24 research outputs found
Design and analysis of a database to evaluate childrenâs reading aloud performance
To evaluate the reading performance of children, human assessment is usually involved, where a teacher or tutor has to take time to individually estimate the performance in terms of fluency (speed, accuracy and expression). Automatic estimation of reading ability can be an important alternative or complement to the usual methods, and can improve other applications such as e-learning. Techniques must be developed to analyse audio recordings of read utterances by children and detect the deviations from the intended correct reading i.e. disfluencies. For that goal, a database of 284 European Portuguese children from 6 to 10 years old (1stâ4th grades) reading aloud amounting to 20 h was collected in private and public Portuguese schools. This paper describes the design of the reading tasks as well as the data collection procedure. The presence of different types of disfluencies is analysed as well as reading performance compared to known curricular goals.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio
On the Effects of Disfluency in Complex Cognitive Tasks
While much previous research has suggested that decreased transcription fluency has a detrimental effect on writing, there is recent evidence that decreased fluency can actually benefit cognitive processing. Across a series of experiments, I investigated the effects of experimental manipulations of transcription fluency on various aspects of essay writing (e.g., lexical sophistication), but also in the context of a single word generation task. In Chapter 1, I introduced disfluency by asking participants to type essays using one hand (vs. standard typing). The results showed that decreasing transcription fluency resulted in increased lexical sophistication. I proposed the time-based account of disfluency in composition whereby decreasing transcription fluency allows more time for lexical processes to unfold. In Chapter 2 I demonstrated that less fluent typing is not related to increased pause and revision rates. Chapter 3 provides a test between the time-based account and an account that attributes the effects to the disruption of typical finger-to-letter mappings caused by the disfluency. Here I slowed down participantsâ typing by introducing a delay between keystrokes. The results presented in Chapter 3 are consistent with the time-based account. In addition, in Chapter 3 I also tested the hypothesis that, unlike in previous studies, the transcription disfluency manipulation in the current study did not introduce large working memory demands. The time-based account of the effects of disfluency in composition was further supported by the results of mediation analyses presented in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 I investigated whether effects of disfluency on lexical selection extend beyond composition to a single word generation task. I discuss implications for writing implements, and lexical selection in composition
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Evaluating morphosyntactic differences in narrative re-tell tasks between bilingual children with and without language impairment using computational methods
The diversity of linguistic backgrounds and second-language competencies of Spanish-English bilingual school-age children present challenges for accurately diagnosing and treating language impairment. Narrative re-tell samples from Peña, Gillam, & Bedore (2014) were analyzed in two groups of 21 matched language-impaired and typically developing children, aged 4-7 years old attending school in central Texas. Transcribed methods included a custom extension of the Natural Language Processing Toolkit in Python and the IPSYN analytical function in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). From these analyses, the complexity and linguistic diversity of nested âing verb phrases and IPSYN scores were compared across groups. Language-impaired children made significantly more errors in auxiliary verb use, had less diverse vocabulary, and had lower syntactic complexity scores than their typically developing counterparts.Communication Sciences and Disorder
Automatic Screening of Childhood Speech Sound Disorders and Detection of Associated Pronunciation Errors
Speech disorders in children can affect their fluency and intelligibility. Delay in their diagnosis and treatment increases the risk of social impairment and learning disabilities. With the significant shortage of Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs), there is an increasing interest in Computer-Aided Speech Therapy tools with automatic detection and diagnosis capability.
However, the scarcity and unreliable annotation of disordered child speech corpora along with the high acoustic variations in the child speech data has impeded the development of reliable automatic detection and diagnosis of childhood speech sound disorders. Therefore, this thesis investigates two types of detection systems that can be achieved with minimum dependency on annotated mispronounced speech data.
First, a novel approach that adopts paralinguistic features which represent the prosodic, spectral, and voice quality characteristics of the speech was proposed to perform segment- and subject-level classification of Typically Developing (TD) and Speech Sound Disordered (SSD) child speech using a binary Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. As paralinguistic features are both language- and content-independent, they can be extracted from an unannotated speech signal.
