Spontaneous Utterances Research Articles

Early Vocal Development in Toddlers With Simultaneous Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Background and Objectives The purpose of this study is to investigate the vocal development in toddlers with simultaneous bilateral cochlear implants (bilateral CI group) and to compare their progress to that of chronological age-matched (CA group) and hearing agematched (HA group) toddlers who have normal hearing and typical development.Subjects and Method Thirteen toddlers who received bilateral CIs simultaneously before 18 months of age participated in this study. Twenty-six toddlers participated as the control groups (CA group and HA group). The spontaneous utterances were collected from each toddler during free play with their parents in the laboratory. A total of 2324 spontaneous utterances of 39 toddlers (13 toddlers in each of the three groups) were classified as either canonical vocalizations or noncanonical vocalizations.Results The bilateral CI group produced significantly fewer canonical vocalizations than the CA group. However, there was not a significant difference in the ratio of canonical vocalizations between the CI and the CA groups. There were no significant differences in the frequency and ratio of canonical vocalization between the CI and HA groups. In the CI group, the frequency of canonical and noncanonical vocalizations was significantly correlated with receptive and expressive language scores.Conclusion The findings of this study showed that toddlers with bilateral CIs make good advancements in vocal development compared to toddlers with normal hearing. However, toddlers with bilateral CIs seem to produce an insufficient quantity of canonical vocalizations compared to age-matched hearing toddlers. Information about vocal development following simultaneous bilateral CI helps speech therapists and parents recognize speech development before the use of intelligible speech in communication.

“I may have benefited more than anyone else”: Responses to Staller’s (2024) Write-Up of Jane Gilgun’s Career Interviews

This commentary is a response to an invitation the editorial board of Qualitative Social Work extended to me to comment on an article that reports on my career interview as a qualitative social work researcher. The article appears in the present issue of the journal (Staller, 2024). The editors and I agree that Karen Staller did an exemplary job of interpreting the transcripts on which the article is based but that the transcripts were incomplete. In my enthusiasm for what I did say, I left things out. In this article, I added to the material that Karen had access to, such as laying out the principles of pragmatism that underlie qualitative social work research and practice and how I coped with the effects of hearing stories about violence and gained from it. I also added to the theory of violence that Karen wrote about and to her descriptions of my relationships with other feminists. I gave a brief account of deductive qualitative analysis that I did not mention at all in the interviews. I realize more than ever that there are differences between interviews, which are spontaneous utterances, and articles, that authors write over time, reflect upon, and revise countless times. Then editors have a go at them.

Frequency and characteristics of echoes and self-repetitions in minimally verbal and verbally fluent autistic individuals.

Nongenerative speech is the rote repetition of words or phrases heard from others or oneself. The most common manifestations of nongenerative speech are immediate and delayed echolalia, which are a well-attested clinical feature and a salient aspect of atypical language use in autism. However, there are no current estimates of the frequency of nongenerative speech, and the individual characteristics associated with nongenerative speech use in individuals across the autistic spectrum are poorly understood. In this study, we aim to measure and characterize spontaneous and nongenerative speech use in minimally verbal and verbally fluent autistic children and adolescents. Participants were 50 minimally verbal and 50 verbally fluent autistic individuals aged 6 to 21 years. Spontaneous and nongenerative speech samples were derived from SALT transcripts of ADOS-2 assessments. Participants' intelligible speech utterances were categorized as spontaneous or nongenerative. Spontaneous versus nongenerative utterances were compared between language subgroups on frequency of use and linguistic structure. Associations between nongenerative speech use and a series of individual characteristics (ADOS-2 subscale scores, nonverbal IQ, receptive vocabulary, and chronological age) were investigated over the whole sample and for each language subgroup independently. Almost all participants produced some nongenerative speech. Minimally verbal individuals produced significantly more nongenerative than spontaneous utterances, and more nongenerative utterances compared to verbally fluent individuals. Verbally fluent individuals produced limited rates of nongenerative utterances, in comparison to their much higher rates of spontaneous utterances. Across the sample, nongenerative utterance rates were associated with nonverbal IQ and receptive vocabulary, but not separately for the two language subgroups. In verbally fluent individuals, only age was significantly inversely associated with nongenerative speech use such that older individuals produced fewer nongenerative utterances. In minimally verbal individuals, there were no associations between any of the individual characteristics and nongenerative speech use. In terms of linguistic structure, the lexical diversity of nongenerative and spontaneous utterances of both language subgroups was comparable. Morphosyntactic complexity was higher for spontaneous compared to nongenerative utterances in verbally fluent individuals, while no differences emerged between the two utterance types in minimally verbal individuals. Nongenerative speech presents differently in minimally verbal and verbally fluent autistic individuals. Although present in verbally fluent individuals, nongenerative speech appears to be a major feature of spoken language in minimally verbal children and adolescents. Our results advocate for more research on the expressive language profiles of autistic children and adolescents who remain minimally verbal and for further investigations of nongenerative speech, which is usually excluded from language samples. Given its prevalence in the spoken language of minimally verbal individuals, nongenerative speech could be used as a way to engage in and maintain communication with this subgroup of autistic individuals.

