Experimental phonetic study of the timing of voicing in English obstruents

The treatment given to the timing of voicing in three areas of phonetic research -- phonetic taxonomy, speech production modelling, and speech synthesis -- Is considered in the light of an acoustic study of the timing of voicing in British English obstruents. In each case, it is found to be deficient. The underlying cause is the difficulty in applying a rigid segmental approach to an aspect of speech production characterised by important inter-articulator asynchronies, coupled to the limited quantitative data available concerning the systematic properties of the timing of voicing in languages. It is argued that the categories and labels used to describe the timing of voicing In obstruents are Inadequate for fulfilling the descriptive goals of phonetic theory. One possible alternative descriptive strategy is proposed, based on incorporating aspects of the parametric organisation of speech into the descriptive framework. Within the domain of speech production modelling, no satisfactory account has been given of fine-grained variability of the timing of voicing not capable of explanation in terms of general properties of motor programming and utterance execution. The experimental results support claims In the literature that the phonetic control of an utterance may be somewhat less abstract than has been suggestdd in some previous reports. A schematic outline is given, of one way in which the timing of voicing could be controlled in speech production. The success of a speech synthesis-by-rule system depends to a great extent on a comprehensive encoding of the systematic phonetic characteristics of the target language. Only limited success has been achieved in the past thirty years. A set of rules is proposed for generating more naturalistic patterns of voicing in obstruents, reflecting those observed in the experimental component of this study. Consideration Is given to strategies for evaluating the effect of fine-grained phonetic rules In speech synthesis

Pitching it differently : a comparison of the pitch ranges of German and English speakers

We thank Frank K_gler and his colleagues for the collection of the German data.This paper presents preliminary findings of a largescale systematic comparison of various measures of pitch range for female speakers of Southern Standard British English (SSBE) and Northern Standard German (NSG). The purpose of the study as a whole is to develop the methodology to allow comparisons of pitch range across languages and regional accents, and to determine how they correlate with listeners' perceptual sensitivity to cross-language/accent differences. In this paper we report on how four measures of pitch range in read speech (text, sentences) compare across the two groups of female speakers. Preliminary results show that the measures of the difference between the 90th and 10th percentile (in semitones), and +/- 2 standard deviations around the mean in ST differentiate the groups of speakers in the direction predicted by the stereotypical beliefs described in the literature about German and English speakers. Furthermore, these differences are most obvious in the read text and longer sentences and the effect disappears in sentences of a short duration.casl[1] Boersma, P., Weenink, D. 2006. Praat (Version 4.5). http://www.praat.org. [2] Brown, A., Docherty, G. J. 1995. Phonetic Variation in Dysarthric Speech As a Function of Sampling Task. Eur. J. Disorder. Comm. 30(1), 17-35. [3] Bruce, G. 1982. Textual Aspects of Prosody in Swedish. Phonetica 39, 274-287. [4] De Pijper, J. R. 1983. Modelling British English Intonation. Foris Publications. [5] Dolson, M. 1994. The Pitch of Speech As a Function of Linguistic Community. Music. Percept. 11(3), 321-331. [6] Eckert, H., Laver, J. 1994. Menschen und ihre Stimmen: Aspekte der vokalen Kommunikation. Weinheim: Psychologie Verlags Union. [7] Estebas-Vilaplana, E. 2000. Peak F0 Downtrends in Central Catalan Neutral Declaratives. Speech, Hearing and Language: work in progress. London, 16- 41. [8] Gibbon, D. 1998. German Intonation. In: Hirst, D. J., Di Christo, A. (eds), Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 78-95. [9] Gilles, P., Peters, J. 2004. Regional Variation in Intonation. T_bingen: Niemeyer Verlag. [10] Grabe, E., Post, B., Nolan, F., Farrar, K. 2000. Pitch Accent Realization in Four Varieties of British English. J. Phonetics 28(2), 161-185. [11] Ladd, D. R. 1988. Declination Reset and the Hierarchical Organization of Utterances. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84(2), 530-544. [12] Ladd, D. R., Terken, J. 1995. Modelling Intra- and Inter-Speaker Pitch Range Variation. Proc.of ICPhS. Stockholm, 386-389. [13] Liberman, M., Pierrehumbert, J. 1984. Intonational Invariance Under Changes in Pitch Range and Length. In: Aronoff, M., Oehrle, R., Kelley, F., Stephens, B. W. (eds), Language Sound Structure, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 157-233. [14] Mennen, I. 2007. Phonological and Phonetic Influences in Non-Native Intonation. In: Trouvain, J., Gut, U. (eds), Non-Native Prosody: Phonetic Descriptions and Teaching Practice, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [15] Prieto, P., Shih, C., Nibert, H. 2007. Pitch Downtrend in Spanish. J. Phonetics 24(4), 445-473. [16] Thorsen, N. 1983. Standard Danish Sentence Intonation - Phonetic Data and Their Representation. Folia Linguist. 17, 187-220. [17] Ulbrich, C. 2006. Pitch Range Is Not Pitch Range. Proc.Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden. [18] van Bezooijen, R. 1995. Sociocultural Aspects of Pitch Differences Between Japanese and Dutch Women. Lang. Speech 38, 253-265.pub42pu

