A longitudinal study of prosodic exaggeration in child-directed speech

We investigate the role of prosody in child-directed speech of three English speaking adults using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid, longitudinal corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We looked at differences in prosody between child-directed and adult-directed speech. We also looked at the change in prosody of child-directed speech as the child gets older. Results showed significant interactions between speech type and vowel duration, mean F0 and F0 range. We also found significant changes in prosody in child-directed speech as the child gets older

The listening talker: A review of human and algorithmic context-induced modifications of speech

International audienceSpeech output technology is finding widespread application, including in scenarios where intelligibility might be compromised - at least for some listeners - by adverse conditions. Unlike most current algorithms, talkers continually adapt their speech patterns as a response to the immediate context of spoken communication, where the type of interlocutor and the environment are the dominant situational factors influencing speech production. Observations of talker behaviour can motivate the design of more robust speech output algorithms. Starting with a listener-oriented categorisation of possible goals for speech modification, this review article summarises the extensive set of behavioural findings related to human speech modification, identifies which factors appear to be beneficial, and goes on to examine previous computational attempts to improve intelligibility in noise. The review concludes by tabulating 46 speech modifications, many of which have yet to be perceptually or algorithmically evaluated. Consequently, the review provides a roadmap for future work in improving the robustness of speech output

Near-field evaluation of reproducible speech sources

The spatial speech reproduction capabilities of a KEMAR mouth simulator, a loudspeaker, the piston on the sphere model, and a circular harmonic fitting are evaluated in the near-field. The speech directivity of 24 human subjects, both male and female, is measured using a semicircular microphone array with a radius of 36.5 cm in the horizontal plane. Impulse responses are captured for the two devices, and filters are generated for the two numerical models to emulate their directional effect on speech reproduction. The four repeatable speech sources are evaluated through comparison to the recorded human speech both objectively, through directivity pattern and spectral magnitude differences, and subjectively, through a listening test on perceived coloration. Results show that the repeatable sources perform relatively well under the metric of directivity, but irregularities in their directivity patterns introduce audible coloration for off-axis directions.Peer reviewe

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In this article, we describe and interpret a set of acoustic and linguistic features that characterise emotional/emotion-related user states – confined to the one database processed: four classes in a German corpus of children interacting with a pet robot. To this end, we collected a very large feature vector consisting of more than 4000 features extracted at different sites. We performed extensive feature selection (Sequential Forward Floating Search) for seven acoustic and four linguistic types of features, ending up in a small number of ‘most important ’ features which we try to interpret by discussing the impact of different feature and extraction types. We establish different measures of impact and discuss the mutual influence of acoustics and linguistics

Understanding the Built Environment of Shelter Homes for Survivors of Domestic Violence

Across the world, 20-25% of all women are victims of domestic violence or abused by their partners. Survivors are abused where they should be the most secure their own homes. In such situations, they turn to shelter homes for safety and security. There are around 1,800 shelters programs across the entire United States (National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2015) but are often crowded, involve communal living, offer little or no privacy, and include numerous restrictions that come with such a living condition. The spatial qualities and setting of shelter homes should have a positive impact on health, recovery, and well-being of the survivor, but it is clearly evident in the literature that the existing facilities do not promote healing. The aim of this study was to explore qualities of the physical environment of shelters that influence and support the survivors in recovering from this traumatic experience. Four facilities were identified within the state and a study conducted to understand needs of the victims, the problems they face, their perspective, services offered in the shelter homes, and the behavioral implications of the built environment on the residents through surveys, interviews, and observations. Each facility was assessed based on the design objective derived from the literature (framework of dignity comprising of safety and security; privacy and control; and comfort). The study focused on defining the objectives, developing a set of design considerations, and creating a toolkit for studying the design of shelter homes

Dwelling in discordant spaces: Material and emotional geographies of parenting in apartments

