Stuttering Consistency in Varied Contexts

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. E. Hamre ◽  
M. E. Wingate
Keyword(s):  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Consistency Effect

The “consistency effect” has been proffered as evidence that stuttering is basically a response to fear-producing stimuli inherent in certain words. To assess consistency in relatively spontaneous speech, each of 16 stutterers gave continuous word associations from which 18 stuttered (experimental) and 18 nonstuttered (control) words matched for length, initial phoneme, and familiarity were selected for each subject. Subjects then produced each of the 36 words in three sentences and read them as a list. The hypothesis to be tested was that significantly more experimental than control words would be restuttered. Grouped totals suggest support for the hypothesis, but inspection of the data reveal that the performance of only a few subjects provided the margin of difference. Moreover, other factors also appear influential in determining the recurrence of stuttering. These results suggest that the term consistency as presently used is misleading, hypotheses concerning stuttering based on the notion of a consistency effect are not tenable, and an account of the loci of repeated occurrences of stuttering must penetrate beyond the word level.

scholarly journals Temporal Integration of Text Transcripts and Acoustic Features for Alzheimer's Diagnosis Based on Spontaneous Speech

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matej Martinc ◽  
Fasih Haider ◽  
Senja Pollak ◽  
Saturnino Luz
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Structural Information ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Data Representation ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
Textual Features ◽  
And Gender

Background: Advances in machine learning (ML) technology have opened new avenues for detection and monitoring of cognitive decline. In this study, a multimodal approach to Alzheimer's dementia detection based on the patient's spontaneous speech is presented. This approach was tested on a standard, publicly available Alzheimer's speech dataset for comparability. The data comprise voice samples from 156 participants (1:1 ratio of Alzheimer's to control), matched by age and gender.Materials and Methods: A recently developed Active Data Representation (ADR) technique for voice processing was employed as a framework for fusion of acoustic and textual features at sentence and word level. Temporal aspects of textual features were investigated in conjunction with acoustic features in order to shed light on the temporal interplay between paralinguistic (acoustic) and linguistic (textual) aspects of Alzheimer's speech. Combinations between several configurations of ADR features and more traditional bag-of-n-grams approaches were used in an ensemble of classifiers built and evaluated on a standardised dataset containing recorded speech of scene descriptions and textual transcripts.Results: Employing only semantic bag-of-n-grams features, an accuracy of 89.58% was achieved in distinguishing between Alzheimer's patients and healthy controls. Adding temporal and structural information by combining bag-of-n-grams features with ADR audio/textual features, the accuracy could be improved to 91.67% on the test set. An accuracy of 93.75% was achieved through late fusion of the three best feature configurations, which corresponds to a 4.7% improvement over the best result reported in the literature for this dataset.Conclusion: The proposed combination of ADR audio and textual features is capable of successfully modelling temporal aspects of the data. The machine learning approach toward dementia detection achieves best performance when ADR features are combined with strong semantic bag-of-n-grams features. This combination leads to state-of-the-art performance on the AD classification task.

Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Turnbull
Keyword(s):  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Word Length ◽  
High Probability ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Neighborhood Density ◽  
Length Frequency ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Low Probability ◽  
Phonetic Reduction

AbstractProbabilistic phonetic reduction is widely attested in a variety of languages, acoustic domains, and interpretations of predictability. Less well-studied is the categorical effect of probabilistic segment deletion, which in principle is subject to similar pressures. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study into patterns of segment deletion in corpora of spontaneous speech in English and Japanese. Analysis at the word level reveals that words with more phonemes and higher-frequency words tend to have more of their segments deleted. Analysis at the phoneme level reveals that high-probability phonemes are more likely to be deleted than low-probability phonemes. For Japanese only, this analysis also shows effects of word length, frequency, and neighborhood density on deletion probability. Taken together, these results suggest that several large-scale patterns of probabilistic segment deletion mirror the processes of phonetic reduction and apply to both languages. Some patterns, though, appear to be language-specific, and it is not clear to what extent languages can and do differ in this regard. These findings are discussed in terms of our understanding of the universality of proposed predictability effects, and in terms of probabilistic reduction more broadly.

