Accurate Speech Research Articles

Метаэлементы в контекстах с наименованиями пищи и кухонной утвари (на материале вологодских говоров)

The article examines food tradition that exists on the territory of Vytegorsky (Megra) and Totemsky districts in Vologda Oblast (Varnitsy village, Ivoilovo village, Pyatovskaya village, Glubokoe village, Myasokombinat village, Savino village, Sovinskaya village, Tsareva village, Chernyakovo village, Pritykino village, Totma). Research data is dialect recordings of Saratov dialectological text corpus. Food tradition, represented in speech by food names and kitchen tools, is analyzed in a discursive aspect in the article: we focus on the reflectivity of dialect speech. The author studies meta-textual comments in contexts with food names and kitchen tools. The main research method is descriptive, contextual analysis of the units. The following types of meta-elements are identified in the study: meta-elements indicating specifics of lexical units and their functioning in speech (including the territory of existence, chronological marking, word origin, etc.) and meta-elements used in the contact-establishing function. The author analyzes the frequency of contexts in which the relations of motivationally related words are actualized. The article deals with the main function of lexical and structural motivational units in analyzed contexts: dialect speakers use these units to explain the meaning of dialect words. Therefore, it is considered important and necessary to study meta-linguistic statements when analyzing vocabulary that names elements of traditional culture. Meta-linguistic statements functioning in speech convey the knowledge of dialect speakers about food traditions, represent the dynamic processes occurring in the vocabulary of the subdialect. The study also shows that food tradition remains one of the important topics of dialectal communication.

Speech Accuracy and Reading in Children with Cochlear Implants

Speech Accuracy and Reading in Children with Cochlear Implants

Outcomes of a novel single case study incorporating Rapid Syllable Transition treatment, AAC and blended intervention in children with cerebral palsy: a pilot study

Purpose Motor speech and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions are commonly used with children with cerebral palsy (CP) but there is limited literature comparing the effectiveness of these interventions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of intensive AAC, Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment (ReST), and blended intervention, a combination of motor-speech and AAC, on speech accuracy and sentence length and complexity. Methods A single case experimental design across participants with repeated measurements across phases (ABACADA design) was used. Four participants aged 8–14 years with CP who used a speech-generating device (SGD) received three 6-week intervention blocks that included ReST, AAC, and blended intervention. Measures were taken during intervention and baseline phases and at maintenance two and four weeks after the last intervention phase. Participants were randomized to starting with either ReST or AAC with the blended intervention delivered last. Results All participants improved their speech accuracy and sentence length and complexity in speech and with their SGD in all three interventions. The data demonstrated overall immediacy of the effect with all interventions and retention of gains across the whole sequence of phases. The order of AAC or ReST interventions or the severity of CP did not impact the intervention gains. Conclusion This study suggests that intensive AAC, a multi-modal approach, and ReST improve speech accuracy and sentence length and complexity in children with moderate CP, but all require further investigation. Implications for rehabilitation In this paper intensive AAC intervention with a speech generating device (SGD), ReST treatment and multimodal blended intervention were effective in improving speech accuracy and sentence length and complexity in both verbal speech and on communication with the SGD. ReST treatment has not been used with children with CP before. This study established a proof of concept for its effectiveness in children with CP. Further research is warranted.

Концепт «дружба» в диалектной речи Среднего Приобья

The work is based on records of dialect speech (the territory of Tomsk and Kemerovo regions). The reliability of the research is provided by the amount of speech samples (more than 600 contexts were analyzed). The novelty of the work is due to the appeal to the study of dialectal discourse as a phenomenon which includes literary and non-literary units and has specific extralinguistic parameters. The main research tool is the electronic corpus of dialect texts created by the authors of the article. In the course of the study, dialect units that were absent in published dictionaries were identified. It was found that friendship relations in dialectal discourse are most often associated with the following parameters: territorial community, participation in rituals, leisure, joint work, military service/participation in a war, home visits and refreshments. The specificity in comparison with representatives of urban culture consists in the prevalence of the parameter of territorial community over the others, the weak representation of the component "school friends", as well as in the fact that the component "mate" is not actualized. The influence of discursive parameters on the representation of the concept is revealed. Thus, a significant number of nominations for women's friendship is explained by the gender of the informants, and the weak representation of the conceptual component "conflict"– by the conditions of recording materials on the expedition. In the figurative layer of the concept "druzhba" ("friendship") in the dialect, semantic transfer from the sphere "Family" prevails, which also reflects the specifics of traditional culture. The value layer of the concept in the dialect includes ideal representations related to the past and opposed to the present. The described ideal of friendship presupposes mutual assistance, trust, openness, which corresponds to general Russian ideas.

