Qualities Of Speech Research Articles

A human vocal utterance corpus for perceptual and acoustic analysis of speech, singing, and intermediate vocalizations

In this paper we present the collection and annotation process of a corpus of human utterance vocalizations used for speech and song research. The corpus was collected to fill a void in current research tools, since no corpus currently exists which is useful for the classification of intermediate utterances between speech and monophonic singing. Much work has been done in the domain of speech versus music discrimination, and several corpora exist which can be used for this research. A specific example is the work done by Eric Scheirer and Malcom Slaney [IEEE ICASSP, 1997, pp. 1331–1334]. The collection of the corpus is described including questionnaire design and intended and actual response characteristics, as well as the collection and annotation of pre-existing samples. The annotation of the corpus consisted of a survey tool for a subset of the corpus samples, including ratings of the clips based on a speech–song continuum, and questions on the perceptual qualities of speech and song, both generally and corresponding to particular clips in the corpus.

I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing

One of the characteristics of writing is that it does not carry the phonetic and prosodic qualities of speech. We will argue, however, that the lexical, syntactic, organizational, and even the material aspects of writing construct identity just as much as do the phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech, and thus writing always conveys a representation of the self of the writer. In this sense, “voice” is not an optional extra: All writing contains “voice” in the Bakhtinian sense of reaccentuating “voice types,” which locate their users culturally and historically. Writers may, through the linguistic and other resources they choose to draw upon in their writing, ventriloquate an environmentally aware voice, a progressive-educator voice, a sexist voice, a positivist voice, a self-assured voice, a deferential voice, a committed-to-plain-English voice, or a combination of an infinite number of such voices. We will illustrate this argument with examples from the writing of six graduate students studying in British universities. We will recommend that an L2 writing pedagogy that raises critical awareness about voice can help learners maintain control over the personal and cultural identity they are projecting in their writing.

Romantic Self-Fashioning: John Thelwall and the Science of Elocution

JOHN THELWALL CAME TO PUBLIC PROMINENCE IN THE 1790S AS AN ORATOR and political theorist at center of British reform movement. His writings on political philosophy and public lectures he gave as a member of London Corresponding Society have contributed greatly to our understanding of how languages of romantic aesthetics and radical politics intersected and of how cult of sensibility was appropriated and redeployed in formation of a proletarian public sphere. This phase of Thelwall's career has been discussed elsewhere and is now seen as central to history of radical political and literary culture in Britain.(1) By end of eighteenth century, however, Thelwall was confronted with a climate of official harassment and hindered by legislation that effectively outlawed radical association as treasonous. Disillusioned, he moved away from political life, publishing, in 1801, a collection of poems accompanied by a prefatory memoir that announced his renunciation of radicalism. In 1797 he also spent time with Coleridge and Wordsworth at Nether Stowey, and certainly this brush with what was to become core of British romanticism is evident in his renunciation of political life and his brief embrace of pastoral.(2) But Thelwall's move away from politics was by no means end of his involvement in public life, although, with exception of a brief renewal of interest in radicalism that ended with failure of his journal The Champion, his career as an activist was effectively over. While Thelwall's writing from 1790s is now attracting critical interest, his writings subsequent to 1800 have attracted almost no interest at all, partly because they don't sustain our view of Thelwall as romantic orator victimized by an oppressive state apparatus. Thelwall's career after 1800 is no less interesting, and no less culturally symptomatic, for that. By 1803 he was again before public, not as a politician, but as a self-styled teacher of elocution, traveling through Britain delivering lectures on physiological aspects of pronunciation, on speech impediments, on anatomy of vocal organs and on art of oration. By 1810 he had established an institution in London that claimed to treat speech impediments as well as teach oratory skills, composition and polite literature as part of a scheme to prepare students for what he called the more liberal departments of active life.(3) His A Letter to Henry Cline, published same year, is thought to be first book concerned solely with speech impediments to be published in English,(4) and an important early text in development of field we now know as speech pathology. Elocution was a burgeoning field in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As Lynda Mugglestone has pointed out it was very directly related to codification of class difference in styles of speech, such that talking proper became a sign of distinction with much broader social and political implications than it had previously had.(5) Crucial to this production of accent and enunciation as modes of social distinction was what Friedrich Kittler calls oralization of alphabet in European languages; that is, a new-found interest in phonetic qualities of speech as a central component of language instruction and liberal education more generally.(6) For Kittler, this shift is integral to an understanding of German romanticism as a discourse network, a system of discursive production and reception encompassing a range of material practices from reading and writing of poetry to basic language instruction. This discourse, Kittler argues, thrives on a denial of its own discursivity: it is underwritten by fantasy of a natural language, a primal orality or inner voice, that locates origins of speech, and by extension, of subject, not in material processes or discursive relations, but in a feminized version of nature. …

