Speaker Age Research Articles

Exploring potential barriers in equitable access to pediatric diagnostic imaging using machine learning.

In this work, we examine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound (US) appointments at the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) department of a pediatric hospital to discover possible relationships between selected patient features and no-show or long waiting room time endpoints. The chosen features include age, sex, income, distance from the hospital, percentage of non-English speakers in a postal code, percentage of single caregivers in a postal code, appointment time slot (morning, afternoon, evening), and day of the week (Monday to Sunday). We trained univariate Logistic Regression (LR) models using the training sets and identified predictive (significant) features that remained significant in the test sets. We also implemented multivariate Random Forest (RF) models to predict the endpoints. We achieved Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.82 and 0.73 for predicting no-show and long waiting room time endpoints, respectively. The univariate LR analysis on DI appointments uncovered the effect of the time of appointment during the day/week, and patients' demographics such as income and the number of caregivers on the no-shows and long waiting room time endpoints. For predicting no-show, we found age, time slot, and percentage of single caregiver to be the most critical contributors. Age, distance, and percentage of non-English speakers were the most important features for our long waiting room time prediction models. We found no sex discrimination among the scheduled pediatric DI appointments. Nonetheless, inequities based on patient features such as low income and language barrier did exist.

Effect of Speaker Age on Listener Perceptions of Word-Final /l/.

This study investigated an effect of speaker age on listeners' perception of word-final /l/ produced by child and adult speakers of Southern White Vernacular English, a dialect that shows higher rates of word-final /l/ vocalization than other dialects of English. Stimuli included children and adults' word-final /l/ embedded in monosyllabic words in two vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ and /ɔ, ɑ/). A total of 25 monolingual adult listeners listened to each word and were asked to judge the /l/-likeness using a visual analog scale. Average listener ratings and three acoustic measures (F2 transition rate [F2 TR] and F2-F1 [Hz] values at 20% and 80% time points along the vowel-/l/ duration) were analyzed. Adult productions were rated more as correct /l/ than those of children in both vowel contexts, despite the similarity in their F2 TR and F2-F1 values at the 80% time point. Correlation between the acoustic measures and the average listener ratings were weak for all three measures for adults' productions. For children's productions, while the correlation with F2 TR values were weak, moderate significant correlations were found for F2-F1 values at the 20% and 80% time points. In terms of vowel context, word-final /l/ in the high front vowel context was rated more as /l/ than those in low back vowel context. Findings suggest that listeners are more likely to accept word-final /l/ as being correct when produced by adult speakers, regardless of their acoustic characteristics, but more likely to perceive an error when produced by a child and attend more to acoustic information for their perceptual judgment. This highlights the importance of considering children's dialectal background when judging word-final /l/, which is more likely to be vocalized in certain dialects and certain vowel contexts, and thus can be misjudged without such consideration.

5. Effect of number and position of frames in speaker age estimation

5. Effect of number and position of frames in speaker age estimation

An overview for assessing a number of systems for estimating age and gender of speakers

The determination of the age and gender of the speaker of the speech signal is an interesting topic in the interaction between human-machine. Speech signal has a variety of applications ranging from speech analyses to allocate human-machine interactions. This paper aims to conduct a comparative study of age and gender classification algorithms applied to the speech signal. Comparison of experimental results of different sources of voices for speakers of different languages and methods of miscellaneous classification such as Bayes classifier, neural network, support vector machines, K-nearest neighbor, gaussien mixture model and hybrid method based on weighted analysis of a directed non-negative matrix and a neural network with a general recession as well as some deep learning methods, is done in order to show different results to classify the age and gender of the speaker when processing the speech signal. The study showed that methods and algorithms of deep learning have excelled in providing accuracy ratios higher than other methods, and it shows that the hybridization of two or more classification methods increases the accuracy level of the results.

Phone duration modeling for speaker age estimation in children.

