How to Tell Beans from Farmers: Cues to the Perception of Pitch Accent in Whispered Norwegian

East Norwegian employs pitch accent contours in order to make lexical distinctions. This paper researches listeners' ability to make lexical distinctions in the absence of f0 (ie. whispered speech) as the listener attempts to determine which pitch accent word token best fits into a whispered ambiguous utterance in spoken Norwegian. The results confirm that local syntactic context alone is not a reliable cue to assist in lexical selection and concur with Fintoft (1970) in suggesting that listeners utilise a separate prosodic cue, possibly syllable duration or intensity, to make the pitch accent distinction in whispered speech

Exploring variation in accuracy and contrast for sibilant fricatives at the onset of fricative acquisition

University of Minnesota M.A. thesis. April 2014. Major: Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences. Advisor: Benjamin Munson, PhD. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 53 pages.Children's speech differs from adult speech in the many ways, including in its phonetic characteristics. A central question for researchers interested in child speech sound acquisition is when and how a child acquires robust adult-like contrasts. In this thesis, I present a protocol for the analysis of the English sibilant fricatives "s" and "sh". Sibilant fricatives are of interest because they are late-acquired sounds that require articulatory-aerodynamic coordination, and are contrastively necessary in multiple languages around the world, English especially. Given the turbulent nature of the sound spectrum of fricative consonants, few agreed upon measures exist. Holliday, Reidy, Beckman and Edwards (In Preparation) propose that peak equivalent rectangular bandwidth is a psychoacoustically appropriate measure for modeling the robustness of phonological contrast between sibilant fricative types. The robustness measures put forth by Holliday et al. are applied to data from the speech of toddlers aged 28-39 months and are discussed

Disfluency in Dialogue: Attention, Structure and Function

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies: pauses, hesitations, restarts, and less than ideal deliveries of information. Disfluency is a topic of interdisciplinary research with insights from psycholinguistics, phonetics and speech technology. Researchers have tried to determine: When does disfluency occur?, Can disfluency be reliably predicted to occur?, and ultimately, Why does disfluency occur? The focus of my thesis will be to address the question of why disfluency occurs by reporting the results of analyses of disfluency frequency and the relationship between disfluency and eye gaze in a collaborative dialogue. Psycholinguistic studies of disfluency and collaborative dialogue differ on their answers to why disfluency occurs and its role in dialogue. One hypothesis, which I will refer to as Strategic Modelling, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker. According to the alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. Throughout this thesis, I will contrast these two theories for an ultimate answer to why disfluency occurs. Each hypothesis attaches a functional role to a structural definition of disfluency and therefore in order to determine why disfluency occurs, I will contrast the structural and functional characteristics of disfluency. I will attempt to do this by analysing the dialogue behaviour in terms of speech goals and eye gaze behaviour a speaker is engaged in when they make certain types of disfluencies. A multi-modal Map Task paradigm was used in this thesis, in which speakers were asked to describe the route on a cartoon map to a distant confederate listener who provided either visual or verbal feedback. Speakers were eye-tracked during the dialogue and a record was kept of when the speaker attended to the listener’s visual feedback. Experiment 1 tested the visual feedback paradigm to establish its validity as a baseline condition. Speakers were found to make more disfluencies when they could interact with the visual feedback, suggesting disfluency is more common in interactive circumstances. Experiment 2 added verbal feedback to the experimental paradigm to test whether listeners react differently to the two modalities of feedback. Speakers made more disfluencies when the feedback was more complicated. Structural disfluency types were also observed to fulfil different functions. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated the motivation of the speaker and found that Motivated speakers gazed more often and were more disfluent per opportunity than Control speakers suggesting that highly motivated subjects are more willing to engage in difficult tasks

