Spontaneous Speech Production Research Articles

Another platform and a changed context: Student experiences of developing spontaneous speaking in French through physical education

This study highlights a complementary partnership between physical education and foreign language learning, endorsing the potential of an applied learning context as an alternative pedagogical platform. A pedagogic model of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) within physical education was adopted to explore the capacity for improving students’ spontaneous speaking in French. The study’s motivation was the 2016 changes to England’s General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) French specifications, which placed an increased emphasis on responding spontaneously in spoken French and sustaining communication in different situations. Students ( n = 42) aged 13–14, soon to embark on GCSE French, were introduced to a 10-week handball scheme of work that included learning associated key French vocabulary and students communicating with each other and the teacher in French. Adopting case study methodology, data collection included student questionnaires, individual teacher interviews and student focus groups, analysed using inductive analysis and constant comparison. The physical education CLIL platform provided a learning context that appeared to support student perceptions of increased motivation and reduced anxiety, with 60% of students reporting that speaking French during physical education increased their confidence in speaking French aloud. Findings suggest the importance of an applied learning environment that emphasises working as a group, encouraging a willingness to take risks in spontaneous speaking, and decreasing sensitivity to negative judgement. A physical education-located CLIL model appears to offer learning experiences within the skill-based traditions of physical education beyond ‘learning to move’, providing a context for ‘moving to learn’ as an investment towards embodied learning.

Prosodic encoding in Mandarin spontaneous speech: Evidence for clause-based advanced planning in language production

This study reports the cross-boundary f0 shifting of prosodic units (PU) in Mandarin conversational speech by analyzing the PU-initial and PU-final f0 heights as a function of its semantic structure. Initial and final f0 heights were defined as the f0 values extracted at the energy max of the first and the last syllable of the PU. The semantic structure of the PU was defined based on its co-extensiveness with a semantic unit in discourse (DU), i.e., a proposition, often encoded by a clause. Our analysis shows significant relationships between the cross-boundary f0 heights and the PU-DU co-extensiveness. PU-DU left alignment introduces a significant up-shifting effect on both initial and final f0 heights. This pitch resetting is effective across the whole PU, suggesting speakers’ sensitivity to the initiation of propositions in production. On the other hand, PU-DU right alignment introduces a down-shifting effect on both f0 heights. The regressive f0-lowering observed in the PU-initial f0 heights (anticipatory effect based on the PU-terminal semantics) and the progressive f0-raising of the PU-final f0 heights (carried-over effect based on the PU-initial semantics) both shed light on the psycholinguistic importance of the proposition and support its central role in advanced planning in spontaneous speech production.

Multivariate Approaches to Understanding Aphasia and its Neural Substrates.

Aphasia is often characterized in terms of subtype and severity, yet these constructs have limited explanatory power, because aphasia is inherently multifactorial both in its neural substrates and in its symptomatology. The purpose of this review is to survey current and emerging multivariate approaches to understanding aphasia. Techniques such as factor analysis and principal component analysis have been used to define latent underlying factors that can account for performance on batteries of speech and language tests, and for characteristics of spontaneous speech production. Multivariate lesion-symptom mapping has been shown to outperform univariate approaches to lesion-symptom mapping for identifying brain regions where damage is associated with specific speech and language deficits. It is increasingly clear that structural damage results in functional changes in wider neural networks, which mediate speech and language outcomes. Multivariate statistical approaches are essential for understanding the complex relationships between the neural substrates of aphasia, and resultant profiles of speech and language function.

Picturebooks: an effective tool to encourage children's English L2 oral production

The purpose of this research-to-practice paper is to delve deeper into the rich potential of picturebooks for eliciting children’s spontaneous speech production during face-to-face conversational interaction. Specifically, it analyses how children apply their existing communicative skills during exposure to the non-textual elements of picturebooks. This in turn enables to get wider understanding of how children learn and use English L2 at an early bilingual immersion school. The study examines the oral narrative production of Spanish-speaking English learners in an early bilingual immersion school. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by studies in the field of child language acquisition. The data are drawn from a 2.5 years longitudinal study of four children (aged 4-5 years at the first recording) from four different classrooms. The conversational interactions created by looking and talking about picturebook illustrations were audio-recorded and the utterances obtained through spontaneous elicitation were transcribed and analysed for emerging syntactic production and for communication strategies. Data analysis provides information on spontaneous oral created language which reflects children’s underlying linguistic competence influenced partly by the learning setting, by the type of input and by the amount of exposure time. Research findings reveal how children use illustrations as a language scaffold and how the English oral language skills develop over time for syntactic development. These findings suggest that picturebooks and even more, picturebook illustrations are ideal tools to elicit oral language from children as well as to support natural acquisition of language. Based on the research findings of this study and on observation of how picturebooks lend themselves to build children’s existing communicative skills, the paper provides several hints to maximize communicative interaction in the young learner’s classroom.

