Phoneme Frequency Research Articles

An Analysis of Syllable and Phoneme Frequencies in Storybooks for Preschool Children

An Analysis of Syllable and Phoneme Frequencies in Storybooks for Preschool Children

An effect of phoneme frequency on stop place perception by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners.

The effects of phoneme frequency on stop place perception were examined. In English, [t] is more frequently observed than [k] while the opposite is true in Japanese. If the sound frequency affects the phoneme perception, English listeners would identify more of the ambiguous [t]-[k] stimuli as “t” than do Japanese listeners. In this study, a 4IAX discrimination experiment and a phoneme boundary decision experiment were conducted with English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners to test this hypothesis. The stimuli of the two experiments were created by the Klatt synthesizer. [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were recorded by a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker, respectively. Then, [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were synthesized based on the parameter values obtained from the measurements of the recorded tokens. They were used as the end-point tokens of a nine-step continuum. The rest of the tokens were created by manipulating frequency parameters of the synthesizer. Four sets of [k]-[t] continua were created (two languages: English and Japanese, and two vowel conditions: [a] and [o]). A preliminary analysis of a subset of data demonstrated that the more frequent sound in each language occupied a larger perceptual region of the [a] vowel continua.

The high redundancy of speech sounds in sentential context.

Readers are exceptionally good at guessing which letter comes next in printed text, even with little contextual information. This was quantified by Shannon [Bell Syst. Tech. J., (1948); Bell Syst. Tech. J., (1951)], who demonstrated that printed English text is approximately 50% redundant (predictable). Here, redundancy of American English speech was examined in a modified “guessing game” paradigm, as listeners guessed which speech sound came next throughout an entire sentence. Four TIMIT sentences were presented to 19 listeners, and guesses were made by clicking buttons on a computer screen corresponding to each consonant and vowel sound in American English. Listeners received feedback after each guess and heard each sentence (up to their most recent correct guess) as often as they wished. Numbers of guesses were at chance levels at sentence and word onsets, and were much better than chance with the addition of phonemic and sentential context. Equiprobable speech sounds predict 0% redundancy (chance performance) and entropy of 5.29 bits/sound. Listener performance demonstrates a mean sentence redundancy of 40% (3.18 bits/sound), within a narrow range of 36–43. Behavioral results will be evaluated with reference to simple phoneme frequency and transitional probabilities between phonemes. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Inteligibilidade: efeitos da análise de transcrição e do estímulo de fala

intelligibility measures are limited to providing information on the severity level of clinical cases. A key limitation is that such measures are sensitive to changes in performance only in subjects with a determined severity level of speech disturbance. to investigate the influence of stimuli type and transcription analysis on intelligibility measures of speakers with no communication disorders. an experimental study with no intervention procedures was developed. Two groups of subjects with no communication disorders took part in the research. The group of speakers was composed by 30 adults. Speech samples were recorded by repeating three lists of stimuli (sentences, words and non-words) equally distributed according to parameters of frequency of phonemes, syllabic structures and word length. The group of listeners was composed by 60 young adults who orthographically transcribed the speech samples. Two transcription intelligibility measures were obtained for each list of stimuli: percentage of correct answers per syllable unit and per item (for each sentence, word and non-word). intelligibility scores were statistically higher for syllable units than for the other items. Regarding intelligibility scores per syllables, a statistical difference was observed amongst scores for sentences, words and non-words. both transcription analysis and stimulus type influenced the intelligibility scores of the studied population, especially when non-words were used as speech material. The handling of these variables can help to improve intelligibility tests.