Фонетические и морфологические черты говоров Тихвинского района на рубеже XX-XXI вв.

The purpose of the research is to describe the phonetic and morphological dialect features of subdialects of the Tikhvinsky District of Leningrad Oblast in their current state, using new empirical data. The paper analyses the recordings of dialect speech made during dialectological expeditions to the Tikhvinsky District at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries and identifies the phonetic and morphological features of the subdialects at this stage of their existence in the setting of their interaction with other forms of the Russian national language. Scientific novelty lies in introducing into scientific use new data on the subdialects of Leningrad Oblast and in identifying the most stable features of the studied dialect system. The research findings reflect the dynamics of the subdialects in the studied area and create the basis for mapping the corresponding phonetic and morphological phenomena.

Paremiology Peter’s Era as Historical Source

Proverbs and sayings of the Petrine era are considered as an important source for the study of the Russian language and culture. It is emphasized that the time of Peter the Great went down in history as an era of cardinal and great transformations in Russia, which affected various spheres of society. It is noted that many researchers associate the formation of the Russian literary language with the Petrine era. It is argued that the study of the language of the era of Peter the Great is impossible without the analysis of proverbs — such figurative and expressive speech material, which reflects the attitude of the people to science and education, everyday realities, spatial facts, etc. The importance of the paremiological heritage of the Petrine era for the study of its language and culture: collections of proverbs and sayings by P. K. Simonyi, A. I. Bogdanov, V. N. Tatishev, Petrovsky Gallery, a handwritten collection of proverbs, sayings and sayings of Peter’s time by A. A. Barsov is emphasized in the article. The special significance of the handwritten collection of P. K. Simoni is proved, proverbs and sayings from which reflect many details of the life of this period and capture the history of Russian colloquial and dialectal speech. Examples of this kind are subjected to linguistic and cultural analysis in the article.

The SATPAC Approach and Remediation of Speech Sound Errors in an RTI Context: A Replication

Purpose: This retrospective study was intended to replicate findings from Sacks et al. (2013) regarding the efficacy of using the SATPAC (Systematic Articulation Training Program Accessing Computers) approach for remediating speech sound errors in a Tier 3 response to intervention (RTI) context. Method: Nine children aged 7;7 (years;months) to 9;11 (eight boys, one girl) previously treated using the SATPAC approach within an RTI context who had exhibited consistent errors on one or two speech sounds were identified. Three others served as delayed-treatment controls. Eleven of the 12 children spoke another language in addition to English. Baseline data were available from a recording of Contextual Probes of Articulation Competence words and sentences. Treatment occurred once weekly for 15 min and was terminated either upon successful completion of the program or at the end of the school year. Each student received 1.25–7.75 total hours of treatment per speech sound target. Generalization to conversational speech was also measured. Results: Seven of nine students achieved at least 90% target accuracy in single words at the end of the treatment period. Six of the nine achieved at least 90% target accuracy in conversational speech at follow-up. The three delayed-treatment controls failed to complete the treatment program but exhibited greater and faster improvement during 8–9 weeks of treatment than during the 6-month no-treatment period. This suggested that the change observed for the majority of the participants was the result of the treatment provided. Conclusions: Consistent with Sacks et al. (2013), the SATPAC approach appeared to be efficacious for remediating single speech sound errors within an RTI context. It did so with a relatively brief amount (i.e., less than 5 hr on average) of treatment. Thus, it appears to represent a viable option for application to RTI.

