314 research outputs found

    Audiovisual speech perception in cochlear implant patients

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    Hearing with a cochlear implant (CI) is very different compared to a normal-hearing (NH) experience, as the CI can only provide limited auditory input. Nevertheless, the central auditory system is capable of learning how to interpret such limited auditory input such that it can extract meaningful information within a few months after implant switch-on. The capacity of the auditory cortex to adapt to new auditory stimuli is an example of intra-modal plasticity — changes within a sensory cortical region as a result of altered statistics of the respective sensory input. However, hearing deprivation before implantation and restoration of hearing capacities after implantation can also induce cross-modal plasticity — changes within a sensory cortical region as a result of altered statistics of a different sensory input. Thereby, a preserved cortical region can, for example, support a deprived cortical region, as in the case of CI users which have been shown to exhibit cross-modal visual-cortex activation for purely auditory stimuli. Before implantation, during the period of hearing deprivation, CI users typically rely on additional visual cues like lip-movements for understanding speech. Therefore, it has been suggested that CI users show a pronounced binding of the auditory and visual systems, which may allow them to integrate auditory and visual speech information more efficiently. The projects included in this thesis investigate auditory, and particularly audiovisual speech processing in CI users. Four event-related potential (ERP) studies approach the matter from different perspectives, each with a distinct focus. The first project investigates how audiovisually presented syllables are processed by CI users with bilateral hearing loss compared to NH controls. Previous ERP studies employing non-linguistic stimuli and studies using different neuroimaging techniques found distinct audiovisual interactions in CI users. However, the precise timecourse of cross-modal visual-cortex recruitment and enhanced audiovisual interaction for speech related stimuli is unknown. With our ERP study we fill this gap, and we present differences in the timecourse of audiovisual interactions as well as in cortical source configurations between CI users and NH controls. The second study focuses on auditory processing in single-sided deaf (SSD) CI users. SSD CI patients experience a maximally asymmetric hearing condition, as they have a CI on one ear and a contralateral NH ear. Despite the intact ear, several behavioural studies have demonstrated a variety of beneficial effects of restoring binaural hearing, but there are only few ERP studies which investigate auditory processing in SSD CI users. Our study investigates whether the side of implantation affects auditory processing and whether auditory processing via the NH ear of SSD CI users works similarly as in NH controls. Given the distinct hearing conditions of SSD CI users, the question arises whether there are any quantifiable differences between CI user with unilateral hearing loss and bilateral hearing loss. In general, ERP studies on SSD CI users are rather scarce, and there is no study on audiovisual processing in particular. Furthermore, there are no reports on lip-reading abilities of SSD CI users. To this end, in the third project we extend the first study by including SSD CI users as a third experimental group. The study discusses both differences and similarities between CI users with bilateral hearing loss and CI users with unilateral hearing loss as well as NH controls and provides — for the first time — insights into audiovisual interactions in SSD CI users. The fourth project investigates the influence of background noise on audiovisual interactions in CI users and whether a noise-reduction algorithm can modulate these interactions. It is known that in environments with competing background noise listeners generally rely more strongly on visual cues for understanding speech and that such situations are particularly difficult for CI users. As shown in previous auditory behavioural studies, the recently introduced noise-reduction algorithm "ForwardFocus" can be a useful aid in such cases. However, the questions whether employing the algorithm is beneficial in audiovisual conditions as well and whether using the algorithm has a measurable effect on cortical processing have not been investigated yet. In this ERP study, we address these questions with an auditory and audiovisual syllable discrimination task. Taken together, the projects included in this thesis contribute to a better understanding of auditory and especially audiovisual speech processing in CI users, revealing distinct processing strategies employed to overcome the limited input provided by a CI. The results have clinical implications, as they suggest that clinical hearing assessments, which are currently purely auditory, should be extended to audiovisual assessments. Furthermore, they imply that rehabilitation including audiovisual training methods may be beneficial for all CI user groups for quickly achieving the most effective CI implantation outcome

    Linguística clínica

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    A Linguística Clínica reúne profissionais, investigadores e estudantes de diferentes graus académicos cujo foco de trabalho é a exploração da ponte entre a Linguística e a Fonoaudiologia (na tradição brasileira) ou a Terapia da Fala (na tradição portuguesa). Tem como objetivos centrais a construção de conhecimento sobre a natureza dos desempenhos linguísticos atípicos e a preocupação constante em tornar os processos de avaliação e de intervenção em contexto clínico cada vez mais rigorosos e eficazes. O presente volume destina-se a quem estuda ou investiga aspetos relacionados com desempenhos linguísticos atípicos em países lusófonos, nomeadamente a estudantes e docentes de cursos de graduação e pós-graduação nas áreas da Terapia da Fala/ Fonoaudiologia, da Linguística, da Psicologia e da Educação. Os capítulos que integram a presente publicação estão organizados em quatro blocos temáticos. O bloco inicial tem como objetivo central fornecer uma perspetiva histórica dos estudos em Fonologia Clínica e em Sintaxe Clínica. O segundo centra-se em aspetos fonológicos e sua relação com a dimensão fonética da língua. O terceiro bloco integra capítulos que exploram o módulo gramatical da sintaxe, a interface gramática-pragmática e o discurso. O último bloco reúne um conjunto de investigações sobre populações específicas

