Creaky voice and utterance fluency measures in predicting fluency and oral proficiency of spontaneous L2 Finnish

While utterance fluency measures are often studied in relation to perceived L2 fluency and proficiency, the effect of creaky voice remains ignored. However, creaky voice is frequent in a number of languages, including Finnish, where it serves as a cue for phrase-boundaries and turn-taking. In this study we investigate the roles of creaky voice and utterance fluency measures in predicting fluency and proficiency ratings of spontaneous L2 Finnish (F2) speech. In so doing, 16 expert raters participated in assessing narrative spontaneous speech samples from 160 learners of Finnish. The effect of creaky voice and utterance fluency measures on proficiency and fluency ratings was studied using linear regression models. The results indicate that creaky voice can contribute to both oral proficiency and fluency alongside utterance fluency measures. Furthermore, average duration of composite breaks – a measure combining breakdown and repair phenomena – proved to be the most significant predictor of fluency. Based on these findings we recommend further investigation of the effect of creaky voice to the assessment of L2 speech as well as reconsideration of the utterance fluency measures used in predicting L2 fluency or proficiencyPeer reviewe

Speech intelligibility and prosody production in children with cochlear implants

Objectives—The purpose of the current study was to examine the relation between speech intelligibility and prosody production in children who use cochlear implants. Methods—The Beginner\u27s Intelligibility Test (BIT) and Prosodic Utterance Production (PUP) task were administered to 15 children who use cochlear implants and 10 children with normal hearing. Adult listeners with normal hearing judged the intelligibility of the words in the BIT sentences, identified the PUP sentences as one of four grammatical or emotional moods (i.e., declarative, interrogative, happy, or sad), and rated the PUP sentences according to how well they thought the child conveyed the designated mood. Results—Percent correct scores were higher for intelligibility than for prosody and higher for children with normal hearing than for children with cochlear implants. Declarative sentences were most readily identified and received the highest ratings by adult listeners; interrogative sentences were least readily identified and received the lowest ratings. Correlations between intelligibility and all mood identification and rating scores except declarative were not significant. Discussion—The findings suggest that the development of speech intelligibility progresses ahead of prosody in both children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing; however, children with normal hearing still perform better than children with cochlear implants on measures of intelligibility and prosody even after accounting for hearing age. Problems with interrogative intonation may be related to more general restrictions on rising intonation, and th

Exploring the Growth of Text-Reading Fluency in Upper-Elementary English Language Learners during Instruction based on Repeated Reading

For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong potential for accelerating the general reading achievement of native-English-speaking children, but there is a lack of concomitant research on English language learners. This dissertation describes a formative experiment with the goal to improve, in 9 weeks, the general reading achievement of 17 English language learners in Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. These students were are at the Intermediate level of English development and lagged behind their native-English-speaking peers in reading. A formative experiment is basically descriptive in nature and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative study methods. The instructional intervention for this study was based on theories of language acquisition, reading development, and automatic processes of reading that underlie fluent reading. The intervention combined two types of repeated reading instruction: (a) silent repeated reading of controlled-vocabulary texts, with comprehension checks, and (b) repeated oral reading for performance, with explicit instruction about oral text-reading fluency. Instruction was altered as necessary, based on formative data, to meet the pedagogical goal. The students\u27 pre- and postintervention performances on reading-fluency indicators, including standardized measures, are compared and a detailed narrative of the experiment reported. The pedagogical goal, improved reading fluency with comprehension, was realized for most of the students on at least one instrument. On the standardized reading-fluency measures, increases in reading accuracy offset decreases in reading rate for many students, an unexpected finding, while comprehension of unfamiliar passages improved. Most students improved on at least two of four measures of prosodic reading, with the exception of third graders

Exploring the Growth of Text-Reading Fluency in Upper-Elementary English Language Learners during Instruction based on Repeated Reading