Listener evaluation of sociophonetic variability : probing constraints and capabilities

This paper reports the results of an experimental study designed to investigate how listeners learn to create new associations between phonetic properties of the speech signal and external social referents. Very little is known of how this learning takes place in children, and it is a particularly challenging area to study given the difficulty in controlling some of the variables which are likely to be important factors in children's learning of the productive and interpretative dimensions of social-indexical phonetic variation. Thus, in this study, we focus on adult listeners in order to develop a sense of how adults might approach this learning task, and also to test out a method for probing this form of learning in a controlled fashion. 49 participants were trained on new patterns of social-indexical variability and, in a subsequent test phase, we assessed the extent to which this training led the listeners to acquire new associations between specific realizational variants and the social categories with which they have been associated in the training material. Results are reported from four experimental conditions which provided listeners with a range of different learning tasks. Our findings suggest that learning of novel sociophonetic associations can be achieved as the result of a relatively short amount of exposure to training material incorporating the new association, but that the success with which learning takes place is dependent on a number of factors such as the nature of the criterial variable and individual learner variation.Full Tex

Revealing perceptual structure through input variation: cross-accent categorization of vowels in five accents of English

This paper characterizes the perceptual structure of vowel systems in five regional accents of English, from Australia (A), New Zealand (Z), London (L), Yorkshire (Y), and Newcastle upon Tyne (N), on the basis of “whole system” vowel categorization experiments. We established patterns of within-accent vowel confusions, and then explored cross-accent perception, assessing how listeners from one accent background categorize vowels from another. Our experimental task required mapping continuous phonetic dimensions to perceptual categories in the absence of phonotactic and lexical cues to vowel identity and socio-indexical information about the talker. Our results show that, without these sources of information, there is uncertainty in vowel categorization, even for native accent vowels, and that this degree of uncertainty increases for unfamiliar accents. The patterns of cross-accent perception largely reflect the accent-specific perceptual structure of the listener, as opposed to adaptations to the stimulus accents. This finding contrasts with the type of active talker adaptation found with tasks offering lexical information about vowel identity and indexical information about the talker

The GATA1s isoform is normally down-regulated during terminal haematopoietic differentiation and over-expression leads to failure to repress MYB, CCND2 and SKI during erythroid differentiation of K562 cells

Background: Although GATA1 is one of the most extensively studied haematopoietic transcription factors little is currently known about the physiological functions of its naturally occurring isoforms GATA1s and GATA1FL in humans—particularly whether the isoforms have distinct roles in different lineages and whether they have non-redundant roles in haematopoietic differentiation. As well as being of general interest to understanding of haematopoiesis, GATA1 isoform biology is important for children with Down syndrome associated acute megakaryoblastic leukaemia (DS-AMKL) where GATA1FL mutations are an essential driver for disease pathogenesis. <p/>Methods: Human primary cells and cell lines were analyzed using GATA1 isoform specific PCR. K562 cells expressing GATA1s or GATA1FL transgenes were used to model the effects of the two isoforms on in vitro haematopoietic differentiation. <p/>Results: We found no evidence for lineage specific use of GATA1 isoforms; however GATA1s transcripts, but not GATA1FL transcripts, are down-regulated during in vitro induction of terminal megakaryocytic and erythroid differentiation in the cell line K562. In addition, transgenic K562-GATA1s and K562-GATA1FL cells have distinct gene expression profiles both in steady state and during terminal erythroid differentiation, with GATA1s expression characterised by lack of repression of MYB, CCND2 and SKI. <p/>Conclusions: These findings support the theory that the GATA1s isoform plays a role in the maintenance of proliferative multipotent megakaryocyte-erythroid precursor cells and must be down-regulated prior to terminal differentiation. In addition our data suggest that SKI may be a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of children with DS-AMKL

Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: A Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed

Cross-language differences in fundamental frequency range: a comparison of English and German