Automatic inference of paralinguistic information from speech, such as age, is an important area of research with many technological applications. Speaker age estimation can help with age-appropriate curation of information content and personalized interactive experiences. However, automatic speaker age estimation in children is challenging due to the paucity of speech data representing the developmental spectrum, and the large signal variability including within a given age group. Most prior approaches in child speaker age estimation adopt methods directly drawn from research on adult speech. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that exploits temporal variability present in children's speech for estimation of children's age. We focus on phone durations as biomarker of children's age. Phone duration distributions are derived by forced-aligning children's speech with transcripts. Regression models are trained to predict speaker age among children studying in kindergarten up to grade 10. Experiments on two children's speech datasets are used to demonstrate the robustness and portability of proposed features over multiple domains of varying signal conditions. Phonemes contributing most to estimation of children speaker age are analyzed and presented. Experimental results suggest phone durations contain important development-related information of children. The proposed features are also suited for application under low data scenarios.

A Cross-Sectional Age Group Study of Coarticulatory Resistance: The Case of Late-Acquired Voiceless Fricatives in English.

As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /θ, s, ʃ/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech sounds. Ten 5-year-old children, seven 8-year-old children, and nine college-age adults produced [əFV] sequences in carrier phrases, where F was /θ/, /s/, or /ʃ/ and V was /æ/, /i/, or /u/. In Experiment 1, coarticulation was perceptually indexed: 65 adults predicted the target stressed vowel based on forward-gated audiovisual speech samples for a subset of four speakers from each age group. In Experiment 2, dynamic spectral measures of the /əFV/ sequences were analyzed using smoothing spline analysis of variance to again test for vowel effects on fricative articulation across age groups. The perceptual results indicated that fricatives blocked vowel-vowel coarticulation across speaker age groups. Contrary to expectation, vowels were most accurately predicted when F was /s/ and not when it was /ʃ/ or /θ/ across age groups. Acoustic results indicated the expected biomechanically motivated /ʃ/ > /s/ > /θ/ coarticulatory resistance hierarchy in adults' speech. By contrast, /ʃ/ > /s/ were similarly influenced by context in 8-year-olds' speech, and the results from 5-year-olds' speech suggested an influence of order of acquisition in that /θ/ was surprisingly resistant to coarticulation. The study results are taken to suggest that a temporal constraint on fricative articulation interacts with biomechanical constraints during development to influence patterns of coarticulation in school-age children's speech.

Орфоэпические варианты как социолингвистические переменные в устной речевой коммуникации

The article presents the research of correlation between orthoepic variants used by a speaker and his socio-demographic characteristics, obtained by means of native modern Russian speakers survey. The relationship between frequency of orthoepic variant choosing and gender and age of speakers was studied. The absence of gender differences in the choice of orthoepic variants was revealed, on the one hand, and the existence of a relationship between frequency of some variants and the age of respondent, on the other hand. The necessity of further comprehensive study of socially marked pronunciation variants in Russian language is highlighted.

Fast passives, slow relatives

ABSTRACT Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and three-clause structures in active and passive voice. The complex structures included complements and relative clauses. The experiment yielded 1,884 utterances that were coded for lexical, grammatical, and fluency factors. Articulation rate was calculated for the 790 fully fluent utterances. Age, utterance length, and structure affected rate. Increases in rate as speakers age are generally taken to reflect gains in proficiency as the complex skills of language production are practiced. The length effect is tentatively explained in terms of a strategy that adjusts the time to articulate different structures. Central analyses found passives articulated faster than actives, and subject (passive) relative clauses articulated faster than object (active) relative clauses. These structural effects—the rate increase in passives and rate decrease in object relatives—support a planning-based account that hinges on filler-gap dependencies.

