Speech Units Research Articles

Нарративные Я-репрезентации социально ориентированных ожиданий лиц с нарушением интеллекта

The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations and empirical implementation of the approach to the study of narrative self-representations in the field of socially oriented expectations of young and adult persons with intellectual disabilities. Socially oriented expectations largely determine the behavioral representations of the subject in relation to the outside world and other people. There are no special methods for studying the socially oriented expectations of adults with intellectual disabilities, in connection with which an approach can be proposed using the content analysis of narrative representations obtained in the framework of the study of socially oriented personality self-structures (social self). In this case, the coding is based on two parameters: the frequency of occurrence of representative references and the emotional orientation of representative references to socially oriented expectations. With the use of latent coding, based on the semantic analysis of speech units and representative references, it becomes possible to distinguish semantic clusters describing areas of life for which respondents have socially oriented expectations of a particular emotional orientation. This approach makes it possible to overcome the difficulties of analyzing the verbal production of persons with intellectual disabilities, arising in connection with the presence of systemic speech underdevelopment in the latter. The high values of the coefficient of agreement of expert opinions obtained in this study indicate the relevance of the proposed method for obtaining reliable data. The quantitative ratio of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations between adolescence and adulthood changes insignificantly, there is a qualitative redistribution of the inter-thematic semantic load, as well as a change in the emotional component of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations of persons with mild intellectual disabilities.

Voice Controlled Mini CNC Plotter

The (CNC) stands for Computer Numerical Control.It is an advanced technology that has automated many manufacturing applications concerning parts machining as well as other applications. This work presents the implementation of a low-cost desktop size 3-axis CNC machine. It has been built from free software and cheap components. It is able for light duty cutting, painting, carving, and drawing. The control system of the machine consists of a PC and a microcontroller running Grbl software, which is an open source free program. The PC has the task of loading files written in a special programming language for CNCs, which is called G-code. It sends the lines of this file to the microcontroller, which parses the code, interpolates the motion commands, and drives the stepper motors of the machine. The system is built and tested experimentally to prove its operation, robustness, and accuracy. Also this paper presents techniques for speech-to-text and speech-to-speech automatic summarization based on speech unit extraction and concatenation. For the latter case, sentences, words, and between-filler units are investigated as units to be extracted from original speech. These methods are applied to the summarization of unrestricted-domain spontaneous presentations and evaluated by objective and subjective measures. It was confirmed that proposed methods are effective in spontaneous speech summarization.

Взаємодія просодичних характеристик у реалізації висловлювань-здивувань

The aim of the article is to define the role of prosodic variables play in actualizing emotional utterances. Sometimes they can be the only ones that indicate the speaker’s pragmatic intention. The purpose of the study is to determine the interaction level of prosodic means that helps to achieve maximum effect on the recipient as well as to establish the invariant of the intonation model of utterances expressing surprise and its variable modifications. The correlation of the intonation components and parts of the intonation contour is able to provide an adequate description of positive, negative, indefinite and complex emotions. Utterances expressing surprise of different kinds are characterized by the variability of a pitch-tone level, tempo, timbre, rhythm, each of which carries certain semantic meaning. At the same time, the type of a nuclear tone, scale, pre-scale, core elements of the melodic contour, interacting with the components of intonation define the modal meaning of an utterance. To determine the common and distinct perceptual prosodic characteristics of utterances expressing surprise, as the most frequent emotional speech units of business and cultural communication, with a view to define the prosodic model of the utterances explored, the auditory and acoustic analyses were performed. The perceptive and acoustic analyses comparison allowed us to formulate the general structure of the intonation patterns of utterances expressing surprise. It is concluded that the leading prosodic means, which differentiate the types of utterances expressing surprise, should include: the tone level of the beginning of the syntagm, the tone of the first stressed syllable, the configuration of the terminal tone and its range, the rate of pitch frequency change in the terminal rhythm group, the frequency range of the intonation group, the tone intervals on the pre-scale, scale, nuclear tone as well as tempo and timbre. Linguistic interpretation of the results of the perceptual and acoustic analyses allows us to consider the established intonation features sufficiently complete to describe their prosodic model and define them as appropriate for the use in teaching proper intonation of the English emotional utterances. The achieved data can be used in teaching students the most common intonation patterns of emotional utterances and to make them realize semantic variabilities of utterances expressing surprise.

