Inequity in Popular Voice Recognition Systems Regarding African Accents

With new age speakers such as the Echo Dot and Google Home, everyone should have equal opportunity to use them. Yet, for many popular voice recognition systems, the only accents that have wide support are those from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. This can be frustrating for users who have dialects or accents which are poorly understood by common tools like Amazon's Alexa. As such devices become more like household appliances, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of bias and inequity in Speech Recognition, as well as other sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence. The addition of African accents can potentially diversify smart speaker customer bases worldwide. My research project can help developers include accents from the African diaspora as they build these systems. In this work, we measure recognition accuracy for under-represented dialects across a variety of speech recognition systems and analyze the results in terms of standard performance metrics. After collecting audio files from different voices across the African diaspora, we discuss key findings and generate guidelines for developing an implementation for current voice recognition systems that are more fair for all

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Return to Nursing: A Meta-Synthesis of Academic Bridging Programs’ Effect on Internationally Educated Nurses

This meta-synthesis explored the effect of bridging programs on internationally educated nurses (IENs). Eight papers that met the inclusion criteria were selected for this review. There were 437 participants from eight studies who come from different parts of the globe and who settled in either Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United Kingdom. Using a grounded theory approach for data analysis, four effects of bridging programs on IENs were identified. These are: (a) the concepts from the regulatory body, the client-centred care; (b) do something better for us, for our future; (c) we have to learn English; and, (d) faculty, program coordinator and preceptors that were willing to work with them. These effects were defined and explored in light of the study samples selected for this study

The effects of English proficiency on the processing of Bulgarian-accented English by Bulgarian-English bilinguals

This dissertation explores the potential benefit of listening to and with one’s first-language accent, as suggested by the Interspeech Intelligibility Benefit Hypothesis (ISIB). Previous studies have not consistently supported this hypothesis. According to major second language learning theories, the listener’s second language proficiency determines the extent to which the listener relies on their first language phonetics. Hence, this thesis provides a novel approach by focusing on the role of English proficiency in the understanding of Bulgarian-accented English for Bulgarian-English bilinguals. The first experiment investigated whether evoking the listeners’ L1 Bulgarian phonetics would improve the speed of processing Bulgarian-accented English words, compared to Standard British English words, and vice versa. Listeners with lower English proficiency processed Bulgarian-accented English faster than SBE, while high proficiency listeners tended to have an advantage with SBE over Bulgarian accent. The second experiment measured the accuracy and reaction times (RT) in a lexical decision task with single-word stimuli produced by two L1 English speakers and two Bulgarian-English bilinguals. Listeners with high proficiency in English responded slower and less accurately to Bulgarian-accented speech compared to L1 English speech and compared to lower proficiency listeners. These accent preferences were also supported by the listener’s RT adaptation across the first experimental block. A follow-up investigation compared the results of L1 UK English listeners to the bilingual listeners with the highest proficiency in English. The L1 English listeners and the bilinguals processed both accents with similar speed, accuracy and adaptation patterns, showing no advantage or disadvantage for the bilinguals. These studies support existing models of second language phonetics. Higher proficiency in L2 is associated with lesser reliance on L1 phonetics during speech processing. In addition, the listeners with the highest English proficiency had no advantage when understanding Bulgarian-accented English compared to L1 English listeners, contrary to ISIB. Keywords: Bulgarian-English bilinguals, bilingual speech processing, L2 phonetic development, lexical decision, proficienc

British Students in the United States: motivations, experiences and career aspirations

Twelve years ago, the British educational press, and indeed the mainstream media, were consumed by the story of Laura Spence, a super-bright pupil from a Newcastle comprehensive school who, despite having five straight-As at ‘A level’ (the final secondary school exams), had been refused a place to read Medicine at Oxford after an interview there. General outrage at Oxford’s snobbishness ensued, with politician Gordon Brown, amongst others, weighing in with the criticism that Oxford favored applicants from the UK’s fee-paying independent schools (which include the elite but perversely named ‘public schools’), thereby excluding excellent applicants from state schools like Laura – especially if they come from deprived parts of the country with strong local accents. Laura instead went to the US to Harvard on a funded scholarship, completed her biochemistry degree there and returned to do postgraduate medical training at Cambridge – the other UK university which constitutes the top duo known collectively as ‘Oxbridge’. How typical is Laura’s story? Are there many British students who, as Oxbridge ‘rejects’, or fearful of being turned down for a place at the UK’s two most ancient and prestigious universities, apply abroad to widen their chances of success at other globally recognized institutions? Brooks and Waters (2009a) argue that there are indeed those like Laura who apply to US universities as a ‘second chance at success’; but our research suggests that there are many other explanations of the upward trend in favor of international study. Since the US is the most important destination for people from the UK studying abroad, the findings of this chapter are particularly important in producing a more robust understanding of the key drivers of international student mobility between one advanced economy and another. We suggest that there are some movers for whom study abroad is part of a carefully strategized plan of international career enhancement, while for others it is a product of their class habitus and family networks (see Bourdieu 1977). We would also argue that there are those who are looking for ‘something different’ yet, at the same time, desire a ‘knowable’ destination, familiar to them for example from film and television and without any great linguistic challenge. In the next section we describe our research project and its aims and methods. The main body of the chapter is made up of three sections which correspond to our three key research questions: about motivations for study in the US, about experiences there, and about future career plans. The conclusion emphasises the motivational and strategic nature of UK student migration to the US, targeted especially at universities perceived to be of high international standing. In terms of the link between study abroad and future career plans, fears about a putative British ‘brain drain’ are shown to be largely unfounded, since most students plan to return to the UK