Seeing a talking face matters: The relationship between cortical tracking of continuous auditory‐visual speech and gaze behaviour in infants, children and adults

An auditory-visual speech benefit, the benefit that visual speech cues bring to auditory speech perception, is experienced from early on in infancy and continues to be experienced to an increasing degree with age. While there is both behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for children and adults, only behavioural evidence exists for infants – as no neurophysiological study has provided a comprehensive examination of the auditory-visual speech benefit in infants. It is also surprising that most studies on auditory-visual speech benefit do not concurrently report looking behaviour especially since the auditory-visual speech benefit rests on the assumption that listeners attend to a speaker's talking face and that there are meaningful individual differences in looking behaviour. To address these gaps, we simultaneously recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) and eye-tracking data of 5-month-olds, 4-year-olds and adults as they were presented with a speaker in auditory-only (AO), visual-only (VO), and auditory-visual (AV) modes. Cortical tracking analyses that involved forward encoding models of the speech envelope revealed that there was an auditory-visual speech benefit [i.e., AV > (A + V)], evident in 5-month-olds and adults but not 4-year-olds. Examination of cortical tracking accuracy in relation to looking behaviour, showed that infants’ relative attention to the speaker's mouth (vs. eyes) was positively correlated with cortical tracking accuracy of VO speech, whereas adults’ attention to the display overall was negatively correlated with cortical tracking accuracy of VO speech. This study provides the first neurophysiological evidence of auditory-visual speech benefit in infants and our results suggest ways in which current models of speech processing can be fine-tuned.

Understanding the mediation of dialectal value

AbstractDialect, when viewed in contrast with standard language, creates a variety of geographical or social implications. This variety may be hybridized with other social voices to convey the theme of the text. Previous studies have elaborated much on the representation of the socio-cultural connotations in dialectal speech. However, the value of dialect may not be confined only to its socio-cultural connotations. Drawing on insights from sociolinguistics and systemic functional linguistics, this study aims to uncover the representation of the English dialect ofPygmalionin its Chinese translations and the possible reasons why it is represented as such in the Chinese context. By quantifying the shifts in Eliza Doolittle’s dialect voice, the analysis shows that a local variety or varieties of colloquial register were adopted to recreate the dialectal variety in Chinese translations ofPygmalion. The local variety provides a better interpretation of the functions and stylistic significance of the source dialect. The recreation of the source dialect in the translated texts ofPygmalionresults from the mediation of the translator’s positioning and what has been established by the receptor system’s literary conventions, social hierarchy, language ideologies, and the roles of literary translation.

Hall Pass: DACA recipients’ experiences “passing” in higher education

ABSTRACT Undocumented students face numerous hardships in their pursuit of higher education. Those who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program experience some improved college access and tuition affordability, but many administrative and financial barriers continue to impede their educational pursuits. This qualitative work explores how DACA recipients attempt to circumvent those limitations by “Hall Passing.” The concept of “Hall Passing” combines the familiar concept to most attendees of U.S. schools of the hall pass (written, conditional, permission granted to students to be out of the locational bounds typically expected) and the concept of the act of “passing.” “Passing” is when some members of marginalized groups modify or conceal characteristics that identify them as the Other. The new concept of “Hall Passing” came out of the results of this study which found that DACAmented students at predominantly white institutions commonly rely on their government-issued documentation and presumptions about their race, speech accent, and background to create opportunities to circumvent restrictions (i.e., Hall Passes). Instances of Hall Passing are understood as acts of resistance to existing inequalities related to post-secondary education.

Analysis Model of Spoken English Evaluation Algorithm Based on Intelligent Algorithm of Internet of Things.

With the in-depth promotion of the national strategy for the integration of artificial intelligence technology and entity development, speech recognition processing technology, as an important medium of human-computer interaction, has received extensive attention and motivated research in industry and academia. However, the existing accurate speech recognition products are based on massive data platform, which has the problems of slow response and security risk, which makes it difficult for the existing speech recognition products to meet the application requirements for timely translation of speech with high response time and network security requirements under the condition of network instability and insecurity. Based on this, this paper studies the analysis model of oral English evaluation algorithm based on Internet of things intelligent algorithm in speech recognition technology. Firstly, based on the automatic machine learning and lightweight learning strategy, a lightweight technology of automatic speech recognition depth neural network adapted to the edge computing power is proposed. Secondly, the quantitative evaluation of Internet of things intelligent classification algorithm and big data analysis in this system is described. In the evaluation, the evaluation method of oral English characteristics is adopted. At the same time, the Internet of things intelligent classification algorithm and big data analysis strategy are used to evaluate the accuracy of oral English. Finally, the experimental results show that the oral English feature recognition system based on Internet of things intelligent classification algorithm and big data analysis has the advantages of good reliability, high intelligence, and strong ability to resist subjective factors, which proves the advantages of Internet of things intelligent classification algorithm and big data analysis in English feature recognition.