N400 evidence of abnormal responses to speech in Alzheimer's disease

The status of semantic priming in Alzheimer's disease (AD) was examined using the speech elicited N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Speech was naturally paced, with 1 s of silence before the final word. In the semantic task, subjects attended to the meaning of the sentences for a subsequent memory test. In the phonemic monitoring task, they counted the words beginning with the letter ‘p’. The effects of age were assessed by comparing young and elderly, and the effects of disease by comparing elderly and AD subjects. In healthy young and elderly subjects, N400s were large to semantically unprimed words and small to semantically primed words. In AD subjects, N400s were large to primed words, reflecting a failure of the sentence stem to prime the final word, and probably an impairment in semantic knowledge. The N400 priming effect was not smaller during the phonemic than semantic task in any group, suggesting that the semantic qualities of speech are processed even when subjects are attending to phonemic qualities. N400 latency was delayed with age and further delayed with dementia.

Hot topics in architectural acoustics

This lecture will review some of the current topics of interest in the architectural acoustics community. There has been much recent work in trying to determine what physical factors contribute to subtle perceptions of spaciousness and source width in rooms. Efforts to standardize measurement techniques for recently proposed acoustical measures derived from the impulse response of rooms is underway as well as experiments to determine the utility of these measures in applied situations. These measures are also predicted in rooms by tests in physical scale models and computer models. Aural simulation of the effects of the architectural features of rooms on the qualities of music and speech is also being pursued. Measurements of the effects of flanking transmission, plumbing noise, and impact noise are also being refined as are recommended methods for assessing background noise levels in rooms. A significant area of activity in the architectural community that differentiates it from other technical committees occurs through the design and construction of real buildings to meet design goals based on current understandings of sound perception and propagation. Several case studies of actual buildings that have been designed to test some of the emerging knowledge gained in the laboratory will be presented.

Speech and Voice in Instructional Programmes

Abstract Literature search shows that, compared to vision, very little attention has been given to audio as a vehicle of information. This contrasts strongly with the daily use of audio in direct as well as in mediated communication. New technologies relate audiovisual instruction with computer‐assisted learning. New challenges and new questions appear from this development. A number of cases of deliberate application of audio are briefly described. Applying audio in AV/CAI format, one has to deal with aspects of dominance and redundancy in auditory‐visual presentation which are still not clear. Describing acoustic and informational characteristics of audio and qualities of voice and speech may be helpful for the designer of auditory materials.

News and notes

Pronunciation models in the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) and English as foreign language (EFL) are changing. This paper reviews purposes for pronunciation teaching, questions the hegemony of native English speaker (NES) models, and explores the possibility of incorporating at least some attention to non-native English speaker (NNES) models when teaching ESL or EFL pronunciation. A premise is that samples of non-native English (NNE) speech are useful as pronunciation models as long as they are intelligible and comprehensible. Two advantages of working with illustrations of intelligible, comprehensible NNE language samples are their transparency as aspirational models and relevance to learners' pronunciation needs. In support of this position, the paper reports questionnaire research through which 34 specialists in pronunciation teaching characterized the qualities of a recorded speech sample of an NNES, the award winning film actor Javier Bardem. One purpose was to determine if Bardem is a comprehensible NNES. A second purpose was to characterize qualities of Bardem's speech as a way of informing pronunciation pedagogy. The changes in instructional perspectives and teaching practices the paper proposes reject a deficit model of NNE pronunciation and foreground positive dimensions of what intelligible, comprehensible NNESs are able to do well.

Experiencing the aural environment of buildings

A simple audio system was developed to allow architecture students to simulate the aural environment of various rooms. A basic set of exercises provide a conceptual and aural understanding of the room impulse response method for evaluating subjective acoustic qualities of rooms. The focus of the exercises is to provide a structure for the experiential understanding and manipulation of acoustics of buildings in applied design situations. Aural demonstrations illustrating how changes in the impulse response such as the loudness, direction, and number of early reflections as well as the subsequent reverberation affect the perceived acoustical qualities of speech and music are shown for various environments. The exercises are implemented using anechoic music recordings played via loudspeakers or headphones. The impulse responses are simulated using digital delay and reverberator units. Once they become familiar with the equipment, students can actually manipulate listening conditions easily for an endless opportunity of listening experiences.