NUCLEUS-SATELLITE MODEL OF DISCOURSE IN RHETORICAL STRUCTURE THEORY

Statement of the problem. The article gives an explanation of the text generation and interpretation according to the Rhetorical structure theory (RST), developed by W. Mann and S. Thompson. This theory is based on structural and functional approaches in linguistics, which present the relations between the form and the content of a language unit as the structure of dependencies. The dependency of one language unit on another in the newly formed unity is understood as a function performed by the language unit in speech or discourse. RST provides as a model for analyzing semantic relations between nucleus (main) and satellite (dependent) discursive units that form the coherence of the text. Results. Different approaches to defining discourse and its structural components are described. The nucleus-satellite model of the discourse structure proposed by W. Mann and S. Thompson is analyzed. The authors of RST emphasize that the coherence of the text is based on rhetorical relations that connect the units of discourse and contribute to the adequate coding and decoding of information. The nucleus-satellite organization of discursive units distributes the addressee`s focus of text perception. The principles of graphic representation of rhetorical relations are revealed, as well as the principles of classification of asymmetrical and symmetrical, mononucleus and multinucleus rhetorical relations. Conclusion. Nuclearity and hierarchy are recognized as the leading ways of discourse structural organization in RST. Hierarchy can be traced not only in the semantic and intentional allocation of the nucleus, but also in the structural organization of rhetorical relations among discursive units. Thus, a nucleus-satellite model of discourse serves as an effective functional principle to generate and interpret texts, which used to solve various communication tasks.

ОККАЗИОНАЛИЗМ КАК МАНИПУЛЯТИВНАЯ РЕЧЕВАЯ ЕДИНИЦА В ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ

ОККАЗИОНАЛИЗМ КАК МАНИПУЛЯТИВНАЯ РЕЧЕВАЯ ЕДИНИЦА В ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ

Onomasticon of the Story by B. K. Zaitsev ‘Priest Kronid’ in the Context of Constants of Russian Orthodox Christianity

The article examines the problem of studying the semantics of linguistic units in fiction, in particular, the study of how proper names function in a literary text. In this study, proper names are treated as functional and semantic units of language, speech, and culture. The re-search material is the story by B. K. Zaitsev ‘Priest Kronid’ (1905), and its object is onomas-tic vocabulary and specific constants of Russian Orthodox Christianity. The onomasticon of the story consists of anthroponyms (Kronid, etc.), toponyms (Kostenka, Dmitrovo), hagionyms (Christ, God), eortonyms (Easter, Trinity, Egor’s day, etc.), zoonym (Kashtan), etc. The purpose of the article is to examine how proper names function in B. K. Zaitsev’s text. The study makes a new contribution to as of yet insufficient research of the onomastic space of fiction by B. K. Zaitsev, and its relevance is enhanced by the importance of studying proper names as a component of the writer’s linguistic picture of the world and the need for scientific understanding of the functional role of onomastic units in the literary text in terms of national religious ideas about the world. The paper uses a complex method of studying proper names in fiction, combining various methods and techniques, namely: the method of conceptual analysis, the method of component analysis of fictional text, the method of continuous sampling as well as the semantic and stylistic methods. The author investigates the onomastic field of B. K. Zaitsev’s text and determines the functional role of proper names of different categories. The story reveals associative and semantic connections of individual onyms with certain constants of Russian Orthodox Christianity. The author also makes a number of specific conclusions about the features of B. K. Zaitsev’s poetics, including those about conceptualizing meanings of individual linguistic units and strengthening of the value component in their meaning in the literary text. The linguistic material can be used in special courses on the onomastics of a literary text or issues related to the writer’s linguistic picture of the world, or in courses that include philological analysis of texts.

