for ASD speakers to follow different display rules for both positive emotions (happiness and surprise) tested. Finally, male ASD speakers were rated to use voice cues less appropriately compared to NT male speakers, an effect less pronounced for female ASD speakers. Together, the results imply that difficulties in social interactions among individuals with high-functioning ASD could be due to non-prototypical voice use of male ASD speakers and emphasize that female individuals do not show the same effects.

Preliminary Findings From the Hearing Assessment in Response to Noise Screener: A New Pediatric Tool for Measuring Speech Identification in Noise

Purpose: As part of the development of a speech-in-noise screener, speech recognition was measured in quiet and in an interrupted noise for 59 children with typical development according to parent report. Method: There were 39 monolingual and 20 bilingual participants. A corpus of 107 words were presented by a male and female speaker and present in the following conditions: +3 dB signal-to- noise ratio (SNR), −3 dB SNR, and quiet. Results: The participants showed increasing difficulty with speech identification as the SNR decreased. Additionally, age-related differences in accuracy were observed at each noise level. Conclusion: Our findings provide preliminary support for the utility and efficacy of a speech-in-noise screener for use with children.

Accommodation Patterns in the Speech of Arabic-Speaking Children and Adolescents: A Variationist Analysis

This paper presents a variationist analysis of patterns of speech accommodation by 40 Arabic-speaking children and adolescents (aged 3–17) experiencing dialect contact in a Bedouin speech community near Damascus, Syria. It examines participants’ use of the phonological variables (θ), (ð), and (q), and the morphophonological feminine suffix (-a) in recorded sociolinguistic interviews and play sessions with two female fieldworkers, a local and an urban speaker, in order to investigate accommodation patterns across different interlocutors. Accommodation patterns were influenced by age, gender, and the linguistic variable under examination. Convergence to the urban interviewer was most evident in the realization of (q), whereas little convergence, and indeed variation, occurred in the realization of (-a), and more convergence occurred in the speech of girls and speakers younger than 15. Divergence and maintenance emerged in the speech of 15–17-year-old male speakers. These patterns are analysed in light of Accommodation Communication Theory and issues of identity and linguistic prestige in Arabic. Accommodative behaviour in the speech of participants exhibits their awareness of the social value of the phonological variables under investigation and demonstrates a high level of sociolinguistic awareness and competence.

Speaker Identification in Multiple Languages: Regional, Indonesian, and English with Short Utterance

One of the authentication models that are currently often used is based on biometrics, such as eye retina, fingerprint, and speech recognition. Moreover, textindependent speaker identification is one of the domains of speech recognition that has been widely studied. Short speech duration in the speaker identification process is one of the challenges in the field of speaker recognition. Accuracy is a great issue when speech duration shorter, besides identification system has to be general enough to process various languages with different dialects which have their own characteristic based on tribe and region. Therefore, the author of this study introduces the speaker identification system in multi languages that comprise of regional, Indonesian, and English with short utterance. Researchers used MFCC technique to extract voice features and CNN as the classification model. There are two kinds of dataset used, open dataset for regional and English language, and own dataset for Indonesian. Own dataset used is a voice recording of 18 persons of different gender who each read the text in several paragraphs of sentences in Indonesian. Whereas public dataset of regional language used consisted of 80 speakers, 41 Sundanese and 39 Javanese. As for English dataset, 126 male speakers and 125 female speakers were taken from LibriSpeech. Tests are carried out separately with variety of language and speech duration, about 3 seconds in English and regional languages, 1 and 3 seconds in Indonesian. The result, best accuracy obtained by each dataset is 95% (regional dataset), 94% (English dataset), and 98% (private dataset).

VSpace: A browser-based vowel synthesiser

Two-formant representation of the universal vowel space is a foundational model in phonetics (Fant & Risberg 1963; Traunmüller & Lacerda 1983), but tools for rapid synthesis of vowel sounds corresponding to points in the vowel space are limited. Stand-alone applications such as the Formant Synthesizer Demo (Beskow, 2000) provide this functionality, and rich tools for formant synthesis are available in Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2023), Matlab (Rabiner et al., 2023) and other platforms, but these tools are not universally accessible, while web-based speech synthesis tools (e.g., Thapen, 2017) do not typically allow systematic manipulation or quantification of key acoustic parameters. VSpace is a browser-based formant synthesizer developed using the Tone.js Web Audio framework. A universal vowel space is represented as a trapezoid scaled to typical male, female or child speaker formant ranges. Clicking on any point generates a vowel sound corresponding to the first and second formant frequencies selected, synthesized with typical F3 and F4 frequencies excited by a selectable source signal. IPA symbols corresponding to typical formant frequencies for language-specific vowel phonemes may be superimposed on the vowel space. Key synthesis parameters are configurable through the web interface to allow exploration of the acoustic consequences for vowel perception.

