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.

Word Position and Grammatical Function in Relation to Preschoolers' Speech Disfluency

1974 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Phase I ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Word Position ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
Speech Disfluency ◽  
Children's Speech

Spontaneous speech samples were tape-recorded from 10 4-yr.-old nonstutterers in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation. The samples were analyzed to determine whether the children tended to be disfluent on initial words of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions. The tendency for beginning stutterers to stutter on such words is considered part of the symptomatology of Phase I, or beginning, stuttering. The children in this study demonstrated a statistically significant tendency in both situations to be disfluent on these words. Thus, the tendency to produce speech interruptions at the beginning of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions appears to be a characteristic of young children's speech production rather than an aspect of the symptomatology of beginning stuttering.

Disfluency Behavior of Elementary-School Stutterers and Nonstutterers: Loci of Instances of Disfluency

1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean E. Williams ◽  
Franklin H. Silverman ◽  
Joseph A. Kools
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Sixth Grade ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Speech Task ◽  
Sentence Position ◽  
Word Attributes

One hundred fifty-two children from kindergarten and grades one through six, 76 stutterers and 76 nonstutterers, performed a speech task. Each of the kindergarten and first-grade children repeated 10 sentences after the experimenter, and each of the second- through sixth-grade children read a passage. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of each of Brown’s four word attributes—initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these children. For both stutterers and nonstutterers, disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes as those reported by Brown to be troublesome for adult stutterers. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity in the loci of instances of disfluency in the speech of (1) children and adults and (2) stutterers and nonstutterers.

Syntactic Complexity of Preschoolers' Egocentric and Socialized Speech

1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Nursery School ◽  
Private Speech ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Interval Scale ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom

The purpose of this study was to determine whether young children's socialized speech (their speech addressed to an auditor) is more syntactically complex than their egocentric (private) speech. 150 utterances produced by 10 4-yr.-old boys in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation were randomly selected for analysis. 52 judges rated each utterance on a 7-point equal-appearing-interval scale of “intricacy of language usage.” No difference in intricacy was observed between the children's egocentric and socialized utterances.

The Influence of Preschoolers' Speech Usage on Their Disfluency Frequency

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
School Classroom

A relationship between the function of speech usage and disfluency as it interacts with the speaking situation was hypothesized to explain a previously observed situational difference in preschoolers' frequency of disfluency. To test this hypothesis, speech samples collected from 10 preschoolers in their nursery school classroom and in a structured interview were subjected to a functional analysis. The results revealed that the function of the children’s language usage influenced the frequency of their disfluency.

scholarly journals Current Aspects of Speech Disfluency Research: Scientific Review of the International Workshop DiSS 19 (Budapest) Issues

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-74
Author(s):  
Tatiana Sineokova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Information Transfer ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Speech Technology ◽  
Scientific Review ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Speech Disfluency ◽  
Working Out

Disfluency in spontaneous speech is currently a subject of study of specialists working in different fields of knowledge. Different external manifestations of disfluency (hesitation pauses, sound prolongations, pause fillers, articulatory perseverations and lexico-grammatical repetitions, self-corrections, breaks, nonverbal means of information transfer, etc.) are being investigated. They turn out to be a convenient tool for revealing and monitoring the peculiarities of cognitive processes with the help of explicit clearly registered signals occurring in speech under the influence of a number of extralinguistic factors such as the communicative situation, the type of speech (monologic or dialogic), the language of communication (L1 or L2), the emotional state of the speaker, the age, the social status, the diseases impairing speech and mental activity, and others. Further investigation of disfluency makes it possible to solve both a number of fundamental problems connected with modeling of cognitive coding and decoding speech processes and applied tasks connected with adoption of research findings in such fields as developmental pedagogy, psychology, medicine, foreign language training, translation, automatic recognition of speech signal, etc. Up to now, a sufficient number of empirical investigations have been carried out providing a basis for working out particular models which will make it possible, in the long run, to create the overall model of disfluency in spontaneous speech. Conferences and workshops undoubtedly play an important role in uniting the efforts of specialists in this sphere. One of them is the international workshop “Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS)” that was first held in 1999. The current problems that were discussed by the participants of the workshop (production and perception speech models, age and clinical factors of disfluency, special difficulties in foreign speech production, including translation, speech technology) may be a useful reference point for researchers working on the issue.

Lip EMG Activity During Vowel Production in Apraxia of Speech

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 786-801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Strauss Hough ◽  
Richard J. Klich
Keyword(s):  
Muscle Activity ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Emg Activity ◽  
Apraxia Of Speech ◽  
Vowel Production ◽  
Normal Individuals ◽  
Monosyllabic Words

This investigation examined the timing relationships of EMG activity underlying vowel production in 2 normal individuals and in 2 individuals with marked-tosevere apraxia of speech of approximately two-and-one-half years duration. The timing of lip muscle activity was investigated in monosyllabic words embedded in phrases and in syllable word stems as a function of changes in word length. Specifically, the onset and offset of EMG activity of lip muscles used for production of /u/ in the monosyllables and word stems were examined. The results revealed that the relative amounts of time devoted to onset and offset of EMG activity for lip rounding are disorganized in apraxia of speech. Word length appeared to affect the timing of the onset of muscle activity for both the normal speakers and the speakers with apraxia of speech. Word length also influenced the offset of muscle activity, but its effect was less systematic for the speakers with apraxia of speech. The findings suggest that termination of EMG activity may be at least as disturbed as the initiation of EMG activity in apraxia of speech.

Pause Duration of Disfluent Speech

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Paulo Teixeira ◽  
Maria Goreti Fernandes ◽  
Rita Alexandra Costa
Keyword(s):  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Pause Duration ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Speech Disfluency ◽  
Normal Speech

This work has the goal of comparing the pause duration in the disfluent speech and normal speech. Disfluency and normal spontaneous speech was recorded in a context were the subjects had to describe a scene from each other. The pause determination algorithm is presented. The automatic pause determinations allowed the measure of percentage of silence along the record of several minutes of speech. The stuttering scale is used to compare the severity of the subject. As expected, the percentage of speech pauses parameters is rather different in subjects with and without disfluent speech, but it does not seem that it is proportional to the severity of the disfluency.

Loci of Disfluencies in the Speech of Nonstutterers During Oral Reading

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 790-794 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin H. Silverman ◽  
Dean E. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Oral Reading ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Sentence Position ◽  
Word Characteristics

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether “disfluencies” in the speech of nonstutterers occur most frequently on words possessing the four linguistic attributes which Brown (1945) reported were related to the occurrence of “stutterings” in the speech of his stutterers. A group of 24 male nonstutterers, ranging in age from 18 to 34 years, read the same 1000-word passage used by Brown. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently, a total of 226, were analyzed for the presence of Brown’s four word characteristics, i.e., initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these nonstutterers. Disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes (except sentence position) as the words on which Brown reported his stutterers stuttered. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity of the loci of the normal speaker’s disfluencies and the stutterer’s “stutterings.”

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.

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.

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