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ЕГОЦЕНТРИЧНОГО МОВЛЕННЯ ДІТЕЙ СТАРШОГО ДОШКІЛЬНОГО ВІКУ

Іn this work, one of the types of speech of older preschool children - egocentric - is analyzed. Scientific approaches to the vision of the problem of egocentric speech are clarified. The egocentric speech of older preschoolers was studied, the content of which is connected only with the utterances of children of metalanguage. The obtained empirical data once again convincingly proved the spontaneity of children’s metalanguage and confirmed the need to develop different types of utterances of older preschoolers, to achieve success in communication and adequate utterances, including about units of speech.

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ЕГОЦЕНТРИЧНОГО МОВЛЕННЯ ДІТЕЙ СТАРШОГО ДОШКІЛЬНОГО ВІКУ

Іn this work, one of the types of speech of older preschool children - egocentric - is analyzed. Scientific approaches to the vision of the problem of egocentric speech are clarified. The egocentric speech of older preschoolers was studied, the content of which is connected only with the utterances of children of metalanguage. The obtained empirical data once again convincingly proved the spontaneity of children’s metalanguage and confirmed the need to develop different types of utterances of older preschoolers, to achieve success in communication and adequate utterances, including about units of speech.

System of deictic coordinates and intertextual deixis in academic discourse

Until recently the deictic procedure in most research papers by Russian and foreign linguists has been discussed on the material of fiction texts and oral communication, where we deal with situational deixis, functioning within the framework of spatial-temporal coordinates. The system of these coordinates is not applicable to contextual deixis, whereas the system of deictic coordinates for contextual deixis has not been designed yet. Such a well-designed system of deictic coordinates for contextual deixis would allow scholars to analyze the functions of lexical units in speech in order to find out if they perform a deictic function. In other words, this system would enable researchers to define the scope of deictic elements, which at the moment is rather vague for the time being. In order to develop the system of deictic coordinates functioning within contextual deixis we have selected academic texts, where contextual deixis is especially vivid there, whereas situational deixis is not presented at all. The research is aimed at defining the main elements of the system of deictic coordinates functioning in academic texts. The material under analysis includes 1450 pages of linguistic research papers in English. The main methods of the research are contextual analysis and the constructive method, applied for designing the system of deictic coordinates and describing intertextual deixis. The research is yielded a system of deictic coordinates for contextual deixis which, designed throughout the research, consists of three elements: the deictic centre, the deictic vector, and the antecedent / subsequent element(s). The fact that the research is conducted on the English language material does not mean that this developed system of deictic coordinates can be applied only to texts written in English: this part of the research results is applicable to contextual deixis functioning in any text, regardless of its style, genre and the language it is written in. The proposed system of deictic coordinates is used to describe the new type of contextual deixis - the intertextual one, which is a peculiar feature of academic texts and not described in other researchers papers. Moreover, it provides the opportunity to define new deictic elements of intertextual deixis: intertextual references in brackets, and lexical units which, being full-fledged units of a local context, point at elements of vertical presupposition. Thus, the results of the research are relevant for defining the dimensions of the deictic procedure applied to contextual deixis.

On the Cognitive-semantic Approach to the Study of Modern Chinese Language

The article makes an attempt to comprehend the cognitive-semantic approach to the Chinese language in the framework of its teaching and study in higher education, taking into account features contrasting to the Russian language. The main theoretical postulates of the Chinese language-study were formulated by the Russian sinologists in line with formal structural paradigms based on materials of Western languages and their level of language organization. This approach is reflected in most Chinese language textbooks. In this regard, the Chinese language is taught according to the patterns of teaching Western languages. This approach does not allow to fully master the language, as it does not take into account the semantic and cognitive disproportion of the basic units of languages. The basic unit of the Russian language is the word as its nominative and at the same time the main speech unit. In the Chinese language, according to our observations and analysis of the relevant literature, this role belongs mainly to a more fractional substantive unit, which in the dictionary, in the nomination, acts as the main unit of the language division of the world, and in speech can also act as a simple word and as part of more complex formation - words or phrases. In writing, this unit is presented in the form of a «zi» hieroglyph, figuratively or otherwise denoting certain objects of reality and conceptualizing them, which allows us to consider these «zi» as expressors of minimal concepts of Chinese linguistic thinking. For the first time in Russian linguistics, the article addresses issues related to these basic units in connection with teaching issues. At the present stage, there are practically no textbooks or techniques aimed at mastering these specific Chinese language units. The authors make an attempt to attract the attention of sinologists to this problem and to reconsider the existing views in a new cognitive-semantic vein. In this context, the necessity of reorienting teaching that reproduces the methodological and linguistic orientations applied in relation to the study of Indo-European languages to methodological orientations corresponding to the essential characteristics of the Chinese language as consistently isolated in type and specifically orientational in terms of mental and cultural grounds is substantiated. In this regard, there marked relevant issues are there proposed some ways to resolve them.

