Manner Of Articulation Research Articles

Spoken Word Recognition Errors in Speech Audiometry: A Measure of Hearing Performance?

This report provides a detailed analysis of incorrect responses from an open-set spoken word-repetition task which is part of a Dutch speech audiometric test battery. Single-consonant confusions were analyzed from 230 normal hearing participants in terms of the probability of choice of a particular response on the basis of acoustic-phonetic, lexical, and frequency variables. The results indicate that consonant confusions are better predicted by lexical knowledge than by acoustic properties of the stimulus word. A detailed analysis of the transmission of phonetic features indicates that “voicing” is best preserved whereas “manner of articulation” yields most perception errors. As consonant confusion matrices are often used to determine the degree and type of a patient's hearing impairment, to predict a patient's gain in hearing performance with hearing devices and to optimize the device settings in view of maximum output, the observed findings are highly relevant for the audiological practice. Based on our findings, speech audiometric outcomes provide a combined auditory-linguistic profile of the patient. The use of confusion matrices might therefore not be the method best suited to measure hearing performance. Ideally, they should be complemented by other listening task types that are known to have less linguistic bias, such as phonemic discrimination.

The Manner of Articulation of the Emphatic /d?/ in Both Saudi and Palestinian Dialects

This study aims at investigatingthe manner of articulation of the emphatic /dˁ/ sound in both the Saudi and Palestinian dialects. The subjects’ sound recordings have been digitized on a PC and analyzed via Praat.The results reveal that the Saudis produce /dˁ/ as an emphatic fricative, whereas the Palestinians as an emphatic plosive. The implications of this study suggest that /ðˁ/ (the fricative emphatic sound) and /dˁ/ (the plosive emphatic sound) merge into /ðˁ/ in Saudi Arabic, whereas they are distinct from one another in Palestinian Arabic. This is similar to Alani’s (1970: 46) finding that the /dˁ/ sound is pronounced as /ðˁ/ (emphatic fricative), but not as /dˁ/ (pharyngealized plosive) in Iraqi dialects except in the dialects of Iraqi Christians despite its orthographical representation as /dˁ/ in the writing system.

Constraints on statistical computations at 10 months of age: the use of phonological features.

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French-learning infants' perceptual preference for labial-coronal (LC) words over coronal-labial words (CL) words (e.g. preferring bat over tab) to determine whether this phonotactic preference is based on the acquisition of the statistical properties of the input based on a single phonological feature (i.e. place of articulation), multiple features (i.e. place and manner of articulation), or individual consonant pairs. Results from four experiments revealed that infants had a labial-coronal bias for nasal sequences (Experiment 1) and for all plosive sequences (Experiments 2 and 4) but a coronal-labial bias for all fricative sequences (Experiments 3 and 4), independently of the frequencies of individual consonant pairs. These results establish for the first time that constellations of multiple phonological features, defining broad consonant classes, constrain the early acquisition of phonotactic regularities of the native language.

A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on the Acquisition of Manner of Articulation Contrasts in the Productions of Dutch and German Children

The present article investigates the acquisition of Manner of Articulation (MoA) contrasts in child language production. We analyzed spontaneous longitudinal speech data of four German and six Dutch 1- to 3-year-olds. The data suggest that the acquisition of MoA contrasts is influenced by various co-occurrence constraints at the word level. Interestingly, developmental patterns are very similar across languages. However, children seem to follow different strategies to introduce MoA contrasts: They either introduce MoA contrasts in word-initial position in monosyllables as well as in disyllables, or they introduce MoA contrasts in noninitial position in both types of words. We couch the data in a lexical framework assuming that early lexical representation fits templates that evolve in the course of development.

Speech-cue transmission by an algorithm to increase consonant recognition in noise for hearing-impaired listeners.

Consonant recognition was assessed following extraction of speech from noise using a more efficient version of the speech-segregation algorithm described in Healy, Yoho, Wang, and Wang [(2013) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134, 3029-3038]. Substantial increases in recognition were observed following algorithm processing, which were significantly larger for hearing-impaired (HI) than for normal-hearing (NH) listeners in both speech-shaped noise and babble backgrounds. As observed previously for sentence recognition, older HI listeners having access to the algorithm performed as well or better than young NH listeners in conditions of identical noise. It was also found that the binary masks estimated by the algorithm transmitted speech features to listeners in a fashion highly similar to that of the ideal binary mask (IBM), suggesting that the algorithm is estimating the IBM with substantial accuracy. Further, the speech features associated with voicing, manner of articulation, and place of articulation were all transmitted with relative uniformity and at relatively high levels, indicating that the algorithm and the IBM transmit speech cues without obvious deficiency. Because the current implementation of the algorithm is much more efficient, it should be more amenable to real-time implementation in devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

The segment as the minimal planning unit in speech production: evidence based on absolute response latencies.

