Spoken Utterances Research Articles

Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive arguments, based on converging evidence from the phonetic and phonological analysis of intonational patterns in the spoken utterances of a systematically varied set of syntactic structures. This empirical observation raises puzzles that probe the nature of the syntax-prosody interface and the relation between tone and intonation: what is the relation between this absolutive high edge tone and: (i) other case markers in Samoan, which are all segmental?, and (ii) other high edge tones in Samoan that co-occur with fronted expressions and coordination? I propose that: (i) the absolutive high edge tone is a tonal case marker that may be related to an apparently moribund stressed, segmental absolutive particle [ˈia], (ii) the high tones that co-occur with absolutives, fronting, and coordination are all syntactically determined and each inserted in the spellout of distinct syntactic configurations, and (iii) there is another class of edge tones which reliably co-occur with pauses—intonational phrase boundary tones—that are not inserted in spellout but by the phonological grammar. While my proposal may seem surprising at first, I show that it fits the current data better than any alternative.

The Context Meaning of Deixis in Soundtracks Lyric of the Greatest Showman Movie

<p>Deixis is one of the important studies in pragmatics. It is a word or phrase that can refer to a person, place, or time in the speakers' utterance. Usually, each deixis has a different function. That function relies on the context of deixis both implicitly and explicitly. Then, the objective of this research is to find the types of deixis and divulge the function which is applied in the speaker utterance. The writers used the descriptive qualitative method to analyze deixis in the two soundtracks lyric of <em>The Greatest Showman</em> movie, they are <em>the greatest show</em><em> and</em> <em>This is me</em>. The results of the analysis found that there are five types of deixis in the two lyrics; person deixis, spatial deixis, temporal deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixis. The functions showed that deixis provides the information and gives a reference to the deixis word. This analysis is important to understand the speaker's intends in the song by the use of context deixis.</p>

Dynamics and Hierarchical Encoding of Non-compact Acoustic Categories in Auditory and Frontal Cortex.

Categorical perception is a fundamental cognitive function enabling animals to flexibly assign sounds into behaviorally relevant categories. This study investigates the nature of acoustic category representations, their emergence in an ascending series of ferret auditory and frontal cortical fields, and the dynamics of this representation during passive listening to task-relevant stimuli and during active retrieval from memory while engaging in learned categorization tasks. Ferrets were trained on two auditory Go-NoGo categorization tasks to discriminate two non-compact sound categories (composed of tones or amplitude-modulated noise). Neuronal responses became progressively more categorical in higher cortical fields, especially during task performance. The dynamics of the categorical responses exhibited a cascading top-down modulation pattern that began earliest in the frontal cortex and subsequently flowed downstream to the secondary auditory cortex, followed by the primary auditory cortex. In a subpopulation of neurons, categorical responses persisted even during the passive listening condition, demonstrating memory for task categories and their enhanced categorical boundaries.

Music as a scaffold for listening to speech: Better neural phase-locking to song than speech

Neural activity synchronizes with the rhythmic input of many environmental signals, but the capacity of neural activity to entrain to the slow rhythms of speech is particularly important for successful communication. Compared to speech, song has greater rhythmic regularity, a more stable fundamental frequency, discrete pitch movements, and a metrical structure, this may provide a temporal framework that helps listeners neurally track information better than the rhythmically irregular rhythms of speech. The current study used EEG to examine whether entrainment to the syllable rate of linguistic utterances, as indexed by cerebro-acoustic phase coherence, was greater when listeners heard sung than spoken sentences. We assessed listeners phase-locking in both easy (no time compression) and hard (50% time-compression) utterance conditions. Adults phase-locked equally well to speech and song in the easy listening condition. However, in the time-compressed condition, phase-locking was greater for sung than spoken utterances in the theta band (3.67–5 ​Hz). Thus, the musical temporal and spectral characteristics of song related to better phase-locking to the slow phrasal and syllable information (4–7 ​Hz) in the speech stream. These results highlight the possibility of using song as a tool for improving speech processing in individuals with language processing deficits, such as dyslexia.