This paper presents a systematic comparison of various measures of f0 range in female speakers of English and German. F0 range was analysed along two dimensions, level (i.e. overall f0 height) and span (extent of f0 modulation within a given speech sample). These were examined using two types of measures, one based on 'long-term distributional' (LTD) methods, and the other based on specific landmarks in speech that are linguistic in nature ('linguistic' measures). The various methods were used to identify whether and on what basis or bases speakers of these two languages differ in f0 range. Findings yielded significant cross-language differences in both dimensions of f0 range, but effect sizes were found to be larger for span than for level, and for linguistic than for LTD measures. The linguistic measures also uncovered some differences between the two languages in how f0 range varies through an intonation contour. This helps shed light on the relation between intonational structure and f0 range.caslAltenberg, E. P., and Ferrand, C. T. (2006). Fundamental frequency in monolingual English, bilingual English=Russian, and bilingual English- Cantonese young adult women,- J. Voice 20(1), 89-96. Awan, S. N., and Mueller, P. B. (1996). Speaking fundamental frequency characteristics of white, African American, and Hispanic kindergartners,- J. Speech. Hear. Res. 39(3), 573-577. Baken, R. J., and Orlikoff, R. F. (2000). Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 2nd ed. (Singular Publishing Group, San Diego, CA). Banse, R., and Scherer, K. R. (1996). Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression,- J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 70(3), 614-636. Beckman, M., and Ayers Elam, G. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI Labeling, version 3 (Ohio State University, Ohio). Benjamini, Y., and Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate-a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing,- J. R. Statist. Soc. B 57(1), 289-300. Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2007). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 4.6) [computer program],- http:==www.praat.org= (Last viewed May 14, 2007). Breen, M., Dilley, L. C., Kraemer, J., and Gibson, E. (2012). Inter-transcriber agreement for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch),- Corpus Linguist. Linguist. Theory (in press). Brown, A., and Docherty, G. J. (1995). Phonetic variation in dysarthric speech as a function of sampling task,- Eur. J. Disord. Commun. 30(1), 17-35. Chen, S. H. (2005). The effects of tones on speaking frequency and intensity ranges in Mandarin and Min dialects,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117(5), 3225-3230. Clark-Carter, D. (1997). Doing Quantitative Psychological Research: From Design to Report (Psychology Press, Hove, East Sussex). Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient for agreement for nominal scales,- Educ. Psychol. Meas. 20, 37-46. Deutsch, D., Le, J., Shen, J., and Henthorn, T. (2009). The pitch levels of female speech in two Chinese villages,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125(5), EL208-EL213. Diehl, J. J., Watson, D., Bennetto, L., Mcdonough, J., and Gunlogson, C. (2009). An acoustic analysis of prosody in high-functioning autism,- Appl. Psycholinguist. 30(3), 385-404. Dilley, L. C., and Brown, M. (2007). Effects of pitch range variation on f0 extrema in an imitation task,- J. Phonetics 35(4), 523-551. Dolson, M. (1994). The pitch of speech as a function of linguistic community,- Music. Percept. 11(3), 321-331. Eady, S. J. (1982). Differences in the F0 patterns of speech: Tone language versus stress language,- Lang. Speech 25, 29-42. Eckert, H., and Laver, J. (1994). Menschen und ihre Stimmen: Aspekte der vokalen Kommunikation (Humans and their Voices: Aspects of Vocal Communication) (Psychologie Verlags Union, Weinheim). Escudero, D., Aguilar, L., Vanrell, M. M., and Prieto, P. (2012). Analysis of inter-transcriber consistency in the Cat_ToBI prosodic labelling system,- Speech Communications, retrieved from http:==prosodia.upf. edu=home=arxiu=publicacions=escudero-et-al_analysis-intertranscriberconsistency- cattobi.pdf (Last viewed December 21, 2011). Field, A. (2005). Discovering Statistics using SPSS, 2nd ed. (SAGE Publications, London). Gibbon, D. (1998). German Intonation,- in Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages, edited by D. J. Hirst and A. Di Christo (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 78-95. Grabe, E. (1998). Comparative intonational phonology: English and German,- Ph.D. thesis, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Max Planck Institute Series in Psycholinguistics No. 7, Wageningen, Ponsen en Looien. Gussenhoven, C., Repp, B. H., Rietveld, A., Rump, H. H., and Terken, J. (1997). The perceptual prominence of fundamental frequency peaks,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102(5), 3009-3022. Hanley, T. D., Snidecor, J. C., and Ringel, R. L. (1967). Some acoustic differences among languages,- Phonetica 14, 97-107. Hirschberg, J., and Ward, G. (1992). The influence of pitch range, duration, amplitude, and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise fall rise intonation contour in English,- J. Phonetics 20(2), 241-251. Hollien, H., Hollien, P. A., and de Jong, G. (1997). Effects of three parameters on speaking fundamental frequency,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102(5), 2984-2992. Hubbard, K., and Trauner, D. A. (2007). Intonation and emotion in autistic spectrum disorders,- J. Psycholinguist. Res. 36(2), 159-173. Keating, P., and Kuo, G. (2010). Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin,- UCLA Work. Papers Phonetics 108, 164-187. Kreiman, J., and Van Lancker Sidtis, D. (2011). Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception (John Wiley and Sons, Chichester). Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational Phonology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Ladd, D. R., Silverman, K. E. A., Tolkmitt, F., Bergmann, G., and Scherer, K. R. (1985). Evidence for the independent function of intonation contour type, voice quality, and F0 range in signaling speaker affect,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78(2), 435-444. Landis, J., and Koch, G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data,- Biometrics 33(1), 159-174. Liberman, M., and Pierrehumbert, J. (1984). Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length,- in Language Sound Structure, edited by M. Aronoff, R. Oehrle, F. Kelley, and B. W. Stephens (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 157-233. Majewski, W., Hollien, H., and Zalewski, J. (1972). Speaking fundamental frequency of Polish adult males,- Phonetica 25(2), 119-125. Mangold, M., and Grebe, P. (2005). Duden Ausspracheworterbuch (Duden Pronunciation Dictionary), 6th ed. (Dudenverlag, Mannheim). Nishio, M., and Niimi, S. (2008). Changes in speaking fundamental frequency characteristics with aging,- Folia Phoniatr. Logo. 60(3), 120-127. NIST=SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods, (2010). http:==www.itl.nist.gov=div898=handbook= (Last viewed October 26, 2010). Patterson, D. (2000). A linguistic approach to pitch range modelling,- Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. Pierrehumbert, J. (1979). Perception of fundamental-frequency declination,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66(2), 363-369. Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation,- Ph.D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Rendall, D., Vokey, J. R., and Nemeth, C. (2007). Lifting the curtain on the Wizard of Oz: Biased voice-based impressions of speaker size,- J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 33(5), 1208-1219. Sobin, C., and Alpert, M. (1999). Emotion in speech: The acoustic attributes of fear, anger, sadness, and joy,- J. Psycholinguist. Res. 28(4), 347-365. Terken, J. (1994). Fundamental-frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables II: Nonfinal accents,- J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95(6), 3662-3665. 't Hart, J., Collier, R., and Cohen, A. (1990). A Perceptual Study of Intonation (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Van Bezooijen, R. (1995). Sociocultural aspects of pitch differences between Japanese and Dutch women,- Lang. Speech 38, 253-265. Van Dommelen, W. A., and Moxness, B. H. (1995). Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: Sex-specific behaviour,- Lang. Speech 38, 267-287. Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), Vols. 1-3. Yoon, T., Chavarria, S., Cole, J., and Hasegawa, M. (2004). Intertranscriber reliability of prosodic labeling on telephone conversation using ToBI,- Proc. Interspeech 2004, 2729-2732.131pub2622pub

