Ultrax:An Animated Midsagittal Vocal Tract Display for Speech Therapy

Speech sound disorders (SSD) are the most common communication impairment in childhood, and can hamper social development and learning. Current speech therapy interventions rely predominantly on the auditory skills of the child, as little technology is available to assist in diagnosis and therapy of SSDs. Realtime visualisation of tongue movements has the potential to bring enormous benefit to speech therapy. Ultrasound scanning offers this possibility, although its display may be hard to interpret. Our ultimate goal is to exploit ultrasound to track tongue movement, while displaying a simplified, diagrammatic vocal tract that is easier for the user to interpret. In this paper, we outline a general approach to this problem, combining a latent space model with a dimensionality reducing model of vocal tract shapes. We assess the feasibility of this approach using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to train a model of vocal tract shapes, which is animated using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) data from the same speaker. Index Terms: Ultrasound, speech therapy, vocal tract visualisation 1

Shaping Metrics for HEI Cultural Engagement - Knowledge Transfer

An application was submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for support for a project that would identify and define activities deemed relevant to Knowledge Transfer (KT) - Cultural Engagement (CE), and propose appropriate means to evaluate them. It was acknowledged from the outset that efforts at agreeing “metrics” for the impact of such activities had been attempted before, albeit with limited success. (One such notable example has been lately provided by the Higher Education and Business Community Interaction Survey (HEBCIS) which has collected some data on social, community, and cultural engagement for some years; however, the robustness and consistency of the data for these purposes have often been questioned.

HMM-based speech synthesiser using the LF-model of the glottal source

A major factor which causes a deterioration in speech quality in HMM-based speech synthesis is the use of a simple delta pulse signal to generate the excitation of voiced speech. This paper sets out a new approach to using an acoustic glottal source model in HMM-based synthesisers instead of the traditional pulse signal. The goal is to improve speech quality and to better model and transform voice characteristics. We have found the new method decreases buzziness and also improves prosodic modelling. A perceptual evaluation has supported this finding by showing a 55.6 % preference for the new system, as against the baseline. This improvement, while not being as significant as we had initially expected, does encourage us to work on developing the proposed speech synthesiser further

Estimating Velum Height from Acoustics During Continuous Speech

This paper reports on present work, in which a recurrent neural network is trained to estimate `velum height' during continuous speech. Parallel acoustic-articulatory data comprising more than 400 read TIMIT sentences is obtained using electromagnetic articulography (EMA). This data is processed and used as training data for a range of neural network sizes. The network demonstrating the highest accuracy is identified. This performance is then evaluated in detail by analysing the network's output for each phonetic segment contained in 50 hand-labelled utterances set aside for testing purposes

The Gridiron King : March Song

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4704/thumbnail.jp

Effects of gap junction blockage on regenerating body segments of Lumbriculus variegatus

Lumbriculus variegatus is a freshwater annelid that is well known for its regenerative capacity. There are many different factors that affect regeneration in animals. Cell-to-cell communication is a key component of regeneration. Gap junctions are made up of proteins that create a channel that connects the cytoplasm of two cells. Many molecules and ions pass through the gap junctions that can affect regeneration. The purpose of this study was to determine if blocking gap junctions would have an impact on regenerating body segments of L. variegatus and what effects it would produce. L. variegatus was exposed to a known gap junction blocker, octanol, for differing time periods following transection, then measured and photographed for six days. Worms treated with octanol experienced regenerative growth that was notably slower and also resulted in abnormal morphology of the regenerated tail. Octanol is known to leave the system immediately after treatment is taken away; however, L. variegatus did not show immediate recovery of growth when placed back into pond water. It is not clear whether there is a critical time period for exposure to octanol that affects regeneration; however, the duration of the exposure corresponded to the severity of abnormal morphology. The observations of the outcome of gap junction blockage on regenerative growth will contribute to the on-going research in areas of biology related to regeneration and gap junction communication

NUMERICAL MODELING OF FLUID BEHAVIOR AROUND A HOVERING DRONE ROTOR

Research conducted on a remote-controlled drone aids in the quantification of individual rotor performance in the hovering state. Analysis via a three-dimensional numerical model identifies specific flow characteristics that are unique to the drone blade selected for the study. These flow characteristics give insight to lifting force, torque, velocity and pressure characteristics exerted on and induced by the blade. These metrics are made available to validate and improve actuator disk theory for a disk-size equivalent to the rotor’s planform area. Improvements to actuator disk theory occur by implementing pressure and velocity gradients extracted from the three-dimensional numerical simulation. Although computationally expensive, three-dimensional simulations provide most accurate results. Once the extracted radial pressure and velocity distributions are provided, less accurate and computationally cheaper analytical processes can be used as a substitution to this time-consuming investigation into vehicle performance.ONR, Arlington, VA, 22217Ensign, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Texas Forestry Paper No. 5

Experimental planting of eucalyptus in the rio grand valley, texashttps://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/texas_forestry_papers/1006/thumbnail.jp

Correlating the Developmental Test of Visual Perception -2 (DTVP and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills - revised (TVPS-R) as assesssment tools for learners with learning difficulties

Learners are often referred to occupational therapists to assess their visual perceptual functioning. It is, therefore, imperative that the occupational therapists use the best assessment tools to obtain accurate and reliable results that lead to effective intervention which will be noticeable in the classroom functioning of these learners. A study was therefore conducted which correlated the results of the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (second edition) (DTVP-2) and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills Revised (TVPS-R) in a cohort of 173 learners from Grade 1 to Grade 4 (children aged 6 years to 11 years). The learners attend a remedial school in Kwa-Zulu Natal (South Africa)