Social identity, group speech, and negotiated meaning

Certain approaches to the meaning of utterances primarily characterize speakers' communicative intentions as the only source of meaning of a speaker's utterance. I show that a strict version of this position is difficult to maintain because the meaning of an utterance is partially due to the intentional attitudes of the audience to an utterance, including their reaction to the social identity of a speaker. This can result in a negotiation over meaning that can take place if the speaker and audience do not agree on the significance of the utterance. The view is motivated if one takes an ameliorative approach to meaning which acknowledges that theories of meaning are constrained by normative concerns related to meaning and communication.

An analysis of illocutionary acts in a fantasy movie

This study aims to find out the types and the most dominant illocutionary acts used by the main character in a fantasy movie, ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret’. A descriptive qualitative study was done by observing the utterances spoken by the main character in the movie. The spoken utterances were then analysed based on the types of illocutionary acts, namely: representative, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative. The results of the study showed that out of the five, only four types of illocutionary acts were found in the movie, they are representative, directive, expressive, and commissive. The most frequently illocutionary act used is directive (47.64%), while the least frequently used is commissive (4.19%). The directive forces used by the main character are varied. Directives are used get the hearers to do something, where in the movie, he often used asking and ordering. Meanwhile, declarative is not employed by the main character since performing declarative act needs authorities and status; this act is used to change the world through utterances. But the main character in this movie do not have any certain status or authority in any position at the magic school he attended, he is a student, still new with the magic world and do not have much power. This is why declarative was not found in the utterances of the main character.

The Speaker-Oriented Connective Particle ‘Al-Kēn in 2 SAM. 7:22

Abstract The connective particle ‘al-kēn ‘therefore’ usually functions to intro-duce a logical conclusion or consequence: ‘A therefore B’. However, in cases such as 2 Sam 7:22 it functions as a speaker-oriented particle — what is mentioned in the preceding verse is the reason why the speaker makes the following statement. This usage may be compared with another speaker-oriented particle kî ‘for’, which explains the reason for the speaker's previous utterance. These two speaker-oriented particles may be explained thus: speaker-oriented kî: ‘This (B) is the reason why I said that (A)’ speaker-oriented ‘al-kēn: ‘That (A) is the reason why I say this (B)’

Contributions of modal and creaky voice to the perception of habitual pitch

In some languages, creaky voice is used over relatively long stretches of speech as a prosodic element, to convey emotion, and/or stylistically. A primary acoustic and perceptual cue to creaky voice quality is a low fundamental frequency. Previous research has shown that listeners can make fine-grained comparisons of speakers' habitual modal pitch, but this study focuses on how a combination of modal and nonmodal phonation affects the perception of habitual pitch. A perception experiment assesses whether listeners are more likely to rate a speaker's utterance as being holistically lower in pitch if it contains both modal and creaky voice than if it is fully modal speech. Results indicate that for female American English speakers with higher modal pitch, the inclusion of creaky voice leads listeners to rate such utterances as lower in pitch than fully modal utterances, but not for speakers with lower modal pitch. These results are consistent with studies showing that pitch perception interacts with nonmodal phonation, and they relate to previous observations that speakers may utilize nonmodal phonation to manipulate their intended habitual pitch.

Text-Independent Speaker Identification Through Feature Fusion and Deep Neural Network

