Identification of phonological processes in preschool children's single-word productions

Speech and language therapists (SLTs) often refer to phonological data norms as part of their assessment protocols in evaluating the communication skills of the pre-school child. There is a variety of norms available and although broadly similar, differences are embedded within their definitions of mastery of the adult target system. Presence of velar fronting, stopping of affricates and [s] reduction in the dataset was found to mirror previous research. However, there was a lower than expected incidence by age groups of palato-alveolar fronting, stopping of fricatives and obstruent cluster reduction

Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with, or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2), Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200

Commentary: School Psychologists as Advocates for Racial Justice and Social Justice: Some Proposed Steps

I am extremely honored to have this opportunity to comment on the articles in this special issue of School Psychology Forum (SPF). Social justice and racial justice are critical frameworks from which to view school psychology. Individually and collectively, the works in this issue of SPF are a tremendous service to the field

Energy Conservation Framework

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90459/1/SUS-2E2011-2E9659.pd

Associations Between Phonology and Syntax in Speech-Delayed Children

Interactions between phonology and syntax are inspected in continuous speech samples from 30 speech-delayed children. Two types of interactions are examined: The co-occurrence of speech and language delay and the effects of phonological reduction on the realization of phonetically complex morphophonemes. Four possible patterns of association between the phonological and syntactic systems are outlined, and subjects are assigned to these patterns based on their phonological and syntactic performance. Results indicate that two-thirds of the subjects display evidence of overall syntactic delay, whereas half show some limitation in the use of phonetically complex morphophonemes, their performance in that area being below the level of their syntactic production. Implications of these findings for a theory of speech delay and for management programming are discussed

A frequent acoustic sign of speech motor delay (SMD)

Recent studies report prevalence, phenotype, and persistence findings for a paediatric motor speech disorder in addition to childhood dysarthria and childhood apraxia of speech termed Speech Motor Delay (SMD). The aim of the present study was to determine if there is a frequent acoustic sign of SMD, with implications for theory, assessment, and treatment. We examined the frequency of 19 acoustic signs of SMD in audio recordings of continuous speech and word-imitation tasks in three groups of speakers with SMD: 50 children (mean age 5.1 years) with idiopathic Speech Delay (SD) from 6 USA cities; 87 children, adolescents, and adults with eight types of complex neurodevelopmental disorders; and 9 children (mean age 8.8 years) with persistent idiopathic SD from a population-based study of children in the South West of England. The 19 acoustic signs of imprecise or unstable speech, prosody, and voice were standardized on typical speakers of the appropriate dialect. The criterion for a frequent acoustic sign was that it occurred in at least 50% of participants with SMD in each of the three groups. Findings indicated that lengthened mid-vowels and diphthongs was the one sign that met criteria, occurring in 64.4% of the 146 participants with SMD, including 71% of the 87 participants with complex neurodevelopmental disorders. Findings are interpreted to support the potential of this acoustic sign, and possibly several others associated with temporal dimensions of speech sound development, to inform explication of the neuromotor substrates of SMD.</p

Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

University of Michigan’s Sustainability Scholars Program: Empowering Leaders

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140222/1/SUS.2013.9842.pd

Responding to the Challenges and Opportunities of Workforce 2000

We report results of a national study examining the impact of demographic changes in the American workforce on small business management practices.    Telephone interviews with a national random sample of 94 small business owners explored a) if small business owners are aware of changing workforce demographics,  and b) if these small  business  owners are proactively responding to these changes by modifying their personnel practices.   Findings indicate that while small business managers are aware of changing workforce demographics, only a minority have changed their practices to take advantage of the new population available to them