Effects of Age and Parkinson's Disease on the Relationship between Vocal Fold Abductory Kinematics and Relative Fundamental Frequency

This study reports on two experiments to examine vocal fold abduction and its relationship with relative fundamental frequency (RFF), considering two attributes that have been shown to elicit group differences in RFF: age (Experiment 1) and Parkinson's disease (PD; Experiment 2). For both experiments, simultaneous acoustic and nasendoscopic recordings were collected as participants produced the utterance, /ifi/. RFF values were computed from the acoustic signal, whereas abduction duration and glottic angle at voicing offset were identified from the laryngoscopic images. In Experiment 1, 50 speakers with typical voices (18-83 years) were analyzed to examine (1A) the effects of speaker age on individual outcome measures (RFF, abduction duration, glottic angle) via Pearson's correlation coefficients, and (1B) the effects of abductory measures and age on RFF via an analysis of covariance. In Experiment 2, 20 speakers with PD and 20 matched controls were analyzed to examine (2A) the effects of group (with/without PD) on outcome measures via an analysis of variance, and (2B) the relationship of RFF with abduction duration, glottic angle, and age when considering group via an analysis of covariance. Age demonstrated a significant, negative relationship with glottic angle (1A) but was not a significant factor when examining the relationship of vocal fold abduction and RFF (1B). Speaker group (with/without PD) demonstrated a significant effect on measures of RFF and abduction duration (2A) but was not a significant factor when examining the relationship of vocal fold abduction and RFF (2B). RFF is sensitive to changes in vocal fold abductory patterns during devoicing, irrespective of speaker age or PD status.

Acquiring French Intonation against the Backdrop of Heritage Bilingualism: The Case of German–Turkish Learners

This paper investigates the intonation of L3 French, produced by six bilingual learners (ages: 15–17) who speak Turkish as a heritage language (HL) along with German and six same-aged monolingual German learners. We examined of a corpus of read speech in two respects: first, we determined the number of accentual phrases (APs) and, second, we extracted F0 values for each segment, normalized them, and calculated the deviations from the average values produced by three native controls (age: 21–23). Although the bilinguals were expected to outperform the monolinguals due to certain similarities between the intonational systems of French and Turkish, their mean deviation from the native contours was only slightly smaller than that of the monolinguals (difference not significant). To determine how strongly the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation was influenced by German and whether it could serve as a basis for positive transfer whatsoever, we compared their production in Turkish with data recorded from three monolingual Turkish L1 speakers (ages: 21–32) and five German learners of L2 Turkish (ages: 22–43). Results show that the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation does not deviate substantially from the monolinguals’ one, in contrast to the contours produced by the L2 learners. This suggests that metalinguistic and prosodic awareness should be fostered in heritage bilinguals to make them benefit from their full linguistic repertoire.

Study of the Effects of Control Factors on Speech Features Using Taguchi Method

In this paper, Taguchi optimization method is used for the first time to study the effect of some factors on the features included in speech signal. These factors are ambient temperature, speaker's age, number of words, and number of letters in each word. Taguchi method has the advantage of using a small number of experiments while getting good results for finding which factor has more effect on the phenomena under study. In this method, the number of experiments is based on the orthogonal array that depends on the number and level of the control factors. The main advantage of this method is evident in relation to reducing number of needed experiments where time, cost and material resources are minimized compared to other methods that rely mainly on trial-and-error approach. Nine representative experiments have been carried out. Each one is repeated three times. MATLAB has been employed to find the speech features under study including entropy and linear predictive coding (LPC). Minitab statistical software has been used to analyze the results based on Taguchi method. It has been found out that the order of factors according to their effect on the abovementioned speech features from higher to lower is number of words, number of letters, age, and ambient temperature. In order to validate these results, a linear regression analysis, which has confirmed the results obtained using Taguchi method, has been carried out. The results are immensely beneficial for researchers in improving speech analysis related applications by understanding which factors have more effect on speech features.

