Speaking Style Research Articles

Register in The Good Doctor Movie

This study aims to describe the types and functions of register used in The Good Doctor (season 5 episode 18). This research is qualitative and descriptive with The Good Doctor movie as the data source. The data were collected by watching, annotating, and coding. Analysis by presenting, describing, analyzing, and concluding the data. This research found there are 60 utterances of type of registers used in the movie such as Frozen, Formal, Consultative, Casual, and Intimate. Then, the researcher also found that there are sixty-six data on the function of the register including Emotive (13), Directive (21), Referential (26), Peotic (1), and Phatic (5). In this movie, the researcher found all types of registers used by characters. For the function of the register, the researcher only found five of six functions in the movie. The most used type of register is the casual register with twenty-eight data and referential is most used by characters in the movie with twenty-six data. The use of a casual register can reflect a more relaxed speaking style, not overly formal, and closer to everyday conversation. The metalinguistic function was not found because there are no situations where characters have a conversation that refers to the metalinguistic function in the movie.

La prononciation du français au Burundi: influence du français de Belgique et du kirundi

Abstract French in Burundi offers an interesting case of language contact: speakers have Kirundi as their first language and French imported during the colonial era was the variety spoken in Belgium, which does not share all the features of reference French. In this study, we analyze a corpus of 12 speakers (including 4 women; mean age 38.5) producing different speaking styles collected according to the methodology of the Phonologie du Français Contemporain project: word reading, text reading, and free narration. The results of the pronunciation analysis concern vowels, consonants and schwa. We identify eight pronunciation features that differ from reference French. In addition, we analyze for each one the possible interferences with Kirundi or with Belgian French. In conclusion, we discuss which of these features can be considered pan-African.

When Language Matters

Abstract Text analysis is increasingly used for consumer and marketing insight. But while work has shed light on what firms should say to customers, when to say those things (e.g., within an advertisement or sales interaction) is less clear. Service employees, for example, could adopt a certain speaking style at a conversation's start, end, or throughout. When might specific language features be beneficial? This article introduces a novel approach to address this question. To demonstrate its potential, we apply it to warm and competent language. Prior research suggests that an affective (i.e., warm) speaking approach leads customers to think employees are less competent, so a cognitive (competent) style should be prioritized. In contrast, our theorizing, analysis of hundreds of real service conversations from two firms across thousands of conversational moments (N = 23,958), and four experiments (total N = 1,589) offer a more nuanced perspective. Customers are more satisfied when employees use both cognitive and affective language but at separate, specific times. Ancillary analyses show how this method can be applied to other language features. Taken together, this work offers a method to explore when language matters, sheds new light on the warmth/competence trade-off, and highlights ways to improve the customer experience.

Identifying and Treating Functional “Nonnative [Foreign] Accent Syndrome”: Perspectives From the Patient and Speech-Language Pathologist

Purpose: When nonnative speaking patterns emerge following neurologic insult or injury, it has often been referred to as foreign, or nonnative, accent syndrome (FAS). In many other cases, FAS can occur as a manifestation of a functional speech disorder (FSD). The purpose of this clinical focus article is to (a) describe the methods utilized in identifying and managing a functional communication disorder characterized by nonnative speech, language, and nonverbal communication intrusions, accompanied by a functional movement disorder and (b) describe the patient's lived experience. Method and Results: The patient is a 59-year-old monolingual English-speaking gentleman with a remote history of episodic stuttering, who later developed an abrupt onset of a nonnative speaking style that changed in quality over time. He also developed gait difficulties that, after visiting with several neurologists, were judged to reflect a functional neurological disorder. During the speech evaluation session, an “Eastern European accent” was noted, along with nonnative word use and word order. A diagnosis of FSD characterized by foreign accent was made, and intervention was undertaken as detailed in the clinical focus article and demonstrated in the accompanying video. With behavioral intervention, the patient was able to correct sound-level changes in structured tasks such as reading and repetition and then in conversation. Language dialect–like changes resolved without direct intervention. The nonspeech movement disorder was addressed with intensive occupational and physical therapy. Conclusions: The patient presented with functional FAS, which was effectively managed with symptomatic, targeted behavioral intervention. His experience demonstrates the importance of patient advocacy in acquiring an accurate diagnosis and appropriate management recommendations. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24653430