Evaluating transfer learning approach for detecting Arabic anti-refugee/migrant speech on social media

PurposeThe present study was designed to investigate eight research questions that are related to the analysis and the detection of dialectal Arabic hate speech that targeted African refugees and illegal migrants on the YouTube Algerian space.Design/methodology/approachThe transfer learning approach which recently presents the state-of-the-art approach in natural language processing tasks has been exploited to classify and detect hate speech in Algerian dialectal Arabic. Besides, a descriptive analysis has been conducted to answer the analytical research questions that aim at measuring and evaluating the presence of the anti-refugee/migrant discourse on the YouTube social platform.FindingsData analysis revealed that there has been a gradual modest increase in the number of anti-refugee/migrant hateful comments on YouTube since 2014, a sharp rise in 2017 and a sharp decline in later years until 2021. Furthermore, our findings stemming from classifying hate content using multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language transformers demonstrate a good performance of the AraBERT monolingual transformer in comparison with the monodialectal transformer DziriBERT and the cross-lingual transformers mBERT and XLM-R.Originality/valueAutomatic hate speech detection in languages other than English is quite a challenging task that the literature has tried to address by various approaches of machine learning. Although the recent approach of cross-lingual transfer learning offers a promising solution, tackling this problem in the context of the Arabic language, particularly dialectal Arabic makes it even more challenging. Our results cast a new light on the actual ability of the transfer learning approach to deal with low-resource languages that widely differ from high-resource languages as well as other Latin-based, low-resource languages.

Native language identification for Indian-speakers by an ensemble of phoneme-specific, and text-independent convolutions

Identifying the social background of an unknown speaker by speech accent has multiple applications including in forensic profiling and adaptation of speech recognition. The most effective accent classification models based on phoneme pronunciation require the presence of certain phonemes in the test speech and hence, are applicable only for a longer duration of test samples. On the other hand, the text-independent classifiers disregard the phoneme and linguistic information completely. This paper proposes an ensemble of convolutional neural networks for phoneme-based short-term and text-independent long-term classification of speech regarding speaker background profiling. The model is evaluated by classifying the native language of Indian speakers by their English speech. Both the classifiers within the ensemble complement each other positively; to give higher classification accuracy as compared to classification accuracies obtained from the individual classifiers. Low-pass filtering based speech augmentation has been proven to further improve the classification performance and average accuracy, with up to 79% and 73.7% accuracies achieved for speaker-level and sentence-level tests, respectively.

Classification of accurate and misarticulated /ɑr/ for ultrasound biofeedback using tongue part displacement trajectories

ABSTRACT Ultrasound biofeedback therapy (UBT), which incorporates real-time imaging of tongue articulation, has demonstrated generally positive speech remediation outcomes for individuals with residual speech sound disorder (RSSD). However, UBT requires high attentional demands and may therefore benefit from a simplified display of articulation targets that are easily interpretable and can be compared to real-time articulation. Identifying such targets requires automatic quantification and analysis of movement features relevant to accurate speech production. Our image-analysis program TonguePART automatically quantifies tongue movement as tongue part displacement trajectories from midsagittal ultrasound videos of the tongue, with real-time capability. The present study uses such displacement trajectories to compare accurate and misarticulated American-English rhotic /ɑr/ productions from 40 children, with degree of accuracy determined by auditory perceptual ratings. To identify relevant features of accurate articulation, support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were trained and evaluated on several candidate data representations. Classification accuracy was up to 85%, indicating that quantification of tongue part displacement trajectories captured tongue articulation characteristics that distinguish accurate from misarticulated production of /ɑr/. Regression models for perceptual ratings were also compared. The simplest data representation that retained high predictive ability, demonstrated by high classification accuracy and strong correlation between observed and predicted ratings, was displacements at the midpoint of /r/ relative to /ɑ/ for the tongue dorsum and blade. This indicates that movements of the dorsum and blade are especially relevant to accurate production of /r/, suggesting that a predictive parameter and biofeedback target based on this data representation may be usable for simplified UBT.

