Single-word Utterances Research Articles

The role of connected speech in distinguishing types of apraxia of speech following brain damage

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a common condition resulting from brain damage causing impairments to speech planning and programming that is distinct from aphasia and dysarthria. Following a stroke, AOS is most often seen as a part of nonfluent Broca’s aphasia. Recovery and dissolution of speech in stroke induced apraxia of speech (sAOS) and progressive AOS (pAOS) appear on a symptomatic level to be reversals of each other, but the existing evidence shows that sAOS is distinct from pAOS. This suggests different causes that have relevance for management of pAOS. In this article, we examine the similarities and differences between sAOS and pAOS and conclude that while the two conditions present similarly, certain features differ significantly, which may suggest different mechanisms underlying their manifestation. The role of connected speech as opposed to single word utterances is noted.

What’s so complex about conversational speech? A comparison of HMM-based and transformer-based ASR architectures

Highly performing speech recognition is important for more fluent human-machine interaction (e.g., dialogue systems). Modern ASR architectures achieve human-level recognition performance on read speech but still perform sub-par on conversational speech, which arguably is or, at least, will be instrumental for human-machine interaction. Understanding the factors behind this shortcoming of modern ASR systems may suggest directions for improving them. In this work, we compare the performances of HMM- vs. transformer-based ASR architectures on a corpus of Austrian German conversational speech. Specifically, we investigate how strongly utterance length, prosody, pronunciation, and utterance complexity as measured by perplexity affect different ASR architectures. Among other findings, we observe that single-word utterances – which are characteristic of conversational speech and constitute roughly 30% of the corpus – are recognized more accurately if their F0 contour is flat; for longer utterances, the effects of the F0 contour tend to be weaker. We further find that zero-shot systems require longer utterance lengths and are less robust to pronunciation variation, which indicates that pronunciation lexicons and fine-tuning on the respective corpus are essential ingredients for the successful recognition of conversational speech.

The influence of word stress on segmental and cluster match: a Bulgarian three-year-old with protracted phonological development

ABSTRACT The current paper analyses speech data of a monolingual Bulgarian girl (“Etty”, aged 3;11) with protracted phonological development (PPD). Etty's profile demonstrates the strong effects of prohibitive word structure constraints on segmental and whole-word accuracy. Single-word utterances were audio-recorded by a native speaker and transcribed phonetically by three transcribers. Data were analysed within a constraints-based nonlinear phonological framework (Bernhardt & Stemberger, Introduction to this issue). Even though the child's segmental system met age-level expectations in stressed syllables, strong constraints against initial unstressed syllables and consonant sequences reduced her overall accuracy and intelligibility. The data highlight the importance of examining all aspects of the phonological hierarchy, and further define the scope of PPD for Bulgarian.

An Acoustic Phonetic Study on the Korean loanwords Pitch-Accent Realization by Native Japanese Speakers

The purpose of this study is to examine Korean loanwords of which pronunciation is similar to Japanese by analyzing Japanese Korean learners’ pitch patterns with objective values. Considering the point that in Japanese, a word’s accent is maintained in a sentence while in Korean, it is not kept in a sentence, this researcher performed an experiment on loanwords by dividing the cases of sentence unit speech from those of word unit speech. According to the results of analyzing sentence unit speech, in the parts where postpositions are combined, Japanese, the mother tongue’s pitch patterns have negative influence. In the case of single word utterances, a significant difference was found due to the difference in the descending width rather than the difference according to the pattern type. The findings of this study imply that when teaching Japanese learners about Korean pitch patterns, we should consider the phenomena of mother tongue transfer shown in different forms according to the environment of speech and also words’ pitch patterns along with combined postpositions’ pitch patterns.

Tailoring the Input to Children's Needs: The Use of Fine Lexical Tuning in Speech Directed to Normally Hearing Children and Children With Cochlear Implants.