The overlooked effect of amplitude on within-speaker vowel variation

Abstract We analyse variation in vowel production within monologues produced by speakers in a quiet, well-controlled environment. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), applied to a large corpus of naturalistic recordings of New Zealand English speakers, we show that the first formant of monophthongs varies significantly with variation in a speaker’s relative amplitude. We also find that amplitude variation is used, potentially agentively, to mark the beginning and ending of topical sections within single-speaker monologues. These results have significant methodological consequences for the study of vocalic variation in the context of research on speaker style and language variation and change. While laboratory research has shown a connection between variation in F1 and amplitude in loud environments or with distant interlocutors, this has not been seen in quiet environments with unscripted speech of the sort often used in sociolinguistcs. We argue that taking account of this variation is an important challenge for both within-speaker investigation of stylistic covariation and across-speaker investigation. In the latter case we recommend, as a minimal step, the inclusion of a measure of relative amplitude within regression models.

A dense layer model for cognitive emotion recognition with feature representation

The predictions of cognitive emotions are complex due to various cognitive emotion modalities. Deep network model has recently been used with huge cognitive emotion determination. The visual and auditory modalities of cognitive emotion recognition system are proposed. The extraction of powerful features helps obtain the content related to cognitive emotions for different speaking styles. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized for feature extraction from the speech. On the other hand, the visual modality uses the 50 layers of a deep residual network for prediction purpose. Also, extracting features is important as the datasets are sensitive to outliers when trying to model the content. Here, a long short-term memory network (LSTM) is considered to manage the issue. Then, the proposed Dense Layer Model (DLM) is trained in an E2E manner based on feature correlation that provides better performance than the conventional techniques. The proposed model gives 99% prediction accuracy which is higher to other approaches.

Two efforts towards natural speech synthesis: Incorporating disfluency and speaking style change based on the interlocutor

During the period 2000–2005, a Japanese female speaker recorded her everyday conversations with many different interlocutors using a head-set microphone. As a result, 600 hours of natural Japanese speech data were obtained. This study describes a DNN-based speech synthesis system which was trained on 300 hours of the data, focusing on two unique efforts to make it more expressive in a human-like way: (1) allowing for disfluencies, and (2) accounting for the category of interlocutor. Incorporating some frequently observed disfluent patterns in general Japanese speech such as fillers, phrase-final rising intonation, and word-internal prolongation or suspension, is believed to be effective in practical application as certain disfluencies are connected to a speaker’s attitude in Japanese communication. For example, having word-internal prolongations can show hesitation or politeness, and word-internal suspending can show the speaker’s surprised attitude. Interlocutors in the original data were categorized into four groups: family, friend, child and others. This information was used in the training process, and as a result, the synthesizer can generate different speaking styles according to the interlocutor setting. Being able to generate disfluent speech and change the speaking style depending on who you are talking to can make the synthesizer ever more expressive.

Order Affects Clear and Loud Speech Response.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of instruction order on the speech production response when adopting higher effort speaking styles, specifically loud and clear speech. Speech intensity, lip aperture range, and speech rate data were collected from 24 talkers who repeated the utterance "Buy Bobby a puppy" using habitual, clear, and loud speech. Participants were assigned in quasi-random fashion to one of two groups: a Clear-Loud Group (11 participants; order: habitual-clear-loud) or a Loud-Clear Group (13 participants; order: habitual-loud-clear). Talkers in the Clear-Loud Group exhibited higher speech intensity during the loud style compared with those who performed the Loud-Clear Group. Furthermore, talkers in the Clear-Loud Group retained the increases lip aperture range and reductions in speech rate associated with the clear style when producing the loud style. Conversely, talkers in the Loud-Clear Group exhibited significant increases in lip aperture range between the habitual and loud styles and between the loud and clear styles. Additionally, the Loud-Clear Group exhibited a reduction in speech rate only during the clear style, as no differences in speech rate were observed between the habitual and loud styles. These findings may suggest that producing a higher effort style leads to carry-over effects in subsequent styles. Future research should investigate factors that moderate the degree of order effects for both research and clinical purposes. For instance, if generalizable, the compounding carry-over effects may prove advantageous for certain clinical populations.

