Variation In Speech Research Articles

Changes in variability during intervention for childhood apraxia of speech: implications for therapy

ABSTRACT Typically developing children are variable in their speech production with decreasing variability indicating mastery of speech. Excessive variability which does not change over time may be an indication of unstable motor plans as often seen in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) provides a framework for understanding the role of variability in speech development and disorder. There are few studies that explore the impact of therapy on speech variability. This work explores the impact of therapy on perceptual speech production variability. It is a post-hoc analysis of data collected in two intervention studies of a motor-based treatment approach with children with CAS and explores DST variability effects in speech skill acquisition based on the case data from those studies. There were six participants in total across the two studies. Findings were mixed showing some non-linear changes in variability with larger changes in variability observed in participants who engaged in more extensive therapy. However, the pattern of variability change was not consistent across the participants. These findings suggest that targeting variability in therapy may be an effective way to improve the speech of children with CAS. A model for utilising variability in therapy is presented.

Breaking Age Barriers With Automatic Voice-Based Depression Detection

Adults over the age of 60 years are a rising population at-risk for depression, and there is a need to create automatic screening for this illness. Most existing voice-based depression datasets comprise speakers younger than 60 and variations in speech due to age and depression are not well understood. In this study, which uses Patient Health Questionnaires for depression severity ground-truth, automatic depression detection is explored using acoustic-based prosodic, spectral, landmark, and voice quality features derived from smartphone recordings from 152 speakers in four different age ranges (e.g., 18–34, 35–48, 49–62, and 63–79). An age-dependent modeling paradigm for voice-based depression detection is proposed and evaluated. Results show that age-dependent models improve voice-based automatic depression classification accuracy with up to 10% absolute gains when compared with an age-agnostic model. Further, when compared with age-agnostic and gender-dependent models, age-dependent models often produced greater depressed class identification f-score sensitivity (up to 0.39 absolute gains). While automatically extracted acoustic voice features lead to statistically significant depression detection accuracy gains over the age-agnostic modeling baseline (4%–9% absolute), manually extracted voice quality features also are useful (4%–7% absolute gains over baseline). This investigation demonstrates the benefits of implementing age modeling to improve voice-based depression screening via smart devices.

Neural representations for modeling variation in speech

Variation in speech is often quantified by comparing phonetic transcriptions of the same utterance. However, manually transcribing speech is time-consuming and error prone. As an alternative, therefore, we investigate the extraction of acoustic embeddings from several self-supervised neural models. We use these representations to compute word-based pronunciation differences between non-native and native speakers of English, and between Norwegian dialect speakers. For comparison with several earlier studies, we evaluate how well these differences match human perception by comparing them with available human judgements of similarity. We show that speech representations extracted from a specific type of neural model (i.e. Transformers) lead to a better match with human perception than two earlier approaches on the basis of phonetic transcriptions and MFCC-based acoustic features. We furthermore find that features from the neural models can generally best be extracted from one of the middle hidden layers than from the final layer. We also demonstrate that neural speech representations not only capture segmental differences, but also intonational and durational differences that cannot adequately be represented by a set of discrete symbols used in phonetic transcriptions.

Multi-modal speech emotion recognition using self-attention mechanism and multi-scale fusion framework

Accurately recognizing emotion from speech is a necessary yet challenging task due to the variability in speech and emotion. In this paper, a novel method combined self-attention mechanism and multi-scale fusion framework is proposed for multi-modal SER by using speech and text information. A self-attentional bidirectional contextual LSTM (bc-LSTM) is proposed to learn the context-sensitive dependences from speech. Specifically, the BLSTM layer is applied to learn long-term dependencies and utterance-level contextual information and the multi-head self-attention layer makes the model focus on the features that are most related to the emotions. A self-attentional multi-channel CNN (MCNN), which takes advantage of static and dynamic channels, is applied for learning general and thematic features from text. Finally, a multi-scale fusion strategy, including feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion, is applied to improve the overall performance. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset IEMOCAP demonstrate that our method gains an absolute improvement of 1.48% and 3.00% over state-of-the-art strategies in terms of weighted accuracy (WA) and unweighted accuracy (UA), respectively.

A CROSS-CULTURAL AND INTERLANGUAGE STUDY OF REQUESTS IN THE KAZAKH AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

This paper provides some (more) insights into cross-cultural variation in speech act realization by analyzing English, Kazakh, Chinese and other languages requests. It aims to shows that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is interpreted differently across cultures.