Syllable based approach for text to speech synthesis of Assamese language: A review

In this review article authors are trying to put light on text to speech synthesis of Assamese language using unit selection concatenative speech synthesis technique. Assamese is one of the North East Indian languages spoken by millions of people. This article tries to highlight some major difficulties when developing the synthesizer. The speech units used to concatenate for building the synthesizer is syllable. Assamese is a syllable centric language and syllable based concatenation gives more natural sound. A discussion is done with phoneme and diphone units as well. There is also a short overview on development process of the Assamese synthesizer on festival framework as a part of review. Another challenging task the researchers dealt with is building speech corpus for a low resource language like Assamese.

Пищевая традиция в народно-речевой культуре: продукты, блюда, напитки (на материале вологодских говоров)

This article analyzes food tradition in the folk speech culture based on the material of Vologda dialects. The article examines one of the main elements of the food tradition – the names of food items, dishes and drinks. The research is carried out by means of the thematic classification of units: the composition of the thematic group and the functioning of units in speech are analyzed.

Preschoolers’ private speech during spelling in Hebrew: the role of word structure and letter position

The study’s aims were to (a) evaluate preschoolers’ use of private speech (overt talk to themselves) during spelling; and (b) study how it is affected by the nature of orthography. Participants were 197 Hebrew speaking Israeli preschoolers (109 girls and 88 boys) (M = 5.6 years). Children spelled 12 words (N =44 letters) that represented one of three phonological word structures in terms of their consonants (C) and vowels (V): CV.CVC, CV.CV.CVC, and CVC.CVC. Children’s private speech during spelling was documented and analysed. In this paper, we report the private speech units most frequently produced when spelling the letters correctly—CV, CVC, and letter name. When using private speech, children succeeded in correctly spelling a greater number of letters (30.69%) than when not using private speech (17.64%). The private speech across word structures primarily contained CV units and letter names. Children used private speech mostly for words’ first letters and for CV.CVC words. The structure and position of the letters (first, second, last) had a combined effect on the production of private speech. CV units were used mostly in the first letter of CV.CVC words, CVC units in the second letter of a CVC.CVC word, and letter names in the first letter of CV.CVC words. These findings suggest that preschoolers are aware of the features of the orthography, as exemplified by their internal thought process when spelling words. Adults can support children’s understanding of the written language by encouraging them to use private speech during word writing.

The role of isochrony in speech perception in noise

The role of isochrony in speech—the hypothetical division of speech units into equal duration intervals—has been the subject of a long-standing debate. Current approaches in neurosciences have brought new perspectives in that debate through the theoretical framework of predictive coding and cortical oscillations. Here we assess the comparative roles of naturalness and isochrony in the intelligibility of speech in noise for French and English, two languages representative of two well-established contrastive rhythm classes. We show that both top-down predictions associated with the natural timing of speech and to a lesser extent bottom-up predictions associated with isochrony at a syllabic timescale improve intelligibility. We found a similar pattern of results for both languages, suggesting that temporal characterisation of speech from different rhythm classes could be unified around a single core speech unit, with neurophysiologically defined duration and linguistically anchored temporal location. Taken together, our results suggest that isochrony does not seem to be a main dimension of speech processing, but may be a consequence of neurobiological processing constraints, manifesting in behavioural performance and ultimately explaining why isochronous stimuli occupy a particular status in speech and human perception in general.

