Finding the Most Uniform Changes in Vowel Polygon Caused by Psychological Stress

Using vowel polygons, exactly their parameters, is chosen as the criterion for achievement of differences between normal state of speaker and relevant speech under real psychological stress. All results were experimentally obtained by created software for vowel polygon analysis applied on ExamStress database. Selected 6 methods based on cross-correlation of different features were classified by the coefficient of variation and for each individual vowel polygon, the efficiency coefficient marking the most significant and uniform differences between stressed and normal speech were calculated. As the best method for observing generated differences resulted method considered mean of cross correlation values received for difference area value with vector length and angle parameter couples. Generally, best results for stress detection are achieved by vowel triangles created by /i/-/o/-/u/ and /a/-/i/-/o/ vowel triangles in formant planes containing the fifth formant F5 combined with other formants

The importance of "scaffolding" in clinical approach to deafness across the lifespan

Throughout the present work of thesis, the concept of scaffolding will be used as a fil rouge through the chapters. What I mean for “scaffolding approach”, therefore, is an integrated and multidisciplinary clinical and research methodology to hearing impairments that could take into account persons as a whole; an approach that needs to be continuously adapted and harmonized with the individuals, pursuant to their progress, their limits and resources, in consideration of their audiological, cognitive, emotional, personal, and social characteristics. The following studies of our research group will be presented: A study (2020) designed to assess the effects of parent training (PT) on enhancing children’s communication development (chapter two); Two studies of our research group (2016; 2020) concerning variables influencing comprehension of emotions and nuclear executive functions in deaf children with cochlear implant (chapter three and chapter four) In chapter five a presentation and description of our Mind-Active Communication program, main topics and aims, multidisciplinary organizations of group and individual sessions with a description of used materials and methodology is given. Finally, a preliminary evaluation to explore the use of this multidisciplinary rehabilitative program on quality of life, psychological wellbeing, and hearing abilities in a sample of cochlear implanted elderly persons is reported

Temporal Characteristics of Fluent Speech in the Stuttered Utterances of Children

Studies investigating the stuttered speech of children are fewer in number as compared to those exploring adult dysfluency. This is notable as the features that characterize child stuttering are generally thought to be significantly different from those that describe advanced stuttering. Clinical intervention programs currently use timing-based interventions as one means of treating stuttering. As such, acoustic data describing the timing disorder is critical to determining the efficacy of these programs for both children and adults. The present study investigated the difference in duration (in msec) between words of stuttered and nonstuttered utterances of children. The words immediately before and after a stuttered event were compared with the same words, produced by the same speaker, in the same nonstuttered utterance. Stimulus materials consisted of 20 items selected from the Patterned Elicitation Syntax Test, (PEST), (Young & Perachio, 1983). Sixty stimulus sentences (3 per item) were verbally presented to each of 3 preschool subjects who were instructed to repeat exactly what they heard. The stimulus sentences were presented on two different occasions, with a 5 minute break between each session to reduce the affects of adaption, to elicit corresponding speech samples from each subject. Analysis consisted of digital spectrographic strip measurement of word duration for the words immediately before (BSTUT) and after (ASTUT) a stuttered word. These measurements were then compared to word duration measurements for the exact corresponding words immediately before (BNSTUT) and after (ANSTUT) the same nonstuttered words produced by the same speaker. The results of two-tailed t-tests for paired samples calculated for BSTUT vs. BNSTUT (p=.998) and ASTUT vs. ANSTUT (p=.076) indicate no significant differences exist between the word durations of both data groups at the p=.05 level of confidence. The findings of the present study do not support the theory that stuttering effects the production of words immediately before and after a stuttered word in children\u27s speech

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n=25 children aged 3\u20135 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half began with a weak\u2013strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patata, while the other half began with a strong\u2013weak (SW) pattern, as in gomito. Word productions that were identified as correct via perceptual judgement were analysed acoustically. The initial 2 syllables of each correct word production were analysed in terms of the duration, peak intensity, and peak fundamental frequency of the vowels using a relative measure of contrast\u2014the normalised pairwise variability index (PVI). Results across the majority of measures showed that children\u2019s stress contrastivity was adult-like. However, the data revealed that children\u2019s contrastivity for trisyllabic words beginning with a WS pattern was not adult-like regarding the PVI for vowel duration: children showed less contrastivity than adults. This effect appeared to be driven by differences in word-medial gemination between children and adults. Results are compared with data from a recent acoustic study of stress contrastivity in English speaking children and adults and discussed in relation to language-specific and physiological motor-speech constraints on production

Gender detection in children’s speech utterances for human-robot interaction

The human voice speech essentially includes paralinguistic information used in many real-time applications. Detecting the children’s gender is considered a challenging task compared to the adult’s gender. In this study, a system for human-robot interaction (HRI) is proposed to detect the gender in children’s speech utterances without depending on the text. The robot's perception includes three phases: Feature’s extraction phase where four formants are measured at each glottal pulse and then a median is calculated across these measurements. After that, three types of features are measured which are formant average (AF), formant dispersion (DF), and formant position (PF). Feature’s standardization phase where the measured feature dimensions are standardized using the z-score method. The semantic understanding phase is where the children’s gender is detected accurately using the logistic regression classifier. At the same time, the action of the robot is specified via a speech response using the text to speech (TTS) technique. Experiments are conducted on the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Kids dataset to measure the suggested system’s performance. In the suggested system, the overall accuracy is 98%. The results show a relatively clear improvement in terms of accuracy of up to 13% compared to related works that utilized the CMU Kids dataset