    Measuring speech intelligibility with deaf and hard-of-hearing children : A systematic review

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    © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] is great variability in the ways in which the speech intelligibility of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use spoken language as part, or all, of their communication system is measured. This systematic review examined the measures and methods that have been used when examining the speech intelligibility of children who are DHH and the characteristics of these measures and methods. A systematic database search was conducted of CENTRAL; CINAHL; Cochrane; ERIC; Joanna Briggs; Linguistics, Language and Behavior Abstracts; Medline; Scopus; and Web of Science databases, as well as supplemental searches. A total of 204 included studies reported the use of many different measures/methods which measured segmental aspects of speech, with the most common being Allen et al.'s (2001, The reliability of a rating scale for measuring speech intelligibility following pediatric cochlear implantation. Otology and Neurotology, 22(5), 631-633. https://doi.org/10.1097/00129492-200109000-00012) Speech Intelligibility Rating scale. Many studies included insufficient details to determine the measure that was used. Future research should utilize methods/measures with known psychometric validity, provide clear descriptions of the methods/measures used, and consider using more than one measure to account for limitations inherent in different methods of measuring the speech intelligibility of children who are DHH, and consider and discuss the rationale for the measure/method chosen.Peer reviewe

    Data-driven Speech Intelligibility Enhancement and Prediction for Hearing Aids

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    Hearing impairment is a widespread problem around the world. It is estimated that one in six people are living with some degree of hearing loss. Moderate and severe hearing impairment has been recognised as one of the major causes of disability, which is associated with declines in the quality of life, mental illness and dementia. However, investigation shows that only 10-20\% of older people with significant hearing impairment wear hearing aids. One of the main factors causing the low uptake is that current devices struggle to help hearing aid users understand speech in noisy environments. For the purpose of compensating for the elevated hearing thresholds and dysfunction of source separation processing caused by the impaired auditory system, amplification and denoising have been the major focuses of current hearing aid studies to improve the intelligibility of speech in noise. Also, it is important to derive a metric that can fairly predict speech intelligibility for the better development of hearing aid techniques. This thesis aims to enhance the speech intelligibility of hearing impaired listeners. Motivated by the success of data-driven approaches in many speech processing applications, this work proposes the differentiable hearing aid speech processing (DHASP) framework to optimise both the amplification and denoising modules within a hearing aid processor. This is accomplished by setting an intelligibility-based optimisation objective and taking advantage of large-scale speech databases to train the hearing aid processor to maximise the intelligibility for the listeners. The first set of experiments is conducted on both clean and noisy speech databases, and the results from objective evaluation suggest that the amplification fittings optimised within the DHASP framework can outperform a widely used and well-recognised fitting. The second set of experiments is conducted on a large-scale database with simulated domestic noisy scenes. The results from both objective and subjective evaluations show that the DHASP-optimised hearing aid processor incorporating a deep neural network-based denoising module can achieve competitive performance in terms of intelligibility enhancement. A precise intelligibility predictor can provide reliable evaluation results to save the cost of expensive and time-consuming subjective evaluation. Inspired by the findings that automatic speech recognition (ASR) models show similar recognition results as humans in some experiments, this work exploits ASR models for intelligibility prediction. An intrusive approach using ASR hidden representations and a non-intrusive approach using ASR uncertainty are proposed and explained in the third and fourth experimental chapters. Experiments are conducted on two databases, one with monaural speech in speech-spectrum-shaped noise with normal hearing listeners, and the other one with processed binaural speech in domestic noise with hearing impaired listeners. Results suggest that both the intrusive and non-intrusive approaches can achieve top performances and outperform a number of widely used intelligibility prediction approaches. In conclusion, this thesis covers both the enhancement and prediction of speech intelligibility for hearing aids. The proposed hearing aid processor optimised within the proposed DHASP framework can significantly improve the intelligibility of speech in noise for hearing impaired listeners. Also, it is shown that the proposed ASR-based intelligibility prediction approaches can achieve state-of-the-art performances against a number of widely used intelligibility predictors