A Survey of Speech Perception Tests for Children with Hearing Loss Used in Cochlear Implant Centers in Korea

Background and ObjectivesZZVarious speech perception tests have been developed for children with hearing loss (HL) in Korea, although they are not standardized yet. This study aims to examine the actual condition of speech perception tests for children with HL in Korea. Subjects and MethodZZSurvey questionnaires and speech perception tests for children with HL were collected from 24 cochlear implant (CI) centers between March and July 2009. The speech perception tests were classified according to target ages, speech stimulus levels, and response formats. We interviewed speech therapists who had developed monosyllabic word (MW) tests, and gathered source materials, considerations, and limitations of the MW tests. We also analyzed vocabulary familiarity and phonetic balancing of words in the most commonly used MW tests. ResultsZZThirty-eight kinds of speech perception tests for children with HL were collected from 24 CI centers. Among these tests, open-set MW tests and sentence tests were used in all centers. Speech therapists responsible for developing MW tests had selected words from textbooks, storybooks, and spontaneous speech data to secure vocabulary familiarity and phonetic balancing within each list. Four commonly used MW tests revealed that vocabulary familiarity was compatible with commonly used MW in preschoolers and demonstrated a similar trend in phoneme frequencies. ConclusionZZThe results of this study showed that current speech perception tests for children with HL should be verified, revised, and standardized in an experimental setting. Korean J Otorhinolaryngol-Head Neck Surg 2010;53:534-46 Key WordsZZHearing loss·Cochlear implant·Children·Speech perception test.

Using Automated Rhyme Detection to Characterize Rhyming Style in Rap Music

Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music previously ignored in the music information retrieval literature. We developed a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We used this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line2final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrated the performance of this method compared to rules2based models. We then calculated higher2level rhyme features and used them to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists. We found that these detected features corresponded to real2 world descriptions of rhyming style and were strongly characteristic of different rappers, resulting in potential applications to style2based comparison, music recommendation, and authorship identification.

Open-Set Monosyllabic Speech Perception Test for Preschool Children

Background and Objectives：An open-set monosyllabic speech perception test is necessary, not only to devise habilitation programs but to select candidates and estimate performance in pediatric cochlear implant program. The purpose of this study is to develop a validated open-set monosyllabic speech perception test for preschool children. Subjects and Method：Qualitative test development was based on vocabulary familiarity, syllabic and phonemic frequency, and phonetic balancing between the lists. The devised test lists were applied to 138 normal hearing children and 46 children with cochlear implant to examine the validity and reliability. Results：The final two test lists were made up of 100 items with 260 phonemics. The consequential validity of this devised test was proven by the applied results that the speech perception score of children with implanted devices was significantly lower than that of normal children, when controlling for the length of auditory experience. Conclusion：The developed monosyllabic speech perception test is the validated instrument for preschool children. It is sensitive to perceptual characteristics of articulatory function in cochlear implanted children. The validity of this test needs to be enhanced by clinical application and further item analysis. (Korean J Otorhinolaryngol-Head Neck Surg 2009;52:312-21)

Sublexical units in aphasic jargon and in the standard language: Comparative analyses of neologisms in connected speech

Background: It is a well‐documented finding that phonemic speech errors in aphasia reflect certain characteristics of their intended targets. However, only few studies have investigated spontaneous speech productions of jargon‐aphasic patients, in which lexical targets may be completely unrecognisable (abstruse phonemic neologisms). There is some evidence that these neologisms correspond to the standard language concerning phonemic content and structure. Aims: The present study further explores similarities of aphasic neologisms and the standard language, to contribute to the discussion about the origin of non‐target‐related errors in jargon aphasia. It investigates whether similarities at the phoneme level can be confirmed even in connected, severely jargonised speech that does not allow identification of lexical targets. Moreover, it raises the question whether other sublexical units like syllables contribute to the formation of phonemic neologisms. Methods & Procedures: Neologisms in spontaneous speech of a German‐speaking jargon‐aphasic patient were compared to the standard language concerning phoneme and syllable inventory, structural aspects, and distributional frequencies of sublexical measures. Data of the standard language were derived from meta‐analyses of a German phonological word form database. Outcomes & Results: A strong relatedness to the standard language was demonstrated for the aphasic neologisms in connected speech. Similarities regarded phoneme inventory, phonotactics, and phoneme frequency distributions. The patient data point to a preferred use of high‐frequency phonemes and syllables in neologisms. In addition, a similar distribution of syllable frequencies and structures was observed in the neologisms and in standard German. Results indicate that syllable frequency serves as a predictor for the neologisms' distributional frequencies. Conclusions: The present study indicated that phonemic neologisms with no or weak evidence for a lexical origin still conformed to the phonological characteristics of the standard language, suggesting undisturbed segmental phonological processing. With respect to processing levels in speech production, results specifically pointed to a prominent role of syllabic units. The present findings are compatible with the assumption that syllabic representations, like structural information of syllables, are constrained in neologism formation.