In recent decades, many cities in the industrialised west have witnessed unprecedented residential densification. The scale and pace of development is largely driven by population growth and speculative real-estate investment, enabled by strategies of urban consolidation, and manifest materially within planner’s visions for future cities shaped by notions of order and control, standardisation and homogeneity. What remains opaque is the lived experience of diversity within this seemingly more ordered, consolidating landscape. To what extent are apartments produced to accommodate diverse needs and evolving senses of home and belonging? This thesis seeks to answer this question through examination of Australian parents’ experiences raising children in apartments. Despite being framed as the domain of singles, childless couples and empty nesters, increasing numbers of families with children are living in apartments. This presents a pronounced departure from hegemonic discourses that position a detached house as the ideal home for families with children, especially in the Australian context. When such families live in apartments, they are at risk of being seen as out-of-place, their needs poorly accommodated. Urban researchers have begun to document the challenges families with children face in higherdensity residential settings, but as yet, researchers have seldom explored the material negotiations and emotional work of parenting and making home in apartments. With planning agendas prioritising the expansion of higher-density living within a narrow format of apartment buildings, our cities are being reshaped in ways that may fail to support a diversity of needs across the life-course. This thesis responds by examining the everyday experiences of parents living with children in apartments in Sydney, Australia’s most populous city. Qualitative methods and feminist and cultural geographic insights on housing and home foreground narratives that reveal connections between material, cultural and emotional dimensions of apartment life. Positioned as a contribution to the interdisciplinary field of housing studies, I bring together urban planning discourses and cultural norms (as they affect apartment design, materials and regulations), with the lived and embodied experiences of families who dwell in this setting. A mixed-method approach incorporating interviews, floor plan sketches and home tours, allowed insight into eighteen families’ everyday practices and emotions, the materiality of their dwellings and accompanying interactions. Spending up to four and a half hours with families over repeat visits provided in-depth understanding of homemaking processes. From this empirical base, I adopt a narrative format throughout the thesis to privilege the voices of parents and support readers’ insight into the complexity, emotion and depth of their accounts

Speech Enhancement for Automatic Analysis of Child-Centered Audio Recordings

Analysis of child-centred daylong naturalist audio recordings has become a de-facto research protocol in the scientific study of child language development. The researchers are increasingly using these recordings to understand linguistic environment a child encounters in her routine interactions with the world. These audio recordings are captured by a microphone that a child wears throughout a day. The audio recordings, being naturalistic, contain a lot of unwanted sounds from everyday life which degrades the performance of speech analysis tasks. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the utility of speech enhancement (SE) algorithms in the automatic analysis of such recordings. To this effect, several classical signal processing and modern machine learning-based SE methods were employed 1) as a denoiser for speech corrupted with additive noise sampled from real-life child-centred daylong recordings and 2) as front-end for downstream speech processing tasks of addressee classification (infant vs. adult-directed speech) and automatic syllable count estimation from the speech. The downstream tasks were conducted on data derived from a set of geographically, culturally, and linguistically diverse child-centred daylong audio recordings. The performance of denoising was evaluated through objective quality metrics (spectral distortion and instrumental intelligibility) and through the downstream task performance. Finally, the objective evaluation results were compared with downstream task performance results to find whether objective metrics can be used as a reasonable proxy to select SE front-end for a downstream task. The results obtained show that a recently proposed Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based progressive learning architecture provides maximum performance gains in the downstream tasks in comparison with the other SE methods and baseline results. Classical signal processing-based SE methods also lead to competitive performance. From the comparison of objective assessment and downstream task performance results, no predictive relationship between task-independent objective metrics and performance of downstream tasks was found

Automatic Classification of Infant- and Adult-directed Speech from Acoustic Speech Signals

Paralinguistic speech processing (PSP) is a field of audio processing where the focus of the analysis is beyond the literal message. One potential task in the area of PSP is the classifica-tion of samples into infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). In the pre-sent study, a system which classifies samples into IDS/ADS as accurately as possible was examined by experimenting with different classifiers used in other fields of PSP, and by testing different sets of manually defined features. The classification results showed that the best set of features was a set which included all speech-relevant features extracted in this study except spectrogram. Additionally, support vector machines (SVMs) performed the best of the individ-ual classifiers used in the study, while an ensemble classifier outperformed all individual clas-sifiers. These results were in line with the previous IDS/ADS classification studies in the field. Keywords: classification, speaking style, infant-directed speech, adult-directed speech, motherese, speech processing, acoustic signa