Speech Sounds Research Articles

Auditory separation and perceptual advantage in team sports players: A behavioral study

There is a dearth of research related to perceptual advantages in noise, specifically in speech perceptual skills. In an initial study from this lab, the investigators observed that perceptual advantage was present in team sports players with higher percent correct scores relative to non-team sports players, specifically in noise. Research is required to understand if the perceptual advantage is present only for players engaged in specific team sports or not, hence the need for this study. The purpose of this study was to compare speech discrimination and identification skills in soccer players, other team sports players, and non-team sports persons. Thirty participants in the age range of 20-45 years were recruited: 10 soccer players, 10 other team sports players, (e.g., football), and 10 with no experience in team sports. Speech sounds /a/ and /s/ were presented in quiet and in the presence of background noise using speech babble at 0 signal-to-noise ratio. The procedure included a speech discrimination task using AX paradigm and speech identification using four closed-set response. Percent correct responses and reaction times were measured and analyzed using mixed model ANOVA. The findings from the study help towards applying speech in noise perception in sports rehabilitation.

Effects of vowel coloration on perceived directional offsets between single-syllable speech sounds

The ability of normal hearing listeners to spatially localize single-syllable speech sounds was examined via a two-interval, two alternative forced choice (2AFC) spatial offset discrimination task. To examine directional biases in horizontal sound localization, this task required listeners to observe the direction of an unseen second talker’s voice immediately after hearing a first talker’s voice in an alternative direction. Listeners reported only the relative frontward versus rearward spatial offset between the two voices heard during each trial. Headphone-based virtual acoustic simulation enabled blind listening tests that were completed without feedback to the listener, revealing the ease with which listeners judged the relative spatial offset of the second speech sound, although those judgments were strongly biased by differences in the source spectra. The single-syllable speech-sound stimuli were processed using individually measured head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) of 15 listeners for whom individually measured earphone transfer functions (ETFs) were also employed. While analysis of the 2AFC response data via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves showed a generally high level of directional sensitivity, systematic biases were observed that could be explained via the differences in vowel coloration between the first and second source presented during each trial.

Cross-linguistic variability in audiovisual enhancement of coronal consonants

The role of auditory perceptibility in phonological contrast is uncontroversial. In clear speech, speakers increase acoustic distance between contrastive phones, thereby improving perception. Although visual cues are also known to improve perception, it is unclear whether speakers actively enhance their speech for visual perceptibility. 20 native English and 20 native Mandarin speakers participated in a two-part production experiment. Words containing /l d n s r/ (and English /θ/) were elicited, with vowels balanced for height, backness, and rounding. Speakers first recited each word while alone in a soundproof booth. Words were then spoken for a native listener (who attempted to guess the word) over Zoom with heavily degraded audio. Audio and high-speed video were recorded. English speakers showed a significant increase in visually exaggerated articulations for /l, θ/ (but not /n, d, s, r/), including interdental and linguolabial productions with external lingual protrusion. Mandarin speakers increased their use of interdental articulation for /n, l, t, s/ (but not /r/), although lingual protrusion was limited. These results demonstrate that speakers may enhance their speech for visual over auditory perceptibility but suggest that enhancement is mediated by language-specific factors including phonological contrast and the articulatory characteristics of sounds in normal speech.

The Key English Pronunciation Difficulties for Egyptian EFL Learners

Despite all the attempts by ESL and EFL learners to attain (near-)native proficiency, many phonological, lexical and spelling mistakes still occur in any L2 learning environment (Huwari 2019, 31). This paper aims to investigate the key English pronunciation difficulties, both segmental (on the level of speech sounds) and suprasegmental (rhythm, stress, and juncture), of Egyptian learners of English, in a corpus of audio and/or video recordings of English conversation and presentation skills classes by Egyptian university students who are also native speakers of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). The project involves both contrastive analysis (of the phonological systems of English, Egyptian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic) as well as error analysis. While the significance of contrastive analysis lies in helping EFL teachers predict the problematic aspects (Al-Saqqaf and Vaddapalli 2012, 56), error analysis would provide them with the actual problems encountered by the learners and the extent of their seriousness.