Reductions in prefrontal activation predict off-topic utterances during speech production

The ability to speak coherently is essential for effective communication but declines with age: older people more frequently produce tangential, off-topic speech. Little is known, however, about the neural systems that support coherence in speech production. Here, fMRI was used to investigate extended speech production in healthy older adults. Computational linguistic analyses were used to quantify the coherence of utterances produced in the scanner, allowing identification of the neural correlates of coherence for the first time. Highly coherent speech production was associated with increased activity in bilateral inferior prefrontal cortex (BA45), an area implicated in selection of task-relevant knowledge from semantic memory, and in bilateral rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA10), implicated more generally in planning of complex goal-directed behaviours. These findings demonstrate that neural activity during spontaneous speech production can be predicted from formal analysis of speech content, and that multiple prefrontal systems contribute to coherence in speech.

“My lecturer’s expressionless face kills me!” An evaluation of learning process of German language class in Indonesia

This qualitative study aimed at evaluating the circumstances in plenary class that provoke learners’ speaking anxiety. To meet the objectives, this study investigated students of German as a Foreign Language (GFL) course who were experiencing speaking anxiety symptoms in the plenary class. The research was a narrative qualitative study, and the data were collected through observation and interview. The result of this study reveals that learners’ speaking anxiety occurred in particular circumstances of the plenary class, such as unfamiliar topic, still class, students’ unpreparedness for spontaneous speaking, expressionless face of the lecturer, and students’ fear of native speaker lecturers.

Investigating speech and language impairments in delirium: A preliminary case-control study

IntroductionLanguage impairment is recognized as as part of the delirium syndrome, yet there is little neuropsychological research on the nature of this dysfunction. Here we hypothesized that patients with delirium show impairments in language formation, coherence and comprehension.MethodsThis was a case-control study in 45 hospitalized patients (aged 65–97 years) with delirium, dementia without delirium, or no cognitive impairment (N = 15 per group). DSM-5 criteria were used for delirium. Speech was elicited during (1) structured conversational questioning, and (2) the "Cookie Theft" picture description task. Language comprehension was assessed through standardized verbal and written commands. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.ResultsDelirium and dementia groups scored lower on the conversational assessment than the control group (p<0.01, moderate effect sizes (r) of 0.48 and 0.51, resp.). In the Cookie Theft task, the average length of utterances (i.e. unit of speech), indicating language productivity and fluency, distinguished patients with delirium from those with dementia (p<0.01, r = 0.50) and no cognitive impairment (p<0.01, r = 0.55). Patients with delirium performed worse on written comprehension tests compared to cognitively unimpaired patients (p<0.01, r = 0.63), but not compared to the dementia group.ConclusionsProduction of spontaneous speech, word quantity, speech content and verbal and written language comprehension are impaired in delirious patients compared to cognitively unimpaired patients. Additionally, patients with delirium produced significantly less fluent speech than those with dementia. These findings have implications for how speech and language are evaluated in delirium assessments, and also for communication with patients with delirium. A study limitation was that the delirium group included patients with co-morbid dementia, which precludes drawing conclusions about the specific language profile of delirium.

Relevance matters. Eighteen-month-olds’ use of relevant informative pointing as a predictor of two-year-olds’ language abilities / La relevancia es importante. El uso de gestos deícticos relevantes e informativos por parte de niños de año y medio como factor predictor de las capacidades lingüísticas a los dos años

The significance of pointing gestures in the development of linguistic communication is linked to their referential character and formation of common ground in use of gestures and speech. Our longitudinal study aimed to define the nature of this relationship more precisely and to explore whether the relevance vs lack of relevance of a child’s pointing gestures is related to development of language abilities. We developed a special protocol to measure relevant and irrelevant pointing gestures in 18-month-olds, sampled production of spontaneous speech and measured their language comprehension at two years of age. A group of 343 children was tested, and using structural equation modelling we showed that relevant gestures predict the level of development of language production and comprehension. As predicted, this association was not applied to irrelevant gestures. It is likely that a child’s more frequent use of relevant pointing gestures helps the caregiver to recognize the child’s communicative intentions and to comment on his/her behaviour appropriately. The identified developmental/predictive relationship is valid in both mentalistic and teleological interpretation of early communicative development.