    Modelos, avaliação e intervenção

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    Sinopse: A Linguística Clínica reúne profissionais, investigadores e estudantes de diferentes graus académicos cujo foco de trabalho é a exploração da ponte entre a Linguística e a Fonoaudiologia (na tradição brasileira) ou a Terapia da Fala (na tradição portuguesa). Tem como objetivos centrais a construção de conhecimento sobre a natureza dos desempenhos linguísticos atípicos e a preocupação constante em tornar os processos de avaliação e de intervenção em contexto clínico cada vez mais rigorosos e eficazes. O presente volume destina-se a quem estuda ou investiga aspetos relacionados com desempenhos linguísticos atípicos em países lusófonos, nomeadamente a estudantes e docentes de cursos de graduação e pós-graduação nas áreas da Terapia da Fala/ Fonoaudiologia, da Linguística, da Psicologia e da Educação. Os capítulos que integram a presente publicação estão organizados em quatro blocos temáticos. O bloco inicial tem como objetivo central fornecer uma perspetiva histórica dos estudos em Fonologia Clínica e em Sintaxe Clínica. O segundo centra-se em aspetos fonológicos e sua relação com a dimensão fonética da língua. O terceiro bloco integra capítulos que exploram o módulo gramatical da sintaxe, a interface gramática-pragmática e o discurso. O último bloco reúne um conjunto de investigações sobre populações específicas.Synopsis: Clinical Linguistics brings together professionals, researchers and students in different academic degrees focused on the bridge between Linguistics and Speech and Language Therapy. The main purpose is to display knowledge on the nature of atypical linguistic performances and to make the assessment and intervention processes increasingly rigorous and effective in the clinical context. This volume is intended for those who study or investigate aspects related to atypical linguistic performance in Portuguese-speaking countries, namely for students and teachers of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of Speech and Language Therapy, Linguistics, Psychology and Education. The chapters that make up this publication are organized into four thematic blocks. The main objective of the initial block is to provide a historical perspective of studies in Clinical Phonology and Clinical Syntax. The second block focuses on phonological aspects and their relationship with the phonetic dimension of the language. The third one includes chapters that explore the grammatical module of syntax, the grammar-pragmatic interface and discourse. The last block brings together a set of investigations on specific populations

    Conference Proceedings of the Euroregio / BNAM 2022 Joint Acoustic Conference

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    Communication with diminutives to young children vs. pets in German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, and English

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    This contribution is dedicated to Steven Gillis with whom we have collaborated since the nineties within the “Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition” on both child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS) and also about the development of diminutives (DIMs). We investigate parallels in the use of DIMs and of hypocoristics (HYPs) between CDS and pet-directed speech (PDS), whereas CS is only marginally dealt with. When relevant, also adult-directed speech (ADS), written or oral (especially from electronic corpora, wherever available) will be compared. The presuppositions of this investigation will be stated at the beginning of the Introduction (§ 1). This involves several innovations (beyond descriptions of new data), when compared with existing literature, relevant to theoretical and typological problem areas. We will show that also in DIMs and HYPs used in CDS and PDS semantics only plays a partial or even marginal role when using more DIMs to communicate with young children and young and/or small pets, because it is more relevant that both younger and smaller pets are emotionally closer to us, which is again a pragmatic factor. In regard to language typology, we will apply our concepts of morphological richness and productivity, as argued for and supported in our previous publications, to CDS and PDS and show that richer and more productive patterns of DIM formation of a language also have a typological impact on more frequent and more productive use both in CDS and PDS. We will also apply our concepts of grading morphosemantic transparency/opacity, as argued for and supported in our previous publications, and we start to show, as al- ready shown for CS, that also in CDS towards young children (and similarly in PDS) more morphosemantically transparent DIMs are used than in ADS. This is also connected to their predominantly pragmatic meanings in CDS and PDS (obviously not exclusively pragmatic as in early CS). The languages and authors were selected according to who among the participants in the Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition had CDS and PDS available, plus Elisa Mattiello who has collected English and Italian PDS data.Dit artikel gaat over het gebruik van verkleinwoorden en koosnamen (hypocoristics) in twee taalregisters: taal gericht tot kinderen (child-directed speech, CDS) en taal gericht tot huisdieren (pet-directed speech, PDS). De semantiek van verkleinwoorden blijkt een minder grote rol te spelen dan de pragmatiek: de emotionele nabijheid van kinderen en huisdieren. De studie, waarin vijf talen worden vergeleken, verkent ook de typolo- gie: de morfologische rijkdom van verkleinwoorden in een taal beïnvloedt de produc- tie.Daarnaast speelt de semantische transparantie van verkleinwoorden crosslinguïs- tisch een rol. In CDS en PDS worden meer transparante verkleinwoorden gebruikt

    Linguística clínica: modelos, avaliação e intervenção

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