Purpose: The aim of the present study was to explore fine lexical tuning in Dutch infant-directed speech (IDS) addressed to congenitally deaf infants who received a cochlear implant (CI) early in life (<2 years of age) in comparison with children with normal hearing (NH). The longitudinal pattern of parents' utterance length in the initial stages of the child's lexical development was examined. Parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired in the earliest developmental stages were selected and their MLU (Mean Length of Utterance) was measured.Method: Transcriptions of monthly recordings of spontaneous interactions of 10 CI children and 30 NH children with their parents were analyzed. The children with CI were followed from the moment their device was switched on, and the NH children from the age of 6 months onwards. A total of 57,846 utterances of parents of CI children and 149,468 utterances of parents of NH children were analyzed.Results: IDS addressed to children with NH and children with CI exhibits fine lexical tuning: parents adjust the MLU of the utterances that contain the words that children are on the verge of producing themselves. More specifically, the parents' mean length of those utterances decreased in relation to the point when the children began using the item. Consequently, the number of occurrences in isolation of the lexical item increased. The speech addressed to all the children exhibited this phenomenon, but it was significantly more strongly present in speech addressed to the children with CI.Conclusions: The speech addressed to children with NH and CI is characterized by fine lexical tuning and a high incidence of single-word utterances in the period leading up to the children's first use of words in speech production. Notwithstanding striking commonalities, IDS addressed to children with a hearing impairment is markedly different, which suggests that parents take this specific character of the children into account.

Study on Phonologycal Process: A Case on Indonesian EFL Students' Pronunciations

The present article seeks to discuss the phonological process concerning the alterations in English sounds produced by Indonesian EFL students. This study drew on generative phonology and utilized Schane’s (1973) categories of the phonological process to highlight the changes in English sounds. This study applied a qualitative method with a descriptive research design. All data of this study were gathered through digitally recording eight EFL students’ oral presentations in the research proposal seminars. According to the results of this study, the transformations in the English sounds arose in both the consonant and vowel sounds of the English, where these changes attributed to the four categories of phonological process, including assimilation, dissimilation, deletion, and insertion. The present study also found the occurrences of a double and triple different phonological process in single word utterance produced by participants of this study. This study signified that such changes in English sounds occurred owing to the mother tongue influence. The results of this study offer a significant contribution to the insights into both linguistics and EFL instruction.

A Study on Phonological Process: A Case on Indonesian EFL Students’ Pronunciations

The present article seeks to discuss the phonological process concerning the alterations in English sounds produced by Indonesian EFL students. This study drew on generative phonology and utilized Schane’s (1973) categories of the phonological process to highlight the changes in English sounds. This study applied a qualitative method with a descriptive research design. All data of this study were gathered through digitally recording eight EFL students’ oral presentations in the research proposal seminars. According to the results of this study, the transformations in the English sounds arose in both the consonant and vowel sounds of the English, where these changes attributed to the four categories of phonological process, including assimilation, dissimilation, deletion, and insertion. The present study also found the occurrences of a double and triple different phonological process in single word utterance produced by participants of this study. This study signified that such changes in English sounds occurred owing to the mother tongue influence. The results of this study offer a significant contribution to the insights into both linguistics and EFL instruction.

Glottalisation, coda voicing, and phrase position in Australian English.

Glottalisation is an important cue to coda stop voicelessness, particularly for younger Australian English speakers who utilise glottalisation more than older speakers, suggesting a recent sound change. However, most previous studies of glottalisation in this variety of English have focussed on single word utterances, raising questions about whether glottalisation in those studies may have been prosodically conditioned rather than specific to the coda stop: Could the observed effect have been due to phrase-final creaky voice, which is acoustically similar to coda-related glottalisation? This study therefore explored the differential effects of phrase position on the production of glottalisation. Phrase-medially (where phrase-final creaky voice is not expected to occur), results confirmed previous findings that glottalisation cues coda stop voicelessness and that it does so more frequently for younger compared to older speakers. In phrase-final position, rates of glottalisation increased, but older speakers appeared more similar to younger speakers in use of glottalisation, suggesting that the change towards the increased use of glottalisation may be nearing completion in this prosodic position. Younger speakers appear to represent a more advanced stage of the change extending the use of glottalisation from phrase-final to phrase-medial position.