Investigating the role of vocabulary size in second language speaking ability

The current study investigates the extent to which receptive vocabulary size test scores can predict second language (L2) speaking ability. Forty-six international students with an advanced level of L2 proficiency completed a receptive vocabulary task (Yes/No test; Meara &amp; Miralpeix, 2017) and a spontaneous speaking task (oral picture narrative). Elicited speech samples were submitted to expert rating based on speakers’ vocabulary features as well as lexical sophistication measures. Results indicate that vocabulary size was significantly associated with vocabulary rating. However, learners with large vocabulary sizes did not necessarily produce lexically sophisticated L2 words during speech. A closer examination of the data reveals complexities regarding the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and speaking. Based on these findings, we explore implications for L2 vocabulary assessment in classroom teaching contexts and provide important suggestions for future research on the vocabulary-and-speaking link.

English Oral Communication in Public Secondary Schools in Kazakhstan: Understanding its Practice and Challenges

The teaching of oral communication (OC) has been addressed in different ESL and EFL contexts, though mainly in a university setting. However, it has received little attention in the Central Asian context. This paper will provide preliminary insights into the practice of teaching English OC and the challenges associated with it in public schools in Kazakhstan (KZ), a country in Central Asia. For the pilot study reported here, data was collected from 18 KZ learners from 9 different schools via e-mail interviews. The study was guided by a theoretical model representing three levels of influence on OC practice: micro, meso, and macro. The current OC activities were found to be lacking in spontaneity, too teacher-centred and individual-oriented. At the micro level, emotional constraints were considered to have a greater impact on female students’ oral performance, while limited linguistic repertoire affected male students’ oral production. At the meso level, females found a lack of emotional support from their teachers, while males preferred to have out-of-class help from their friends to practise English. At the macro level, males were found to be more influenced by a wider sociocultural context than females. Firstly, the findings reveal the gap between the actual and preferred OC practices in KZ public schools, which can be further addressed by the stakeholders. Secondly, they illustrate how gender influences the way learners engage in OC activities. And lastly, they underline the importance of examining OC in relation to learners’ self, their social communities and the overarching context that shapes their attitude towards a language. Keywords: EFL context; Asian learners; gender; spontaneous speaking; affective factors

Intraword Variability in Children With Cochlear Implants: The Long-Term Development up to 5 Years of Age and a Comparison With Children With Normal Hearing.

This study evaluates intraword or token-to-token variability in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) longitudinally up to 5 years of age in comparison with intraword variability in age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH). Spontaneous speech samples of 9 children with CI were collected longitudinally up to age 5. The data of the NH control group consisted of cross-sectional recordings. Children's word productions were categorized into 4 response types of the variability score (consistent correct, consistent incorrect, variable with hits, variable with no hits), and the proportion of whole-word variation (PWV) was calculated. PWV was high in both groups of children but decreased with age. All response types of the variability score appeared in both groups. Children with CI were significantly more variable than their peers with NH up to age 4, but this difference has disappeared by age 5. Longer words had a higher PWV and were more often consistent incorrect and variable. Intraword variability was characteristic of children with CI's spontaneous speech productions as it was in children with NH, and a similar factor (word length) affected variability in production. Group comparisons showed higher rates of intraword variability in children with CI, but they seemed to catch up with their peers with NH by age 5.

Development of Velopharyngeal Closure for Vocalization During the First 2 Years of Life.