Micro‐prosody

AbstractThis article introduces micro‐prosody as the study of the duration and timing of speech events. We present a descriptive framework, formalising micro‐prosody in terms of gestural landmarks and coordination relations between them, and we use the framework to illustrate different patterns of micro‐prosody across languages. We show that potential ambiguity between coordination relations can be resolved by considering how they structure natural variation in speech. The framework presented here is intended to offer effective tools for phonetic documentation. We end with some considerations for a theory of micro‐prosody, including how micro‐prosody relates to other levels of phonological structure, and a brief discussion of different data types that can be used to infer aspects of micro‐prosody.

Development of the Pittsburgh Dialect in the Postmodern Period from the Perspective of the Influence of Sociolinguistic Factors

The relevance of the work is determined, first of all, by a new perspective on the speech variability analysis depending on the influence of selected extralingual factors: gender, ethnicity, social status and age, which, of course, corresponds to the current state of the linguistic development and growing interest in disclosure of the influence of social factors on the functioning of language in different territories, as well as the application of an ecolinguistic approach to the analysis of Pittsburgh dialect sociolinguistic differentiation. Second, our study is quite interesting in response about the sociocultural role importance of the Pittsburgh dialect (object of study) in the overall linguistic picture of the United States of America. The aim of the work is to determine the main parameters of the concept of “language behaviour of Pittsburgh residents” and to establish patterns of language unit’s variation of the Pittsburgh dialect in accordance with the impact on their functioning of extralingual factors: gender, ethnicity, social status and age. The language behaviour of Pittsburgh residents is due to the influence of non-linguistic factors (gender, ethnicity, social status of speakers and age). The functioning of speech in this area, the implementation of phonetic processes and lexical units in communication directly depends on the social impact on speech. The novelty of the study is that for the first time on the material of the modern Pittsburgh dialect the regularities of variation of language mean of phonetic and lexical levels from the point of view of ecolinguistic approach to studying sociolinguistic differentiation of speech of Pittsburgh dialects speakers are determined. An analytical study was conducted and the variation of certain language tools used by Pittsburgh speakers according to their social affiliation was established.

Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales

Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker’s age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners’ ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

Habla conmigo, daddy! Fathers' language input in North American bilingual Latinx families.

This study examines the language environments of bilingually raised Latinx infants (n=37) in mother-father families of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, with a focus on paternal parentese, a speaking style distinguished by higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation. Two daylong audio recordings were collected on weekends, when both parents were at home. Paternal, maternal, and infant speech variables were quantified through automatic and manual analyses. Most infants experienced Spanish and English within child-directed speech, and language mixing was common in mothers and fathers. Adjusting for demographic variables, infants heard 50.4% less talk from men compared to women, and 43.4% less parentese from fathers compared to mothers. However, when controlling for overall speech amount, the rate of parentese use did not differ between mothers and fathers, demonstrating that, contrary to the stereotype, fathers in Latinx families adjust their speech in verbal interactions with their infants. An asymmetry emerged, where paternal parentese was associated with paternal knowledge of language development but not with paternal involvement in childcare responsibilities; the opposite was true for paternal speech amount. Controlling for maternal contributions, paternal parentese was predictive of concurrent parent-infant turn-taking and infant language vocalizations, demonstrating its important role in infant language development.

Varieties of Inner Speech and Creative Potential

Inner speaking, the covert talking that goes on inside a person's mind, can shape creative thought. How the phenomenological properties and quality of inner speaking correlate with a person's creative potential, however, is an open scientific problem. To explore this, participants ( n = 267) filled in the revised Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire and the revised Launay Slade Hallucination Scale (auditory subscale), and performed three tests of creative potential: one divergent (Alternative Uses Test) and two convergent thinking tests (Compound Remote Associates Test, short Hagen Matrices Test). The results showed that a tendency to engage in condensed and evaluative/ critical inner speaking negatively correlated with convergent thinking ability; and the results pointed toward a potential negative correlation of auditory hallucination proneness with divergent and convergent thinking ability. No evidence was found for a correlation of the dialogicality, imagining of others’ voices, or positive/regulatory aspect of the participants day-to-day inner speech, with creative potential. Herewith, the presented study contributes novel insight into the relationship between the varieties of inner speech and creative potential.