Dialogue acts enhanced extract–abstract framework for meeting summarization

Meeting summarization is challenging due to complex multi-party interactions with spontaneous utterances. This paper tries to mitigate this challenge by leveraging dialogue acts (DAs). We propose Dialogue Acts enhanced extract–abstract framework for meeting Summarization (DASum). We jointly train meeting summarization with DAs classification to enable our model get aware of DAs and better understand dialogue interactions. Moreover, our DASum model uses DAs to measure the salience of an utterance in the extractor and as prefix prompt to guide how to integrate extracted utterances in the abstractor. We conducted experiments on two public datasets, ICSI (for meeting summarization) and QMSum (for query-based meeting summarization), which compress the meeting transcripts (average 9000 tokens) into a general summary (no more than 700 tokens) or a specific summary (no more than 150 tokens) for a query. Experimental results show our DASum achieves promising results on the ICSI (46.41/ 11.52/ 43.82/ 5.86) and QMSum (36.37/ 11.71/ 32.07/ 19.18) datasets in terms of ROUGE-1/ ROUGE-2/ ROUGE-L/ BERTScore.

VALENCY OF CHILD SPEECH IN THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL “STEVE TV SHOW”: SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Current linguistic studies tend to investigate sentence structure to determine the form of valency in written sentences. However, the study of valency in verbal communication still needs more exploration. This study investigated the types of valency and its arguments used by Ariana Jalia, a 6-year-old child, in her spontaneous utterances during the interview on ‘Steve TV Show’. As a qualitative descriptive study, the purpose was to gain a deep understanding of valency and its arguments found in the child's speech. In the field of semantics, the findings of this study indicated that the utterances produced by Ariana contained four types of valency zero, twelve types of valency one, and three types of verb valency. In addition, the semantic analysis investigated the thematic roles assigned to the argument verbs used by the child. Viewed from the agents, themes, causes, and topics of what Ariana described in her narrative, she employed transitive verbs. The findings shed light on the way children used language in informal and conversational settings and how they constructed sentences with different verb structures to convey their thoughts and ideas. It also highlights the importance of understanding the grammatical structures used by children in order to better support their language development. The need for further research suggests that there is still much to be learned about the early stages of language development and how children use language in various settings.

The combinatorial patterns of twá 'to cut' in Asante-Twi (Akan):

Cross-linguistically, verbs have combinatorial patterns. When the semantics of a verb combines with the semantics of its internal arguments, different interpretations are derived. These interpretations can be literal or non-literal (Ameka 2019; Spalek 2015; Rappaport Hovav 2014; Bobuafor 2013, 2018; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2013; Ameka and Essegbey 2007; Levin 1993). Using data collected from written texts, video-stimuli descriptions, spontaneous utterances and native-speaker intuitions, this paper explores the potential combinatorial patterns of twá ‘to cut’ in Asante-Twi (Akan, Kwa-Niger Congo). I show that the verb combines with different types of internal arguments, in different argument structure constructions to derive multiple interpretations. Taking into consideration the fact that “natural language tries to minimize polysemy” (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2013: 2), I propose a univocal lexical semantics for twá ‘to cut’ and show that its basic semantics is kept constant even in non-prototypical contexts. I argue that the use of twá ‘to cut’ in non-prototypical contexts represent contextual modulations of the verb’s single meaning. Following Spalek (2015) and Ameka (2019), I suggest that such contextual interpretations should be analysed compositionally, paying attention to the verb’s internal arguments as well as the argument structure constructions in which it occurs.