ŞAGİRD NİTQİNİN İNKİŞAF ETDİRİLMƏSİ YOLLARI

Speech is not only directly involved in the creation of human mental activity, but also forms its basis. Students also acquire knowledge of foreign objects and events by mastering perfect speech. Schooling has a special role to play in increasing students' opportunities and resources for speech development. The concept of speech development should be implemented in four directions: 1. To enrich the vocabulary of students; 2. To develop the habits of students; 3. To develop students' communication skills; 4. To develop students' reading skills. The model of the teacher plays an important role in the development of students' speech. In Azerbaijani language and literature classes, the teacher's speech (expressive reading, narration, report, speech, dialogue, etc.) has a strong impact on students. Orthoepic requirements must be taken into account during speech development. These requirements bring naturalness, fluidity, vitality to speech, enhance its aesthetic effect and help to easily grasp the idea. The main unit of speech is considered to be the sentence. Therefore, it is important to pay special attention to the development of students' skills of correct sentence construction. Sentence-building skills are practiced from the first grade, and these skills are developed and strengthened as students move from class to class. Key words: speech, speech development, training, speech culture, vocabulary work, phonetic norm, sentence

PRAGMATICS OF SPEECH STYLE IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN BUSINESS LINGUISTICS

Purpose of the study: The study aims to identify, describe, systematize, and compare linguistic means expressing communicative and pragmatic meaning in determining their composition, semantics, and functions in the genres of law, order, and international agreement. The development of linguistic thought is characterized by an increasing interest in the functioning of linguistic units in speech, increased attention to the human factor in the language.
 Methodology: A communicative-pragmatic approach described the transition from the study of genres as functional and stylistic types of text to their study as special expressions inherent in a certain area of communication. The authors used models of the relationship between linguistic units and their various associations with extra-linguistic situations of communication in a certain sphere of human activity.
 Main Findings: The authors showed specifics of the representation of the value of the address in an official speech, establishes a repertoire of language means that realize the meaning of address in prescription genres, determines the dependence of the choice of the lexico-grammatical form of means of express the essence of addressing, forms the speech structure of styles.
 Applications of this study: The work defines the specifics of the conditions of communication in the business sphere; revealed the communicative specificity of stereotyped role manifestations and speech behavior in terms of the functioning of oral and written genres, characteristic for speech communication in the professional sphere. The classification of speech genres is proposed primarily for the business area.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The novelty is determined by the object of research and the enterprise's attempt to make a comprehensive description of the genres of speech communication in business from the position of communicative-pragmatic approach. The communicative-pragmatic method in modern linguistics has updated the research of the specifics of speech communication and language support of speech communication in various spheres of human activity.

The influence of linguistic information on cortical tracking of words

Speech is a complex sound sequence that has rich acoustic and linguistic structures. Recent studies have suggested that low-frequency cortical activity can track linguistic units in speech, such as words and phrases, on top of low-level acoustic features. Here, with an artificial word learning paradigm, we investigate how different aspects of linguistic information, e.g., phonological, semantic, and orthographic information, modulate cortical tracking of words. Participants are randomly assigned to the experimental group or the control group. Both groups listen to speech streams composed of trisyllabic artificial words or trisyllabic real words. Participants in the experimental group explicitly learn different types of linguistic information of artificial words (phonological, phonological + semantic, or phonological + orthographic information), while participants in the control group do not explicitly learn the words. Electroencephalographic (EEG) data from the control group reveal weaker cortical tracking of artificial words than real words. However, when comparing the experimental and control groups, we find that explicit learning significantly improves neural tracking of artificial words. After explicit learning, cortical tracking of artificial words is comparable to real words, regardless of the training conditions. These results suggest training facilitates neural tracking of words and emphasize the basic role phonological information played in sequential grouping.

Acoustic Variability of Voice Signal as Factor of Information Security for Automatic Speech Recognition Systems with Tuning to User Voice

