Investigating Clear Speech Adaptations in Spontaneous Speech Produced in Communcative Settings

In order to investigate the clear speech adaptations that individuals make when communicating in intelligibility-challenging conditions, it would seem essential to examine speech that is produced in interaction with a conversational partner. However, much of the literature on clear speech adaptations has been based on the analysis of sentences that talkers were instructed to read clearly. In this chapter, we review methods for eliciting spontaneous speech in interaction for the purpose of investigating clear speech phenomena. We describe in more detail the Diapix task (Van Engen et al., 2010) and DiapixUK picture pairs (Baker & Hazan, 2011) which have been used in the production of large corpora investigating clear speech adaptations. We present an overview of the analysis of spontaneous speech and clear speech adaptations from the LUCID corpora that include spontaneous speech recordings from children, young and older adults

How does foreigner-directed speech differ from other forms of listener-directed clear speaking styles?

Forty talkers participated in problem-solving tasks with another talker in conditions differing in communication difficulty for the interlocutor. A linguistic barrier condition (L2 interlocutor) was compared to acoustic barrier conditions (native interlocutors hearing vocoded or noisy speech). Talkers made acoustic-phonetic enhancements in all barrier conditions compared to the no-barrier condition, but talkers reduced their articulation rate less and showed less increase in vowel hyperarticulation in foreigner-directed speech than in the acoustic barrier condition, even though communicative difficulty was greater in the L2 condition. Foreigner-directed speech was also perceived as less clear. This suggests that acoustic enhancements in clear speech are not simply a function of the level of communication difficulty

Comunicación enriquecida a lo largo de la vida

Speech is a hugely efficient means of communication: a reduced capacity in listening or speaking creates a significant barrier to social inclusion at all points through the lifespan, in education, work and at home. Hearing devices and speech synthesis can help address this reduced capacity but their use imposes greater listener effort. The goal of the EU-funded ENRICH project is to modify or augment speech with additional information to make it easier to process. Enrichment reduces listening burden by minimising cognitive load, while maintaining or improving intelligibility. ENRICH investigates the relationship between cognitive effort and natural and synthetic speech. Non-intrusive metrics for listening effort will be developed and used to design modification techniques which result in low-burden speech. The value of various enrichment approaches will be evaluated with individuals and cohorts with typically sub-optimal communication ability, such as children, hearing-or speech-impaired adults, non-native listeners and individuals engaged in simultaneous tasks.El habla es un medio de comunicación sumamente eficiente: la capacidad reducida para oír o hablar crea barreras importantes para la inclusión social a lo largo de la vida en la educación, en el trabajo o en el hogar. Los audífonos y la síntesis del habla pueden ayudar a abordar esta capacidad reducida, pero su uso impone un mayor esfuerzo por parte del oyente. El objetivo del proyecto europeo ENRICH es modificar o aumentar el habla con información adicional resultando así más fácil de procesar. El enriquecimiento reduce el esfuerzo de escucha minimizando la carga cognitiva, mientras se mantiene o mejora la inteligibilidad. ENRICH investigará la relación entre el esfuerzo cognitivo y las diferentes formas de habla natural y sintética. Se desarrollarán métricas no intrusivas para el esfuerzo de escucha que se utilizarán para diseñar modificaciones que resulten en un habla de baja carga. El valor de los diversos enfoques de enriquecimiento se evaluará con individuos y cohortes con habilidades de comunicación típicamente subóptimas, como niños, adultos con problemas de audición o de habla, oyentes no nativos e individuos que realizan tareas simultáneas.ENRICH has received funding from the EU H2020 research and innovation programme under MSCA GA 675324

Developmental and gender-related trends of intra-talker variability in consonant production

This study investigates the effect of age and gender on the internal structure, cross-category distance, and discriminability of phonemic categories for two contrasts varying in fricative place of articulation (/s/-/ʃ/) and stop voicing (/b/-/p/) in word-initial tokensspoken by adults and normally-developing children aged 9 to 14 years. Vast between- and within-talker variability was observed, with 16% of speakers of all ages exhibiting some degree of overlap between phonemic categories—a possible contribution to the range of talker intelligibility found in the literature. Females of all ages produced farther and thus more discriminable categories than males, though gender-marking for fricative between-category distance did not emerge until approximately 11 years of age. Children produced farther yet also much more dispersed categories than adults, with increasing discriminability with age, such that by age 13, children’s categories were no less discriminable than those of adults. However, children’s ages did not predict category distance or dispersion, indicating that convergence on adult-like category structure must occur later in adolescence

Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication

This study investigated vowel space area (VSA) development in childhood and adolescence and its impact on the ability to hyperarticulate vowels. In experiment 1, 96 participants aged 9-14 years carried out an interactive task when communication was easy (no barrier, 'NB') and difficult (the speech of one participant was filtered through a vocoder, 'VOC'). Previous recordings from 20 adults were used as reference. Measures of VSA (ERB2), F1 and F2 ranges (ERB) and articulation rate were obtained. Children's VSA were significantly larger than adults'. From the age of 11, vowel hyperarticulation was evident in VOC, but only because VSA were gradually reducing with age in NB. The results suggest that whilst large VSA do not prevent children from hyperarticulating vowels, the manner in which this is achieved may not be adult-like. Experiment 2 was conducted to verify that large VSA were not a by-product of children being unable to see each other. Thirteen participants carried out the same task face-to-face with their interlocutor. Comparisons to matched participants from experiment 1 showed no differences in VSA, indicating that the audio-only modality did not influence results. Possible reasons for larger VSA in the spontaneous speech of children and adolescents are discussed

DiapixUK: task materials for the elicitation of multiple spontaneous speech dialogs

The renewed focus of attention on investigating spontaneous speech samples in speech and language research has increased the need for recordings of speech in interactive settings. The DiapixUK task is a new and extended set of picture materials based on the Diapix task by Van Engen et al. (2010) where two people are recorded while conversing to solve a ‘spot the difference’ task. The new task materials allow for multiple recordings of the same speaker pairs due to a larger set of picture pairs which have a number of tested features: equal difficulty across all twelve picture pairs, no learning effect of completing more than one picture task and balanced contributions from both speakers. The new materials also provide extra flexibility making them useful in a wide range of research projects; they are multi-layered electronic images that can be adapted to suit different research needs. This paper presents details of the development of the DiapixUK materials along with data taken from a large corpus of spontaneous speech which demonstrate its new features. Current and potential applications of the task are also discussed

The effect of talker and intonation variability on speech perception in noise in children with dyslexia.

In this study, the authors aimed to determine whether children with dyslexia (hereafter referred to as "DYS children") are more affected than children with average reading ability (hereafter referred to as "AR children") by talker and intonation variability when perceiving speech in noise

Enhancing Information-Rich Regions Of Natural Vcv And Sentence Materials Presented In Noise

Two sets of experiments to test the perceptual benefits of enhancing information-rich regions of consonants in natural speech were performed. In the first set, hand-annotated consonantal regions of natural VCV stimuli were amplified to increase their salience, and filtered to stylize the cues they contained. In the second set, natural semantically unpredictable sentence (SUS) material was annotated and enhanced in the same way. Both sets of stimuli were combined with speech-shaped noise and presented to normally-hearing listeners. Both sets of experiments showed statistically significant improvements in intelligibility as a result of enhancement, although the increase was greater for VCV than for SUS. These results demonstrate the benefits gained from enhancement techniques which use knowledge about acoustic cues to phonetic contrasts to improve the resistance of speech to noise. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper reports some work carried out as part of a program investigating the effects o..