Acoustic properties of non-native clear speech: Korean speakers of English

The present study examined the acoustic properties of clear speech produced by non-native speakers of English (L1 Korean), in comparison to native clear speech. L1 Korean speakers of English (N=30) and native speakers of English (N=20) read an English word-list in casual and clear speaking styles. Analysis included clear speech correlates thought to be universal across languages (vowel space expansion and stressed vowel lengthening) and clear speech modifications believed to function in a languages-specific way (increased mean voice fundamental frequency and fo range and acoustic enhancement of English voicing contrast via voice onset time and onset fo). The results showed that across the two groups of participants clear speech was acoustically distinct from casual speech in every parameter. In addition, the presence and direction of the acoustic difference between the two speaking styles was largely the same for both native and non-native speakers. Nevertheless, non-native clear speech differed from native one in the magnitude of acoustic modifications. Specifically, L2 speakers implemented less vowel space expansion, less increase of mean fo, and less positive and negative VOT lengthening in clear speech than native speakers. Many, but not all differences between native and non-native clear speech could be attributed to the effect of participants’ L1, for example, lower functional load of VOT in the differentiation of Korean laryngeal categories and absence of pitch-dependent system of prosodic prominence in Korean. Overall, we conclude that Korean speakers were successful in producing native-like English clear speech, although the observed deviations in the extent of acoustic modifications suggest some reliance on L1-specific prosodic system and system of phonetic implementation and enhancement of phonological contrasts.

Standardization of the Tharu Language: A Critical Analysis

This research paper highlights the importance and rationale of standardization in the Tharu language spoken in Nepal. It has some variants throughout Nepal and is being used on the individual styles of accent and pronunciation. These individual styles of speaking and writing the language have created some confusion and occasional linguistic disputes. This research project aims at mitigating such linguistic controversy. The native speakers of the Tharu language are found to have been pronouncing cerebral and dental sounds haphazardly. It happens so because the language hasn't been authentically standardized so far although it has had lots of literary activities with quite a good folk literature too. The Tharu language is the fourth largest language of Nepal. It’s the major language of southern Nepal from the east to the west but it doesn't have any authentic linguistic guidelines. Being centred on these points, the paper advocates for the standardization of the Tharu language with the authorized publication of grammar books, dictionaries, etc. Views of various authors regarding the standardization of language have been presented in this paper that has adopted the qualitative research method. The analysis and discussion have been made primarily based on the secondary sources of data with the conclusion that the Tharu language is in dire need to be standardized for its spread and quality as well.

Aoba_v3 bot: a multimodal chatbot system combining rules and various response generation models

In this paper, we present a multimodal dialogue system combining a neural response generation mechanism, a reranking mechanism, and a rule-based avatar control mechanism. Our system was submitted to the open track at the Fifth Dialogue System Live Competition and won second place. Remarkably, our system received the best human evaluation performance for visual information control (i.e. speaking style of avatar) in the preliminary round. The assessment of the competition evaluators revealed that our system generates natural utterances appropriate to the conversational context and topic with an appealing speaking style. Through the analysis, we found that our devices, such as post-processing on speech recognition results and the final response selection method, are effective, but we also found room for improvement, such as speech recognition errors and challenges in the reranking module.

Speech Intelligibility and Speech Naturalness while Speaking with and without Medical Mask

Introduction: The COVID-19 situation has led to an increase use of medical mask for protection. Facial and respiratory PPE covering the mouth and nose have been reported to diminish Speech Intelligibility. Altering the volume, rate and volume and rate together may contribute to influencing the speech intelligibility and speech naturalness rating. Therefore, identifying the appropriate method to speak with medical mask can help train people to communicate with mask. This study aimed to (1) analyse effects of wearing masks on speech intelligibility, naturalness and comprehensibility, and (2) document an altered style of speaking to improve speech intelligibility, naturalness and comprehensibility while wearing masks. Method: Cross-over study design was used. Spoken utterances from 14 naïve speakers were recorded with and without medical mask, and speech in typical style, increased volume (loudness), reduced rate, and mixed method (combination of increased loudness and reduced rate) with medical mask was recorded from 12 professional speakers. Two expert listeners rated the naïve speakers, and two naïve listeners rated professional speakers using standard rating scales of speech intelligibility and naturalness. Percentage of correct identification of utterance was calculated as a measure of comprehensibility. Wilcoxon signed rank test and Friedman test were used to report significant differences among conditions and parameters analysed. Results: Speech intelligibility, naturalness and comprehensibility was poorer while speaking with medical mask than without them. Speaking in mixed method (combination of increased loudness and reduced rate), while using medical masks was the most appropriate style of speech in order to be intelligible, natural and comprehensible, followed by increased loudness style, typical style and reduced rate style. Conclusion: People should be alerted that wearing mask leads to reduction in speech intelligibility, comprehensibility and naturalness. These can be improved by modifying the style of speaking.