Binaural fusion with ecologically valid stimuli

Binaural fusion, or the perception of a single auditory “image” can arise from simultaneous inputs across ears. Fusion is fundamental to binaural abilities, including sound source localization. One potent determiner of degree of fusion is the interaural correlation of the binaurally presented waveforms. Noise waveforms can be used to manipulate the interaural correlation, but the normalized correlation of the envelopes of such noises is limited to between 1.0 and 0.785 (π/4). As a result of differing properties between noises and speech, pairs of speech sounds can be generated having normalized interaural envelope correlations well below 0.785. We measured cochlear implant users’ perceived degree of binaural fusion while varying the interaural correlation of speech-like signals from 0.4 to 1.0. Stimuli were generated using speech-based envelopes from multi-channel vocoders that modulated 1000 pulse-per-second pulse trains. Envelopes derived from different vocoder channels were extracted to yield interaural correlations that varied over a wider range than would be possible using noises. Preliminary results suggest that the speech-based stimuli, while differing qualitatively from noises and being more ecologically valid, yield similar effects of interaural correlation on binaural fusion, while allowing a larger range of interaural correlations to be employed.

Probing the phonological-coding deficit in dyslexia with vowel length perception

There is an established linkage between dyslexia and anomalous processing of speech sounds. We probed this in a Danish language context with vowel length tasks based on “kugle” ball /ku:lə/ and sequential deletions of the vowel portion to yield “kulde” coldness /kulə/. Vowel length continua are methodologically advantageous as they do not involve the perception of a sudden phonetic change that may instead tap other auditory processing abilities. Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to tertiary (n = 28), reading impaired (n = 26), and lower secondary students (n = 20), and the latter were approximately aged matched to the reading-impaired group. Identification functions derived from regression modelling of the responses showed that the dyslexics had significantly flatter curves than the other groups. Moreover, the secondary and dyslexic groups differed at the long vowel extremity of the continuum. Discrimination results showed that mean peak sensitivity of the tertiary students was higher than that of the secondary and dyslexic students. These results indicate that the phonological-coding deficit observed in dyslexics may be indexed by vowel length identification. Furthermore, identification results suggest that the nature of the phonological-coding deficit concomitant with dyslexia may stem from a lack of precision in processing the minimally modified longer vowel stimuli.

An electroglottographic study on the effect of following context on glottal constriction in Australian English coda /t/

To achieve inhibition of voicing for voiceless speech sounds, the glottis may be either spread or constricted. Glottal spreading may lead to breathiness, and constriction to glottalization. Previous research has shown that glottalization associated with English coda /t/ differs as a function of surrounding environment, with glottalization more likely when the following word begins with a sonorant consonant (such as /l, n/) compared to other environments. However, it is unclear the extent to which following sonorant consonants induce glottalization compared to following vowels. We used an electroglottograph to record 12 Australian English speakers producing phrases eliciting coda /t/ in target words preceding words with onset sonorants /n, l/ (now, long) and onset vowels /əʉ, ə/ (only, again). Open quotient (OQ) was established through the second half of the target word vowel. Increasing OQ indicates breathiness whereas lowering OQ indicates constriction. Using generalized additive mixed modelling we found that the OQ of vowels preceding coda /t/ in the sonorant-following context was significantly lower than in vowel-following contexts. This indicates greater glottal constriction when a sonorant consonant follows the coda /t/, showing that coda /t/ voicelessness is implemented differently before sonorant consonants compared to vowels

Performances of Pointing Phonological Memory Tasks between Children with and without Speech Sound Disorders

Objectives: A new phonological memory task using pointing responses was developed and the performance of each sub-task was compared between children with and without speech sound disorders (SSD). Methods: 16 children with SSD and 14 typically developing children (TD) performed pointing memory tasks, which consists of four sub-tasks—auditory short-term, auditory working, visual short-term, and visual working memory; and performances between groups and between each sub-task were compared. In addition, the correlation between the new task and the existing task (digit span task), vocabulary sizes and the accuracy of consonants was analyzed. Results: First, the SSD group showed significantly lower performance in the pointing memory tasks than the TD group. Second, both the SSD and TD groups showed significantly higher performance in auditory stimulation compared with visual stimulation, and in short-term memory than working memory. Third, in the case of the TD group, the performance of the auditory short-term memory task was much better, and there were no significant differences among the other three sub-tasks, while the SSD group showed a sequential decline in performances among the four sub-tasks. Finally, there was a high correlation between the new task and the existing task, vocabulary sizes, and the accuracy of consonants. Conclusion: The low performance in the phonological memory task of the SSD group is not due to weakness in articulation or in auditory processing, but to defects in phonological short-term/working memory itself. The results of this study provide meaningful information on the different performance patterns of phonological memory tasks according to stimulus modalities between the SSD and TD groups.