Object play as a mediator of the role of exploration in communication skills development

In this study, we investigated exploration and language development, particularly whether preliminary object play mediates the role of exploration in gesture and speech production. We followed 27 infants, aged 8–17 months, and gathered data on the frequency of their exploration, preliminary functional acts with single or multiple objects, and communicative behaviors (e.g., gesturing and single-word utterances). The results of our path analysis indicated that exploration had a direct effect on single-object play, which, in turn, affected gesturing and advanced object play. Gesturing as well as single and multi-object play affected speech production. These findings suggest that exploration is associated with language development. This association may be facilitated by object play milestones in which infants recall the object’s function, which strengthens their memory and representation skills. Further, recalling the usage of an object by the caregivers may encourage an infant’s overall imitation tendency, which is important for learning how to communicate with gestures and words.

EARLY SYNTACTIC ACQUISITION IN A BALINESE SPEAKING CHILD

This article addresses the acquisition of syntax in a Balinese monolingual child at the age of 2;5 until 2;7. The data was collected in natural setting when the child involved in spontaneous interaction with adults. The speech produced by the child was segmented based on the utterances. The speech produced by the child was transcribed orthographically, along with the phonetic transcription. Besides, every utterance produced by the child accompanied by contextual description and explanation. The data was coded and glossed according to the parts of speech, and grammatical functions. The results show that at this stage, even though the child goes through early sentence or word combinations stage, the child still produces single-word utterances at the onset as well. The words belong to noun, verb, adjective, adverb and particle. Words combination produced can be classified into declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences. Initially, the child frequently omit subject. The fact that in colloquial adult’s conversation in Balinese omitting subject is acceptable may contribute to the subject omission. In two words combinations NP and VP occurred and in three or more words utterances S-P, S-P-O and S-P-C starting to be produced. In making questions kije‘where’, ape ‘what’, encen ‘which one’ and nyen ‘whose’ are used. In question, the child also applied rising intonation when question words are not applied. The child is also able to express tag question. In imperative sentences, the child is able to use command, request, and invitation. This study implies the role of adult’s input in children language acquisition as shown in subject omission and the flexible word order.

The applications and effects of learning English through augmented reality: a case study of Pokémon Go

The rise of augmented reality hits the world of Information, Communication and Technology which brings about the booming phenomenon of mobile games. One of hot mobile game with the successful application of augmented reality is Pokémon Go, issued in August 2016. The uses of augmented reality not only give the gamers a new kind experience to learn new technology, but also provide a new way for teachers and learners to benefit the origins of English and its meanings of each pocket monster. Each pocket monster stands for a new word that is created by its founder. In each new word, the uses of prefix, root and suffix have been established and named, as the single-word utterances of the pokémon names are the sentences. Hence, this article aims at (1) the overview of augmented reality and educations, (2) the applications of augmented reality into the mobile games, (3) the uses of prefix, root and suffix in learning English and pokémon languages, and (4) the experiments. A total number of 61 students were divided into the experimental group and the control group. The questionnaires, descriptive statistics, a paired-sample t-test, one sample t-test, and ANCOVA were employed into the quantitative data. The research questions were to evaluate (a) students’ learning attitudes, (b) learning satisfactions and (c) learning achievements in order to show the differences of pre-test and post-test between the experimental group and the control group. The experimental results indicate that the experimental group had significant performances than the control group in promoting their learning attitudes, learning satisfactions and learning achievements.

Early Speech Acts in Child Language

Abstract&#x0D; Each utterance is designed to serve a specific function. It may be meant to inform the listeners, warn them, order them to do something, question them about the fact, or thank them for a gift or act of kindness. All of these speech acts are called as the communicative functions of language or the functions of speech acts. Therefore, in communicating, people do not just “say things”, but also perform certain “actions”.In the process of language development in children, the development of the language functions or speech acts (i.e. illocutionary speech acts) occur simultaneously with the development of linguistics aspects of language (phonemes or sounds, morpheme, words, and sentences) in each stages of language development. The development began early from infants start to babble, produce single-word utterances, until they produced more complex sentences. However, how is the process of the evolution at the early stage of child language development? How do children use their language at the early stage of the development?In this short paper, the writer describes thesome forms of speech acts produced by children.

Detecting Abnormal Word Utterances in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: Machine-Learning-Based Voice Analysis Versus Speech Therapists.