Features of speech signal recognition in conditions of vocal competition with normal hearing and with hearing or speech disorders

We studied the features of speech signals perception in conditions of vocal competition based on gender (male/female voice) in subjects of different ages and status of auditory and speech functions. Psychophysical measurements were carried out while simulating a “speech cocktail” situation by simultaneously pronounced different words by a male and female. The average fundamental voice frequency for the male speaker was 108 ± 5.92 Hz, for the female speaker – 185 ± 12.03 Hz. Both speakers were standard native speakers of the Russian language. Digital recordings of speech signals were equalized in intensity and compounded so that the total test stimulus was a synchronized mixture of words spoken by a male (M) and female (F) voice. Test speech signals were presented through headphones or through a speaker located in front of the auditor at a distance of 50 cm. The indicators of reaction time and the number of correct recognitions of words of the target speaker (M or F) were compared in 4 groups of subjects of different ages and hearing or speech status: adult subjects with normal hearing and speech (n = 35) and with hearing impaired (n = 26); schoolchildren with normotypical development (n = 26) and with speech disorders (n = 25). The results indicated a falling in the ability to segrerate target speech streams under conditions of vocal competition in the subjects with hearing and speech dysfunctions included in the comparative study. Differences in the perception of male and female voices in subjects with hearing loss and with speech problems were obtained. This result may have a biological and social basis. The data have practical significance for the development of a system of auditory and speech training and modern hearing aid technologies.

Variation in pre-nasal raising of TRAP in Australian English

Phonetically raised and fronted realizations of pre-nasal TRAP are increasingly common in Australian English with previous research suggesting that greater raising may be associated with speakers from monolingual English-speaking backgrounds. Here, we present the results of an acoustic examination of pre-nasal TRAP raising (which we refer to as HAND) in a corpus of speech recordings from 183 adolescent speakers (aged 15–18) from five areas of Sydney that differ according to levels of linguistic diversity and the major heritage languages spoken (English-only, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese). We extracted 1971 items containing the HAND vowel, along with 1807 items of pre-obstruent TRAP and 540 items of pre-obstruent DRESS. We calculated the degree of raising in HAND relative to pre-obstruent TRAP and DRESS through Euclidean Distance. The results show increased HAND raising in female speakers, although less raising is seen in the area with the highest proportion of Vietnamese language background speakers. Among male speakers the greatest incidence of raising is seen in the area with the lowest level of linguistic diversity (i.e., highest level of English-speaking background). These results suggest that HAND raising is associated with English-speaking backgrounds, but also that this is a change led by females.

An Acoustic Analysis of Voice Onset Time in the Production of Voiceless Plosives in English and Iraqi Kurdish

This paper is a study of voice onset time)VOT( in Iraqi Kurdish and English. The stops /t, k/ were used in initial position and were embedded in words which were presented to ten native speakers of Iraqi Kurdish and four English native speakers. Recordings were made and analyzed using a computer software that generated a spectrogram for each word (prrat). The results prove that stops in Iraqi Kurdish and in English occur at the same place along the VOT. The study also found that Place of articulation has a significant effect on VOT values and asserts the strong relationship between VOT values and place of articulation. Moreover vowel context has its significant effect on VOT values and asserts the strong relationship between VOT values and vowel context. Additionally, it is found that gender impact on VOT values varied from one language group to another, gender has no significant effect in the production of voiceless plosives in Iraqi Kurdish. Whereas English male speakers produce longer voice onset time than Female speakers.

Development of a smartphone-based Turkish digits in noise test

BackgroundPure-tone audiometry is the traditional gold standard for assessment and screening of hearing impairment, but it requires the use of calibrated devices and soundproof booth. Mobile apps can offer a good alternative to traditional methods in limited circumstances and in some emergency situations, especially when traditional methods are not available. The aim of the study was to develop an easily accessible mobile-based Turkish Digit in Noise Test screening test for the assessment of hearing.MethodsThe digits were read by a male speaker whose native language is Turkish. A mobile application was developed in accordance with the Android operating system. Twenty-five individuals with normal hearing, 25 individuals with bilateral mild sensorineural hearing loss, 25 with bilateral mild mixed hearing loss, and 25 with bilateral mild conductive hearing loss total of 100 participated in the study. All participants were between the ages of 18–60. The Turkish Digit in Noise Test mobile application was applied to the participants and the test scores were compared among the types of hearing loss.ResultsThe Turkish Digit in Noise Test scores of participants with bilateral mild sensorineural hearing loss (19.4 ± 5.39) and mixed hearing loss (22.96 ± 4.52) were lower than those of participants with normal hearing (39.68 ± 6.82) (p < .01). In addition, the results of participants with bilateral mild sensorineural hearing loss (19.4 ± 5.39) and mixed hearing loss (22.96 ± 4.52) were lower than those of participants with conductive hearing loss (36.88 ± 6.31) (p < .01).ConclusionAn easy and accessible Turkish Digit in Noise Test mobile application has been developed using which one can assess his/her hearing.