On the Discursive Construction of Dialectal Varieties: The Case of Central South Slavic ‘Supradialects’

ABSTRACT This paper critically examines the construction of ‘supradialects’ (BCMS narječje) in Central South Slavic (CSS) dialectology. The concept is unique because it is usually placed in the hierarchy of varieties above ‘dialect’ and below ‘language’, also because supradialects are indicated as the ‘dialectal bases’ of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian (BCMS) languages (and their predecessor, Serbo-Croatian). Despite that, the definition of supradialects in CSS literature is paradoxical: they are not fully described varieties, but sets of old isoglosses, reconstructed by dialectologists by comparing remote village speech varieties to *proto-Slavic. This poses the question of how they can act as a “base” of a contemporary standard language. To explore this issue, I analyse the CSS dialectological literature of the past two centuries and inspect the metalanguage used to define and construct supradialects. I also illustrate how the use of the “base” metaphor in authoritative publications on BCMS languages creates an understanding of supradialects as homogenous, contemporary varieties, concealing their (re)constructed nature. Theoretically, the paper offers and alternative perspective on dialects as discursive constructs in their own terms rather than by-products of linguistic standardization, as they are most often treated in sociolinguistics.

Out of sight, out of mind: The influence of communicative load and phonological neighborhood density on phonetic variation in real listener-directed speech.

Some models of speech production propose that speech variation reflects an adaptive trade-off between the needs of the listener and constraints on the speaker. The current study considers communicative load as both a situational and lexical variable that influences phonetic variation in speech to real interlocutors. The current study investigates whether the presence or absence of a target word in the sight of a real listener influences speakers' patterns of variation during a communicative task. To test how lexical difficulty also modulates intelligibility, target words varied in phonological neighborhood density (ND), a measure of lexical difficulty. Acoustic analyses reveal that speakers produced longer vowels in words that were not visually present for the listener to see, compared to when the listener could see those words. This suggests that speakers assess in real time the presence or absence of supportive visual information in assessing listener comprehension difficulty. Furthermore, the presence or absence of the word interacted with ND to predict both vowel duration and hyperarticulation patterns. These findings indicate that lexical measures of a word's difficulty and speakers' online assessment of lexical intelligibility (based on a word's visual presence or not) interactively influence phonetic modifications during communication with a real listener.

Алгоритм и методика количественной оценки схожести речевых сигналов

The paper proposes a method to solve the task of automated quantitative assessment of the syllable pronunciation. This quantitative assessment is used to evaluate the speech quality during speech rehabilitation. An algorithm for quantifying the similarity of two audio signals of different lengths is presented. The algorithm uses a hybrid match measure. The hybrid measure is based on calculation of three metrics (DTWdistance, correlation coefficient and Minkowski metric) and using a fuzzy classifier as a mechanism for combining the calculated values. The average number of coincidences of estimates by the proposed algorithm and estimates by the previously applied method is 83%. A method for quantifying the similarity of speech signals using several reference signals is proposed. The method allows to consider the variability of speech and the individual characteristics of the phoneme’s pronunciation. This is achieved by using records of the patient's preoperative speech as reference signals.

Current practices, supports, and challenges in speech-language pathology service provision for autistic preschoolers.

Speech-language pathology services are among the most frequently accessed services for young autistic children. Therefore, understanding the nature of these services, what challenges these clinicians face, and what supports they value is critical for developing appropriate policies and practices that can maximize positive outcomes for children and families. This study had two primary aims. The first was to examine the self-reported assessment and intervention practices of community-based Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) and communicative disorders assistants (CDAs; who provide services under the supervision of a SLP) in supporting preschool children with suspected and diagnosed autism. The second aim was to identify barriers and supports (facilitators) to providing services in the community using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) as a framework. A cross-sectional online survey was used to collect qualitative and quantitative data from clinicians in Ontario Canada who were providing speech and language services to preschool children with suspected or diagnosed autism. Quantitative data were used to describe clinicians" practices, and qualitative data captured their perspectives on barriers and supports to providing services. A total of 258 clinicians participated in the survey. On average, clinicians reported almost half of the preschoolers on their caseload had either diagnosed or suspected autism. There was consistency across the skill development areas assessed by SLPs, and targeted during therapy sessions, with the top four areas targeted being: foundational social communication, language, play and pragmatics. However, there was wide variation in speech and language assessment and intervention practices reported by this sample of clinicians (i.e., service delivery models, tools or programs used, length and duration of therapy services, level of collaboration with other professionals). Clinicians identified several barriers to providing services: limited funding and time, lack of inter-professional collaboration, difficulty accessing services, community messaging about autism services, family readiness and clinician knowledge. Supports (facilitators) included: access to autism-focused professional development, inter- and intra-professional collaboration, and access to additional supports in the community.