A minimal amount of information about a word must be phonologically and phonetically encoded before a person can begin to utter that word. Most researchers assume that the minimum is the complete word or possibly the initial syllable. However, there is some evidence that the initial segment is sufficient based on longer durations when the initial segment is primed. In two experiments in which the initial segment of a monosyllabic word is primed or not primed, we present additional evidence based on very short absolute response times determined on the basis of acoustic and articulatory onset relative to presentation of the complete target. We argue that the previous failures to find very short absolute response times when the initial segment is primed are due in part to the exclusive use of acoustic onset as a measure of response latency, the exclusion of responses with very short acoustic latencies, the manner of articulation of the initial segment (i.e., plosive vs. nonplosive), and individual differences. Theoretical implications of the segment as the minimal planning unit are considered.

A Brief Description of Consonants in Modern Standard Arabic

The present study deals with A brief description of consonants in Modern Standard This study tries to give some information about the production of Arabic sounds, the classification and description of consonants in Standard Arabic, then the definition of the word consonant. In the present study we also investigate the place of articulation in Arabic consonants we describe sounds according to: bilabial, labio-dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal. Then the manner of articulation, the characteristics such as phonation, nasal, curved, and trill. The aim of this study is to investigate consonant in MSA taking into consideration that all 28 consonants of Arabic alphabets. As a language Arabic is one of the most important languages in the world, because it is the language of Quran. Each language has its own phonetic system; furthermore to the enlightenment of MSA sound system; giving a comparison between Arabic and English sound considered as similarities and differences between the two systems such as /p/ and /b/ e.g. /p/- pit /pɪt/ in English but is not spoken in Arabic. Although /b/ sound is similar in both the languages e.g., / b /- bit/bɪt/ in English, بالغ / balɪɣ/ Adult in Arabic. This study attempts to observe these words and statistical work for each other and their representation in the data included with the analysis of these results. Modern Standard Arabic. This study starts from an elucidation of the phonetic bases of sounds classification. At this point shows the first limit of the study that is basically phonetic rather than phonological description of sounds. This attempt of classification is followed by lists of the consonant sounds in Standard Arabic with a key word for each consonant. The criteria of description are place and manner of articulation and voicing. The attempt of description has been made to lead to the drawing of some fundamental conclusion at the end of the paper.

Perception of Consonants in Reverberation and Noise by Adults Fitted With Bimodal Devices

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the contribution of a contralateral hearing aid to the perception of consonants, in terms of voicing, manner, and place-of-articulation cues in reverberation and noise by adult cochlear implantees aided by bimodal fittings. Eight postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) listeners with a fully inserted CI in 1 ear and low-frequency hearing in the other ear were tested on consonant perception. They were presented with consonant stimuli processed in the following experimental conditions: 1 quiet condition, 2 different reverberation times (0.3 s and 1.0 s), and the combination of 2 reverberation times with a single signal-to-noise ratio (5 dB). Consonant perception improved significantly when listening in combination with a contralateral hearing aid as opposed to listening with a CI alone in 0.3 s and 1.0 s of reverberation. Significantly higher scores were also noted when noise was added to 0.3 s of reverberation. A considerable benefit was noted from the additional acoustic information in conditions of reverberation and reverberation plus noise. The bimodal benefit observed was more pronounced for voicing and manner of articulation than for place of articulation.

Korean listeners’ perception of L2 English phoneme contrast

The current study investigates how Korean L2 listeners identify English minimal pairs contrasting in voicing and manner and attempts to testify the essential tenets of the Perceptual Assimilation Model. Another purpose of our research is to explore other factors which might affect the identification patterns within the identical contrast categories proposed by PAM. Identification tasks were performed with target vowel and consonant contrasts within real word and nonce word conditions. Identification accuracy and reaction time were measured to evaluate the relative difficulty of L2 sound identification. First, we found that Korean listeners encountered the most difficulty in identifying L2 English minimal pairs in the Single Category contrast, followed by those in the Category Goodness contrast, and those in the TC contrast were most accurately and rapidly identified in accordance with the predictions of the PAM model. Next, it was shown that there were varying levels of difficulty in identification tasks within the TC and SC contrast. This finding suggests that PAM is not sufficient to predict L2 identification accuracy and other factors should be taken into consideration, including the Speech Learning Model, and other phonological factors such as manner of articulation, the vocalicity of the segments, individual contrast type, etc.