For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong potential for accelerating the general reading achievement of native-English-speaking children, but there is a lack of concomitant research on English language learners. This dissertation describes a formative experiment with the goal to improve, in 9 weeks, the general reading achievement of 17 English language learners in Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. These students were are at the Intermediate level of English development and lagged behind their native-English-speaking peers in reading. A formative experiment is basically descriptive in nature and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative study methods. The instructional intervention for this study was based on theories of language acquisition, reading development, and automatic processes of reading that underlie fluent reading. The intervention combined two types of repeated reading instruction: (a) silent repeated reading of controlled-vocabulary texts, with comprehension checks, and (b) repeated oral reading for performance, with explicit instruction about oral text-reading fluency. Instruction was altered as necessary, based on formative data, to meet the pedagogical goal. The students\u27 pre- and postintervention performances on reading-fluency indicators, including standardized measures, are compared and a detailed narrative of the experiment reported. The pedagogical goal, improved reading fluency with comprehension, was realized for most of the students on at least one instrument. On the standardized reading-fluency measures, increases in reading accuracy offset decreases in reading rate for many students, an unexpected finding, while comprehension of unfamiliar passages improved. Most students improved on at least two of four measures of prosodic reading, with the exception of third graders

Implicit Prosody in Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment in Croatian

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages. (1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC]. In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and could therefore be innate. Five major explanations have been proposed in the literature to account for cross-linguistic differences in RC-attachment: the Construal/Gricean account, Attachment-Binding Dualism, the Predicate Proximity/Recency model, the Tuning Hypothesis, and the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH). This thesis examines RC-attachment preferences in Croatian. The data reported address four of the above proposals: they argue against the first three and support the fifth, the IPH. (The data do not bear on the Tuning Hypothesis, which holds that there is no principled parsing explanation for the cross-linguistic facts.) The IPH claims that a default prosodic pattern, which may differ across languages, is mentally computed during silent reading, influencing syntactic attachment decisions. Croatian has a distinctive pattern of prosodic phrasing in that in sentences comparable to (1), it favors a prosodic break before a long RC as compared with a short RC, and a prosodic break before the preposition in the complex NP construction as compared with the non-prepositional variant of the same construction. (Both variants of the construction, prepositional and non-prepositional, are acceptable in Croatian.) The experimental findings reported here document these prosodic characteristics, and show that they are reflected in syntactic attachment preferences in silent reading. This evidence is important because if the IPH is correct, then cross-language RC-attachment differences are attributable to independently demonstrable differences in the prosodic principles in the grammar. That is, they fall into line with other observed parsing preferences in that they do not reflect non-universal processing routines

The phonetics of speech breathing : pauses, physiology, acoustics, and perception

Speech is made up of a continuous stream of speech sounds that is interrupted by pauses and breathing. As phoneticians are primarily interested in describing the segments of the speech stream, pauses and breathing are often neglected in phonetic studies, even though they are vital for speech. The present work adds to a more detailed view of both pausing and speech breathing with a special focus on the latter and the resulting breath noises, investigating their acoustic, physiological, and perceptual aspects. We present an overview of how a selection of corpora annotate pauses and pause-internal particles, as well as a recording setup that can be used for further studies on speech breathing. For pauses, this work emphasized their optionality and variability under different tempos, as well as the temporal composition of silence and breath noise in breath pauses. For breath noises, we first focused on acoustic and physiological characteristics: We explored alignment between the onsets and offsets of audible breath noises with the start and end of expansion of both rib cage and abdomen. Further, we found similarities between speech breath noises and aspiration phases of /k/, as well as that breath noises may be produced with a more open and slightly more front place of articulation than realizations of schwa. We found positive correlations between acoustic and physiological parameters, suggesting that when speakers inhale faster, the resulting breath noises were more intense and produced more anterior in the mouth. Inspecting the entire spectrum of speech breath noises, we showed relatively flat spectra and several weak peaks. These peaks largely overlapped with resonances reported for inhalations produced with a central vocal tract configuration. We used 3D-printed vocal tract models representing four vowels and four fricatives to simulate in- and exhalations by reversing airflow direction. We found the direction to not have a general effect for all models, but only for those with high-tongue configurations, as opposed to those that were more open. Then, we compared inhalations produced with the schwa-model to human inhalations in an attempt to approach the vocal tract configuration in speech breathing. There were some similarities, however, several complexities of human speech breathing not captured in the models complicated comparisons. In two perception studies, we investigated how much information listeners could auditorily extract from breath noises. First, we tested categorizing different breath noises into six different types, based on airflow direction and airway usage, e.g. oral inhalation. Around two thirds of all answers were correct. Second, we investigated how well breath noises could be used to discriminate between speakers and to extract coarse information on speaker characteristics, such as age (old/young) and sex (female/male). We found that listeners were able to distinguish between two breath noises coming from the same or different speakers in around two thirds of all cases. Hearing one breath noise, classification of sex was successful in around 64%, while for age it was 50%, suggesting that sex was more perceivable than age in breath noises.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 418659027: "Pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication

The Effect of Prosody Instruction on Reading Fluency and Comprehension Among Third-Grade Students

Problem Many students are failing to become proficient readers with current instructional methods used in American schools. Students frequently make improvements in two of fluency’s dimensions, rate and accuracy, but these improvements have not consistently correlated to improvements in reading comprehension, which is the objective of reading. The automaticity plus prosody (APP) model was developed by this researcher from Topping’s deep processing fluency model to explain why teaching and assessing the multiple dimensions of fluency (rate, accuracy, and prosody) improve comprehension. The purpose of this study was to compare students in a private school in a small town in southwestern Michigan who received a treatment of only repeated reading and self- graphing with students who received a treatment of repeated reading, self-graphing, and an instructional focus of prosody. Method An experimental pretest-posttest with control group design was used in this study. Participants were members of a class of third-grade students (n=20) from a private school in southwestern Michigan. The control group consisted of half the students (n=10), and the treatment group consisted of the remainder of the students (n=10). Students were initially matched based on their teacher’s informal assessment results for reading comprehension and reading fluency based on the students’ raw scores from the MASI-R Oral Reading Fluency Measures and CORE Reading Maze Comprehension Test . One student from each matched pair was then randomly assigned to the treatment or control group. The students were trained to engage in repeated reading using fiction passages at their independent reading level. Students in the intervention group were also taught lessons with an instructional focus on prosody. The study consisted of 21 sessions, 20-30 minutes per session, 3 days per week, over 7 weeks. Reading comprehension and dimensions of fluency (rate, accuracy, and prosody) were the dependent variables. These variables were measured with the AIMS-web Maze-CBM, the AIMS-web R-CBM, and the Multidimensional Fluency Scale. Results One between (treatment) and within subjects (test period) ANOVA indicated that treatment and interaction (treatment by test period) effects for all dependent variables (rate, accuracy, prosody, and reading comprehension) were not statistically significant at the 0.05 level. However, test period main effect was statistically significant for three of the four dependent variables (p\u3c0.05). No significant changes over test periods were found for accuracy. For prosody (F(3,60) = 6.30, p= .001, ɳ2 =.26), and rate F(1.85, 36.91) = 13.09, p\u3c.001, ɳ2 =.42), significant increases took place between test period 2 (week 3) and test period 3 (week 6). For reading comprehension (F(3,60)=33.20, p\u3c.001, ɳ2 =.65), significant change was observed between test periods 3 and 4. These results indicate that students improved in rate, prosody, and reading comprehension regardless of whether or not they received instruction on prosody. Thus, for this group of third-grade students, prosody instruction appears to be not effective in helping students improve reading fluency and comprehension. Conclusions The APP model, as applied to reading development, was supported by the results. Repeated reading with self-graphing, which was done with students in both the control and intervention groups, developed students’ basic fluency through appropriate, successful practice that led to automaticity. These gains in automaticity contributed to higher comprehension and oral expression, both of which are elements of expressive fluency. Whereas non-significant results did not show an instructional focus on prosody- created heightened levels of fluency or comprehension, the length of the study, the small sample size, and other limitations may have mitigated against adequate opportunity to identify differences between the groups. This study did confirm that students’ fluency and comprehension levels can be significantly raised in a short period of time

