1,478 research outputs found
Envelhecimento vocal: estudo acĂșstico-articulatĂłrio das alteraçÔes de fala com a idade
Background: Although the aging process causes specific alterations in the
speech organs, the knowledge about the age effects in speech production is still
disperse and incomplete. Objective: To provide a broader view of the age-related
segmental and suprasegmental speech changes in European Portuguese (EP),
considering new aspects besides static acoustic features, such as dynamic and
articulatory data. Method: Two databases, with speech data of Portuguese
adult native speakers obtained through standardized recording and segmentation
procedures, were devised: i) an acoustic database containing all EP oral
vowels produced in similar context (reading speech), and also a sample of semispontaneous
speech (image description) collected from a large sample of adults
between the ages 35 and 97; ii) and another with articulatory data (ultrasound
(US) tongue images synchronized with speech) for all EP oral vowels produced in
similar contexts (pseudowords and isolated) collected from young ([21-35]) and
older ([55-73]) adults. Results: Based on the curated databases, various aspects
of the aging speech were analyzed. Acoustically, the aging speech is characterized
by: 1) longer vowels (in both genders); 2) a tendency for F0 to decrease
in women and slightly increase in men; 3) lower vowel formant frequencies in
females; 4) a significant reduction of the vowel acoustic space in men; 5) vowels
with higher trajectory slope of F1 (in both genders); 6) shorter descriptions with
higher pause time for males; 7) faster speech and articulation rate for females;
and 8) lower HNR for females in semi-spontaneous speech. In addition, the total
speech duration decrease is associated to non-severe depression symptoms and
age. Older adults tended to present more depressive symptoms that could impact
the amount of speech produced. Concerning the articulatory data, the tongue
tends to be higher and more advanced with aging for almost all vowels, meaning
that the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger in older
females. Conclusion: This study provides new information on aging speech for
a language other than English. These results corroborate that speech changes
with age and present different patterns between genders, and also suggest that
speakers might develop specific articulatory adjustments with aging.Contextualização: Embora o processo de envelhecimento cause alteraçÔes
especĂficas no sistema de produção de fala, o conhecimento sobre os efeitos da
idade na fala Ă© ainda disperso e incompleto. Objetivo: Proporcionar uma visĂŁo
mais ampla das alteraçÔes segmentais e suprassegmentais da fala relacionadas
com a idade no PortuguĂȘs Europeu (PE), considerando outros aspetos, para alĂ©m
das caracterĂsticas acĂșsticas estĂĄticas, tais como dados dinĂąmicos e articulatĂłrios.
MĂ©todo: Foram criadas duas bases de dados, com dados de fala de adultos
nativos do PE, obtidos através de procedimentos padronizados de gravação e
segmentação: i) uma base de dados acĂșstica contendo todas as vogais orais do
PE em contexto semelhante (leitura de palavras), e também uma amostra de fala
semiespontùnea (descrição de imagem) produzidas por uma larga amostra de
indivĂduos entre os 35 e os 97 anos; ii) e outra com dados articulatĂłrios (imagens
de ultrassom da lĂngua sincronizadas com o sinal acĂșstico) de todas as vogais
orais do PE produzidas em contextos semelhantes (pseudopalavras e palavras
isoladas) por adultos de duas faixas etĂĄrias ([21-35] e [55-73]). Resultados:
Tendo em conta as bases de dados curadas, foi analisado o efeito da idade em
diversas caracterĂsticas da fala. Acusticamente, a fala de pessoas mais velhas Ă©
caracterizada por: 1) vogais mais longas (ambos os sexos); 2) tendĂȘncia para
F0 diminuir nas mulheres e aumentar ligeiramente nos homens; 3) diminuição
da frequĂȘncia dos formantes das vogais nas mulheres; 4) redução significativa
do espaço acĂșstico das vogais nos homens; 5) vogais com maior inclinação da
trajetória de F1 (ambos os sexos); 6) descriçÔes mais curtas e com maior tempo
de pausa nos homens; 7) aumento da velocidade articulatĂłria e da velocidade de
fala nas mulheres; e 8) diminuição do HNR na fala semiespontùnea em mulheres.