Frequency Effects in Cross-linguistic Stop Place Perception: A Case of /t/-/k/ in Japanese and English

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) Frequency Effects in Cross-Linguistic Stop Place Perception: A Case of /t/ - /k/ in Japanese and English Reiko Kataoka and Keith Johnson 1. Introduction The study described in this paper is an attempt to answer the question ‘Which aspect of speech perception is altered by linguistic experience and how this alteration is done?’ As Strange and Jenkins stated, “[t]he knowledge of a language possessed by a normal adult is a product of many years of exposure to a specific language environment” (1978: 125). Therefore, if linguistic knowledge influences speech perception, then adult listeners would perceive speech sounds in language-specific ways. Evidence of experience-based speech perception has been accumulated from both cross-linguistic and within language studies. One source of evidence is the phenomena called categorical perception (Liberman, et al. 1957, 1961a, 1961b), which is characterized by difficulty in discriminating acoustically similar patterns in the single phonemic category and near perfect discrimination for acoustic patterns that straddle different categories. Categorical perception has been replicated with listeners of various language groups, and it seems to be an undeniable fact that linguistic experience influences listeners’ ability to discriminate speech stimuli. However, exactly which aspect of linguistic experience is responsible for language-specific speech perception is not well understood. This is the primary question addressed in this paper. Also, it is often reported that listeners react to speech sounds differently depending on whether they use a continuous mode or a categorical mode of memory (see, for example, Pisoni 1973). Thus, it is of interest to test whether experience-based perception is elicited when the listening task calls for auditory acoustic perception. The goal of this study is to obtain answers of these two questions. The first question was treated by testing whether a particular aspect of linguistic structure—phoneme frequency— influences speech perception; and the second question was treated by testing whether the linguistic knowledge has any effect in an auditory acoustic perception task. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides reviews of previous studies on the experience-based auditory perception, and gives rationales for the particular ways current experiment is designed. Section 3 describes the experimental study, provides the results, and discusses the results. Finally, Section 4 discusses the implications of some of the findings from current study for theories of speech perception. 2. Background 2.1. Experience-based speech perception One of the prime examples of experience-based speech perception is categorical perception, a phenomena originally defined by Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, and Griffith (1957). Categorical perception can be demonstrated in an experiment that uses a series of synthetic consonant-vowel stimuli, ranging across two or more initial consonant categories (e.g. ten-equal- step /da/-/ga/ continuum), and involves identification and discrimination tasks. One of the defining characteristics of categorical perception is predictability of discrimination accuracy from the identification result. In its strongest form, categorical perception predicts that listeners

The effects of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure on the unprompted vocalizations of a young child diagnosed with autism.

The current study evaluated the effects of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure intended to increase spontaneous vocalizations of a young child diagnosed with autism. A multiple-baseline design across two target phonemes was used to evaluate the effects of the pairing procedure on the frequency of phonemes uttered by the participant. Data were collected during presession, postsession, and follow-up periods across three conditions: Baseline, Control, and Pairing. During the Pairing conditions, a target phoneme was repeatedly vocalized by the experimenter and was systematically paired with preferred stimuli. Results from postsession observations following the pairing condition evidenced no increase in the target sounds. Practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Lexical and post-lexical phonological representations in spoken production

Theories of spoken word production generally assume a distinction between at least two types of phonological processes and representations: lexical phonological processes that recover relatively arbitrary aspects of word forms from long-term memory and post-lexical phonological processes that specify the predictable aspects of phonological representations. In this work we examine the spoken production of two brain-damaged individuals. We use their differential patterns of accuracy across the tasks of spoken naming and repetition to establish that they suffer from distinct deficits originating fairly selectively within lexical or post-lexical processes. Independent and detailed analyses of their spoken productions reveal contrasting patterns that provide clear support for a distinction between two types of phonological representations: those that lack syllabic and featural information and are sensitive to lexical factors such as lexical frequency and neighborhood density, and those that include syllabic and featural information and are sensitive to detailed properties of phonological structure such as phoneme frequency and syllabic constituency.