Confessional Style of the Ukrainian Language

The scientific work presents the practical possibilities of stylistics in the development of the confessional variety of the Ukrainian language, covering its diachronic and synchronic planes of study. The authors raise the question of the classification of the confessional style, outline its problems, and to demonstrate the patterns of speech that highlight the characteristic features of this stylistic variety. The areas of use, the dynamics of development, the limits of influence, and the popularity of the style are considered; lexico-stylistic units are listed as an illustrative example. The temporal dimension encompassed by the style begins during paganism in the Ukrainian lands and continues into the present time. Accordingly, the style is recognized as the most ancient type of language known to linguistics. The stylistic system of the Ukrainian language includes seven styles: colloquial/everyday, formal official business, journalistic, artistic, scientific, epistolary, and confessional. The last became the object of thorough research only since the independence of Ukraine. It is worth remembering, however, the legacy of Vasyl Nimchuk, who noted the lexico-semantic and stylistic parameters of the Ukrainian language at the turn of the 17th century through the prism of his confessionalism.1 In connection with the freedoms of speech and religion proclaimed in Article 35 of the Constitution of Ukraine, every citizen can visit and profess any denomination, solidifying the rights of every Ukrainian to faith, thereby consolidating the position of the sacred style of the Ukrainian language and providing opportunities for its free use. The sublimity of the style creates a certain sacred harmony which is not possessed by any other known style of the Ukrainian language. It is noticed that the sacred language laid the foundation for the flourishing of both its own and other varieties of Ukrainian speech, setting the tone for the formation of other styles.

Preliminary study of the temporal variables of continuous speech in patients with neurodegenerative syndromes of the frontotemporal lobar degeneration spectrum

Neurodegenerative diseases, especially frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer's disease, often lead to impaired language functions, and so speech analysis can provide objective measures with which to classify the different syndromes. To study the nature, cognitive correlates and clinical utility of 21 variables related to speech and silence times. Derivation of acoustic variables with Praat in three spontaneous speech tasks conducted in 22 subjects, distributed in six diagnostic groups (five with neurodegenerative diseases + control). A descriptive analysis is performed, with ROC and principal component curves, to study how acoustic variables are related to the different neurodegenerative syndromes and what information they can provide. Three groups of variables are identified related, respectively, to: a) total number of silent pauses and total duration of the task; b) variability of the phonic groups; and c) variability of the periods of silence. These components correlate differentially with the different syndromes studied. Detailed analysis of speech and silence times can provide relevant information for the diagnosis of different neurodegenerative syndromes that are not reflected in traditional neuropsychological assessments. Thus, the total number of silent pauses may be a valuable aid in discriminating patients with lexical access deficits, phonic group parameters seem to reflect motor speech problems, and pause variability is associated with dysexecutive and global impairment.

Okannia and akannia in Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech (“surzhyk”) Ukrainian language policy in the 1920s and after 1991: Development stages and present trends

The Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech (URMS), also known as “surzhyk”, is a widespread phenomenon in central areas of Ukraine. Linguistic studies still lack empirical research on the variation of phonic characteristics of URMS and on its connection with the social characteristics of its speakers. Based on a corpus of spoken speech of this non-standard variety with around 340,000-word tokens taken from informal family conversations and open interviews, this article examines the variation in Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech between two prominent phonic features of Ukrainian and Russian — the variation of unstressed /ɔ/ between Ukrainian okannia and Russian akannia. The results confirm that okannia strongly dominates in unstressed vocalism of URMS thus largely corresponding to the standard Ukrainian pattern and differen tiating it from Russian. A Generalized Linear Mixed Model shows that the variation between okannia and akannia is influenced by complex dialectal and sociolinguistic differences in the Ukrainian language landscape, sociodemographic characteristics of the speakers, e.g., age and gender, and the speech situation. There are evident correlations between the phonic variation and the lexicalmorpho lo gical affinity of the word form, i.e., whether the word form on the lexical-morpho logical level coin cides with either standard Ukrainian or Russian. The findings make it clear that one-dimensional attempts to clarify language variation in Ukraine are bound to fail. Keywords: Ukrainian-Russian language contact, dialect contact, language variation, îkannia, akannia