The vocalizations of young infants often sound nasalized, suggesting that the velopharynx is open during the 1st few months of life. Whereas acoustic and perceptual studies seemed to support the idea that the velopharynx closes for vocalization by about 4 months of age, an aeromechanical study contradicted this (Thom, Hoit, Hixon, & Smith, 2006). Thus, the current large-scale investigation was undertaken to determine when the velopharynx closes for speech production by following infants during their first 2 years of life. This longitudinal study used nasal ram pressure to determine the status of the velopharynx (open or closed) during spontaneous speech production in 92 participants (46 male, 46 female) studied monthly from age 4 to 24 months. The velopharynx was closed during at least 90% of the utterances by 19 months, though there was substantial variability across participants. When considered by sound category, the velopharynx was closed from most to least often during production of oral obstruents, approximants, vowels (only), and glottal obstruents. No sex effects were observed. Velopharyngeal closure for spontaneous speech production can be considered complete by 19 months, but closure occurs earlier for speech sounds with higher oral pressure demands.

“A New Vocation before Me”: Frederick Douglass's Post-Civil War Lyceum Career

ABSTRACTThis article examines the oratorical strategies adopted by Frederick Douglass in the late 1860s and early 1870s when he joined the ranks of professional lyceum speakers. Douglass's speaking shifted away from the long-established topics of slavery and civil rights to appeal to a broader audience. Douglass also shifted from a spontaneous speaking style, honed in years of abolitionist campaigning, to rely upon written texts prepared in advance and delivered repeatedly. A close analysis of those lyceum addresses, newspaper reports of their delivery, and Douglass's personal correspondence reveal that he retained many elements of his older performance style and facilely adapted his topic, sometimes in mid-lecture, to suit many audiences' demand to hear him address the “race question.”

A Speech Recognition-based Solution for the Automatic Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment from Spontaneous Speech.

Background: Even today the reliable diagnosis of the prodromal stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains a great challenge. Our research focuses on the earliest detectable indicators of cognitive de-cline in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Since the presence of language impairment has been reported even in the mild stage of AD, the aim of this study is to develop a sensitive neuropsychological screening method which is based on the analysis of spontaneous speech production during performing a memory task. In the future, this can form the basis of an Internet-based interactive screening software for the recognition of MCI.Methods: Participants were 38 healthy controls and 48 clinically diagnosed MCI patients. The provoked spontaneous speech by asking the patients to recall the content of 2 short black and white films (one direct, one delayed), and by answering one question. Acoustic parameters (hesitation ratio, speech tempo, length and number of silent and filled pauses, length of utterance) were extracted from the recorded speech sig-nals, first manually (using the Praat software), and then automatically, with an automatic speech recogni-tion (ASR) based tool. First, the extracted parameters were statistically analyzed. Then we applied machine learning algorithms to see whether the MCI and the control group can be discriminated automatically based on the acoustic features.Results: The statistical analysis showed significant differences for most of the acoustic parameters (speech tempo, articulation rate, silent pause, hesitation ratio, length of utterance, pause-per-utterance ratio). The most significant differences between the two groups were found in the speech tempo in the delayed recall task, and in the number of pauses for the question-answering task. The fully automated version of the analysis process – that is, using the ASR-based features in combination with machine learning - was able to separate the two classes with an F1-score of 78.8%.Conclusion: The temporal analysis of spontaneous speech can be exploited in implementing a new, auto-matic detection-based tool for screening MCI for the community.

Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism

AbstractThe present article argues that the two effects observed in bilingual first language acquisition, delay and acceleration, have different sources. Whereas delay can be due to cross-linguistic influence on the competence or the performance level and to the mere cognitive burden to process two languages, acceleration is always rooted in efficient computation in a non-linguistic sense. The evidence for the difference between delay and acceleration effects stems from children who are raised bilingually from birth and who are studied during spontaneous speech production. It falls out rather naturally that linguistic development is immune to acceleration, while it can be delayed in bilingual children as compared to monolinguals.

Lexical Growth in Egyptian Arabic Speaking Children: A corpus Based Study

This paper calculates developmental index of language growth in Egyptian Arabic based on a corpus consists ofspontaneous speech samples from10 children 5 boys and 5 girls from 1.7 to 4 years. Depending on 30 minutes transcripts of spontaneous speech production the following properties of collected data were analysed: size of vocabulary and frequency of word use in relation to age (development of types and tokens) and individual differences in vocabulary size. The contribution of the current study lies in the use of vocabulary profile results as a measure of potential indicators of developmental language delay. The results provide a new measurement tool for lexical growth at different developmental stages.