Phonological and statistical effects on timing of speech perception: Insights from a database of Dutch diphone perception

We report detailed analyses of a very large database on timing of speech perception collected by Smits et al. (Smits, R., Warner, N., McQueen, J.M., Cutler, A., 2003. Unfolding of phonetic information over time: A database of Dutch diphone perception. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, 563–574). Eighteen listeners heard all possible diphones of Dutch, gated in portions of varying size and presented without background noise. The present report analyzes listeners’ responses across gates in terms of phonological features (voicing, place, and manner for consonants; height, backness, and length for vowels). The resulting patterns for feature perception differ from patterns reported when speech is presented in noise. The data are also analyzed for effects of stress and of phonological context (neighboring vowel vs. consonant); effects of these factors are observed to be surprisingly limited. Finally, statistical effects, such as overall phoneme frequency and transitional probabilities, along with response biases, are examined; these too exercise only limited effects on response patterns. The results suggest highly accurate speech perception on the basis of acoustic information alone.

Syllable frequency effect in speech production: evidence from aphasia

In this study, we investigated whether a syllable frequency effect can be observed in aphasic speakers with a phonological encoding impairment. First of all, we analysed the substitution errors from seven aphasic subjects comparing the frequency of the target syllable to the frequency of the produced syllable. A significant effect of syllable frequency was observed on three subjects' errors and this effect was independent of phoneme frequency in two of them. Secondly, we examined whether syllable frequency can affect the production accuracy on a non-word repetition task. Two aphasic subjects produced significantly more correct responses to non-words composed of high frequency than of low frequency syllables. Finally, syllable frequency was manipulated in monosyllabic words and we analysed the performance and the errors of a single case aphasic subject producing phonemic paraphasias on monosyllabic words. No syllable frequency effect was observed on performance, but a syllable frequency effect arose in the error analysis. Taken together, our results provide evidence for a syllable frequency effect in some aphasic subjects with phonological encoding disorders, supporting the idea of a representation of syllables in speech production.

Word and phoneme frequency of occurrence in conversational Setswana: a clinical linguistic application

Few studies are available that analyze the frequency of occurrence of phonemes in Setswana in conversational discourse. This information is important to better understand the phonemic importance of various phonemes and would contribute to a foundation of data to support further research and clinical applications. This study is aimed at analyzing the phonemes of Setswana language for clinical audiological purposes but the results are not limited to that use. Taped conversational samples of 118 speakers are collected from five different Botswana government departments. The tapes were transcribed and analyzed using a custom made computer program. Frequency of occurrence of Setswana consonant phonemes in a conversational sample of 49 358 Setswana-words was determined. The percentage of occurrence of each consonant in each of the three positions of words was found to be 53.9% in the initial, 41.8% in the medial and 4.1% in the final positions. In addition, the 50 most frequently used Setswana words were found. Further, an inventory of words for each consonant sound of Setswana Language was developed and due to space limitation the word inventory is not attached to this document; it is filed at the Library of California State University, Sacramento.

Frequency effects in phoneme processing

This study tested the hypothesis that phonological segments are activated during word recognition in proportion to their frequency of use, analogous to frequency effects in whole word recognition. Preliminary evidence for the hypothesis was given by Moates, Bond, and Stockmal [LabPhon 7 (2002)] using a word reconstruction task. The present study used a gating task in which progressively longer fragments of a word are presented to listeners who must identify the word after as few gates as possible. High- and low-frequency segments were contrasted by presenting them in word pairs that differed in two segments, e.g., collision–collusion, where /I/ is more frequent than /u/. We constructed 15 words pairs contrasting vowels and 16 pairs contrasting consonants (e.g., relief–release, where /s/ is more frequent than /f/). Identification judgments were gathered from 125 participants. An ANOVA showed high-frequency consonants to be identified at significantly earlier gates than their matched low-frequency consonants with both subjects and items as random factors. No such effect appeared for vowels. Also, whole words containing the high-frequency segments were not identified significantly earlier than those containing low-frequency segments. If the phoneme frequency effect is reliable, then spoken word recognition models should address it.