The phenomenon of the voice signal acoustic variability in automatic speech recognition systems is considered. There are two varieties—intra- and inter-speaker speech variability. The probabilistic cluster model of minimal speech units in the Kullback–Leibler information metric is used for their mathematical description and comparison in magnitude. On its basis, theoretical estimates of the voice signal acoustic variability for each of its varieties are obtained separately. The effect of information security in systems with tuning to the authorized user voice is described and quantitatively characterized. The intra-speaker variability is negligible in comparison with the inter-speaker variability of speech, and therefore does not have a noticeable harmful effect on the effectiveness of automatic speech recognition. The computational experiment is set up to confirm and develop the theoretical research results, where two speech streams from two different speakers are considered. The author’s software is used for its implementation. According to the experimental results we find that the level of inter-speaker speech variability in a number of cases goes beyond the inter-phonemic differences within a homogeneous speech flow. Therefore, in systems with tuning to the speaker voice, the effect of voice signal acoustic variability is not only unambiguously generally positive, namely: it is an information protection from unauthorized access, but also it is significant in terms of probability-theoretic relation. The obtained results are intended for the development of new and modernization of existing systems for automatic speech recognition, designed to work in a standalone mode.

Effect of Various Visual Speech Units on Language Identification Using Visual Speech Recognition

In this paper, we describe our work in Spoken language Identification using Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) and analyze the effect of various visual speech units used to transcribe the visual speech on language recognition. We have proposed a new approach of word recognition followed by the word N-gram language model (WRWLM), which uses high-level syntactic features and the word bigram language model for language discrimination. Also, as opposed to the traditional visemic approach, we propose a holistic approach of using the signature of a whole word, referred to as a “Visual Word” as visual speech unit for transcribing visual speech. The result shows Word Recognition Rate (WRR) of 88% and Language Recognition Rate (LRR) of 94% in speaker dependent cases and 58% WRR and 77% LRR in speaker independent cases for English and Marathi digit classification task. The proposed approach is also evaluated for continuous speech input. The result shows that the Spoken Language Identification rate of 50% is possible even though the WRR using Visual Speech Recognition is below 10%, using only 1[Formula: see text]s of speech. Also, there is an improvement of about 5% in language discrimination as compared to traditional visemic approaches.

An Interactive Dialogue Agent to Assist African American and Hispanic/Latino Heart Failure Patients with Self-Care Needs

Introduction Heart failure (HF) is a public health problem, and self-care remains poor, especially among minorities. Access to personalized educational material via an interactive dialogue agent (DA), a system intended to converse with humans in natural language, has the potential to improve self-care. This abstract outlines the initial steps of developing an artificial intelligence-based DA to assist African American (AA) and Hispanic/Latino (H/L) HF patients with their self-care needs. Hypothesis Analysis of HF education sessions between health educators (HE) and patients can provide insight into the topics that AA and H/L patients value. Method In this IRB approved pilot study, we have recorded, transcribed, and verified 20 (18 AA and 2 H/L) HF education sessions between HE and HF patients. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm and Empath, a text analysis tool were used to identify common discussion topics in the transcripts. An initiative analysis was performed to identify conversation drivers where each turn (unit of speech by a single speaker, without interruption from the other speaker) was classified as either a question (ending with ‘?’), a prompt (having only filler words like umm, okay) or an assertion/command (others). Lastly, we compared the transcripts against a HF ontology published by the National Center for Biomedical Ontology and the Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV) available in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to identify the term overlap. Results On average, HE took 117 turns comprising 205 sentences and 2281 words per conversation, whereas patients took 108 turns comprising 131 sentences and 850 words. Per conversation, HE asked 26 questions and had 17 prompts as opposed to 3 questions and 39 prompts by the patients. LDA identified HF and heart function, effects of HF, low salt diet, and follow-up appointment and medication as the top 4 most common topics discussed by the HE. When looking at the entire transcripts, Empath identified eating, health, and cooking as the most common topics for both the HE and the patients. Patients frequently discussed children and family, whereas HE focused on providing HF information as indicated by LDA. Lastly, only 2.1% of HE terms overlapped with the HF ontology. Our analysis revealed that 25% and 22% of the terms (without stop words such as at, the) used by the patients and HE respectively match with the ‘preferred label’ in the CHV. For both, the high frequency terms included heart, heart failure, salt, water, and fluid. This also correlated with our topic analysis findings from Empath and LDA. Conclusion Our analysis helps triangulate the kind of information HE and HF patients value. Though mostly HE dominated the conversation, it is essential to incorporate the topics that patients brought up into the DA and use culturally sensitive vocabulary while communicating them. Next, we will collect more recordings, conduct focus groups, and evaluate the usability of our prototype DA.