Study on auditory perception of tense and lax vowels of English as a FL by learners with Spanish as L1

Different studies in the field of perception of second-language sounds (L2) suggest that English learners with Spanish as their mother tongue language (L1) are influenced by the sounds of their L1 to perceive the sounds in the L2. As a result, learners are not able to perceive speech sounds as they are in English, because they assimilate the sounds of the foreign language (FL) based on their L1 (Best & Tyler, 2007; Gibson & Gibson, 1955). The objective of this research is to explore the capacity of perception of tense and lax vowels of English (Standard British accent) in 8 high school students from two subsidised schools in Chillán and San Carlos, Chile. The age of the participants range from 15 to 18 years old. One auditory perception test was used: An Identification Test was applied to measure the capacity of the participants to perceive lax and tense vowels: /i:/, /ɪ/, /æ/ and /^/.

AI Enhancements for Linguistic E-Learning System

E-learning systems have been considerably developed after the COVID-19 pandemic. In our previous work, we developed a linguistic interactive E-learning system for phonetic transcription learning. In this paper, we propose three artificial-intelligence-based enhancements to this system from different aspects. Compared with the original system, the first enhancement is a disordered speech classification module; this module is driven by the MFCC-CNN model, which aims to distinguish disordered speech and nondisordered speech. The accuracy of the classification is about 83%. The second enhancement is a grapheme-to-phoneme converter. This converter is based on the transformer model and designed for teachers to better generate IPA words from the regular written text. Compared with other G2P models, our transformer-based G2P model provides outstanding PER and WER performance. The last part of this paper focuses on a Tacotron2-based IPA-to-speech synthesis system, this deep learning-based TTS system can help teacher generate high-quality speech sounds from IPA characters which significantly improve the functionality of our original system. All of these three enhancements are related to the phonetic transcription process. and this work not only provides a better experience for the users of this system but also explores the utilization of artificial intelligence technologies in the E-learning field and linguistic field.

Psychological and Physiological Effects of Low-Level Meaningful Artificial Sounds on Intellectual Tasks

AbstractThe present study aimed to investigate the psychological and physiological effects of low-level meaningful artificial sounds on intellectual tasks. The psychological factors related to the degree of disturbance, concentration, and stress, as measured by subjective evaluation, were compared with the degree of physiological stress, as measured using salivary alpha-amylase activity. The results indicated that human speech and chewing sounds caused similar levels of psychological stress while performing intellectual tasks; however, chewing sounds caused comparatively less physiological stress than did human speech sounds. These findings suggest that depending on the sound stimulus, psychological and physiological stress characteristics may not coincide.

Penyelesaian Sengketa Penggunaan Nama Ormas yang Sama Melalui Pendekatan Yuridis

Community organizations are a means to channel opinions and thoughts for community members, and have a very important role in increasing active community participation in order to realize a life of society, nation, and state that is relevant to a society that is, devout, intelligent, just and prosperous. In the form of today's community order that is no longer "strict" in the pattern of hierarchical relations, among others, by strengthening the autonomy of government management, strengthening community independence. In practice in the field, there is the same name of the CSO, namely (Forkabi) whose dispute is resolved by the Jakarta PTUN Number: 168 / G / 2021 / PTUN. JKT. The research method used is the normative juridical method, which is research that prioritizes literature data, namely research on secondary data. The secondary data can be primary, secondary or tertiary legal material. This research includes research on positive legal provisions in force in Indonesia relating to dispute resolution using the same community organization name. Based on the results of the study, the author concludes that the dispute resolution mechanism for using the same name of CSOs is through the Court, in this case the State Administrative Court which is authorized to resolve disputes over the use of the name of the legal entity of the association where there are similarities in essence between one association and another, to ascertain whether there are similarities in the name of one association with the name of another association. What is meant by "similarity in essence" is the similarity caused by the presence of dominant elements between one Brand and another Brand so as to give the impression of similarity, both regarding the form, way of placement, way of writing or combination between elements, as well as the similarity of speech sounds, contained in the Brand.

Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?

Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors - early access to sign and/or spoken language - on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

Developmental trajectories of speech and language in neglected children aged 3 to 5 years: Results of the ELLAN study

BackgroundNeglected children are at high risk for significant difficulties in speech and language development. Because no longitudinal study has been conducted to date, the dynamic description of development during the preschool period is unknown. ObjectivesEstablish the developmental trajectories of speech sounds, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and morphosyntax among neglected children during the preschool years and compare them with those of non-neglected children. Participants and settingParticipants are 69 neglected children and 99 same age non-neglected peers (37 and 46 males respectively) recruited at 36 months of age. Data were collected at home. MethodsData were collected at six-month intervals between the ages of 3 and 5.5 years using psychometrically robust tools. Neglected and control groups were compared according to age using repeated measures ANOVAs on all variables. A discrete mixture model for clustering longitudinal data was used for testing the heterogeneity of the language trajectories among neglected children. ResultsThe language development of the neglected children as a whole group is lower than that of the control group for all variables. Two subgroups are identified within the neglected group: one with a developmental trajectory similar to that of the non-neglected children, and another whose trajectory is far below that of the control group. The effect sizes of these differences vary between 1.4 and 3 standard deviations under the mean. ConclusionsA large proportion of neglected children present significant speech and language difficulties from the age of 3, but some of them catch up and develop similarly to non-neglected children.

Domain-general but not speech-specific auditory duration perception predicts pseudoword reading in adults.

Associations between reading performance and duration perception have been found both for domain-general and speech-specific duration perception. However, research seems limited to children and, critically, the predictive value of the two duration perception modalities has not been compared so far. In the present study we compared the weight of domain-general (comparison of time intervals defined by beeps) vs. speech-specific duration perception (pre-attentive EEG responses to consonants with different durations) as statistical predictors of reading in a sample of 46 neurotypical adults (18-43 years old) with 13 years of schooling on average. Reading included word and pseudoword decoding, as well as reading comprehension. We ran one regression model with domain-general and speech-specific duration perception as predictors for each of the three reading skills. Pseudoword decoding was the only reading skill that was significantly predicted by duration perception, and this happened for domain-general duration perception only. A complementary analysis adding 26 typically developing and 24 dyslexic adults to the main sample (n = 96 in total) showed the same pattern of results in dyslexics, but not in added controls. Our findings strengthen the idea that duration perception is important to phonological encoding and its use in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, given that only pseudoword decoding was predicted by the interval comparison task. The irrelevance of speech-specific duration perception tones down the possibility that accurately perceiving the length of speech sounds is crucial to skilled reading.

AUDITORY TRAINING IN CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS: A CASE STUDY

verbal communication is studied primarily through the auditory modality. Adverse impact on language development, cognition, academics, including verbal communication when there is a decrease in hearing sensitivity. Hearing loss will result in a reduced ability to understand and produce intelligible speech. Objective: this study aims to provide initial evidence of changes in ability to identify speech sounds after intervention with auditory training. Method: The research method used is a single- subject experiment. Data were collected through interviews with the client’s parents, direct, observations of the client, test and a document study of the client’s medical record. Data analysis was carried out by comparing the ability to identify speech sounds pre- and post- therapy. Result: After 10 sessions of speech therapy using auditory training, the client's ability to detect sounds increased by 83.3%. Conclusion: providing auditory training to identify sounds is important for children with hearing loss. Suggestion: Further research is needed to obtain data and information about the effectiveness of using the Auditory Training method in children with hearing loss.