Speaker identification refers to the process of recognizing human voice using artificial intelligence techniques. Speaker identification technologies are widely applied in voice authentication, security and surveillance, electronic voice eavesdropping, and identity verification. In the speaker identification process, extracting discriminative and salient features from speaker utterances is an important task to accurately identify speakers. Various features for speaker identification have been recently proposed by researchers. Most studies on speaker identification have utilized short-time features, such as perceptual linear predictive (PLP) coefficients and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), due to their capability to capture the repetitive nature and efficiency of signals. Various studies have shown the effectiveness of MFCC features in correctly identifying speakers. However, the performances of these features degrade on complex speech datasets, and therefore, these features fail to accurately identify speaker characteristics. To address this problem, this study proposes a novel fusion of MFCC and time-based features (MFCCT), which combines the effectiveness of MFCC and time-domain features to improve the accuracy of text-independent speaker identification (SI) systems. The extracted MFCCT features were fed as input to a deep neural network (DNN) to construct the speaker identification model. Results showed that the proposed MFCCT features coupled with DNN outperformed existing baseline MFCC and time-domain features on the LibriSpeech dataset. In addition, DNN obtained better classification results compared with five machine learning algorithms that were recently utilized in speaker recognition. Moreover, this study evaluated the effectiveness of one-level and two-level classification methods for speaker identification. The experimental results showed that two-level classification presented better results than one-level classification. The proposed features and classification model for identifying a speaker can be widely applied to different types of speaker datasets.

Towards End-2-end Learning for Predicting Behavior Codes from Spoken Utterances in Psychotherapy Conversations.

Spoken language understanding tasks usually rely on pipelines involving complex processing blocks such as voice activity detection, speaker diarization and Automatic speech recognition (ASR). We propose a novel framework for predicting utterance level labels directly from speech features, thus removing the dependency on first generating transcripts, and transcription free behavioral coding. Our classifier uses a pretrained Speech-2-Vector encoder as bottleneck to generate word-level representations from speech features. This pre-trained encoder learns to encode speech features for a word using an objective similar to Word2Vec. Our proposed approach just uses speech features and word segmentation information for predicting spoken utterance-level target labels. We show that our model achieves competitive results to other state-of-the-art approaches which use transcribed text for the task of predicting psychotherapy-relevant behavior codes.

NAUTILUS: A Versatile Voice Cloning System

We introduce a novel speech synthesis system, called NAUTILUS, that can generate speech with a target voice either from a text input or a reference utterance of an arbitrary source speaker. By using a multi-speaker speech corpus to train all requisite encoders and decoders in the initial training stage, our system can clone unseen voices using untranscribed speech of target speakers on the basis of the backpropagation algorithm. Moreover, depending on the data circumstance of the target speaker, the cloning strategy can be adjusted to take advantage of additional data and modify the behaviors of text-to-speech (TTS) and/or voice conversion (VC) systems to accommodate the situation. We test the performance of the proposed framework by using deep convolution layers to model the encoders, decoders and WaveNet vocoder. Evaluations show that it achieves comparable quality with state-of-the-art TTS and VC systems when cloning with just five minutes of untranscribed speech. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the proposed framework has the ability to switch between TTS and VC with high speaker consistency, which will be useful for many applications.

The first person singular pronoun topic as attention-getter in interaction: A study of qá mà in Longxi Qiang

This paper explores the multifunctionality of qá mà [first-person singular pronoun + topic marker] in Longxi Qiang, a Tibeto-Burman language. The commonality of the various functions of qá mà is attention-getting. Previous researchers have focused on how imperative perception verbs in various languages, such as ‘look’ and ‘listen’, developed into pragmatic markers with an attention-getting function. The self-position of the speaker indicated by the deictic pronoun qá ‘I’ determines its attention-getting usage, that is, attracting the hearer's attention to the speaker's utterance. This paper also describes a new function of the particle ma, constraining the hearer's interpretation of the upcoming segment, that is rarely reported in the deeply contacted Mandarin Chinese. Context dependency allows for semantic change in the situations of language use. Speakers invite hearers to exploit conversational implicatures in different contexts (Inter)subjectification is the main mechanism of the semantic change of qá mà from ideational to interpersonal and textual meaning.