Accenting racism in labour migration

AbstractThis paper concerns how speech accent accents or reinforces racism in the context of labour migration to the English-speaking Global North. It specifically outlines three functions of accent in racial capitalist systems that require the labour of migrants and their acceptance of their “linguistic deficiencies.” First, accent functions as a labour control mechanism that pushes racially minoritised migrants into low-paying work. Second, as evidenced by the language training of transnational call centre workers, accent also reinforces colonial relations between migrant workers and customers. Last, by acting as a credential that can be purchased for professional success, accent distracts from the institutional racism that truly hinders migrants’ employment opportunities. The piece concludes with some thoughts on how combatting racism in labour migration requires another type of accenting.

Frequency domain analysis of MFCC feature extraction in children’s speech recognition system

Abstract —The research on speech recognition systems currently focuses on the analysis of robust speech recognition systems. When the speech signals are combined with noise, the recognition system becomes distracted, struggling to identify the speech sounds. Therefore, the development of a robust speech recognition system continues to be carried out. The principle of a robust speech recognition system is to eliminate noise from the speech signals and restore the original information signals. In this paper, researchers conducted a frequency domain analysis on one stage of the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) process, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), in children's speech recognition system. The FTT analysis in the feature extraction process determined the effect of frequency value characteristics utilized in the FFT output on the noise disruption. The analysis method was designed into three scenarios based on the value of the employed FFT points. The differences between scenarios were based on the number of shared FFT points. All FFT points were divided into four, three, and two parts in the first, second, and third scenarios, respectively. This study utilized children's speech data from the isolated TIDIGIT English digit corpus. As comparative data, the noise was added manually to simulate real-world conditions. The results showed that using a particular frequency portion following the scenario designed on MFCC affected the recognition system performance, which was relatively significant on the noisy speech data. The designed method in the scenario 3 (C1) version generated the highest accuracy, exceeded the accuracy of the conventional MFCC method. The average accuracy in the scenario 3 (C1) method increased by 1% more than all the tested noise types. Using various noise intensity values (SNR), the testing process indicates that scenario 3 (C1) generates a higher accuracy than conventional MFCC in all tested SNR values. It proves that the selection of specific frequency utilized in MFCC feature extraction significantly affects the recognition accuracy in a noisy speech.

Attitudes to regional and standard accents in commercial and non-commercial contexts

Commercials regularly use non-standard accented speakers to promote products and services despite sociolinguistic findings that non-standard accents in non-commercial contexts are evaluated less positively than standard accents. Accent evaluations in commercial contexts may be different because of perceived relevance to the product or service or of perceived manipulative intent. To date, no studies have investigated whether identical accented speech fragments are evaluated differently in commercial and non-commercial contexts.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of non-standard versus standard accented speech in commercial versus non-commercial contexts in terms of attitudes towards the speaker (competence, status, likeability, dynamism), comprehensibility, attitude towards the product, attitude towards the vlog, and perceived realism of the vlog. In a 2 × 2 between-subject design, 631 Dutch respondents evaluated Dutch standard-accented and regionally accented vlogs in either a commercial or non-commercial context. Findings show that commercial versus non-commercial context had no effect on the evaluations of standard and regional accents. In both contexts, a regional accent was evaluated more negatively than a standard accent for the majority of measures: attitudes towards the speaker (competence, status, dynamism), comprehensibility, attitude towards the product, and perceived realism of the vlog. These findings indicate that a regional accent is a potent negative cue across these contexts, overriding possible effects that are specific to commercial contexts.