Além disso, os idosos tendem a apresentar mais sintomas depressivos que podem
afetar a quantidade de fala produzida. Em relação aos dados articulatórios, a
lĂngua tende a apresentar-se mais alta e avançada em quase todas as vogais com
a idade, ou seja o espaço articulatório das vogais tende a ser maior, mais alto
e avançado nas mulheres mais velhas. Conclusão: Este estudo fornece novos
dados sobre o efeito da idade na fala para uma lĂngua diferente do inglĂȘs. Os
resultados corroboram que a fala sofre alteraçÔes com a idade, que diferem em
função do género, sugerindo ainda que os falantes podem desenvolver ajustes
articulatĂłrios especĂficos com a idade.Programa Doutoral em Gerontologia e Geriatri
Correlating ASR Errors with Developmental Changes in Speech Production: A Study of 3-10-Year-Old European Portuguese Children's Speech
International audienceAutomatically recognising children's speech is a very difficult task. This difficulty can be attributed to the high variability in children's speech, both within and across speakers. The variability is due to developmental changes in children's anatomy, speech production skills et cetera, and manifests itself, for example, in fundamental and formant frequencies, the frequency of disfluencies, and pronunciation quality. In this paper, we report the results of acoustic and auditory analyses of 3-10-year-old European Portuguese children's speech. Furthermore, we are able to correlate some of the pronunciation error patterns revealed by our analyses - such as the truncation of consonant clusters - with the errors made by a children's speech recogniser trained on speech collected from the same age group. Other pronunciation error patterns seem to have little or no impact on speech recognition performance. In future work, we will attempt to use our findings to improve the performance of our recogniser
Dialectal variation in European Portuguese Central Vowel Perception
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [É] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [É] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon
SINGING PORTUGUESE NASAL VOWELS: PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING NASALITY IN BRAZILIAN ART SONGS
The articulation of Portuguese nasalized vowels poses some articulatory problems accompanied by negative acoustic effects for the performance of Brazilian art songs. The main objective was to find strategies that permit the singer to conciliate an idiomatic pronunciation of these vowels with a well-balanced resonance, a desirable quality in classical singing. In order to devise these strategies, the author examined sources dealing with nasalized vowels from varied perspectives: acoustic properties of vowel nasalization, phonetic and phonological aspects ofBrazilian Portuguese (BP), historical views on nasality in singing, and recent vocal pedagogy research. In addition to the overall loss of sonority, the main effect of nasalization is felt mainly in the first formant (F1) region of oral vowels, due to the introduction of nasal formants and antiformants, and to shifts in the tongue posture. Several sources report the existence of a nasality contour in BP, by which a nasalized vowel starts with an oral phase and transitions gradually to a nasal phase. The author concludes that the basic approach to sing nasalized vowels in BP is (1) to find the tongue posture corresponding to the oral vowel congener (the âcore vowelâ), and (2) to adjust the nasality contour in such a way that the oral portion remains prominent in order to keep the resonance balance consistent during the emission of the vowel. Once the core vowel is determined, standard vowel modification choices can be made according to voice type and the musical context in which the vowel is being sung. Some challenging excerpts from Brazilian art songs are examined, with suggestions for the application of the discussed strategies
TIPO, BRAZIL'S 'LIKE': SYNCHRONIC FUNCTIONAL AND PHONETIC ANALYSES OF NOMINAL, GRAMMATICAL, AND DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS
Previous research in Brazilian Portuguese has indicated that the noun tipo 'type,' 'kind' is undergoing grammaticalization (Bittencourt, 1999; Lima-Hernandes, 2005). Review of the literature, however, reveals a limited number of studies that provide an account of its current state in conversational speech. Moreover, research on the grammaticalization of tipo has been mostly limited to the examination of its multifunctionality (Bittencourt, 1999; Laurentino,2016; Lima-Hernandes, 2005), resulting in a gap as to how the processes of grammaticalization may be reflected on its use and production.
Using data from the Projeto SociolingĂŒĂstico ContemporĂąneo Brasileiro corpus (Thompson & Onosson, 2016), comprised of sociolinguistic interviews conducted with teenage public-school students in Rio de Janeiro, this dissertation presents the findings of a study that examined the current state of tipo in conversational discourse. An innovative multimethodological approach was employed aiming to address tipo's functional diversity. Distributional, functional, acoustic, and perceptual investigations were conducted with the goal to gain insight into some of the processes tipo is undergoing as it sheds its nominal properties and acquires new grammatical, discourse, and pragmatic functions.