Computational Approaches to Modeling Speaker State in the Medical Domain

Recently, researchers in computer science and engineering have begun to explore the possibility of finding speech-based correlates of various medical conditions using automatic, computational methods. If such language cues can be identified and quantified automatically, this information can be used to support diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions in clinical settings and to further fundamental research in understanding cognition. This chapter reviews computational approaches that explore communicative patterns of patients who suffer from medical conditions such as depression, autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and cancer. There are two main approaches discussed: research that explores features extracted from the acoustic signal and research that focuses on lexical and semantic features. We also present some applied research that uses computational methods to develop assistive technologies. In the final sections we discuss issues related to and the future of this emerging field of research

Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations

International audienceThe present article aims to propose a simple introduction to the topics of (i) lexical tone, (ii) intonation, and (iii) tone-intonation interactions, with practical recommendations for students. It builds on the authors' observations on various languages, tonal and non-tonal; much of the evidence reviewed concerns tonal languages of Asia. With a view to providing beginners with an adequate methodological apparatus for studying tone and intonation, the present notes emphasize two salient dimensions of linguistic diversity. The first is the nature of the lexical tones: we review the classical distinction between (i) contour tones that can be analyzed into sequences of level tones, and (ii) contour tones that are non-decomposable (phonetically complex). A second dimension of diversity is the presence or absence of intonational tones: tones of intonational origin that are formally identical with lexical (and morphological) tones

Is cue-based memory retrieval \u27good-enough\u27?: Agreement, comprehension, and implicit prosody in native and bilingual speakers of English

This dissertation focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. I consolidate research from three distinct areas of inquiry\u27cognitive processing models, development of reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing strategies\u27and outline a cohesive and comprehensive processing model that can be applied to speakers regardless of language profile. This model is characterized by three critical components: a cognitive model of memory retrieval, a processing paradigm that outlines how resources may be deployed online, and the role of factors such as prosody in parsing decisions. The general framework of this integrated \u27Good-enough Cue\u27 (GC) model assumes the \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis and cue-based memory retrieval as central aspects. The \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis states that all speakers have access to two processing routes: a complete syntactic route, and a \u27good enough\u27 heuristic route (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002; Ferreira, 2003). In the interest of conserving resources, speakers tend to rely more on heuristics and templates whenever the task allows, and may be required to rely on this fallback route when task demand is high. In the proposed GC model, cue-based memory retrieval (CBMR) is the instantiation of the complete syntactic route for agreement and long-distance dependencies in particular (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009; Wagers, 2008). When retrieval fails using CBMR (due to cue overlap, memory trace decay, or some other factor), comprehenders may compensate by applying a \u27good-enough\u27 processing heuristic, which prioritizes general comprehension over detailed syntactic computation. Prosody (or implicit prosody) may reduce processing load by either facilitating syntactic processing or otherwise assisting memory retrieval, thus reducing reliance on the good-enough fallback route. This investigation explores how text presentation format interacts with these algorithmic versus heuristic processing strategies. Most specifically, measuring whether the presentation format of text affects readers\u27 comprehension and ability to detect subject-verb agreement errors in simple and complex relative clause constructions. The experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and embedded relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats: a) whole sentence, b) word-by-word, or b) phrase-by-phrase, and rated each item for grammaticality and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicate that while overall comprehension is typically prioritized over grammatical processing (following the \u27Good-Enough\u27 Hypothesis), the effects of presentation format are differentially influential based on group differences and processing measure. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody (phrase-by-phrase presentation) onto text enhances performance in syntactic and grammatical processing, while disrupting it via a word-by-word presentation decreases comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants however, phrase-by-phrase presentation is not significantly beneficial for grammatical processing\u27even resulting in a decrease in comprehension accuracy. These differences provide insight into the interaction of cognitive taskload, processing strategy selection, and the role of implicit prosody in reading fluency, building toward a comprehensive processing model for speakers of varying language profiles and proficiencies