Free choice disjunction as a rational speech act

The so-called free choice inference (from You may take an apple or a pear to You may take an apple) is mysterious because it does not follow from ordinary modal logic. We show that this inference arises in the Rational Speech Act framework (Frank & Goodman 2012). Our basic idea is inspired by exhaustification-based models of free choice (Fox 2007) and by game-theoretic accounts based on iterated best response (Franke 2011). We assume that when the speaker utters You may take an apple or a pear, the hearer reasons about why the speaker did not choose alternative utterances such as You may take an apple. A crucial ingredient in our explanation is the idea of semantic uncertainty (Bergen, Levy & Goodman 2016). Specifically, we assume that the speaker is uncertain whether or not the hearer will interpret You may take an apple as forbidding them from taking a pear. This uncertainty can be thought of as resulting from Fox’s (2007) optional covert exhaustification. Uttering the disjunction is a way for the speaker to prevent the hearer from concluding that any fruit is forbidden to take. Knowing this, the hearer concludes that they may choose either fruit.

MANTAINING BAHASA ANGKOLA BY ITS SPEAKERS AT LANGGAR COMMUNITY IN KOTA MEDAN

The aims of this study was to investigate the strategies of Angkolanese maintain Bahasa Angkola at Langgar Community in Kota Medan. The research was conducted by using qualitative design. The data of this study were the utterances of Angkolanese speakers. There were 20 participants of this research. The data were collected through observation, questionnaire and interview. The result of this study revealed that: There were three factors that affecting language maintenance proposed by Fishman (1991) in this study namely family language policy, Using Angkola language in their daily communication frequently, and using Angkola language in cultural activity like in wedding ceremony. The using of these strategies can be applied to the first and second generation. Meanwhile the third generation found the difficulties when facing the strategies. They tend to use bahasa Indonesia in their daily life because most of their time are spending at school and they are not aware of the cultural activity around them.Key words: Strategies of Language Maintenance, Bahasa Angkola, Langgar Community.

A Child Language Acquisition in Indonesian and English Language: A Longitudinal case study

Learning a dual language at the same time during early childhood has caused the wrong perception. Its false perception makes the parents delay the start of learning a second /foreign language. Therefore, This study aims at analyzing the first and second language acquisition of a child in the Indonesian Language and English. The issues concentrated on the spoken utterances in Indonesian and English and its affecting factors. The research adopted a qualitative approach by using a case study, as the unit analysis is a child of 3 years old. For data collection, I employed The naturalistic approach, which I kept daily notes on the progress of a child’s linguistic and recorded the dialogues. Since it is a longitudinal study, the research was conducted for two years, from 2014 to 2015. The research has revealed that utterances spoken have primarily increased and the child has already understood the commands by following the instructions. Some concepts such as feeling, taste, color, and numbers as well as short phrases and simple words in Indonesian and English at the same time can be understood and uttered. She also can change the affirmative sentence to question in term of objects she sees in her surrounding. Factors such as linguistic inputs, imitation, environment, and significant others as exposure, and language acquisition device affect a child utterance. Thus, it indicates that two languages can be taught at the same time at an early age, and it doesn’t cause misunderstanding or confusion utterance, language acquisition, exposure, L1 and L2

LINGUISTIC MEASURES OF SPOKEN UTTERANCES FOR DETECTING MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

Studies have shown that speech characteristics can aid in early-identification of those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We performed a linguistic analysis on spoken utterances of 41 participants (15 MCI, 26 healthy controls) from conversations with a trained interviewer using the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. Data came from a randomized controlled behavioral clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01571427) to examine effects of conversation-based cognitive stimulation on cognitive functions among older adults with normal cognition or MCI, which served as a pilot study for I-CONECT. From the collected spoken utterances we first constructed a fixed-dimensional feature vector using TF-IDF. Next, to distinguish between MCI and healthy controls, we trained a support vector machine (SVM) classifier on per-subject feature vectors according to 5-fold cross-validation procedure. Our results verify the effectiveness of TF-IDF features in this classification task with Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under Curve of 81%, well above chance at 65%.