Disfluency in dialogue : attention, structure and function

Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies: pauses, hesitations, restarts, and less than ideal deliveries of information. Disfluency is a topic of interdisciplinary research with insights from psycholinguistics, phonetics and speech technology. Researchers have tried to determine: When does disfluency occur?, Can disfluency be reliably predicted to occur?, and ultimately, Why does disfluency occur? The focus of my thesis will be to address the question of why disfluency occurs by reporting the results of analyses of disfluency frequency and the relationship between disfluency and eye gaze in a collaborative dialogue. Psycholinguistic studies of disfluency and collaborative dialogue differ on their answers to why disfluency occurs and its role in dialogue. One hypothesis, which I will refer to as Strategic Modelling, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker. According to the alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. Throughout this thesis, I will contrast these two theories for an ultimate answer to why disfluency occurs. Each hypothesis attaches a functional role to a structural definition of disfluency and therefore in order to determine why disfluency occurs, I will contrast the structural and functional characteristics of disfluency. I will attempt to do this by analysing the dialogue behaviour in terms of speech goals and eye gaze behaviour a speaker is engaged in when they make certain types of disfluencies. A multi-modal Map Task paradigm was used in this thesis, in which speakers were asked to describe the route on a cartoon map to a distant confederate listener who provided either visual or verbal feedback. Speakers were eye-tracked during the dialogue and a record was kept of when the speaker attended to the listener’s visual feedback. Experiment 1 tested the visual feedback paradigm to establish its validity as a baseline condition. Speakers were found to make more disfluencies when they could interact with the visual feedback, suggesting disfluency is more common in interactive circumstances. Experiment 2 added verbal feedback to the experimental paradigm to test whether listeners react differently to the two modalities of feedback. Speakers made more disfluencies when the feedback was more complicated. Structural disfluency types were also observed to fulfil different functions. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated the motivation of the speaker and found that Motivated speakers gazed more often and were more disfluent per opportunity than Control speakers suggesting that highly motivated subjects are more willing to engage in difficult tasks.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Intentionality of Disfluency: Findings from Feedback and Timing

This paper addresses the causes of disfluency. Disfluency has been described as a strategic device for intentionally signalling to an interlocutor that the speaker is committed to an utterance under construction [14, 21]. It is also described as an automatic effect of cognitive burdens, particularly of managing speech production during other tasks [6]. To assess these claims, we used a version of the map task [1, 11] and tested 24 normal adult subjects in a baseline untimed monologue condition against conditions adding either feedback in the form of an indication of a supposed listener’s gaze, or time-pressure, or both. Both feedback and timepressure affected the nature of the speaker’s performance overall. Disfluency rate increased when feedback was available, as the strategic view predicts, but only deletion disfluencies showed a significant effect of this manipulation. Both the nature of the deletion disfluencies in the current task and of the information which the speaker would need to acquire in order to use them appropriately suggest ways of refining the strategic view of disfluency. 1

IRT modeling of the VNT (Fergadiotis et al., 2023)

Purpose: Item response theory (IRT) is a modern psychometric framework with several advantageous properties as compared with classical test theory. IRT has been successfully used to model performance on anomia tests in individuals with aphasia; however, all efforts to date have focused on noun production accuracy. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the Verb Naming Test (VNT), a prominent test of action naming, can be successfully modeled under IRT and evaluate its reliability. Method: We used responses on the VNT from 107 individuals with chronic aphasia from AphasiaBank. Unidimensionality and local independence, two assumptions prerequisite to IRT modeling, were evaluated using factor analysis and Yen’s Q3 statistic (Yen, 1984), respectively. The assumption of equal discrimination among test items was evaluated statistically via nested model comparisons and practically by using correlations of resulting IRT-derived scores. Finally, internal consistency, marginal and empirical reliability, and conditional reliability were evaluated. Results: The VNT was found to be sufficiently unidimensional with the majority of item pairs demonstrating adequate local independence. An IRT model in which item discriminations are constrained to be equal demonstrated fit equivalent to a model in which unique discrimination parameters were estimated for each item. All forms of reliability were strong across the majority of IRT ability estimates. Conclusions: Modeling the VNT using IRT is feasible, yielding ability estimates that are both informative and reliable. Future efforts are needed to quantify the validity of the VNT under IRT and determine the extent to which it measures the same construct as other anomia tests. Supplemental Material S1. A complete participant ID list from AphasiaBank. Supplemental Material S2. A parallel analysis plot. Supplemental Material S3. Ability estimates and their standard errors. Fergadiotis, G., Casilio, M., Dickey, M. W., Steel, S., Nicholson, H., Fleegle, M., Swiderski, A., & Hula, W. D. (2023). Item response theory modeling of the Verb Naming Test. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00458</p