StyleTalk: One-Shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

THE FEATURES OF DEVELOPING RHETORICAL COMPETENCE IN FUTURE TEACHERS

The article explores the theoretical foundations of developing rhetorical competence in future educators during their professional training. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the theoretical foundations for the development of rhetorical competence among future educators in the context of professional training, using a competency-based approach. The research on the issue of rhetorical competence among future educators was conducted using theoretical research methods, including comparative analysis of scientific publications, psychological-pedagogical and methodological literature, and the experience of pedagogical and scientific-educational staff in higher education institutions to determine the current state and prospects of the researched problem. Structural analysis, systematization, and classification were employed to organize and categorize the theoretical materials related to the research problem. It is established that the issue of forming rhetorical competence in future educators is the focus of comprehensive research on the professional training of future teachers, carried out based on a competency-based approach. The views of scholars on the essence of developing rhetorical competence in future educators are examined. It is determined that "rhetorical competence" of future educators is an important component of their education in higher education institutions and involves the ability to effectively shape a communicative strategy, formulate thoughts logically and comprehensibly, communicate proficiently, and skillfully employ rhetorical techniques to develop an individual speaking style.

Zero-shot style transfer for gesture animation driven by text and speech using adversarial disentanglement of multimodal style encoding.

Modeling virtual agents with behavior style is one factor for personalizing human-agent interaction. We propose an efficient yet effective machine learning approach to synthesize gestures driven by prosodic features and text in the style of different speakers including those unseen during training. Our model performs zero-shot multimodal style transfer driven by multimodal data from the PATS database containing videos of various speakers. We view style as being pervasive; while speaking, it colors the communicative behaviors expressivity while speech content is carried by multimodal signals and text. This disentanglement scheme of content and style allows us to directly infer the style embedding even of a speaker whose data are not part of the training phase, without requiring any further training or fine-tuning. The first goal of our model is to generate the gestures of a source speaker based on the content of two input modalities-Mel spectrogram and text semantics. The second goal is to condition the source speaker's predicted gestures on the multimodal behavior style embedding of a target speaker. The third goal is to allow zero-shot style transfer of speakers unseen during training without re-training the model. Our system consists of two main components: (1) a speaker style encoder network that learns to generate a fixed-dimensional speaker embedding style from a target speaker multimodal data (mel-spectrogram, pose, and text) and (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network that synthesizes gestures based on the content of the input modalities-text and mel-spectrogram-of a source speaker and conditioned on the speaker style embedding. We evaluate that our model is able to synthesize gestures of a source speaker given the two input modalities and transfer the knowledge of target speaker style variability learned by the speaker style encoder to the gesture generation task in a zero-shot setup, indicating that the model has learned a high-quality speaker representation. We conduct objective and subjective evaluations to validate our approach and compare it with baselines.

Charismatic speech features in robot instructions enhance team creativity

This study examines whether a social robot can enable team creativity and increase team performance depending on its speaking style. The aim is to provide insight into human teams' creativity and performance when exposed to different ways of speaking by a social robot, that is, when the robotic creativity facilitator is using different acoustic-prosodic features. In one condition, participants received their instructions from the robot in a “charismatic” speaking style, in the other, the robot used a less engaging way of speaking. The results show that when the robot's speech is based on charismatic speech characteristics, it is significantly better at enhancing team creativity and performance than when its speech uses fewer charismatic speech characteristics. The robot's speaking style thus influences its effectiveness as team creativity facilitator.