CONCEPTUAL SPACE OF GERMAN-SPEAKING MATRIMONIAL CONFLICT CONVERSATIONAL DISCOURSE

The article deals with the conceptual space of matrimonial conflict discourse as a system of hierarchically organized and interrelated concepts, which are highlighted and analyzed according to their place in the discourse. The aim of the study is to establish the lingo-cognitive specifics of the conceptual space of German matrimonial conflict spoken discourse by identifying discourse-creating autochthons, their systematization, as well as detailed analysis. Research methods are based on the principles of both cognitive-discursive and system-structural linguistics in order to comprehensively analyze the cognitive resources of conceptual space. The inductive method is used to analyze the language material from its accumulation to further systematization and to establish its functional features in the German matrimonial conflict spoken discourse. Conceptual analysis within the construction method (to establish priority concepts) and statistical methods were also used, which allowed to determine the statistical significance of verbalized in the studied discursive forms of concepts, and, consequently, discourse-creating autochthons (the χ2-square) and determine the strength between researched concepts (contingency coefficient K). German matrimonial conflict discourse is a conflict-marked communication of people, which is characterized by symmetrical relations between communicators, assuming status-role equality and approximately the same age of speakers. The conceptual space of German matrimonial conflicting spoken discourse is a discursive configuration of multilevel and hierarchically ordered conceptual fillers of 506 concepts. The mental information quanta of the German matrimonial conflicting spoken discourse are represented by three macroconcepts: MENSCH / MAN, TÄTIGKEIT / ACTIVITY, UMGEBUNG / ENVIRONMENT, which, in turn, are represented by the concepts below.

Variation in Realizations of /r/ in Saudi Arabian Arabic: An Auditory and

the topic of this study is the realization of /r/ in Saudi Arabian Arabic as a function of prosodic context and speaker age, with a particular focus on the tap variant.

Competing repair strategies for word-final obstruent-liquid clusters in northern metropolitan French

ABSTRACTFrench licenses word-final obstruent-liquid clusters (table /tabl/; souffre /sufʁ/). These clusters may be realised faithfully resulting in an apparent violation of the sonority sequencing principle (Clements, 1990). Yet, the clusters can also be repaired in one of two ways: (1) through the reduction of the cluster (i.e. [tab]) or (2) through the epenthesis of a schwa vowel, resyllabifying the cluster into the onset position (i.e. [ta.blə].) In this article, I investigate which factors condition the realisation of word-final obstruent-liquid clusters. The results are formalised in Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003), but evidence for effects of style and speaker age require the scaling of several constraints (Coetzee and Kawahara, 2013). This study sheds light on these curious clusters, while raising new questions about the interaction of grammatical and non-grammatical factors.

On the Primary Influences of Age on Articulation and Phonation in Maximum Performance Tasks

Maximum performance tasks have been identified as possible domains where incipient signs of neurological disease may be detected in simple speech and voice samples. However, it is likely that these will simultaneously be influenced by the age and sex of the speaker. In this study, a comprehensive set of acoustic quantifications were collected from the literature and applied to productions of sustained [a] productions and Alternating Motion Rate diadochokinetic (DDK) syllable sequences made by 130 (62 women, 68 men) healthy speakers, aged 20–90 years. The participants were asked to produce as stable (sustained [a] and DDK) and fast (DDK) productions as possible. The full set of features were reduced to a functional subset that most efficiently modeled sex-specific differences between younger and older speakers using a cross-validation procedure. Twelve measures of [a] and 16 measures of DDK sequences were identified across men and women and investigated in terms of how they were altered with increasing age of speakers. Increased production instability is observed in both tasks, primarily above the age of 60 years. DDK sequences were slower in older speakers, but also altered in their syllable and segment level acoustic properties. Increasing age does not appear to affect phonation or articulation uniformly, and men and women are affected differently in most quantifications investigated.