Evaluating models of phonotactic constraints on the basis of sC cluster acquisition data

This paper aims to test the model of phonotactics called NAD (Net Auditory Distance) with the acquisition data to see whether it makes better predictions than sonority-based models. NAD assumes that the phonotactic preferability of a cluster depends on perceptual distance between particular sounds in this cluster. The index of perceptual distance within NAD is based on phonetic features: manner of articulation (MOA), place of articulation (POA) and voicing. To test the predictions of our model we used data gathered from 50 Polish kindergarten children, who produced for us six initial double clusters: /st/, /sp/, /sk/, /sx/, /sm/ and /sw/. This sC set ensured that clusters were similar, yet differing on NAD scales. To check for the preferences, we calculated the number of cluster reductions applied for each cluster group. In accordance with the newest version of NAD principle, we predicted that the /st/ would be the most dispreferred (reduced) cluster, followed by /sp/, /sk/ and /sx/, /sm/ and finally /sw/. The results only partially confirmed this hypothesis. For the /sx/, /sm/ and /sw/ clusters, our prediction turned out to be accurate, but the theory did not predict correctly the results for the s+stop clusters. In fact, the results pointed out to /st/ (the most dispreferred cluster according to NAD), as the most preferred sequence. Overall, our results point to a special status of the s+stop clusters among all the other sound sequences. The ambiguous nature of these clusters (they are dispreferred in many phonological theories but relatively salient acoustically) may render them more vulnerable to frequency effects. This would explain the preference for /st/, which is the third most frequent initial double cluster in Polish. Our study thus shows that in ambiguous cases language-specific idiosyncrasies can override the universal tendencies in language acquisition.

A Survey of Kurdish Students’ Sound Segment & Syllabic Pattern Errors in the Course of Learning EFL

This paper is devoted to finding adequate answers to the following queries: (A) what are the segmental and syllabic pattern errors made by Kurdish students in their pronunciation? (B) Can the problematic areas in pronunciation be predicted by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of both native and target languages? (C) Can there be any consistency between the predictions and the results of the error analysis experiments in the same field? To reach the goals of the study the following steps were taken; 1.The sound systems and syllabic patterns of both languages Kurdish and English were clearly described on the basis of place and manner of articulation and the combinatory power of clusters. 2. To carry out a contrastive analysis, the sound segments (vowels, consonants and diphthongs) and the syllabic patterns of both languages were compared in order to surface the similarities and differences. 3. The syllabic patterns and sound segments in English that had no counterparts in Kurdish were detected and considered as problematic areas in pronunciation. 4. To countercheck the acquired predictions, an experiment was carried out with 50 male and female pre-university students. Subjects were given some passages to read. The readability index of these passages ranged from 8.775 to 10.432 which are quite suitable in comparison to the readability index of pre-university texts ranging from 8.675 to 10.475. All samples of bound production were transcribed in IPA and the syllabic patterns were shown by symbols ‘V’ and ‘C’ indicating vowels and consonants respectively. An error analysis of the acquired data proved that English sound segments and syllabic patterns with no counterparts in Kurdish resulted in pronunciation errors.

Language's Borrowings: The Role of the Borrowed and Arabized Words in Enriching Arabic Language

Borrowing is entering Arabic language. Researchers focus on the origin of the borrowed words and their meanings without analyzing the syntactic and semantic changes of these words. This paper focuses on Arabic language's borrowings from other languages. Moreover, it studies the meaning of 'arabization' and the role of arabized and borrowed words in enriching Arabic language, the difference between the arabized words and the borrowed (' dakheel ') ones by examining and analyzing samples for every type. Arabic words are derivatives from the base form, which is applied to wazen , three-letter, ' fa ', ' 'a , and ' la ', three-syllable and three-sound word. The words, which will be studied, are used among speakers of Arabic, and have equivalents in Arabic, besides they follow Arabic rules in a variety of methods, syntactically, morphologically and phonetically. In the process of arabization, these words show that a change happens by an addition of a letter, deletion or replacement of a letter, or by a change in the manner of articulation. Moreover, they exist in more than one phonetic form which permits Arabic language to adopt one of these forms and arabize it.