Language Game with a Case Ending -ов or How Padonki Were Replaced by Kittens

The article discusses the non-standard use of the endings of nouns for feminine and neuter words (продавать рыбов), which became popular in the Runet language in 2021. The competition of the zero ending with -ов in the genitive and animate accusative, arising in the Old Russian language as a result of mixing two declensions, in the modern language led to the victory of -ов (нет столов, домов), while maintaining the zero ending for some groups (нет англичан, мальчишек) and variation in colloquial speech for a number of words (нет помидоров/помидор), meanwhile the zero option in the XXI century is clearly less common than the “ов-forms”. Under the influence of a “viral” meme about a conversation between cats and a seller, since the summer of 2021, a language game has become widespread, consisting in intentionally joining of -ов to the “unsuitable” stem: рыбов, книгов, деньгов, etc. Such a language game has existed for a long time (for example, the traditional ironic imitation of the colloquial делов-то), but as rare individual jokes, and in 2021 it became frequent, popular, used in a variety of memes and in advertising, associated with the theme of “kittens” and a certain worldview. The “Language of kittens” began to turn into a new linguoculturological phenomenon, comparable in degree of recognition to the Olbanian, or the Padonkaffsky jargon, the peak of popularity of which occurred in the mid-2000s. Now, instead of the misrepresentation of the orthographic appearance of the word (аффтар), which is characteristic of the Olbanian, referring to the idea of protest, the grammatical form is changing, referring to the idea of quiet touching humility before the injustice of life.

SOUND CHARACTERISTICS IN THE SPEECH OF UKRAINIAN DESCENDANTS IN BRAZIL

Brazil received many Ukrainian immigrants in the 19th century and most of them were sent to the southern region of the country. The municipality of Prudentópolis, a city of approximately 50,000 inhabitants, located in the Center-South region of the State of Paraná and Southern Brazil, received many of these immigrants, mainly from the regions of Galicia and Bukovina (BORUSZENKO, 1995). The city is known as the Brazilian Ukraine, for preserving traditions, customs, religious rituals and keeping alive the memory and language of the Ukrainian people. This article aims to analyze the pronunciation of rhotics, as the sounds of "r" are called, in Brazilian Portuguese by Ukrainian descendants who live in communities in the interior of the city of Prudentópolis, since the use of r is an important dialect mark for the region's speakers. The theoretical foundation of this research is based on the Labovian quantitative variationist sociolinguistics theory (LABOV, 2008 [1972]). The analyzed sample is part of the speech database Linguistic Variation of Slavic Speech – VARLINFE, which consists of oral interviews with Slav, Polish and Ukrainian descendants, residents of the interior of Paraná. The rhotic sounds produced by eight informants were analyzed, totaling 3.906 data. Such occurrences were submitted to statistical treatment with the Goldvarb program. The results revealed the predominance of the rhotic variant tap and pointed out as conditioning factors the syllabic environment in which the sound occurs in the word, the speaker's education, the morphological class of the word and the sound context prior to the rhotic in the word. This research, still in development, contributes to the knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese spoken within the country and in the communities of Ukrainian descendants.

Comparison of resting state and task-based functional MRI in preoperative mapping in patients with brain gliomas

To analyze and compare the results of cerebral cortex mapping with task-based (tb-fMRI) and resting-state functional MRI in patients with glioma of eloquent cortical areas. There were 55 patients (24 men and 31 women aged 24 - 74 years, median 39) with glial tumors. In 26 patients, the tumor was located in motor areas. Twenty-nine patients had lesions of Broca and Wernicke's areas. All patients underwent preoperative tb-fMRI and rs-fMRI. Then, resection of tumor was carried out in all cases. Comparison of fMRI and rs-fMRI activation maps was assessed by calculating the Dice coefficient for inclusive speech and motor cortex masks and exclusive masks without brainstem, cerebellum, subcortical nuclei. Inclusive Dice coefficient for motor cortex ranged from 0.11 to 0.50, for speech cortex - from 0.006 to 0.240 (p<0.05). In case of exclusive masks, this value ranged from 0.15 to 0.55 for motor cortex and from 0.004 to 0.205 for speech cortex (p<0.05). When comparing the results of cortical mapping in patients with glial tumors, the use of hemispheric exclusive and inclusive masks did not significantly increase activation maps matching. Probably, low degree of correspondence was associated with different genesis of activations, as well as with high variability of speech cortex.