COVID-19 symptoms at hospital admission vary with age and sex: results from the ISARIC prospective multinational observational study

Background: The ISARIC prospective multinational observational study is the largest cohort of hospitalized patients with COVID-19. We present relationships of age, sex, and nationality to presenting symptoms. Methods: International, prospective observational study of 60 109 hospitalized symptomatic patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 recruited from 43 countries between 30 January and 3 August 2020. Logistic regression was performed to evaluate relationships of age and sex to published COVID-19 case definitions and the most commonly reported symptoms. Results: ‘Typical’ symptoms of fever (69%), cough (68%) and shortness of breath (66%) were the most commonly reported. 92% of patients experienced at least one of these. Prevalence of typical symptoms was greatest in 30- to 60-year-olds (respectively 80, 79, 69%; at least one 95%). They were reported less frequently in children (≤ 18 years: 69, 48, 23; 85%), older adults (≥ 70 years: 61, 62, 65; 90%), and women (66, 66, 64; 90%; vs. men 71, 70, 67; 93%, each P < 0.001). The most common atypical presentations under 60 years of age were nausea and vomiting and abdominal pain, and over 60 years was confusion. Regression models showed significant differences in symptoms with sex, age and country. Interpretation: This international collaboration has allowed us to report reliable symptom data from the largest cohort of patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. Adults over 60 and children admitted to hospital with COVID-19 are less likely to present with typical symptoms. Nausea and vomiting are common atypical presentations under 30 years. Confusion is a frequent atypical presentation of COVID-19 in adults over 60 years. Women are less likely to experience typical symptoms than men