A comparison of multiple speech tempo measures: Inter-correlations and discriminating power

Studies that quantify speech tempo on acoustic grounds typically use one of various rate measures. Explicit comparisons of the distributions generated by these measures are rare, although they help assess the robustness of generalisations across studies; moreover, for forensic purposes it is valuable to compare measures in terms of their discriminating power. We compare five common rate measures - canonical and surface syllable and phone rates, and CV segment rate - calculated over fluent stretches of spontaneous speech produced by 30 English speakers. We report deletion rates and correlations between the five measures and assess discriminating powers using likelihood ratios. Results suggest that in a sizeable English corpus with normal deletion rates, these five rates are closely inter-correlated and have similar discriminating powers; therefore, for common analytical purposes the choice between these measures is unlikely to substantially affect outcomes

Measured and perceived speech tempo: Canonical vs surface syllable and phone rates

Studies that quantify speech tempo tend to use one of various available rate measures. The relationship between these measures and perceived tempo as elicited through listening experiments remains poorly understood. We assess how canonical and surface syllable and phone rates compare in terms of their mapping to listeners' tempo ratings. Native speakers of English rated short stretches of spontaneous speech for tempo; we modelled ratings for stimulus samples in which correlations between canonical and surface rates were low. Our findings suggest that listeners' ratings map most straightforwardly to canonical rate for syllables, but to surface rates for phones. We find little evidence of global tempo affecting the mappings, and consistent effects of stimulus duration. We discuss implications for the role of phoneme restoration in temporal processing

Experience and learning in cross-dialect perception: Derhoticised /r/ in Glasgow

It is well known that unfamiliar accents can be difficult to understand. Previous research has investigated the effect of hearing e.g. foreign-accented speech, but relatively little research has been conducted on the effect of hearing an unfamiliar native English accent. This thesis investigates how listeners process fine phonetic detail for a phonological contrast, measuring their perceptual efficiency depending on their level of experience with the working class Glaswegian dialect. In Glasgow, speakers are stereotypically rhotic. However, recent sociophonetic research indicates a trend towards derhoticisation (the phonetic erosion of postvocalic /r/ in working class Glaswegian speech). The potential for misperception exists when listeners hear minimal pairs such as 'hut/hurt', when spoken by working class speakers who realise postvocalic /r/ as an acoustically ambiguous variant, with delayed tongue tip gesture and early tongue body gesture. This makes derhoticised /r/ perceptually very similar to the preceding open back vowel in both 'hut' and 'hurt', leading to difficulty when listeners try to distinguish between /CʌC/ and /CʌrC/ words in general. This thesis begins with a novel dynamic acoustic analysis of the key cues for rhoticity in Glaswegian for such words, demonstrating that minimal pairs such as 'hut/hurt' are acoustically very similar in the Glaswegian working class accent, but remain distinct for middle class speakers. A suite of listening experiments is then described. Experiment 1 was conceived and run as a pilot study to this work, but new analysis of the data assessed the influence of long-term learning, using Signal Detection Theory as a key analytical tool. This showed strong effects of listener familiarity in both sensitivity and response bias. Experiment 2 tested listeners' ability to learn the distinction between 'hut' and 'hurt' word types, with Response Time and Signal Detection analyses finding that listeners least familiar with the accent very quickly matched the response patterns of listeners with an intermediate level of experience. However, neither listener group was able to match the performance of listeners most familiar with the accent, who were native to Glasgow, suggesting that acoustic phonetic detail plays an important role in perception, with interesting interactions with listener experience. Finally, for Experiment 3 the overarching purpose shifts from offline to online perception. The results of the acoustic analysis showed that dynamics are key, so Experiment 3, a Mouse Tracking experiment, allows for the measurement of dynamic perceptual responses – in a listening context which is more difficult – for the most experienced listeners. It yielded results in terms of Response Time, and two sets of measures capturing cursor trajectories, Area Under the Curve, and Discrete Cosine Transformation. Taken together, the results of these analyses reveal that even for the most experienced listeners (Glaswegians), the phonetically ambiguous tokens present perceptual challenges when hearing working class Glaswegian 'hut' and 'hurt' words, and also demonstrated that challenging listening conditions lead to processing costs, even for the ‘easiest’ stimuli; i.e. when hearing talkers and accents randomised together. This thesis examines a single difficult phonological contrast, with the simplicity of the linguistic scope affording an extremely in-depth analysis. Not only did this provide a clear insight into the perception of the contrast itself, but the depth of analysis allows for a more sophisticated discussion of the results, potentially speaking to wider theoretical standpoints. The results have implications for theories of speech perception, as they may be explained by some general principles which underlie exemplar theories and Bayesian inference. They also constitute valuable acoustic and perceptual contributions to the ongoing research into the complex and changing nature of postvocalic /r/ in Scotland