Layer-Wise Fast Adaptation for End-to-End Multi-Accent Speech Recognition

The variety and complexity of accents pose a huge challenge to robust Automatic Speech Recognition&#x00A0;(ASR). Some previous work has attempted to address such problems, however most of the current approaches either require prior knowledge about the target accent, or cannot handle unseen accents and accent-unspecific standard speech. In this work, we aim to improve multi-accent speech recognition in the end-to-end&#x00A0;(E2E) framework with a novel layer-wise adaptation architecture. Firstly, we propose a robust deep accent representation learning architecture to obtain accurate accent embedding, and some advanced schemes are designed to further boost the quality of accent embeddings, including phone posteriorgram&#x00A0;(PPG) feature, TTS based data augmentation in the training stage, test-time augmentation and multi-embedding fusion in the testing stage. Then, the layer-wise adaptation with accent embeddings is developed for fast accent adaptation in ASR, and two types of adapter layers are designed, including the gated adapter layer and multi-basis adapter layer. Compared to the usual two-pass adaptation, these adapter layers are injected between the ASR encoder layers to encode the accent information in ASR flexibly, and perform fast adaption on the corresponding speech accent. The experiments on Accent AESRC corpus show that the proposed deep accent representation learning can capture accurate accent knowledge, and get high performance on accent classification. The new layer-wise adaptation architecture with the accurate accent embedding outperforms the other traditional methods, and obtains consistent <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula>15&#x0025; relative word error rate&#x00A0;(WER) reduction on all kinds of testing scenarios, including seen accents, unseen accents and accent-unspecific standard speech.

ЗАХІДНОПОЛІСЬКИЙ АРЕАЛ І СТАНДАРТ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРНОЇ МОВИ: ЧИННИКИ ТА МЕХАНІЗМИ ВЗАЄМОДІЇ

The article is devoted to the study of the interaction of two idioms: dialect language and literary standard. The typology of the interaction of dialects ↔ literary language is clarified on the example of one dialect – the West Polissian dialect; the factors that determine this interaction within one dialect micro-area are parameterized; the main mechanisms of such interaction are outlined. It is emphasized that the nature of contacts dialect ↔ literary language is two-sided. The first part of the study analyzes the influence of northern dialects on the formation of the literary standard in the diachronic aspect. The West Polissian dialect is characterized in view of its differentiation and peculiarities of functioning; the representation of dialectal elements and phenomena in texts of artistic style and common dictionaries in synchrony is studied and generalized. Several tendencies have been identified: the use of dialectal words in texts, which are not present in common dictionaries; partial semantization of dialecticisms in lexicographical works against the background of their wider semantic scope in dialectal speech; wider functional and stylistic load of dialectal vocabulary in speech compared to dictionaries of literary language. The second part of the article examines how the literary language can influence dialects – the repertoire of their elements, the functionality of individual units, the field of functioning of the dialect as a whole. It is noted that this trend may have varying degrees of manifestation. One of the first stages of influence was the assimilation of new language units, which are layered on dialect elements; the second stage is the neutralizing of some language features, and under condition of its systematic nature, as a consequence, the configuration of the ranges of individual phenomena changes; third stage is a complete transformation of dialectal speech under the influence of literary standard; the fourth is the disappearance of the locus where the dialect resides. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors that affect the interaction of dialect ↔ literary language.

К изучению нонстандартной лексики камня: обозначения кристаллов

The article discusses nonstandard gemstone names – the names of precious stones that do not belong to the official international mineralogical terminology. In Russian linguistics, this lexical group remains understudied. The paper reflects on the ideographic specifics of nonstandard gemstone names. It deals with the names of crystals used in the Middle Urals – in dialectal speech as well as in the language of stonecutters, gemstone hunters, and amateur minerologists. This territory was chosen for the research as it has a rich tradition of mineral recovery and carving. The lexical units analyzed in the article denote crystal minerals. A large part of the names was collected in expeditions with the author’s participation. The article attempts to create an ideographic classification of the names of crystals. The whole array of the lexical material was divided into 7 basic thematic groups: “Color characteristics of crystals,” “Specifics of crystal growth and formation types,” “Crystal inclusions,” “Crystal size,” “The parts of crystals,” “Processes inside crystals”, “Characterization of the quality and preciousness of crystals.” For some lexemes, the author comments on their semantics, motivation, grammatical and sometimes ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic features. The research determines the rate of occurrence (based on the number of lexemes used within a particular group) for each thematic group and analyzes the reasons for differences in the rate.