Effect of Selected Word Attributes on Preschoolers' Speech Disfluency: Initial Phoneme and Length

1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Word Length ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Word Attributes ◽  
Speech Disfluency

This study was designed to determine whether preschool nonstutterers tend to be disfluent on words that begin with consonants or on words that begin with vowels and whether they tend to be disfluent on long or on short words. Analyses of the spontaneous speech of 10 four-year-old boys sampled both in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation indicated that initial phoneme exerted no influence on the distribution of their speech disfluencies. Word length, however, exerted an influence in the interview situation where the children tended to be disfluent on monosyllabic words. These data raise questions with respect to the applicability of Bloodstein’s (1974) model of the development of stuttering to the disfluency behavior of nonstutterers.

Question Answering Using Word Associations

2010 ◽  
pp. 571-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganesh Ramakrishnan ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Feature Representations ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Level Statistics ◽  
Second Tier ◽  
Improved Performance

Text mining systems such as categorizers and query retrievers of the first generation were largely hinged on word level statistics and provided a wonderful first-cut approach. However systems based on simple word-level statistics quickly saturate in performance, despite the best data mining and machine learning algorithms. This problem can be traced to the fact that, typically, naive, word-based feature representations are used in text applications, which prove insufficient in bridging two types of chasms within and across documents, viz. lexical chasm and syntactic chasm . The latest wave in text mining technology has been marked by research that will make extraction of subtleties from the underlying meaning of text, a possibility. In the following two chapters, we pose the problem of underlying meaning extraction from text documents, coupled with world knowledge, as a problem of bridging the chasms by exploiting associations between entities. The entities are words or word collocations from documents. We utilize two types of entity associations, viz. paradigmatic (PA) and syntagmatic (SA). We present first-tier algorithms that use these two word associations in bridging the syntactic and lexical chasms. We also propose second-tier algorithms in two sample applications, viz., question answering and text classification which use the first-tier algorithms. Our contribution lies in the specific methods we introduce for exploiting entity association information present in WordNet, dictionaries, corpora and parse trees for improved performance in text mining applications.

Collecting Words: A Clinical Example of a Morphology-Focused Orthographic Intervention

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Murphy ◽  
Emily A. Diehm
Keyword(s):  
Written Language ◽  
Morphological Knowledge ◽  
English Orthography ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Language Pathology ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Reading And Spelling ◽  
Reading And Spelling Difficulties

Purpose Morphological interventions promote gains in morphological knowledge and in other oral and written language skills (e.g., phonological awareness, vocabulary, reading, and spelling), yet we have a limited understanding of critical intervention features. In this clinical focus article, we describe a relatively novel approach to teaching morphology that considers its role as the key organizing principle of English orthography. We also present a clinical example of such an intervention delivered during a summer camp at a university speech and hearing clinic. Method Graduate speech-language pathology students provided a 6-week morphology-focused orthographic intervention to children in first through fourth grade ( n = 10) who demonstrated word-level reading and spelling difficulties. The intervention focused children's attention on morphological families, teaching how morphology is interrelated with phonology and etymology in English orthography. Results Comparing pre- and posttest scores, children demonstrated improvement in reading and/or spelling abilities, with the largest gains observed in spelling affixes within polymorphemic words. Children and their caregivers reacted positively to the intervention. Therefore, data from the camp offer preliminary support for teaching morphology within the context of written words, and the intervention appears to be a feasible approach for simultaneously increasing morphological knowledge, reading, and spelling. Conclusion Children with word-level reading and spelling difficulties may benefit from a morphology-focused orthographic intervention, such as the one described here. Research on the approach is warranted, and clinicians are encouraged to explore its possible effectiveness in their practice. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12290687

Factors Influencing Cognate Performance for Young Multilingual Children's Vocabulary: A Research Synthesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2170-2188
Author(s):  
Lindsey R. Squires ◽  
Sara J. Ohlfest ◽  
Kristen E. Santoro ◽  
Jennifer L. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Test Validity ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
High Quality Research ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Word Characteristics ◽  
Study Inclusion ◽  
Task Level