Linguistic and relational strategies for advice giving in an online commercial context

Abstract Studies on online advice-giving have focused on non-profit public platforms but rarely examined it in commercial contexts, where the advisor has the motive of seeking economic interests. This study investigates advice-giving in the first five-minute part of paid live talks, which is free but designed to entice the audience to pay for the remaining part. Transcripts of 123 five-minute recordings are collected. This study analyzes individual speakers’ use of discursive moves and the corresponding relational strategies, as well as their effectiveness in boosting online sales. The results indicate that four discursive moves, i.e., metacomment, general information, advice, and assessment, are the most frequently used, with a large majority of advice phrased in declaratives. Statistical analysis showed that inexperienced, non-expert, and low-community-status speakers tend to use more bonding, and expert, experienced, high-community-status, and male speakers prefer to use more hedging. In addition, the effects of bonding, empathizing, and hedging on sales are consistently positive, while those of criticizing are negative; the above effects are moderated by the speaker’s social status. This study adds to the understudied issue of advisors’ relational negotiations and their resultant outcome in public commercial contexts.

Unconventional Usage of Gender-Based Japanese Sentence-Final Particles: A Study of wa and no in Youth Conversations

Japanese society’s traditional gender norms are reflected by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in daily conversation. However, recently, Japanese young people have started to use gendered SFPs in “unclassical” ways. This study mainly examines the usage of the so-called “female” SFPs wa and no by male speakers. In total, 68 cases of wa (43 by male speakers and 25 by female speakers) and 84 cases of no (47 by male speakers and 37 by female speakers) usage were collected from casual conversations of Japanese college students in TalkBank, a public linguistic database. This study demonstrates that the “female” SFPs wa and no are used more frequently by male speakers than by female speakers. Different from the female speakers’ usage to soften the utterances and enhance conversational rapport, wa and no used by male speakers perform other functions. In particular, wa directly indexes self-centeredness, serving the speaker to express emotion, share personal ideas, or perform speech acts such as teasing or amae in a self-focused way, while no directly indexes truthfulness, which allows the speaker to share a story in a vivid tone, reconfirm the speaker’s prior statement, or provide the speaker’s explanation/reasoning in an assertive tone. This study suggests that the new, unconventional gender-based usages of SFPs reveal the social changes in gender dynamics in modern Japanese society, which should not be overlooked in language education.

Analysis of Formant Frequencies and Vowel Articulation in the Spoken Standard Nigerian English of Undergraduate Students

The study compares the first two formants' frequencies in the speech of male and female undergraduate speakers of Standard Nigerian English at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). The study examined eight monophthongs produced in the CVC context (hVd) by 40 males and 40 females, and analysed the vowel quality and phonetic vowel space used by the two gender groups using the Linear Predictive Coding and spectrogram techniques. The findings reveal that there are differences in vowel realisation and quality between male and female speakers, which affect their accents. Specifically, the male undergraduates exhibit compression in the phonetic vowel space while their female counterparts show expansion. This study contributes to the understanding of the vowel space in the speech of male and female speakers, and how these differences may influence speech accent.

Trends in the proportion of women speakers at North American Allergy and Immunology conferences, 2008 to 2020