Abnormal prosody is often evident in the voice intonations of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. We compared a machine-learning-based voice analysis with human hearing judgments made by 10 speech therapists for classifying children with autism spectrum disorders ( n = 30) and typical development ( n = 51). Using stimuli limited to single-word utterances, machine-learning-based voice analysis was superior to speech therapist judgments. There was a significantly higher true-positive than false-negative rate for machine-learning-based voice analysis but not for speech therapists. Results are discussed in terms of some artificiality of clinician judgments based on single-word utterances, and the objectivity machine-learning-based voice analysis adds to judging abnormal prosody.

Online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin: Evidence from ERPs

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin at the attentive stage. We examined the behavioral and electrophysiological responses of native Mandarin listeners to Mandarin sentences, which contrast in final tones (rising Tone2 or falling Tone4) and intonations (Question or Statement). A clear P300 effect was observed for question-statement contrast in sentences ending with Tone4, but no ERP effect was found for question-statement contrast in sentences ending with Tone2. Our results provide ERP evidence for the interaction of tone and intonation in Mandarin, confirming the findings with behavioral metalinguistic data that native Mandarin listeners can distinguish between question intonation and statement intonation when the intonation is associated with a final Tone4, but fail to do so when the intonation is associated with a final Tone2. Our study extended the understanding of online processing of tone and intonation (1) from the pre-attentive stage to the attentive stage and (2) within a larger domain (i.e. multi-word utterances) than a single word utterance.

Emotional and linguistic prosody development in Polish children: Three different paths

AbstractThe development of prosodic competence in children is a complex process. Various, often conflicting developmental paths have been proposed in the literature, with both the general testing method and language specific factors seeming to be responsible for the variety of the outcomes. In the present study receptive prosodic skills of over 100 Polish children aged 3;6–11 were assessed and compared to the skills of young adults (20–30) in three tasks; emotion recognition of single word utterances, question vs. statement distinction, and synthetic vs. recorded human voice discrimination. No age effect was found in the emotion recognition task; the question vs. statement distinction ability had a clear developmental threshold at the age between 7 and 8, and the ability to spot rhythmic and temporal distortions of synthetic speech gradually improved with age, but was generally not developed in 3;6 to 5;6 year olds. The results suggest a complex path of acquisition of the above skills.

Learning transitive verbs from single-word verbs in the input by young children acquiring English.

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than that of sentences. We tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children learn their early verbs from parents' single-word utterances. Distribution of single-word transitive verbs produced by a large sample of young children was strongly predicted by the relative token frequency of verbs in parental single-word utterances, but multiword sentences had no predictive value. Analysis of the interactive context showed that objects of verbs are retrievable by pragmatic inference, as is the meaning of the verbs. Single-word input appears optimal for learning an initial vocabulary of verbs.

Using automatic speech recognition to identify pediatric speech errors

Speech delay is a childhood language problem that might resolve without intervention, but might alternatively presage continued speech and language deficits. Thus, early detection through screening might help to identify children for whom intervention is warranted. The goal of this work is to develop Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) methods to partially automate screening for speech delay in young children. Speech data were recorded from typically developing and speech delayed children (N = 63) aged 6 to 9 years old during administration of the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA). Monophone Hidden Markov Model (HMM) acoustic models were trained on speech data obtained from 207 typically developing children in the same age range. These training data consisted of a total of about 18,000 single-word utterances. The HMMs were then used to develop an utterance verification system to distinguish correct versus error productions. Several variations of the recognition strategy, feature extraction, and scoring methods were investigated. The best overall ASR result for distinguishing normal versus abnormal speech is approximately 86%. It is hypothesized that the ASR methods could approach the level of accuracy of speech therapists for this task (agreement among multiple therapists is over 95%), but a much larger database may be needed.

Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions

Event Abstract Back to Event Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions Daniela Sammler1, 2*, Marie-Hélène Grosbras2, Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer3 and Pascal Belin2, 4 1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany 2 University of Glasgow, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, UK 3 Bangor University , School of Psychology, UK 4 University of Montréal and McGill University, Canada Prosody - on top of its linguistic and emotional roles - serves an interpersonal function in speech: to convey the speaker's communicative intentions. Research on the neural bases of prosodic intentions requires a fusion of the fields of neurolinguistics and social neurosciences. The present data outline (i) a right-hemispheric dual-stream account of prosodic comprehension, in analogy to prevailing dual-stream models of language comprehension in the left hemisphere; and (ii) motor simulation in the dorsal stream as a conceptual interface between prosodic comprehension and the decoding of the speaker's stimulus-linked intentions. In two separate functional/diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments, participants categorized the prosodic intention ("naming" vs "asking"; experimental task) or the word-initial consonant (/bear/ or /pear/; control task) of single word utterances that varied along a pitch contour (falling to rising) or phoneme continuum (/b/ to /p/). The prosody task (vs control) activated (i) right posterior and anterior superior temporal sulcus (p/aSTS) connected via the middle longitudinal fasciculus (ventral pathway), and (ii) right pSTS and laryngeal premotor cortex (PMC) connected via the arcuate fasciculus (dorsal pathway). (iii) Functional relevance of the dorsal pathway was demonstrated by reduced performance in the prosody (but not control) task after TMS-induced inhibition of right PMC. These data draw a dual-stream picture of prosodic comprehension built on complementary mechanisms: A ventral WHAT pathway to map vocal pitch patterns to meaning by evaluating auditory features, and a dorsal HOW pathway to recognize a speaker's vocal action by covertly mapping the perceived pitch contour to laryngeal gestures. Following motor simulation accounts of social cognition, this latter mechanism may ground the understanding of the speaker's (low-level) intention conveyed by speech prosody. Keywords: Larynx, Intention, Motor Simulation, functional MRI, diffusion MRI, pragmatics, TMS, Prosody, dorsal pathway, ventral pathway, speech act Conference: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Language Citation: Sammler D, Grosbras M, Bestelmeyer P and Belin P (2015). Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions. Conference Abstract: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00058 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 19 Feb 2015; Published Online: 24 Apr 2015. * Correspondence: Dr. Daniela Sammler, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, daniela.sammler@ae.mpg.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Google Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Google Scholar Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin PubMed Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of vowels produced by self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers

Prior research (Tracy & Satariano, 2011) investigated the perceptual characteristics of gay and heterosexual male speech; it was discovered that listeners primarily relied on vowels to identify sexual orientation. Using single-word utterances produced by those same speakers, the current study examined both the acoustic characteristics of vowels, such as pitch, duration, and the size of the vowel space, and how these characteristics relate to the perceived sexual orientation of the speaker. We found a correlation between pitch and perceived sexual identity for vowels produced by heterosexual speakers—higher f0 was associated with perceptual “gayness.” We did not find this correlation for gay speakers. Vowel duration did not reliably distinguish gay and heterosexual speakers, but speakers who produced longer vowels were perceived as gay and speakers who produced shorter vowels were perceived as heterosexual. The size of the vowel space did not reliably differ between gay and heterosexual speakers. However, ...

Can You Believe It? 12-Month-Olds Use Word Order to Distinguish Between Declaratives and Polar Interrogatives

Word order is a core mechanism for conveying syntactic structure, yet interrogatives usually disrupt canonical word orders. For example, in English, polar interrogatives typically invert the subject and auxiliary verb and insert an utterance-initial do if no auxiliary is present. These word order patterns result from differences in the underlying syntactic structures; therefore, distinguishing interrogatives from declaratives is crucial for learning the syntax of interrogatives. More broadly, the ability to differentiate sentence types is critical for avoiding errors in syntax acquisition that would occur if interrogatives and declaratives were evaluated as the same type of utterance. Despite the importance of this issue, little is known about when and how infants begin to differentiate sentence types. In this study we exposed one group of 12-month-old infants to auditory passages of polar interrogatives and another group to passages of declaratives. To test sentence discrimination, infants in both groups were played new sets of declaratives and interrogatives in a procedure in which infants controlled how long they listened to each set. The sentences were acoustically modified to remove all prosodic cues that could differentiate them. Regardless of group, infants listened longer to the type of sentence that was different from the type to which they were initially exposed, indicating that they differentiated the sentence types based on lexical distributional patterns. We thus established that, despite only just beginning to produce single word utterances, 12-month-olds are sensitive to word-order properties that differentiate declaratives from interrogatives.