The Plain Talk Implementation Guide

Public/Private Ventures' cross-site evaluation determined that the Plain Talk framework enabled communities to change the ways adults communicated with teens. It also showed that youth in Plain Talk communities who talked to adults were less likely to have an STD or a pregnancy. These results confirmed the validity of three basic Plain Talk components: Community Mapping, Walkers and Talkers, and Home Health Parties

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

This paper reports the results of a pilot study concerned with phonetic imitation in the speech of Polish learners of English. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether native speakers of Polish imitate the length of English vowels and to determine whether the extent of phonetic imitation may be influenced by the model talker being a native or a non-native speaker of English. The participants were asked to perform an auditory naming task in which they indentified objects and actions presented on a set of photos twice, with and without the imitation task. The imitation task was further sub-divided depending on the model talker being a native or non-native speaker of English (a native Southern British English speaker and a native Polish speaker fluent in English). As the aim was to investigate the variability in durational characteristics of English vowels, the series of front vowels /æ e ɪ iː/ were analysed in the shortening and lengthening b_t vs. b_d contexts. The results of the study show that the participants imitated the length of the investigated vowels as a result of exposure to the two model talkers. The data suggest that the degree of imitation was mediated both by linguistic and social factors and that the direction of convergence might have been affected by the participants’ attitude toward L2 pronunciation

Enhanced amplitude modulations contribute to the Lombard intelligibility benefit: Evidence from the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech

Speakers adjust their voice when talking in noise, which is known as Lombard speech. These acoustic adjustments facilitate speech comprehension in noise relative to plain speech (i.e., speech produced in quiet). However, exactly which characteristics of Lombard speech drive this intelligibility benefit in noise remains unclear. This study assessed the contribution of enhanced amplitude modulations to the Lombard speech intelligibility benefit by demonstrating that (1) native speakers of Dutch in the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech (NiCLS) produce more pronounced amplitude modulations in noise vs. in quiet; (2) more enhanced amplitude modulations correlate positively with intelligibility in a speech-in-noise perception experiment; (3) transplanting the amplitude modulations from Lombard speech onto plain speech leads to an intelligibility improvement, suggesting that enhanced amplitude modulations in Lombard speech contribute towards intelligibility in noise. Results are discussed in light of recent neurobiological models of speech perception with reference to neural oscillators phase-locking to the amplitude modulations in speech, guiding the processing of speech

Time and information in perceptual adaptation to speech

Presubmission manuscript and supplementary files (stimuli, stimulus presentation code, data, data analysis code).Perceptual adaptation to a talker enables listeners to efficiently resolve the many-to-many mapping between variable speech acoustics and abstract linguistic representations. However, models of speech perception have not delved into the variety or the quantity of information necessary for successful adaptation, nor how adaptation unfolds over time. In three experiments using speeded classification of spoken words, we explored how the quantity (duration), quality (phonetic detail), and temporal continuity of talker-specific context contribute to facilitating perceptual adaptation to speech. In single- and mixed-talker conditions, listeners identified phonetically-confusable target words in isolation or preceded by carrier phrases of varying lengths and phonetic content, spoken by the same talker as the target word. Word identification was always slower in mixed-talker conditions than single-talker ones. However, interference from talker variability decreased as the duration of preceding speech increased but was not affected by the amount of preceding talker-specific phonetic information. Furthermore, efficiency gains from adaptation depended on temporal continuity between preceding speech and the target word. These results suggest that perceptual adaptation to speech may be understood via models of auditory streaming, where perceptual continuity of an auditory object (e.g., a talker) facilitates allocation of attentional resources, resulting in more efficient perceptual processing.NIH NIDCD (R03DC014045

Real-time interactive speech technology at Threshold Technology, Incorporated

Basic real-time isolated-word recognition techniques are reviewed. Industrial applications of voice technology are described in chronological order of their development. Future research efforts are also discussed