Laboratory Phonology 7 (review)

Reviewed by: Laboratory phonology 7 ed. by Carlos Gussenhoven, Natasha Warner Herrera Z. Esther Laboratory phonology 7. Ed. by Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Pp. xvii, 719. ISBN 3110170876. $41.95. This book contains selected papers from the Seventh Conference on Laboratory Phonology cohosted by the University of Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (28 June–1 July 2000). As the editors remark in the introduction, this was the first time the conference was held outside an English-speaking country. Two main changes distinguish this seventh issue: a new publisher and new series editors. This move has yielded good results. The ‘Papers in’ has been removed from the title, and every paper (except the commentaries) includes an abstract guiding the reader with respect to the topics and the findings reported. Additionally, the book is available in paperback, which makes it more affordable. This rather large book comprises seventeen papers, five commentaries, and three indices, and is partitioned into two sections: Part 1, ‘Phonological processing and encoding’ (eight papers), and Part 2, ‘In the laboratory and in the field: Relating phonetics and phonology’ (nine papers). But not all is new in this volume. As in the previous ones, every block of 3–5 individual contributions is followed by a commentary. The papers in Part 1 extend laboratory phonology into its newest relationships with psycholinguistics. Phonological encoding at different levels is investigated in the first three papers. Daniel Jurafsky, Alan Bell, and Cynthia Girand (‘The role of the lemma in form variation’) use a corpus-based statistical method to explore phonetic variations in production of ‘to’, ‘that’, ‘of’, and ‘you’, four English words each having one phonological form but more than one lemma. ‘Phonological encoding of single words: In search of the lost syllable’ is the title of Niels O. Schiller, Albert Costa, and Angels Colomé’s contribution. Here they test the masked priming paradigm [End Page 175] in order to determine the role of syllables in phonological encoding. The perception of intonation is the issue addressed by Vincent J. van Heuven and Judith Haan in ‘Temporal distribution of interrogativity markers in Dutch: A perceptual study’. Here the authors report their findings with respect to two perceptual tasks: hearing and gating a set of synthesized Dutch intonation patterns. They show the temporal development of cues signaling the statement vs. question contrast. Willem Levelt comments on the above papers (‘Phonological encoding in speech production’). In her contribution, ‘Word-specific phonetics’, Janet B. Pierrehumbert offers a particularly valuable exemplar-based model of speech production. Danny R. Moates, Z. S. Bond, and Verna Stockmal (‘Phoneme frequency in spoken word reconstruction’) reveal that vowels are more mutable than consonants in word reconstruction tasks. Haruo Kubozono’s paper, ‘Temporal neutralization in Japanese’, convincingly shows that neutralization of the vowel length contrast in Japanese has a close bearing on phonetics as well as visual and auditory perception. Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux (‘A typological study of stress “deafness” ’) use four languages with noncontrastive stress (French, Finnish, Hungarian, and Polish) with the aim of testing the speaker’s ability to perceive stress contrasts. Ann R. Bradlow’s contribution, ‘Confluent talker- and listener-oriented forces in clear speech production’, investigates the amount of articulatory influence within CV sequences in clear speech. A commentary paper by Anne Cutler, ‘Phonological processing’, closes this section. The papers in Part 2 make significant contributions to the phonetics-phonology relationship. George N. Clements and Sylvester Osu (‘Explosives, implosives and nonexplosives: The phonological function of air pressure differences in stops’) give a theoretical look into phonetic facts. Based on acoustic, articulatory, and aerodynamic properties of nonexplosive stops in Ikwere, they propose that implosives are nonobstruent stops. In her contribution, ‘Assimila-tory processes and aerodynamic factors’, Maria Josep Solé lays out the aerodynamic forces involved in fricative to tongue tip trill assimilation. In Sónia Frota’s paper, ‘Tonal association and target alignment in European Portuguese nuclear...