An integrated dialect analysis tool using phonetics and acoustics

This study aimed to verify a computational phonetic and acoustic analysis tool created in the MATLAB environment. A dataset was obtained containing 3 broad American dialects (Northern, Western and New England) from the TIMIT database using words that also appeared in the Swadesh list. Each dialect consisted of 20 speakers uttering 10 sentences. Verification using phonetic comparisons between dialects was made by calculating the Levenshtein distance in Gabmap and the proposed software tool. Agreement between the linguistic distances using each analysis method was found. Each tool showed increasing linguistic distance as a function of increasing geographic distance, in a similar shape to Seguy's curve. The proposed tool was then further developed to include acoustic characterisation capability of inter dialect dynamics. Significant variation between dialects was found for the pitch, trajectory length and spectral rate of change for 7 of the phonetic vowels investigated. Analysis of the vowel area using the 4 corner vowels indicated that for male speakers, geographically closer dialects have smaller variations in vowel space area than those further apart. The female utterances did not show a similar pattern of linguistic distance likely due to the lack of one corner vowel /u/, making the vowel space a triangle

Influence of syllable-coda voicing on the acoustic properties of syllable-onset /l/ in English

International audienceProperties of syllable onset /l/ that depend on the voicing of the syllable coda were measured for four speakers, representing different nonrhotic British English accents that differ in their phonetic realization of onset /l/ and in their system of phonological contrast involving onset /l/ and /r/. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless codas for all four speakers, and darker for two of them as measured by lower F2 frequency, and for these two and one other as measured by spectral center of gravity (COG). There were no coda-dependent differences in f0 in the /l/, and F1 frequency differed only for the fourth speaker. The vowel was also longer for all four speakers when the coda was voiced (as expected), while F1 was lower and F2 normally higher. One speaker provided data with fricative or affricate onsets: fricated segments were longer before voiced codas, but no coda-dependent COG differences were found. At least when the onset includes /l/, phonological voicing of the coda seems to be reflected in complex acousticphonetic properties distributed across the whole syllable, some properties being localized, others not. We describe these properties as variations in a brightsomber dimension. In most accents, when the coda is voiceless, the syllable is relatively bright: small proportions of periodic energy which is relatively high frequency at the syllable edges, and a high proportion of silence or aperiodic energy. When the coda is voiced, the syllable is relatively somber: a high proportion of periodic energy which is relatively low frequency at the syllable edges, and relatively small amounts of silence and aperiodic energy. Other accents use other combinations, dependent on the phonetic and phonological properties of liquids in the particular accent. The association of onset darkness and coda voicing does not seem to be ascribable to anticipatory coarticulation of features essential to voicing itself; this observation provides support for nonsegmental models of speech perception in which fine phonetic detail is mapped directly to linguistic structure without reference to phoneme-sized segments

Speech and communication in Parkinson’s disease: a cross-sectional exploratory study in the UK

Objective: To assess associations between cognitive status, intelligibility, acoustics and functional communication in PD. Design: Cross-sectional exploratory study of functional communication, including a within-participants experimental design for listener assessment. Setting: A major academic medical centre in the East of England, UK. Participants: Questionnaire data were assessed for 45 people with Parkinson’s disease (PD), who had self-reported speech or communication difficulties and did not have clinical dementia. Acoustic and listener analyses were conducted on read and conversational speech for 20 people with PD and 20 familiar conversation partner controls without speech, language or cognitive difficulties. Main outcome measures: Functional communication assessed by the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) and Communicative Effectiveness Survey (CES). Results: People with PD had lower intelligibility than controls for both the read (mean difference 13.7%, p=0.009) and conversational (mean difference 16.2%, p=0.04) sentences. Intensity and pause were statistically significant predictors of intelligibility in read sentences. Listeners were less accurate identifying the intended emotion in the speech of people with PD (14.8% point difference across conditions, p=0.02) and this was associated with worse speaker cognitive status (16.7% point difference, p=0.04). Cognitive status was a significant predictor of functional communication using CPIB (F=8.99, p=0.005, η2 = 0.15) but not CES. Intelligibility in conversation sentences was a statistically significant predictor of CPIB (F=4.96, p=0.04, η2 = 0.19) and CES (F=13.65, p=0.002, η2 = 0.43). Read sentence intelligibility was not a significant predictor of either outcome. Conclusions: Cognitive status was an important predictor of functional communication—the role of intelligibility was modest and limited to conversational and not read speech. Our results highlight the importance of focusing on functional communication as well as physical speech impairment in speech and language therapy (SLT) for PD. Our results could inform future trials of SLT techniques for PD