An algorithm to improve speech recognition in noise for hearing-impaired listeners: Consonant identification and articulatory feature transmission

Previous work has shown that a supervised-learning algorithm estimating the ideal binary mask (IBM) can improve sentence intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners from scores below 30% to above 80% [Healy et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134 (2013)]. The algorithm generates a binary mask by using a deep neural network to classify speech-dominant and noise-dominant time-frequency units. In the current study, these results are extended to consonant recognition, in order to examine the specific speech cues responsible for the observed performance improvements. Consonant recognition in speech-shaped noise or babble was examined in normal-hearing and HI listeners in three conditions: unprocessed, noise removed via the IBM, and noise removed via the classification-based algorithm. The IBM demonstrated substantial performance improvements, averaging up to 45% points. The algorithm also produced sizeable gains, averaging up to 34% points. An information-transmission analysis of cues associated with manner of articulation, place of articulation, and voicing indicated general similarity in the cues transmitted by the IBM versus the algorithm. However, important differences were observed, which may guide the future refinement of the algorithm. [Work supported by NIH.]

Tree-based Phone Duration Modelling of the Serbian Language

Considering the importance of segmental duration from a perceptive point of view, the possibility of automatic prediction of natural duration of phones is essential for achieving the naturalness of synthesized speech. In this paper phone duration prediction model for the Serbian language using tree-based machine learning approach is presented. A large speech corpus and a feature set of 21 parameters describing phones and their contexts were used for segmental duration prediction. Phone duration modelling is based on attributes such as the current segment identity, preceding and following segment types, manner of articulation (for consonants) and voicing of neighbouring phones, lexical stress, part-of-speech, word length, the position of the segment in the syllable, the position of the syllable in a word, the position of a word in a phrase, phrase break level, etc. These features have been extracted from the large speech database for the Serbian language. The results obtained for the full phoneme set using regression tree, RMSE (root-mean-squared-error) 14.8914 ms, MAE (mean absolute error) 11.1947 ms and correlation coefficient 0.8796 are comparable with those reported in the literature for Czech, Greek, Lithuanian, Korean, Indian languages Hindi and Telugu, Turkish. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.20.3.4090

Strategies for Treating Compensatory Articulation in Patients with Cleft Palate

Patients with cleft palate frequently show compensatory articulation (CA). CA requires a prolonged period of speech intervention. Some scaffolding strategies can be useful for correcting placement and manner of articulation in these cases. The purpose of this paper was to study whether the use of specific strategies of speech pathology can be more effective if applied according to the level of severity of CA. Ninety patients with CA were studied in two groups. One group was treated using strategies specific for their level of severity of articulation, whereas in the other group all strategies were used indistinctively. The degree of severity of CA was compared at the end of the speech intervention. After the speech therapy intervention, the group of patients in which the strategies were used selectively, showed a significantly greater decrease in the severity of CA, as compared with the patients in whom all the strategies were used indistinctively. An assessment of the severity of CA can be useful for selecting the strategies, which can be more effective for correcting the compensatory errors.

Consonant acquisition in the Malay language: A cross-sectional study of preschool aged malay children

To date, there has been little research done on phonological acquisition in the Malay language of typically developing Malay-speaking children. This study serves to fill this gap by providing a systematic description of Malay consonant acquisition in a large cohort of preschool-aged children between 4- and 6-years-old. In the study, 326 Malay-dominant speaking children were assessed using a picture naming task that elicited 53 single words containing all the primary consonants in Malay. Two main analyses were conducted to study their consonant acquisition: (1) age of customary and mastery production of consonants; and (2) consonant accuracy. Results revealed that Malay children acquired all the syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants before 4;06-years-old, with the exception of syllable-final /s/, /h/ and /l/ which were acquired after 5;06-years-old. The development of Malay consonants increased gradually from 4- to 6 years old, with female children performing better than male children. The accuracy of consonants based on manner of articulation showed that glides, affricates, nasals, and stops were higher than fricatives and liquids. In general, syllable-initial consonants were more accurate than syllable-final consonants while consonants in monosyllabic and disyllabic words were more accurate than polysyllabic words. These findings will provide significant information for speech-language pathologists for assessing Malay-speaking children and designing treatment objectives that reflect the course of phonological development in Malay.

Queixas fonoaudiológicas e verificação da fala de indivíduos com diagnóstico de ardência bucal e xerostomia