Internal Cognitive Load Differentially Influences Acoustic and Lexical Context Effects in Speech Perception: Evidence From a Population With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

To overcome variability in spoken language, listeners utilize various types of context information for disambiguating speech sounds. Context effects have been shown to be affected by cognitive load. However, previous results are mixed regarding the influence of cognitive load on the use of context information in speech perception. We tested a population characterized by an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to better understand the relationship between attention (or internal cognitive load) and context effects. The use of acoustic versus lexical properties of the surrounding signal to disambiguate speech sounds was examined in listeners with ADHD and neurotypical listeners. Compared to neurotypicals, individuals with ADHD relied more strongly on lexical context for speech perception; however, reliance on acoustic context information from speech rate did not differ. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the use of high-level but not low-level context information in speech and imply that speech recognition deficits in ADHD likely arise due to impaired higher order cognitive processes.

Creating luxury brand names in the hospitality and tourism sector: The role of sound symbolism in destination branding

Service firms can use sensory cues to provide a perception of luxury in terms of quality and service. In the area of destination branding, brand names are one of the core elements of brands that help communicate their image to a consumer in the hospitality and tourism sector. Psycholinguistics research demonstrates that linguistic cues embedded within brand names can be used to convey the image of a brand. Relying on the latest literature on psycholinguistics, branding, and hospitality services, the present study investigates the sounds and/or letters present in fictional brand names that may enhance their perception of luxury. The results demonstrate that higher-frequency sounds (e.g., i, e, f, s, v, z) appear to increase the perception of luxury brands more than lower-frequency sounds (e.g., u, o, b, d, g). Among various speech sounds, the letter v in names also increases the intention to visit luxury hospitality services (restaurants, hotels). These findings demonstrate how brands in the hospitality and tourism sectors can use certain linguistic features to signal their perception of luxury to tourists.

Auditory attention influences trajectories of symbol–speech sound learning in children with and without dyslexia

The acquisition of letter–speech sound correspondences is a fundamental process underlying reading development, one that could be influenced by several linguistic and domain-general cognitive factors. In the current study, we mimicked the first steps of this process by examining behavioral trajectories of audiovisual associative learning in 110 7- to 12-year-old children with and without dyslexia. Children were asked to learn the associations between eight novel symbols and native speech sounds in a brief training and subsequently read words and pseudowords written in the artificial orthography. We then investigated the influence of auditory attention as one of the putative domain-general factors influencing associative learning. To this aim, we assessed children with experimental measures of auditory sustained selective attention and interference control. Our results showed shallower learning trajectories in children with dyslexia, especially during the later phases of the training blocks. Despite this, children with dyslexia performed similarly to typical readers on the post-training reading tests using the artificial orthography. Better auditory sustained selective attention and interference control skills predicted greater response accuracy during training. Sustained selective attention was also associated with the ability to apply these novel correspondences in the reading tests. Although this result has the limitations of a correlational design, it denotes that poor attentional skills may constitute a risk during the early stages of reading acquisition, when children start to learn letter–speech sound associations. Importantly, our findings underscore the importance of examining dynamics of learning in reading acquisition as well as individual differences in more domain-general attentional factors.

The influences of forward context on stop-consonant perception: The combined effects of contrast and acoustic cue activation?

The perception of the /da/-/ga/ series, distinguished primarily by the third formant (F3) transition, is affected by many nonspeech and speech sounds. Previous studies mainly investigated the influences of context stimuli with frequency bands located in the F3 region and proposed the account of spectral contrast effects. This study examined the effects of context stimuli with bands not in the F3 region. The results revealed that these non-F3-region stimuli (whether with bands higher or lower than the F3 region) mainly facilitated the identification of /ga/; for example, the stimuli (including frequency-modulated glides, sine-wave tones, filtered sentences, and natural vowels) in the low-frequency band (500-1500 Hz) led to more /ga/ responses than those in the low-F3 region (1500-2500 Hz). It is suggested that in the F3 region, context stimuli may act through spectral contrast effects, while in non-F3 regions, context stimuli might activate the acoustic cues of /g/ and further facilitate the identification of /ga/. The combination of contrast and acoustic cue effects can explain more results concerning the forward context influences on the perception of the /da/-/ga/ series, including the effects of non-F3-region stimuli and the imbalanced influences of context stimuli on /da/ and /ga/ perception.