Purpose The purpose of this systematic review was to determine evidence of a cognate effect for young multilingual children (ages 3;0–8;11 [years;months], preschool to second grade) in terms of task-level and child-level factors that may influence cognate performance. Cognates are pairs of vocabulary words that share meaning with similar phonology and/or orthography in more than one language, such as rose – rosa (English–Spanish) or carrot – carotte (English–French). Despite the cognate advantage noted with older bilingual children and bilingual adults, there has been no systematic examination of the cognate research in young multilingual children. Method We conducted searches of multiple electronic databases and hand-searched article bibliographies for studies that examined young multilingual children's performance with cognates based on study inclusion criteria aligned to the research questions. Results The review yielded 16 articles. The majority of the studies (12/16, 75%) demonstrated a positive cognate effect for young multilingual children (measured in higher accuracy, faster reaction times, and doublet translation equivalents on cognates as compared to noncognates). However, not all bilingual children demonstrated a cognate effect. Both task-level factors (cognate definition, type of cognate task, word characteristics) and child-level factors (level of bilingualism, age) appear to influence young bilingual children's performance on cognates. Conclusions Contrary to early 1990s research, current researchers suggest that even young multilingual children may demonstrate sensitivity to cognate vocabulary words. Given the limits in study quality, more high-quality research is needed, particularly to address test validity in cognate assessments, to develop appropriate cognate definitions for children, and to refine word-level features. Only one study included a brief instruction prior to assessment, warranting cognate treatment studies as an area of future need. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12753179

Morphological Awareness Skills of Second- and Third-Grade Students With and Without Speech Sound Disorders

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-616
Author(s):  
Kenn Apel ◽  
Victoria S. Henbest
Keyword(s):  
Word Reading ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Morphological Awareness ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Real Word ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Third Grade Students ◽  
Pseudoword Reading

Purpose Morphological awareness is the ability to consciously manipulate the smallest units of meaning in language. Morphological awareness contributes to success with literacy skills for children with typical language and those with language impairment. However, little research has focused on the morphological awareness skills of children with speech sound disorders (SSD), who may be at risk for literacy impairments. No researcher has examined the morphological awareness skills of children with SSD and compared their skills to children with typical speech using tasks representing a comprehensive definition of morphological awareness, which was the main purpose of this study. Method Thirty second- and third-grade students with SSD and 30 with typical speech skills, matched on age and receptive vocabulary, completed four morphological awareness tasks and measures of receptive vocabulary, real-word reading, pseudoword reading, and word-level spelling. Results Results indicated there was no difference between the morphological awareness skills of students with and without SSD. Although morphological awareness was moderately to strongly related to the students' literacy skills, performance on the morphological awareness tasks contributed little to no additional variance to the children's real-word reading and spelling skills beyond what was accounted for by pseudoword reading. Conclusions Findings suggest that early elementary-age students with SSD may not present with concomitant morphological awareness difficulties and that the morphological awareness skills of these students may not play a unique role in their word-level literacy skills. Limitations and suggestions for future research on the morphological awareness skills of children with SSD are discussed.

Effects of Gender, Parental Role, and Time on Infant- and Adult-Directed Read and Spontaneous Speech

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (11) ◽  
pp. 4001-4014
Author(s):  
Melanie Weirich ◽  
Adrian Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Parental Involvement ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
First Year ◽  
Space Size ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Phonetic Features ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Description Task

Purpose The study sets out to investigate inter- and intraspeaker variation in German infant-directed speech (IDS) and considers the potential impact that the factors gender, parental involvement, and speech material (read vs. spontaneous speech) may have. In addition, we analyze data from 3 time points prior to and after the birth of the child to examine potential changes in the features of IDS and, particularly also, of adult-directed speech (ADS). Here, the gender identity of a speaker is considered as an additional factor. Method IDS and ADS data from 34 participants (15 mothers, 19 fathers) is gathered by means of a reading and a picture description task. For IDS, 2 recordings were made when the baby was approximately 6 and 9 months old, respectively. For ADS, an additional recording was made before the baby was born. Phonetic analyses comprise mean fundamental frequency (f0), variation in f0, the 1st 2 formants measured in /i: ɛ a u:/, and the vowel space size. Moreover, social and behavioral data were gathered regarding parental involvement and gender identity. Results German IDS is characterized by an increase in mean f0, a larger variation in f0, vowel- and formant-specific differences, and a larger acoustic vowel space. No effect of gender or parental involvement was found. Also, the phonetic features of IDS were found in both spontaneous and read speech. Regarding ADS, changes in vowel space size in some of the fathers and in mean f0 in mothers were found. Conclusion Phonetic features of German IDS are robust with respect to the factors gender, parental involvement, speech material (read vs. spontaneous speech), and time. Some phonetic features of ADS changed within the child's first year depending on gender and parental involvement/gender identity. Thus, further research on IDS needs to address also potential changes in ADS.

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