The Effect of Changing Colours on Central Crowding Reading

Background: Crowding can be defined as the impaired recognition of closely spaced objects. Changing colour and lighting enhance visual comfort and perceptual troubles that influence impaired vision reading. Objective: The current study was aimed to investigate the impact of changing the flanker distance and unflanked targets with colours on central crowding reading for subjects with their distant best correction (BCVA) equal to or greater than 6/6. Methodology: Six native English speakers (age: 18–38) who participated in a cross-section intervention study were asked to identify the orientation of the letter E (flanked or unflanked) in different directions around the central target in different colours (red, green, blue and black) on a white background. Results: Different colours affect central crowding (p<0.05). However, the central crowding reading of red was not affected by changing flankers (P > 0.05). Conclusion: Central reading crowding is visual crowding. Different colours affect central crowding. However, the central crowding reading in red was not affected by changes in flankers.

HF02-01 SENTIMENT ANALYSIS AND PREDICTORS OF OPTIMISM IN THE AUA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES: 1902-2019

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory of Urology Forum II (HF02)1 Sep 2021HF02-01 SENTIMENT ANALYSIS AND PREDICTORS OF OPTIMISM IN THE AUA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES: 1902-2019 Akhil A. Saji, Rachel Passarelli, Ashley Dixon, and John L. Phillips Akhil A. SajiAkhil A. Saji More articles by this author , Rachel PassarelliRachel Passarelli More articles by this author , Ashley DixonAshley Dixon More articles by this author , and John L. PhillipsJohn L. Phillips More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000001993.01AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The AUA Presidential address has been a tradition at the national meeting since 1902 when the first address was given by Ramon Guiteras. We sought to collect and archive each address given between 1902-2019 to characterize AUA Presidents as a group and analyze speech sentiment over the past century. METHODS: We queried AUA archives, journals, recorded tape, and personal records to create a database of all existing AUA Presidential addresses. Each address was categorized by theme and author demographic data was collected. We applied natural language processing utilizing the Python Textblob library to evaluate each address for the overall sentiment, a measure of positivity or negativity and subjectivity, a measure of non-factual opinion usage. Sentiment was validated by manual analysis with reading and annotation to compute sentiment ratios, a measure of positive statements divided by negative statements per address. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to identify significant predictors of presidential address sentiment. RESULTS: Between 1902-2019 a total of 113 AUA meetings were held. A total of 85 of 113 (75.22%) presidential addresses were transcribed and archived representing seven general categories in 254,124 words by male presidents with a median (IQR) age of 61.43 (53.1-66.5) years. AUA Presidents during the second half of the history of the AUA (1960-2019) were significantly older at the time of inauguration and gave more positive speeches in the active voice than presidents during the first half (1902-1959) (p<.05). Age was associated with increasing speech positivity (OR 1.059 (1.007-1.113), p=0.025) but not subjectivity (OR 0.958 (0.913-1.005), p=0.082). Median (IQR) age of ‘Arts & Philosophy’ speakers (61.9 (58.4-67.8)) was significantly older than those of ‘Scope & Practice’ (52.3 (43.5-61.2), p-value, <.01) (Figure 1). Significant independent predictors of positive speech sentiment were age (95% CI 1.007-1.119) and sentiment ratio (95% CI 1.154-2.444) (p=0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The first digital database was created containing all extant AUA Presidential speeches from 1902-2019. Computational and analog analysis mirrored the findings of analog human reading demonstrating that AUA Presidential addresses became more positive with increasing speaker age but without consistent predictors of a speech’s emotional or factual content. Source of Funding: None © 2021 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 206Issue Supplement 3September 2021Page: e237-e237 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2021 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Akhil A. Saji More articles by this author Rachel Passarelli More articles by this author Ashley Dixon More articles by this author John L. Phillips More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Loading ...

