Metalinguistic awareness in literate and illiterate children and adults: a psycholinguistic study

One of the major goals of psycholinguistic research is to be able to account for those mental operations which enable native speakers not only to perform the basic linguistic capacities such as comprehending and producing an illimited number of utterances, but also to exercise such metalinguistic abilities as to judge utterances, segment words, identify sounds and detect ambiguities. The primary concern of this thesis was to elucidate the processes underlying certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness and to trace their relationship to advances in maturation and acquisition of literacy. The guiding principle has been to determine how much of what has been considered normal cognitive development is in fact an age-bound developmental phenomenon, or to what extent it reflects the result of experiences associated with the degree and extent of literacy. The need for this is apparent on examining previous research which, as we demonstrate, has confounded such theoretically important variables as Age, Literacy and peculiarities of the native language. The aim of the methodology employed here was to deconf ound such variables and add more insight as to the nature of metalinguistic abilities. First, by employing literate and illiterate children and adults, the design optimizes the likelihood of tapping a precise relationship between maturation, literacy and metalinguistic awareness. Second, by using native speakers of Arabic, the general design offers the opportunity to add insight from language yet another typologically different from English in which most previous research was conducted. Third, by employing more than one type of linguistic measure for the same population, the design also hopes to answer one empirical question, namely',, whether metalinguistic awareness can be conceptualised as either multidimensional or unitary in nature. The Subjects who participated in the study were 120 Moroccan Arabic speaking literate and illiterate children and adults drawn from a relatively homogeneous socio-economic background. A total of seven experiments -- some with subtasks -- were used. Six chapters make up the study. In Chapter 1 we have tried to provide an introduction to the theoretical issues which we think are of central importance to the topic under investigation. Because our approach is essentially psycholinguistic, Chapter 2 describes and discusses the methodology employed to gather the necessary data for the study. It is also concerned with the procedures used to evaluate these data. Chapters 3,4, and 5 form the main bulk of the research. Using various experiments, they examine the extent to which Ss deploy their metalinguistic knowledge in the process of attending to and manipulating the following linguistic units: (i) words (Chapter 3); (ii) syllables (Chapter 4); (iii) segments (Chapter 5). Typically, each one of these chapters considers various hypotheses and research questions which concern the specific linguistic unit. Finally, Chapter 6 draws general conclusions from the general study and addresses some implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistic research and, although not extensively, education research

A detection-based pattern recognition framework and its applications

The objective of this dissertation is to present a detection-based pattern recognition framework and demonstrate its applications in automatic speech recognition and broadcast news video story segmentation. Inspired by the studies of modern cognitive psychology and real-world pattern recognition systems, a detection-based pattern recognition framework is proposed to provide an alternative solution for some complicated pattern recognition problems. The primitive features are first detected and the task-specific knowledge hierarchy is constructed level by level; then a variety of heterogeneous information sources are combined together and the high-level context is incorporated as additional information at certain stages. A detection-based framework is a â divide-and-conquerâ design paradigm for pattern recognition problems, which will decompose a conceptually difficult problem into many elementary sub-problems that can be handled directly and reliably. Some information fusion strategies will be employed to integrate the evidence from a lower level to form the evidence at a higher level. Such a fusion procedure continues until reaching the top level. Generally, a detection-based framework has many advantages: (1) more flexibility in both detector design and fusion strategies, as these two parts can be optimized separately; (2) parallel and distributed computational components in primitive feature detection. In such a component-based framework, any primitive component can be replaced by a new one while other components remain unchanged; (3) incremental information integration; (4) high level context information as additional information sources, which can be combined with bottom-up processing at any stage. This dissertation presents the basic principles, criteria, and techniques for detector design and hypothesis verification based on the statistical detection and decision theory. In addition, evidence fusion strategies were investigated in this dissertation. Several novel detection algorithms and evidence fusion methods were proposed and their effectiveness was justified in automatic speech recognition and broadcast news video segmentation system. We believe such a detection-based framework can be employed in more applications in the future.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Lee, Chin-Hui; Committee Member: Clements, Mark; Committee Member: Ghovanloo, Maysam; Committee Member: Romberg, Justin; Committee Member: Yuan, Min

VOCAL BIOMARKERS OF CLINICAL DEPRESSION: WORKING TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF DEPRESSION AND SPEECH

Speech output has long been considered a sensitive marker of a person’s mental state. It has been previously examined as a possible biomarker for diagnosis and treatment response for certain mental health conditions, including clinical depression. To date, it has been difficult to draw robust conclusions from past results due to diversity in samples, speech material, investigated parameters, and analytical methods. Within this exploratory study of speech in clinically depressed individuals, articulatory and phonatory behaviours are examined in relation to psychomotor symptom profiles and overall symptom severity. A systematic review provided context from the existing body of knowledge on the effects of depression on speech, and provided context for experimental setup within this body of work. Examinations of vowel space, monophthong, and diphthong productions as well as a multivariate acoustic analysis of other speech parameters (e.g., F0 range, perturbation measures, composite measures, etc.) are undertaken with the goal of creating a working model of the effects of depression on speech. Initial results demonstrate that overall vowel space area was not different between depressed and healthy speakers, but on closer inspection, this was due to more specific deficits seen in depressed patients along the first formant (F1) axis. Speakers with depression were more likely to produce centralised vowels along F1, as compared to F2—and this was more pronounced for low-front vowels, which are more complex given the degree of tongue-jaw coupling required for production. This pattern was seen in both monophthong and diphthong productions. Other articulatory and phonatory measures were inspected in a factor analysis as well, suggesting additional vocal biomarkers for consideration in diagnosis and treatment assessment of depression—including aperiodicity measures (e.g., higher shimmer and jitter), changes in spectral slope and tilt, and additive noise measures such as increased harmonics-to-noise ratio. Intonation was also affected by diagnostic status, but only for specific speech tasks. These results suggest that laryngeal and articulatory control is reduced by depression. Findings support the clinical utility of combining Ellgring and Scherer’s (1996) psychomotor retardation and social-emotional hypotheses to explain the effects of depression on speech, which suggest observed changes are due to a combination of cognitive, psycho-physiological and motoric mechanisms. Ultimately, depressive speech is able to be modelled along a continuum of hypo- to hyper-speech, where depressed individuals are able to assess communicative situations, assess speech requirements, and then engage in the minimum amount of motoric output necessary to convey their message. As speakers fluctuate with depressive symptoms throughout the course of their disorder, they move along the hypo-hyper-speech continuum and their speech is impacted accordingly. Recommendations for future clinical investigations of the effects of depression on speech are also presented, including suggestions for recording and reporting standards. Results contribute towards cross-disciplinary research into speech analysis between the fields of psychiatry, computer science, and speech science

Products and Services

Today’s global economy offers more opportunities, but is also more complex and competitive than ever before. This fact leads to a wide range of research activity in different fields of interest, especially in the so-called high-tech sectors. This book is a result of widespread research and development activity from many researchers worldwide, covering the aspects of development activities in general, as well as various aspects of the practical application of knowledge

Theory and Applications for Advanced Text Mining

Due to the growth of computer technologies and web technologies, we can easily collect and store large amounts of text data. We can believe that the data include useful knowledge. Text mining techniques have been studied aggressively in order to extract the knowledge from the data since late 1990s. Even if many important techniques have been developed, the text mining research field continues to expand for the needs arising from various application fields. This book is composed of 9 chapters introducing advanced text mining techniques. They are various techniques from relation extraction to under or less resourced language. I believe that this book will give new knowledge in the text mining field and help many readers open their new research fields