Phonological Development in Child Language Acquisition: A Study of a Child with Speech Delay

<em>Children acquire language through interaction with other children, their parents, and their surroundings. Acquisition of language may influence children’s success at school. The language aspect that children acquire first is phonology. In acquiring language, children whose language development is slower than their peers may experience speech delay. Thus, the present study emerges to investigate the phonological development of a three-year-old child who is diagnosed with speech delay as well as to examine the factors that support the development. Using a qualitative approach, this study was a case study that employed a single participant. The results of the study indicated that the participant’s language ability developed significantly after several months of receiving therapy. He displayed an ability to produce imitative sounds and non-imitative ones. The spontaneous utterances were also meaningful compared to what he had before the therapy. The evaluation revealed that the development of the subject was affected by the exposure to language at home. Speech simulation and screen time limitation were keys to improving his language ability</em>

Web-Questionnaire-Based Corpus Creation Under Assumption of Human as Speech Targets

This paper presents a method that uses a web questionnaire to create a corpus containing spontaneous utterances of natural ideas, which may contain grammatical mistakes. In an experimental implementation of the method, the subjects were informed that they were receiving nursing care from a person, and they were required to answer a web-based questionnaire in which their responses were recorded as speech utterances. Compared to the Wizard of Oz approach and interview-based corpus-creation methods, the presented method simplifies the collection of utterances. Furthermore, we conducted a two-fold assessment to verify the effectiveness of the presented method. First, the approach exhibited a significant reduction in workload compared to interview-style utterance collection. Second, we compared the variety of expressions collected when subjects were informed that they were talking to a person with those collected when they were informed that they were communicating with a nursing robot. The results indicate that, although the number of utterances was larger for a robot than for a person, in terms of other metrics such as time efficiency index, the total number of morphemes, the average number of morphemes per utterance, the number of unique morphemes, and coefficient of variation, the utterances were larger for a human speech target than for a robot.

Input Utterance Complementation Method by Anaphora Resolution for Spontaneous Utterances on Spoken Dialog Systems

Input Utterance Complementation Method by Anaphora Resolution for Spontaneous Utterances on Spoken Dialog Systems

Perception of gender in children's voices

Research shows that gender in the voices of prepubescent children can be identified relatively well, despite the absence of reliable anatomical differences related to their vocal tract morphology. This implies that information about differences in girls’ and boys’ voices also resides in behavioral and cultural aspects of speech and not exclusively in the acoustic cues corresponding to anatomical differences. The observed improved gender identification (gID) for sentences over syllables suggests that longer stretches of speech provide listeners with a richer acoustic basis for their decisions. Here, we introduce two additional factors that may affect gID: speaking style and children’s dialect. Children (n = 92) ages 8;0–12;4 years, boys (n = 45) and girls (n = 47) from Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina produced isolated syllables, read sentences, and spontaneous utterances. Listeners were young adults from Ohio. Expectedly, gID accuracy for sentences/utterances was greater (66%) than for syllables (55%), and for older than younger children. Dialect was a significant predictor for younger (but not older) children, with the highest gID for Ohio. Overall, spontaneous utterances did not provide more gender information than read sentences except for older children from North Carolina, suggesting that cultural traits in conversational dynamics can also be useful to listeners in gID.

Interpretation, relevance and the ideological effects of discursive practice

Abstract Research in Critical Discourse Studies has for long recognised the central role that both direct and indirect communicative strategies play in the reproduction of social inequality, but a main proponent of this approach has expressed scepticism with regard to the contribution that theories of pragmatics which specifically focus on speaker intentions can make to its agenda. This paper sets out to examine how relevance theory’s theoretical machinery can be applied to the critical discussion of ideology in discourse, by offering insights that overcome the limitations imposed by this concentration of its precursors on speaker intentions. More specifically, I discuss how the cognitive perspective that relevance theory adopts can inform our understanding of the way in which ideological effects automatically arise during spontaneous utterance interpretation. After accounting for the derivation of these effects, I briefly suggest how it can additionally be taken to underlie the propagation of ideologies through discursive practice.

Lexical use and social class: A study on lexical richness, word length, and word class in spoken English

Lexical use is an important indicator of an individual’s social class, and previous studies found that speakers from different social classes show distinct features in their lexical use. However, those studies are more qualitative in nature and the findings are far from conclusive. To address these issues, this study examined the lexical features of the utterances produced by speakers from different social classes in terms of lexical richness, word length, and word class based on a large dataset of spontaneous utterances, i.e., Spoken British National Corpus 2014. The analysis yielded several interesting findings. First, speakers from the middle and upper-middle classes produce utterances of a higher lexical richness than those from the lower class. Second, individuals from all social classes tend to produce utterances of a lower lexical richness and with shorter words in spoken language than they do in writing, which indicates the spontaneous nature of spoken language. Third, speakers from the middle and upper middle classes have similar lexical features such as the more frequent use of derived -ly adverbs (particularly intensifiers), conjunctions, and prepositions. In contrast, those from the lower class use more negative words and first-person singular pronouns. Such differences are explained by factors closely related to the speakers’ social class backgrounds.