THE FIRST STEPS TOWARDS THE FIRST-ORDER POLITENESS RESEARCH IN UDMURT

The research is the continuation of my dissertation written at the Department of the Finno-Ugrian Philology of the University of Szeged. However, in this research I do not analyse politeness on my own like I did in my dissertation, as I include answers of native speakers of the language. They express their own ideas about the different answers I got during my PhD research. This study is based on interviews conducted with 10 native speakers of the Udmurt language. These speakers not only represent different age groups but they have different backgrounds as well: I included speakers of the southern and the northern dialects of the language, there are students and teachers of the Udmurt State University and there are two speakers who had been living abroad for at least two years at the time of recording. There were three main exercises to complete during the interview: in the first one they had to express their opinions about answers that I had acquired earlier in different politeness situations, in the second one they had to group answers based on which ones can belong to the same speaker and in the last one I showed them the correct groups of answers and they had to identify the age, the gender, the dialect and the place of origin of the speaker. Their answers can be really helpful to support my previous results or to open a new perspective in the research because, as native speakers, they are able to understand small differences that could be easily skimmed over by non-native speakers. This research has two main parts. In the first part the native speakers express their ideas about answers in given situations and in the second part they try to identify the age, the gender, the dialect and the place of origin of the speakers based on their answers. In the first part the answers usually matched with each other but the interpretation of the Udmurt second past in this situation led to the biggest contradiction in this research. Some of the speakers (as I expected) said that it makes the sentence more polite, but there were some speakers who felt exactly the opposite way about it because in their interpretation it means that the speaker used this tense to avoid responsibility. From the second part it draws out clearly, that there is no age, gender, dialectal or geographical group of speakers who could be easily identified by the given answers and the speakers mainly, but not exclusively, used stereotypes for identification. The result of this is that the answers were about as accurate as taking a blind guess.

Speaker Age and Gender Estimation Based on Deep Learning Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM)

Estimating the age and gender of the speaker has gained great importance in recent years due to its necessity in various commercial, medical and forensic applications. This work estimates the speakers gender and ages in small range of years where every ten years has been divided into two subcategories for a span of years extending from teens to sixties. A system of speaker age and gender estimation uses Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient (MFCC) as a features extraction method, and Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) as a classification method. Two models of two deep neural networks were building, one for speaker age estimation, and the other for speaker gender estimation. The experimental results show that the deep neural network model of age estimation achieves 94.008 % as accuracy rate, while the deep neural network model of gender estimation achieves 90.816% as accuracy rate.

Sentiment analysis and predictors of optimism: The AUA Presidential addresses, 1902-2019

Objectives The annual addresses of the President of the American Urological Association (AUA) may articulate and reflect the contemporary goals, values, and concerns of contemporary AUA membership. There is no organized archive of such addresses. We aimed to create a searchable database of all AUA Presidents and their addresses to determine variables associated with speech sentiment including positivity, negativity, and emotional tone through the 117 years of the AUA’s history. Methods We queried AUA archives, journals, recorded tape, and personal records, to create a database of all existing AUA Presidential addresses and biographic data. We applied natural language processing and machine learning techniques to evaluate the addresses for overall sentiment with validation using analog analyses (i.e reading and annotation). Multivariable logistic regression was performed to identify significant predictors of Presidential address sentiment. Results Between 1902-2019, a total of 113 AUA meetings were held. A total of 85 of 113 (75.22%) presidential addresses were transcribed and archived in the database representing 254,124 words by male presidents with a median (IQR) age of 61.43 (53.1-66.5) years. AUA Presidents during the second half of the history of the AUA (1960-2019) were significantly older at time of inauguration and gave more positive speeches in the active voice than presidents during the first half (1902-1959) (p &lt; .05). The only significant independent predictor of the degree of positivity in an AUA President’s annual address was speaker age (95% CI 1.007-1.119). Conclusions We created the first digital, searchable database of all AUA Presidential speeches from 1902-2019 and aim to add additional addresses prospectively. Artificial intelligence analyses mirrored the findings of human reading and demonstrated that from 1902-2019 AUA Presidential addresses became more positive and optimistic with increasing speaker age but without consistent predictors of a speech’s emotional or factual content.