Exploring the relationship between productive vocabulary knowledge and second language oral ability

ABSTRACTThe current study investigated the extent to which L2 learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge could predict multiple dimensions of spontaneous speech production. A total of 39 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants with varying L2 proficiency levels first completed a productive vocabulary knowledge task (Lex30). Their spontaneous speech, elicited via a series of picture description tasks, was then assessed for comprehensibility (i.e. ease of understanding), accentedness (i.e. linguistic nativelikeness) and fluency (i.e. speech rate). The findings showed that the productive vocabulary scores significantly correlated with L2 fluency, but not with comprehensibility or accentedness. These results suggest that more proficient L2 learners, as measured by productive vocabulary scores, may speak spontaneously with fewer pauses and repetitions, and at a faster tempo. Finally, future research directions are discussed with a focus on the relationships between vocabulary knowledge and speaking.

Dissociation of quantifiers and object nouns in speech in focal neurodegenerative disease

Quantifiers such as many and some are thought to depend in part on the conceptual representation of number knowledge, while object nouns such as cookie and boy appear to depend in part on visual feature knowledge associated with object concepts. Further, number knowledge is associated with a frontal-parietal network while object knowledge is related in part to anterior and ventral portions of the temporal lobe. We examined the cognitive and anatomic basis for the spontaneous speech production of quantifiers and object nouns in non-aphasic patients with focal neurodegenerative disease associated with corticobasal syndrome (CBS, n=33), behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD, n=54), and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA, n=19). We recorded a semi-structured speech sample elicited from patients and healthy seniors (n=27) during description of the Cookie Theft scene. We observed a dissociation: CBS and bvFTD were significantly impaired in the production of quantifiers but not object nouns, while svPPA were significantly impaired in the production of object nouns but not quantifiers. MRI analysis revealed that quantifier production deficits in CBS and bvFTD were associated with disease in a frontal-parietal network important for number knowledge, while impaired production of object nouns in all patient groups was related to disease in inferior temporal regions important for representations of visual feature knowledge of objects. These findings imply that partially dissociable representations in semantic memory may underlie different segments of the lexicon.

Rhythm in the Speech and Music of Jazz and Riddim Musicians

Previous research has demonstrated similarities in the rhythmic characteristics of the speech and instrumental music within individual languages, such as French or English, but clear differences in these rhythmic patterns between languages. A recent finding has shown a comparable result for the rhythmic patterns of the spontaneous speech and instrumental music of musicians who speak different dialects of English, such that within-dialect speech and music rhythms are more similar to one another than are across-dialect rhythms. We extend the latter finding by comparing the rhythmic characteristics of the spontaneous speech and jazz productions of jazz musicians who speak American English with those of the spontaneous speech and riddim productions of Jamaican musicians, who speak Jamaican English. We found that the speech and music rhythmic patterns were similar within each dialect but different across dialects. Though scholars have suggested a link between speech prosody and jazz in the past, this is the first study known to us to demonstrate a link between the rhythmic properties of the speech and music of jazz musicians.

A preliminary investigation of daily variability of stuttering in adults

PurposeVariability in frequency of stuttering has made the results of treatment outcome studies difficult to interpret. Many factors that affect variability have been investigated; yet the typical range of variability experienced by speakers remains unknown. This study examined the day-to-day variability in the percentage of syllables containing stuttered and nonstuttered disfluencies in the speech of six adult speakers in three spontaneous speaking situations and two reading tasks. MethodsThe frequency of moments stuttering during the tasks were compared within and between speakers and days to document the degree of variability in stuttering frequency and explore whether there were any consistent patterns. The Stuttering Severity Instrument-Fourth Edition (SSI-4) and Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering for Adults (OASES-A) were also tested for day-to-day variability. Correlations between frequency, severity, and life impact were made. ResultsThe primary result of this study was the large range over which frequency of stuttering varied from day to day for the same individual. This variability did not correlate with any measures of stuttering severity but did correlate with life impact as measured by the OASES-A. No global pattern was detected in variability from day to day within or between participants. However, there were significantly more nonstuttered disfluencies present during the spontaneous speaking tasks than during the reading tasks. The day-to-day variability in the life impact of the disorder (OASES-A) was less than the day-to-day variability in observable stuttering behavior (percentage of syllables stuttered and SSI-4). ConclusionFrequency of stuttering varies significantly from situation to situation and day to day, with observed variability exceeding the degree of change often reported in treatment outcomes studies from before to after treatment. This variability must be accounted for in future clinical and scientific work.