Драматизация как техника создания множественного субъекта в современной русской поэзии

The borrowing of certain principles of text structure or other elements from drama are typical ways to dramatize a poem. Dramatization became a widespread phenomenon in Russian poetry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Dramatized poems can be divided into two groups: 1) texts in which we can clearly see elements of drama, such as stage directions, dramatis personae, the names of characters indicated before their speech, etc.; and 2) texts with no explicit dramatic elements but divided into conversational turns in which each utterance can potentially be attributed to a different speaker. Both types of dramatization allow us to see the creation of a new kind of subject in Russian poetry – the multiple subject. In dramatized poems we see a subject but not a persona (liricheskii geroi, according to Tynianov), because the utterances of multiple speakers cannot be united in a non-contradictory image of a single persona. At the same time, they can provide a basis for reconstructing the subject. It is important to emphasize that both strategies of dramatization imply a communicative space represented in the text that is similar in structure to space in drama. We can postulate the correspondence between the multiple subject and dramatization as a formal tool (priem).

On the Insufficiency of Taste Expressivism

It is possible to construct situations (with a suitable kind of setting) in which one speaker utters “This is tasty” and another one responds with “That’s not true.” The aim of this paper is to motivate the idea that typical (broadly) expressivist accounts of taste disagreements are unable to explain such situations (although some of them can successfully explain disagreements in which another kind of dissent phrase — like “Nuh-uh” — is employed). This is because utterances of “That’s not true” are typically used to ascribe falsehood to propositions. Taste expressivism has it, however, that when one utters “This is tasty,” one typically manifests her evaluative attitude (which is non-propositional) toward something rather than describes what attitude she bears toward that thing. Another aim of the paper consists in proposing an alternative account of taste disagreements. It is close to taste expressivism in the case of disagreements in which speakers respond with “Nuh-uh” but departs from it in situations in which they respond with “That’s not true.” The account is developed within a contextualist framework according to which taste utterances express contextually enriched propositions that contain judges who evaluate things as tasty or not.

Flexible predictions during listening comprehension: Speaker reliability affects anticipatory processes

During listening comprehension, the identification of individual words can be strongly influenced by properties of the preceding context. While sentence context can facilitate both behavioral and neural responses, it is unclear whether these effects can be attributed to the pre-activation of lexico-semantic features or the facilitated integration of contextually congruent words. Moreover, little is known about how statistics of the broader language environment, or information about the current speaker, might shape these facilitation effects. In the present study, we measured neural responses to predictable and unpredictable words as participants listened to sentences for comprehension. Critically, we manipulated the reliability of each speaker's utterances, such that individual speakers either tended to complete sentences with words that were highly predictable (reliable speaker) or with words that were unpredictable but still plausible (unreliable speaker). As expected, the amplitude of the N400 was reduced for locally predictable words, but, critically, these context effects were also modulated by speaker identity. Sentences from a reliable speaker showed larger facilitation effects with an earlier onset, suggesting that listeners engaged in enhanced anticipatory processing when a speaker's behavior was more predictable. This finding suggests that listeners can implicitly track the reliability of predictive cues in their environment and use these statistics to adaptively regulate predictive processing.

PEMAKNAAN TINDAK TUTUR DIREKTIF GURU PENUTUR ASLI DAN NON PENUTUR ASLI DALAM PEMBELAJARAN BAHASA INGGRIS

This study aims to describe the meaning of the directive illocutionary speech acts used by Native Speakers and Non-Native Speakers in teaching English at the Denpasar Children Center School. The data sources of this study are the utterance of native speaker and non-native speaker. Data obtained by using observation method with uninvolved conversation observation technique and record techniques. Data containing illocutionary speech acts then analyzed descriptively qualitatively based on theories of speech act proposed by Searle (1969) and Leech (1974) about meaning. The results showed that the directive speech acts used by native speakers and non-native speakers were requirements, requestives, questions, prohibitive, permissives and advisories. The meanings of directive speech acts spoken by native speakers and non-native speakers are analyzed from the context of the conversation. The meaning of speech acts for the native speaker tends to be connotative and sometimes contains affective meaning. Whereas the meaning of speech acts of non-native speaker tend to use a combination of connotative, denotative, and affective meanings.