BackgroundWomen in medicine continue to be underrepresented at medical conferences. Previous studies have evaluated the proportion of invited female speakers across multiple specialties and evaluated factors that may have led to this disparity. The field of Allergy and Immunology has often been excluded and analyses have not illustrated how the trends have changed over the past decade. ObjectiveTo evaluate the distribution of invited speakers by gender over time at the 3 largest North American Allergy and Immunology conferences. MethodsThis retrospective longitudinal analysis used conference programs from 2008 to 2020 from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI), the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (ACAAI), and the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (CSACI). The gender (binary definition, man or woman, based on names, photos, pronouns, from conference programs and institutional profiles) of invited speakers was analyzed as the primary outcome, and planning committee members, and multispeaker sessions as secondary outcomes. These data were compared with publicly available data on the composition of the specialty by gender in the United States and Canada. ResultsWomen speakers at AAAAI, ACAAI, and CSACI conferences have historically been lower than male speakers and underrepresented compared with specialty composition. However, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of women speakers over time for all 3 conferences individually (AAAAI: 23.7% in 2008, 41.1% by 2020; ACAAI: 16.7% in 2008, 37.3% by 2020; CSACI: 19.4% in 2008, 54.8% by 2020; P < .001 for each) and combined (21.3% in 2008, 40.7% by 2020, P < .001). This trend coincides with a significant increase in women on the planning committee (all conferences: 20% in 2008, 50.6% by 2020; P < .001). There is also a decreasing trend over time for men-only multispeaker sessions. ConclusionThis study sheds light on the trends of women speaker representation at Allergy and Immunology conferences and provides clarity on future needs to reach equal representation in this field.

Attitude towards Jordanian Arabic Dialects: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

This study investigates the unequal attitude people have toward the main spoken dialects in Jordan. Eight stereotypical features were considered: intelligibility and clarity, prestige, elegance, education, social status, accent thickness, courage, and generosity. It examines how the distribution of attitude differs in different contexts, how it can affect employability chances, and how responses can be argued for within the social identity theory. An evaluative/matched guise test with eight recordings of the dialects by male and female speakers was answered by 234 respondents of different ages, genders and dialects. Responses were collected from three non-native speakers of any of the Jordanian Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Iraqi, and Druze). Results demonstrated that the urban dialect has the most positive attitudes regarding intelligibility, prestige, elegance, education, and social status, but the least positive attitudes regarding courage, generosity, and accent thickness, in which the Bedouin dialect scored the most positive attitudes. Attitude may change when changing the context of judgment. Such attitudes were found to affect employability chances especially for jobs that require speaking skills. Evaluation also may be affected if the speaker is from a group which is different or similar to that of the respondent. These reports may be taken as substantial evidence of the power of language ideologies and social psychology in speech communities with which individuals can align themselves. Keywords: Language Attitude; Dialect; Jordanian Arabic; Social Image.

Dialect and gender perception in relation to the intelligibility of low-pass and high-pass filtered spontaneous speecha).

Most cues to speech intelligibility are within a narrow frequency range, with its upper limit not exceeding 4 kHz. It is still unclear whether speaker-related (indexical) information is available past this limit or how speaker characteristics are distributed at frequencies within and outside the intelligibility range. Using low-pass and high-pass filtering, we examined the perceptual salience of dialect and gender cues in both intelligible and unintelligible speech. Setting the upper frequency limit at 11 kHz, spontaneously produced unique utterances (n = 400) from 40 speakers were high-pass filtered with frequency cutoffs from 0.7 to 5.56 kHz and presented to listeners for dialect and gender identification and intelligibility evaluation. The same material and experimental procedures were used to probe perception of low-pass filtered and unmodified speech with cutoffs from 0.5 to 1.1 kHz. Applying statistical signal detection theory analyses, we found that cues to gender were well preserved at low and high frequencies and did not depend on intelligibility, and the redundancy of gender cues at higher frequencies reduced response bias. Cues to dialect were relatively strong at low and high frequencies; however, most were in intelligible speech, modulated by a differential intelligibility advantage of male and female speakers at low and high frequencies.

The Acoustics of Gender in Indian English: Toward Forensic Profiling in a Multilingual Context

The present study is an acoustic analysis of Indian English, specifically examining the speech patterns and characteristics of three different groups with different native languages. This study investigates fundamental frequency (fo), fo range, fo variance, formant frequencies, and vowel space size in 42 native male and female speakers of Odia, Bangla, and Hindi. Furthermore, it investigated the potential correlation between fundamental frequency and vowel space, examining whether variations in vowel space size could be influenced by gender-specific perceptual factors. The paper emphasizes that in a multilingual context, gender identification can be efficiently correlated with both fo and formant frequencies. To measure a range of acoustic characteristics, speech samples were collected from the recording task. Analysis was done on PRAAT. The study revealed significant differences between genders for the examined acoustic characteristics. Results indicate differences in the size of gender-specific variations among the language groups, with females exhibiting more significant differences in fo, formant frequencies, and vowel space than males. The findings show no significant correlation between fo and vowel space area, indicating that other features are responsible for large vowel space for females. These findings display significant potential towardcreating a robust empirical framework for gender profiling that can be utilized in a wide range of forensic linguistics investigations.