파워카드 중재가 자폐성 장애 중학생의 자발적 발화에 미치는 영향

연구목적: 이 연구에서는 특별한 관심을 활용한 파워카드 중재가 자폐성장애 중학생의 자발적 발화에 미치는 영향을 알아보았다. 연구방법: 연구 대상은 특수학교에 재학 중인 중학교 2학년 남학생 1명이며, 연구 설계로는 행동간중다기초선설계를 적용하였다. 연구는 기초선, 중재, 유지, 일반화 단계로 진행되었다. 예비 관찰 및 자료 수집을 통해 연구 대상의 특별한 관심을 판별하고 이에 근거하여 스크립트와 파워카드를 구성하였다. 파워카드 중재는 주 2-3회 일대일 활동으로 시행되었다. 중재의 효과에 대한 자료 수집은 또래들과 함께 참여하는 요리 수업시간에 이루어졌고 일반화 효과 자료 수집은 미술수업시간에 이루어졌다. 자발적 발화 수행율을 그래프로 나타내고 속도, 수준, 경향, PND로 시각적 분석을 하였다. 연구결과: 파워카드 중재를 통해 자폐성장애 중학생의 자발적 발화가 향상되었다. 중재 효과는 중재 종료 후에도 유지되었다. 또한 자발적 발화의 향상은 다른 상황에도 일반화되었다. 결론: 이 연구의 결과는 교육현장에서 자폐성장애 중학생의 특별한 관심을 강점으로 활용하여 자폐성 장애 학생의 자발적 발화 향상에 영향을 미칠 수 있음을 시사한다.

Design and evaluation of a context-adaptive AAC application for people with aphasia

Communication with an Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) device tends to be extremely slow, mainly due to difficulties in navigating the extensive vocabulary needed for the generation of spontaneous utterances in a manner that allows the user to easily find and select appropriate words when communicating. This work aims to design, implement, and evaluate a context-adaptive AAC application that suggests the most appropriate words according to the user location and past vocabulary usage.

Lexical diversity and lexical skills in children who stutter

PurposeNumerous “small N” studies of language ability in children who stutter have produced differing conclusions. We combined test and spontaneous language data from a large cohort of children who stutter (CWS) and typically fluent peers, gathered from independent laboratories across the US, to appraise a variety of lexical measures. MethodStandardized receptive and expressive vocabulary test data and spontaneous language samples from 99 pairs of CWS (ages 25–100 months), and age-, gender-, and SES-matched children who do not stutter (CWNS) were compared. Language sample transcripts were analyzed with four measures of lexical diversity. Correlations between lexical diversity measures and expressive vocabulary scores were also calculated. ResultsOn standardized tests of both receptive and expressive vocabulary, there were significant differences between CWS and CWNS. In contrast, on spontaneous language measures of lexical diversity, CWS did not differ in their lexical diversity, across analyses, compared to CWNS. Three of the four lexical diversity analyses, MATTR, VocD, and NDW, were significantly correlated with each other. ConclusionsWe were able to confirm prior findings of relative disadvantage on standardized vocabulary tests for a very large sample of well-matched CWS. However, spontaneous language measures of lexical diversity did not distinguish the groups. This relative weakness in CWS may emerge from task differences: CWS are free to encode their own spontaneous utterances but must comply with explicit lexical prompts in standardized testing situations.

Discourse Intonation Patterns in The Non-Interrogative Utterances of Selected Educated Nigerian Speakers of English

Previous studies on English intonation have concentrated on its rule-governed patterns; people’s spontaneous utterance intonational choice characteristics are inadequately explored. This study investigated the interactionally-motivated intonation patterns of selected educated Nigerian speakers of English (ENSE) to determine the conformity of their spontaneous speech intonation patterns with their interactional context. David Brazil’s Discourse Intonation (DI) model provided the theoretical framework. Thirty-two excerpts were purposively sampled from the spontaneous utterances of 17 purposively selected electronic media participants (Group A) and 15 focus group discussion participants (Group B). Structure and centrality to the messages of the excerpts informed the selection of the analysed non-interrogative tone units. Data were collected using textual analysis, FGD and questionnaire. Frequency and analysis of variance were used for quantitative analysis. The participants’ non-interrogative tone-unit intonation patterns largely ran counter to DI, with 7 excerpts (41.2%) from Group A and 5 (33.3%) from Group B largely conforming to DI (p = 0.642), even when they did not necessarily obey formalised rules. Statistical p-value, being above 0.05, showed no statistically significant difference in the mean between the two groups. The selected ENSE’s intonational choices ran contrary to DI. ENSE’s natural speech intonational choices are generally inconsistent as they follow no specific set of rules.