Results reveal a functional expansion of tipo, which was found to be performing roles such as a preposition, a conjunction, and a discourse marker among others. More notably, results from a subsequent acoustic analysis reveal consistent differences in pronunciation between nominal and non-nominal forms, suggesting that as tipo expands to perform new functions, speakers are encoding such changes at the segment level. A discrimination task conducted with 98 teenage students also confirmed that speakers are able to discriminate nominal from non-nominal forms, suggesting that other processes beyond durational differences may be playing a role in the grammaticalization of that noun
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT OF BILINGUAL DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN
Due to gaps in literature exploring communication outcomes in Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children with access to more than one spoken language, limited agreement on optimal language use for DHH children, and an ongoing cultural and linguistic loss in this population, the aim of this pilot study was to further the literature and comprehensively explore the impact of oral bilingualism in DHH children. Participants were self-selected and recruited primarily through relevant social media. Speech and language development in children were observed and quantified at two time points (at the time of enrollment into the study and subsequently after 3-4 months of initial assessment), through administration of standardized questionnaires and twenty minutes of conversational play language samples between the parent and child. Specific language constructs such as the mean length utterance, number of total words, number of different words, and rate of spoken words per minute were analyzed. Speech production skills were assessed by identifying the sounds the child was able to produce during the conversational play sample to compare to monolingual norms. The data from the five case studies presented in this paper indicated that DHH children with access to more than one language were able to develop language skills on par with their typical hearing peers when factors such as early acoustic access, linguistically rich environment, and active parent advocacy were present
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT OF BILINGUAL DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN
Due to gaps in literature exploring communication outcomes in Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children with access to more than one spoken language, limited agreement on optimal language use for DHH children, and an ongoing cultural and linguistic loss in this population, the aim of this pilot study was to further the literature and comprehensively explore the impact of oral bilingualism in DHH children. Participants were self-selected and recruited primarily through relevant social media. Speech and language development in children were observed and quantified at two time points (at the time of enrollment into the study and subsequently after 3-4 months of initial assessment), through administration of standardized questionnaires and twenty minutes of conversational play language samples between the parent and child. Specific language constructs such as the mean length utterance, number of total words, number of different words, and rate of spoken words per minute were analyzed. Speech production skills were assessed by identifying the sounds the child was able to produce during the conversational play sample to compare to monolingual norms. The data from the five case studies presented in this paper indicated that DHH children with access to more than one language were able to develop language skills on par with their typical hearing peers when factors such as early acoustic access, linguistically rich environment, and active parent advocacy were present
Learning to Produce Speech with an Altered Vocal Tract: The Role of Auditory Feedback
Modifying the vocal tract alters a speakerâs previously learned acousticâarticulatory relationship. This study investigated the contribution of auditory feedback to the process of adapting to vocal-tract modifications. Subjects said the word /tÉs/ while wearing a dental prosthesis that extended the length of their maxillary incisor teeth. The prosthesis affected /s/ productions and the subjects were asked to learn to produce âânormalââ /s/âs. They alternately received normal auditory feedback and noise that masked their natural feedback during productions. Acoustic analysis of the speakersâ /s/ productions showed that the distribution of energy across the spectra moved toward that of normal, unperturbed production with increased experience with the prosthesis. However, the acoustic analysis did not show any significant differences in learning dependent on auditory feedback. By contrast, when naive listeners were asked to rate the quality of the speakersâ utterances, productions made when auditory feedback was available were evaluated to be closer to the subjectsâ normal productions than when feedback was masked. The perceptual analysis showed that speakers were able to use auditory information to partially compensate for the vocal-tract modification. Furthermore, utterances produced during the masked conditions also improved over a session, demonstrating that the compensatory articulations were learned and available after auditory feedback was removed
Perception and production of english vowels by brazilian efl speakers
Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e ExpressĂŁo. Programa de PĂłs-Graduação em Letras/InglĂȘs e Literatura Correspondente.This study investigated the relationship between the perception and production of English vowels by 18 highly proficient Brazilian EFL speakers, most of them M.A. and doctoral students of the Graduate Program in English of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Two experiments were carried out: A production test to measure the first two formants of the learners' English and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels, and an identification test with synthetic stimuli to investigate the L2 (second language) perception of English vowels. The production and perception results reveal that the Euclidean distance between the three English target pairs (/i/-/I/, /E/-/ae/, /U/-/u/) was significantly larger for the American English monolinguals than for the L2 learners, thus indicating that the Brazilians have difficulty in both producing and perceiving these vowels in a native-like fashion. Importantly, some relationship between vowel perception and production was found because the target pairs which were better perceived were also the ones produced more accurately by the L2 learners. These results provide further evidence for the fact that L2 perception outperforms L2 production
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