Joseph R. Biden as a Multi-layered President

A little understood reason for the success of the Biden Presidency is the occupant's range of role diversity. His multiple forms of leadership allow him to present himself as the situation warrants at a moment's notice. This skill refers not just to varied speaking styles but wholly different personae. Eight of these roles are illustrated and evaluated: Mentor, Commander, Lawgiver, Warrior, Advocate, Visionary, Preacher, and Comforter.

On the speaker discriminatory power asymmetry regarding acoustic-phonetic parameters and the impact of speaking style.

This study aimed to assess what we refer to as the speaker discriminatory power asymmetry and its forensic implications in comparisons performed in different speaking styles: spontaneous dialogues vs. interviews. We also addressed the impact of data sampling on the speaker's discriminatory performance concerning different acoustic-phonetic estimates. The participants were 20 male speakers, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between familiar individuals, and interviews conducted between each individual participant and the researcher. Nine acoustic-phonetic parameters were chosen for the comparisons, spanning from temporal and melodic to spectral acoustic-phonetic estimates. Ultimately, an analysis based on the combination of different parameters was also conducted. Two speaker discriminatory metrics were examined: Cost Log-likelihood-ratio (Cllr) and Equal Error Rate (EER) values. A general speaker discriminatory trend was suggested when assessing the parameters individually. Parameters pertaining to the temporal acoustic-phonetic class depicted the weakest performance in terms of speaker contrasting power as evidenced by the relatively higher Cllr and EER values. Moreover, from the set of acoustic parameters assessed, spectral parameters, mainly high formant frequencies, i.e., F3 and F4, were the best performing in terms of speaker discrimination, depicting the lowest EER and Cllr scores. The results appear to suggest a speaker discriminatory power asymmetry concerning parameters from different acoustic-phonetic classes, in which temporal parameters tended to present a lower discriminatory power. The speaking style mismatch also seemed to considerably impact the speaker comparison task, by undermining the overall discriminatory performance. A statistical model based on the combination of different acoustic-phonetic estimates was found to perform best in this case. Finally, data sampling has proven to be of crucial relevance for the reliability of discriminatory power assessment.

Robot reads ads: likability of calm and energetic audio advertising styles transferred to synthesized voices

The increasing prevalence of audio advertising has provided a challenge to find out more about voices and performance styles used in advertisements. In this study, we were interested in the listeners' preferences when a synthesizer performs the advertisements. As training an advertisement style synthesizer requires big corpora, the creation of which is time-consuming and expensive, we have chosen to use less resource-intensive style transfer on already extant synthesized voices trained on neutral speech. We used a corpus of advertisements created out of 120 male and 120 female voices reading one text in both an energetic and calm advertisement style, the styles most commonly provided by advertising agencies, to train four style transfer models: energetic and calm for both male and female voices. These were used to convert two synthesized female and two male voices that had been created using a Merlin-based speech synthesizer for Estonian. Each converted voice performed three short advertisements. Adult listeners rated the likability of the performances on a 7-point Likert scale. The results showed that the calm performance style was overwhelmingly preferred. We also ascertained the acoustic features of the calm and energetic performances using the open-source toolkit openSMILE to calculate the 88 parameters of the extended Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set. The calm style differed from the energetic in acoustic features that are related to a lower, quieter, and more sonorous voice and a more neutral speaking style. Considering the difference in style ratings, it is worth taking the target audiences' style preferences into account.

Speaking in the presence of noise: Consistency of acoustic properties in clear-Lombard speech over time

Individual speakers are often able to modify their speech to facilitate communication in challenging conditions, such as speaking in a noisy environment. Such vocal "enrichments" might include reductions in speech rate or increases in acoustic contrasts. However, it is unclear how consistently speakers enrich their speech over time. This study examined inter-speaker variability in the speech enrichment modifications applied by speakers. The study compared a baseline habitual speaking style to a clear-Lombard style and measured changes in acoustic differences between the two styles over sentence trials. Seventy-eight young adult participants read out sentences in the habitual and clear-Lombard speaking styles. Acoustic differences between speaking styles generally increased nonlinearly over trials, suggesting that speakers require practice before realizing their full speech enrichment potential when speaking clearly in noise with reduced auditory feedback. Using a recent objective intelligibility metric based on glimpses, the study also found that predicted intelligibility increased over trials, highlighting that communicative benefits of the clear-Lombard style are not static. These findings underline the dynamic nature of speaking styles.