The effects of gracilis muscle transplantation on speech in children with Moebius syndrome.

Speech and communication are major problems for children with Moebius syndrome, a congenital anomaly that includes facial and abducens nerve paralysis and, often, other cranial nerve deficits. In addition, these children frequently have severe functional problems such as drooling as well as poor self-esteem. The purpose of this study was to investigate the outcome of speech with bilateral gracilis muscle transplants innervated by the masseteric nerve in children with Moebius syndrome. The outcome of this two-stage procedure was investigated in 12 patients. Assessments were done before and after surgery, and additional data were collected from video records. After surgery, the children showed improved intelligibility of speech with a significantly lower frequency of all compensatory phonemes, including the sounds of /p/, /b/, /m/, /w/, "sh", /f/, and /v/. This procedure had evident positive impact in all problematic areas and is the procedure of choice for these unfortunate children.

Vowel dominance and morphological processing

In morphological processing in adult speech, irregular forms are subject to several types of errors, including overregularisation (e.g., falled for correct “fell”) and overtensing (e.g., didn’t fell for correct “didn’t fall”). In two experiments using the morphonaming task, it was found that the probability of these errors is affected by a phonological factor that derives from vowel phoneme frequencies in a complex fashion: whether the vowel in the past-tense form is dominant relative to the vowel in the base form, or recessive relative to the base vowel. A dominant vowel in the past tense decreases the rate of overregularisation errors, but increases the rate of overtensing errors. Access of irregular forms must involve competition between the vowels of the base and past-tense forms in a way that can be influenced by the frequencies of phonemes in all words. Ramifications for models of speech production are discussed.

Phoneme frequency effects in jargon aphasia: A phonological investigation of nonword errors

This study investigates the nonwords produced by a jargon speaker, LT. Despite presenting with severe neologistic jargon, LT can produce discrete responses in picture naming tasks thus allowing the properties of his jargon to be investigated. This ability was exploited in two naming tasks. The first showed that LT’s nonword errors are related to their targets despite being generally unrecognisable. This relatedness appears to be a general property of his errors suggesting that they are produced by lexical rather than nonlexical means. The second naming task used a set of stimuli controlled for their phonemic content. This allowed an investigation of target phonology at the level of individual phonemes. Nonword responses maintained the English distribution of consonants and showed a significant relationship to the target phonologies. A strong influence of phoneme frequency was identified. High frequency consonants showed a pattern of frequent but indiscriminate use. Low frequency consonants were realised less often but were largely restricted to target related contexts rarely appearing as error phonology. The findings are explained within a lexical activation network with the proposal that the resting levels of phoneme nodes are frequency sensitive. Predictions for the recovery of jargon aphasia and suggestions for future investigations are made.

The word-length effect and disyllabic words.

Three experiments compared immediate serial recall of disyllabic words that differed on spoken duration. Two sets of long- and short-duration words were selected, in each case maximizing duration differences but matching for frequency, familiarity, phonological similarity, and number of phonemes, and controlling for semantic associations. Serial recall measures were obtained using auditory and visual presentation and spoken and picture-pointing recall. In Experiments 1a and 1b, using the first set of items, long words were better recalled than short words. In Experiments 2a and 2b, using the second set of items, no difference was found between long and short disyllabic words. Experiment 3 confirmed the large advantage for short-duration words in the word set originally selected by Baddeley, Thomson, and Buchanan (1975). These findings suggest that there is no reliable advantage for short-duration disyllables in span tasks, and that previous accounts of a word-length effect in disyllables are based on accidental differences between list items. The failure to find an effect of word duration casts doubt on theories that propose that the capacity of memory span is determined by the duration of list items or the decay rate of phonological information in short-term memory.