Child relationships in the middle grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

An acoustic analysis of rhoticity in Lancashire, England

This paper presents the first systematic acoustic analysis of a rhotic accent in present- day England. The dataset comprises spontaneous and elicited speech of 28 speakers from Blackburn in Lancashire, Northern England, where residual rhoticity remains, having never been lost in the earlier sound change which rendered most of England non-rhotic. Although sociolinguistic studies of rhoticity in England exist, we have almost no description of its phonetic properties. Moreover, most sociolinguistic studies focus on the South West of England and relatively little is known about rhoticity in the North. Our study is timely because Northern rhoticity is predicted to disappear in the next few generations, a process which is now complete in many areas of the South West. Our results demonstrate that rhoticity is still present in Blackburn, although non-prevocalic /r/ is weaker when compared to other rhotic varieties of English such as those in Scotland and North America. We find that non-prevocalic /r/ is phonetically weakening in apparent time, with the F3-F2 difference being larger for younger speakers as well as females. We present additional social and linguistic factors affecting its potential demise, and discuss how our results contribute to our understanding of historical /r/-loss in Anglo-English

Genetic Analyses and Annotations of Two Newly Discovered C1 Mycobacteriophages

Poster presentation abstract

Proliferation-dependent differential regulation of the dolichol pathway genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The dolichol pathway serves in the synthesis of the dolichol-linked oligosaccharide precursor for protein N-glycosylation. Recently, we reported that mRNAs of genes that function at the early steps in the dolichol pathway in yeast, ALG7, ALG1 and ALG2, were co-ordinately induced following growth stimulation of G0-arrested cells in a manner similar to that of the transcripts of the early growth response genes (Kukuruzinska,M.A. and Lennon,K. Glycobiology, 4, 437-443, 1994). To determine whether the entire dolichol pathway was co-ordinately regulated with growth, we examined the expression of genes functioning late in the pathway, including two genes encoding oligosaccharyltransferase subunits, at two critical control points in the G1 phase of cell cycle: G0/G1 and START. We show that early in G1, at the G0/G1 transition point, the late ALG genes and the two oligosaccharyltransferase-encoding genes examined were regulated co-ordinately with the early ALG genes: they were downregulated upon exit from the mitotic cell cycle into G0, and they were induced following growth stimulation in the absence of de novo protein synthesis. All the dolichol pathway genes produced transcripts with short, half-lives that were rapidly stabilized in the presence of cycloheximide. In contrast, cell division arrest late in G1, at START, was accompanied by a selective downregulation of only the first dolichol pathway gene, ALG7, and not of the genes functioning later in the pathway. These results indicate that, depending on their position in G1, cells either co-ordinately or differentially regulate the dolichol pathway gene

Measuring Economic Disadvantage During Childhood: A Group-Based Modeling Approach

Recent research suggest that child well-being and subsequent status attainment are influenced not only by the overall magnitude of exposure to family economic disadvantage during childhood, but also by the age of exposure and significant changes in family economic circumstances. Unfortunately, traditional measures of children's economic deprivation, such as permanent and transitory income, persistent or cumulative poverty, and the number and length of poverty spells, fail to differentiate between exposure to disadvantage at different stages in childhood and largely ignore how family economic circumstances are changing over time. In this paper, the authors propose a new method for assessing economic disadvantage during childhood that captures both children's overall levels of exposure to economic disadvantage and their patterns of exposure. This new method, which takes advantage of recent advances in finite mixture modeling, uses a longitudinal latent class model to classify children into a limited number of groups with similar histories of exposure to family economic disadvantage. Using this new methodology, group membership can be related to both family background characteristics and achievement in childhood and early adulthood, making it possible both to assess how family characteristics affect patterns of exposure to disadvantage during childhood and directly test alternative theories about the effect of different patterns of exposure on achievement. In this paper, the relationship between background factors, such as race, parental education, and family structure, and group membership is investigated, as is the association between group membership and achievement in early adulthood. The use of this technique is demonstrated using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)