OBJETIVO: Investigar as queixas das funções orais em presença dos sintomas de ardência e secura bucal e analisar as alterações da fala em seu aspecto articulatório. MÉTODOS: Foram avaliados 66 indivíduos com idade entre 30 e 78 anos, divididos em três grupos: grupo ardência bucal, grupo xerostomia e grupo sem sintomas bucais. Foram realizadas entrevistas, exame clínico da cavidade oral e gravação da fala, com utilização de fichário evocativo. RESULTADOS: A característica comum nos dois primeiros grupos foi a presença do sintoma de secura bucal. Na localização dos sintomas, o grupo xerostomia apresentou maior quantidade de estruturas afetadas pelo sintoma. As queixas mais referidas por esse grupo foram cansaço e força na fala e força e engasgos à deglutição. A queixa de força foi significativa, na comparação com grupo de ardência bucal, com aumento do sintoma provocado pela função de fala. Dos sujeitos que se queixaram de boca seca, como sintoma principal, ou associado, a maioria apresentou ruídos durante a fala. O grupo xerostomia apresentou maior ocorrência desse ruído. Não foram evidenciadas alterações fonéticas nos grupos de sintomas bucais. CONCLUSÃO: Das queixas envolvendo as funções orais, falar e deglutir com força foram as mais referidas pelos indivíduos do grupo xerostomia. Observou-se a presença de estalidos na fala da maioria dos sujeitos com o sintoma de secura bucal. Apesar das sintomatologias apresentadas e do número de estruturas orais afetadas, não houve evidência de alteração fonética nos indivíduos com sintomas bucais.

Compensatory vowel shortening before complex coda clusters in the production and perception of German monosyllables

The main aim of the present study was to investigate incremental coda compensatory shortening in the production and perception of German monosyllables including factors such as accentuation (i.e., accented vs deaccented) and codas’ manner of articulation (i.e., sonorant vs obstruent). Ten speakers produced real German words like /klɪŋ/ and /klɪŋt/. We measured the duration of the vowel and the first coda consonant (C1). Overall there was no significant vowel shortening effect. However, some speakers did show vowel shortening and even more so in accented tokens with sonorant codas. Additionally, all speakers tended to shorten C1. In a subsequent experiment, we tested whether listeners compensate for different degrees of vowel and C1 shortening. 21 subjects judged which vowel in selected pairs such as /klɪŋ/—/klɪŋt/ was longer. In two thirds of all pairs, listeners perceived vowels before simplex codas as longer—even in pairs with equal segment durations. While this overall bias indicates perceptual vowel shortening before complex codas, listeners nevertheless show tendencies to compensate for non-shortened vowels before complex sonorant codas, i.e., they were perceived as longer. Although there was less vowel shortening in production, listeners showed perceptual vowel shortening and some tendencies toward compensation in contexts that favor shortening.

Statistical structure of speech sound classes is congruent with cochlear nucleus response properties

Natural sounds possess considerable statistical structure. Lewicki (2002, Nature Neurosci. 5(4), 356–363) used independent components analysis (ICA) to reveal the statistical structure of environmental sounds, animal vocalizations, and human speech. Each sound class exhibited distinct statistical properties, but filters that optimally encoded speech closely resembled response properties in the mammalian auditory nerve. This and other analyses of statistical properties of speech examine only global structure without considering systematic variability in different speech sound classes, while acoustic/phonetic analyses of these classes are agnostic to their statistical structure. Here, statistical structure was investigated in principled subdivisions of speech: consonants organized by manner of articulation, and vowels organized by vocal tract configuration. Analyses reveal systematic differences for local statistical structure in speech: statistically optimal filters in ICA were highly diverse for different consonant classes but broadly similar for different vowel classes. While the global statistical structure of speech reflects auditory nerve response properties (Lewicki, 2002), local statistical structure of speech sound classes is well-aligned with cochlear nucleus response properties. Results support theories of efficient coding, in which sensory systems adapt and evolve in order to efficiently capture natural stimulus statistics.

자발화에 나타난 3-4세 아동의 어중종성 습득

Coda in the word-medial position plays an important role in acquisition of our speech. Accuracy of the coda in the word-medial position is important as a diagnostic indicator since it has a close relationship with degrees of disorder. Coda in the word-medial position only appears in condition of connecting two vowels and the sequence causes diverse phonological processes to happen. The coda in the word-medial position differs in production difficulty by the initial sound in the sequence. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the tendency of producing a coda in the word-medial position with consideration of an optional phonological process in spontaneous speech of three and four year old children. Data was collected from 24 children (four groups by age) without speech and language delay. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Sonorant coda in the word-medial position showed a high production frequency in manner of articulation, and alveolar in place of articulation. When the coda in the word-medial position is connected to an initial sound in the same place of articulation, it revealed a high frequency of production. 2) The coda in word-medial position followed by an initial alveolar stop revealed a high error rate. Error patterns showed regressive assimilation predominantly. 3) The order of difficulty that Children had producing codas in the word-medial position was <TEX>$/k^{\neg}/$</TEX>, <TEX>$/p^{\neg}/$</TEX>, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/. Those results suggest that in targeting coda in the word-medial position for evaluation, we should consider optional phonological process as well as the following initial sound. Further studies would be necessary which codas in the word-medial position will be used for therapeutic purpose.