Second, a novel Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) approach was introduced to detect the pronunciation errors made due to SSDs and provide low-level diagnostic information that can be used in constructing formative feedback and a detailed diagnostic report. Unlike existing MDD methods where detection and diagnosis are performed at the phoneme level, the proposed method achieved MDD at the speech attribute level, namely the manners and places of articulations. The speech attribute features describe the involved articulators and their interactions when making a speech sound allowing a low-level description of the pronunciation error to be provided. Two novel methods to model speech attributes are further proposed in this thesis, a frame-based (phoneme-alignment) method leveraging the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) criterion and training a separate model for each attribute, and an alignment-free jointly-learnt method based on the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) sequence to sequence criterion.
The proposed techniques have been evaluated using standard and publicly accessible adult and child speech corpora, while the MDD method has been validated using L2 speech corpora
The presence, nature and role of formulaic sequences in English advanced learners of French : a longitudinal study
PhD ThesisThe present study is a longitudinal investigation of the presence, nature, and role of
formulaic sequences (FS) in advanced English learners of French. The learners
investigated are in their second year of an undergraduate degree in French at the onset
of the study, and are tested before and after a seven-month stay in France. FS are
defined psycholinguistically as multiword units which present a processing advantage
for a given speaker, either because they are stored whole in his/her mental lexicon
(Wray 2002) or because they are highly automatised.
The construct of FS is particularly relevant to investigate key linguistic issues such as
the dynamism of linguistic representations, their idiosyncratic nature as well as the
relationship between the lexicon and grammar. FS have been shown to be frequent in
the oral productions of native speakers. They also play an important role in first
language acquisition as well as in the initial stages of instructed second language (L2)
acquisition. However, very little is known about their presence and role in advanced L2
learners, as most studies dealing with them have not adopted a psycholinguistic
approach and have focused on L2 learnersâ knowledge and use of idioms and idiomatic
expressions.
Conversely, this study seeks to evaluate and characterise the presence of
psycholinguistically-defined FS in advanced learners as well as examine their
longitudinal development in relation to the development of the learnersâ fluency and
lexical diversity. It seeks to determine whether FS use can be said to play a role in the
development of fluency and lexical diversity and if it does, describe the underlying
mechanisms that account for this role.
Data from five learners performing five oral tasks (an interview, a story retell and 3
discussion tasks), repeated before and after their stay in France, was elicited and
transcribed. FS were identified through the hierarchical application of a range of criteria
aiming to capture the holistic nature of the sequences. The necessary criterion used for
identification was fluent pronunciation of the sequence, and additional criteria were
applied such as irregularity, holistic mapping of form to meaning or holistic status of the
sequence in the input. Fluency was operationalised through 4 measures (phonation-time
ratio, speaking rate, mean length of runs and articulation rate) and lexical diversity was
measured using D.
The results show that psycholinguistically-defined FS represent about 27% of the
language of advanced learners of French. The typology of the identified sequences
shows that they are mostly grammatically regular but that despite the advanced level of
the participants, some present non-nativelike characteristics. Individual differences in
the learnersâ repertoires of FS as well as task effects are also found.
Between time 1 and time 2, across the group of 5 subjects, there is a general and
statistically significant increase in FS use, fluency and lexical diversity. Significant
correlations are found between FS use, fluency and lexical diversity. The qualitative
analysis suggests that FS use plays a role in increasing fluency by allowing longer
speech runs, contributing to the reduction of pausing time as well as the speeding up of
the articulation rate. At the internal level of processing mechanisms, the results suggest
that FS play a facilitating role not only in the formulation stage of speech production but
also in the conceptualisation and articulation stages. Significant correlations are also
found between FS use and lexical diversity, which suggests that FS, by lightening the
processing burden and freeing some attentional resources, might facilitate the
acquisition of new vocabulary.
The analysis of the development of the learners across all variables shows a single
developmental path with similar processes of automatisation but with different rates of
acquisition, as the learners vary in how efficient they are at proceduralising their
language. Because of this, it is suggested that the year abroad is more likely to be
beneficial for a given subject if their language has already reached a certain level of
automatisation pre-time abroad.Arts and Humanities Research Counci