Within- and between-speaker acoustic variability: Spontaneous versus read speech

Using principal component analysis (PCA), our previous study [JASA 145(pt. 2), 1930, (2019)] of read sentences found surprisingly similar acoustic voice spaces for groups of female and male talkers and for the individuals within groups. Formant frequencies and the balance between higher harmonic amplitudes and inharmonic energy in the voice accounted for the most acoustic variance within and across talkers, but many further details varied idiosyncratically for individual talkers. In this study, we replicated this finding using a set of recorded phone conversations from 99/100 original speakers (49 F), hypothesizing that the same measures would characterize both individual and population acoustic spaces, despite greater acoustic variability for spontaneous utterances. F0, formant frequencies, spectral noise, source spectral shape, and their variability were measured every 5 ms from vowels and approximants. Individual and group PCAs revealed that the acoustic voice spaces derived from spontaneous speech are highly similar to those spaces previously identified based on read speech. One significant difference between the two speaking styles was that unlike read speech, variability in F0 emerged as one of the variables that accounted for significant acoustic variability in spontaneous speech. Implications for voice learning, recognition, and discrimination will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH/NSF.]

Vocal Development in Infants and Toddlers With Bilateral Cochlear Implants and Infants With Normal Hearing.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the time course of vocal development in infants and toddlers with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs; bilateral CI group) who are acquiring Finnish and to compare their progress to that of infants with normal hearing and typical development (TD group). Method Five thousand nine hundred sixty-four spontaneous utterances of 30 infants and toddlers (15 in both groups) were classified as either precanonical (PC) vocalizations, basic canonical syllables (BCS), or advanced forms (AF) levels. Time course of development and group differences were analyzed in a prospective longitudinal study during a time course of 1 year: before implantation and 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after CI activation for the bilateral CI group and at 6, 9, and 12 months of age for the TD group. Results The least mature PC vocalizations decreased and the BCS and AF vocalizations increased for both the bilateral CI and TD groups during the follow-up period of 1 year. The bilateral CI group produced a lower percentage of PC vocalizations (effect size, ηp 2 = .35) and a higher percentage of BCS (effect size, ηp 2 = .16) and AF vocalizations (effect size, ηp 2 = 0.24) than the TD group. Conclusions The findings of this study showed that vocal development of infants and toddlers with early-identified profound hearing loss is delayed before CI activation. Findings also showed that infants and toddlers with bilateral CIs make rapid advancements in vocal development after implantation compared to infants with typical development. However, their vocal development seems to remain delayed at least during the 1st year of bilateral CI use as compared to the well-documented milestones of infants and toddlers with typical development. Information about the vocal development time course following bilateral CI activation helps parents recognize progress in auditory-guided speech development before the emergence and the use of spoken words in communication.

A Developmental-Longitudinal Study of Request External Modifiers in Authentic and Elicited Data

This developmental-longitudinal study aims to investigate the pragmatic development of Iraqi EFL learners in the use of external modifications of request over four years of study in authentic and elicited data. The authentic data is natural requests of Viber and WhatsApp while the elicited data is discourse completion test (DCT). The researcher has collected 202 authentic messages and 192 elicited messages from 24 learners. The external modifications are coded based on Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) and Economidou-Kogetsidis’s (2011) taxonomy of external devices.
 The results unveil that there is an evidence of pragmatic development in the learners’ use of external devices in the two types of data. Yet, the use of these devices increases with increased study years particularly when these learners produce their natural requests. Besides, this study reveals that the authentic data includes authentic results occur in real context whereby natural and spontaneous utterances are produced. Hence, the elicited data must be used in addition to other types of research instruments to arrive at valid results because it does not accurately uncover the learners’ real development

Enhanced milieu teaching for children with autism spectrum disorder in South Africa

Purpose: Efficient and effective interventions are required to meet the communication needs of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, most children with ASD living in South Africa do not receive individualised interventions.Method: This multiple baseline study examined the effects of therapist-implemented enhanced milieu teaching (EMT) on the diversity and frequency of spoken language of three children with ASD in South Africa.Result: A moderate functional relation was demonstrated between the introduction of EMT and increases in (1) the number of different words and (2) the number of spontaneous utterances used by each participant. Some evidence of generalisation to novel partners and contexts was observed.Conclusion: Results indicated that EMT may be effective for improving communication in South African children with ASD. Implications for clinical practice and cultural and linguistic adaptations are discussed.