Disturbances of speech prosody following right hemisphere infarcts

The ability to perceive and express emotional, as well as number of linguistic prosodic qualities of speech was tested in 20 Swedish-speaking patients with right-sided cortical, as well as purely subcortical brain infarcts, and in 18 normal controls. The infarcts were assessed by clinical neurological examination, and by CT, EEG, and measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF). In the patients the identification of emotional messages was disturbed, as well as the identification and production of several linguistic prosodic qualities. The study supports the claim that prosodic impairment could be linguistic in nature, and not secondary to affective disorder. The total degree of anatomical and functional disturbance of the right hemisphere played a role for both the ability to identify emotional messages and for identification of two of the linguistic prosodic qualities tested. However, it was not possible to find support for the hypothesis that the organization of prosody in the right hemisphere mirrors that of propositional speech on the left side.

Automatic background noise suppression

A circuit for suppressing background noise of a continuous nature while enhancing speech signals, or signals having the transient temporal qualities of speech, includes a signal multiplier which, in the preferred embodiment, receives the composite audio signal along with a control signal present only when the speech component of the audio signal is present. The control signal may be derived from an AGC circuit having a slow attack, fast decay characteristic to establish a quiescent output level from the AGC amplifier in the absence of speech. An envelope detector is biased to provide a zero output amplitude in response to the quiescent amplifier output level. Speech components appearing in the amplifier output signal are then envelope-detected and filtered to provide the control signal. Alternatively, the control signal can be derived by envelope-detecting the audio signal, filtering the detected signal to remove its d.c. component representing the continuous noise, and then detecting and filtering again. In still another embodiment, the control signal acts upon a constant amplitude instead of the audio input signal in order to provide a speech-responsive tactile vibration for the deaf.

Judgments of Characteristics of Speakers in a Natural Stress Situation

This paper describes two related studies. The general hypothesis was that the rhythmic patterning of dialogue is related to how onlookers perceive certain psychological characteristics of the speakers. The experimental procedures in both studies involved evaluation by independent observers of the “credibility” of participants. In the first study 30 female college students were assigned to two conditions; each subject was either to read or to listen to monologues and dialogues (between senators and witnesses) from the “Watergate” hearings. There were significant differences in student ratings between listening and reading conditions for witnesses engaged in dialogues. In the second study 53 male and female subjects listened to tapes or read transcripts of dialogue from four senator-witness pairs. As in Study 1 subjects rated witnesses on a number of dimensions including credibility. Non-lexical qualities of speech in the taped dialogues were analyzed using a PDP-12 computer and these data were correlated with subjects' credibility ratings. The multiple regression analyses indicated that mean turn time, variability of pauses, and similarity in duration of pauses and vocalizations were significantly related to ratings of witnesses.

The language of class and nation

T he duality of the black experience both within and without the American national experience, and the contribution of different classes and strata of the black community to that duality, appeared in the kind of English spoken on the farms and plantations and in the towns and cities. The slave, Kelly Miller remarks, had to be ear-minded, whereas the master could be eye-minded) Up to a point the ear-mindedness of AfroAmerican slaves did not differ essentially from that of, say, Eastern European slaves in the cities of Renaissance Italy) Even today in the black urban ghettos verbal ability contributes at least as much as physical strength to individual prestige. Thomas Kochman writes: "The prestige norms which influence black speech behavior are those which have been successful in manipulating and controlling people: and situations. ''3 But the slaves did more than set the pace for a certain verbal style; they created, or at least elaborated, their own version of the English language. 4 Although the slave traders wanted to reduce communication within their human cargoes, they never wholly succeeded. The two great West African language families, the Bantu and the Sudanese, did not exclude passage from one variant to another within each nor even between them. s More important, the slaves often had to be held for reshipment at various points on the coast, where pidgin English (or pidgin French or especially pidgin Portuguese) served as a lingua franca. Based on English vocabulary but perhaps with some West African grammatical influence and tonal characteristics, it provided these Africans with the first English they were to learn, and by its very nature it could be learned quickly. When on the New World plantations these slaves taught those who came after them. Gerald W. Mullin has estimated that slaves in Virginia were speaking an adequate amount of English within six months and that they were speaking well in about two and a half years. 6 From those days forward, blacks, not whites, took primary responsibility for teaching other blacks on the plantation. 7 The English they taught was based on the pidgin that had arisen in the slave trade. The principal need of the slaves was communication with the other slaves, not with whites. The terms "pidgin" and "creole" (the development of pidgin into a first language for a new generation) evoke peculiar reactions, for they are for some reason regarded as pejorative. They are, however, technical linguistic terms that imply no value judgment. Pidgin English, which became common in the New World, probably arose, in the manifestation relevant to Afro-Americans, on the slave-trading coast of West Africa. It appeared wherever British slave traders appeared) Linguists have variously interpreted the special qualities of southern speech, in its wide variety of forms, and until recently have denied much of an African contribution, mush less the existence of a separate black dialect. Clement Eaton has admirably summed up and applied the views of such linguists as Cleanth Brooks and G.P. Krapp:

On the Fundamental Qualities of Speech in Communication

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