Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Speech production'
To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Speech production.
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Speech production.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Collins, Alan. "Processes in speech production." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.253499.
Full text
2
Morton, K. "Speech production and synthesis." Thesis, University of Essex, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.377930.
Full text
3
Soni, Maya. "Semantics in speech production." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2011. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/semantics-in-speech-production(c446ac01-7c32-468a-816b-04993347e135).html.
Full textAbstract:
The semantic system contributes to the process of speech production in two major ways. The basic information is contained within semantic representations, and the semantic control system manipulates that knowledge as required by task and context. This thesis explored the evidence for interactivity between semantic and phonological stages of speech production, and examined the role of semantic control within speech production. The data chapters focussed on patients with semantic aphasia or SA, who all have frontal and/or temporoparietal lesions and are thought to have a specific impairment of semantic control. In a novel development, grammatical class and cueing effects in this patient group were compared with healthy participants under tempo naming conditions, a paradigm which is thought to impair normal semantic control by imposing dual task conditions. A basic picture naming paradigm was used throughout, with the addition of different grammatical classes, correct and misleading phonemic cues, and repetition and semantic priming: all these manipulations could be expected to place differing loads on a semantic control system with either permanent or experimentally induced impairment. It was found that stimuli requiring less controlled processing such as high imageability objects, pictures with simultaneous correct cues or repetition primed pictures were named significantly more accurately than items which needed more controlled processing, such as low imageability actions, pictures with misleading phonemic cues and unprimed pictures. The cueing evidence offered support to interactive models of speech production where phonological activation is able to influence semantic selection. The impairment in tasks such as the inhibition of task-irrelevant material seen in SA patients and tempo participants, and the overlap between cortical areas cited in studies looking at both semantic and wider executive control mechanisms suggest that semantic control may be part of a more generalised executive system.
4
Williams, A. Lynn, Sharynne McLeod, and R. J. McCauley. "Direct Speech Production Interventions." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2010. https://www.amzn.com/1598570188/.
Full textAbstract:
Book Summary: With detailed discussion and invaluable video footage of 23 treatment interventions for speech sound disorders (SSDs) in children, this textbook and DVD set should be part of every speech-language pathologist's professional preparation. Focusing on children with functional or motor-based speech disorders from early childhood through the early elementary period, this textbook gives preservice SLPs critical analyses of a complete spectrum of evidence-based phonological and articulatory interventions.
This textbook fully prepares SLPs for practice with a vivid inside look at intervention techniques in action through high-quality DVD clips large and varied collection of intervention approaches with widespread use across ages, severity levels, and populations proven interventions in three categories: direct speech production, broader contexts such as perceptual intervention, and speech movements clear explanations of the evidence behind the approaches so SLPs can evaluate them accurately contributions by well-known experts in SSDs from across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK
An essential core text for pre-service SLPs—and an important professional resource for practicing SLPs, early interventionists, and special educators—this book will help readers make the best intervention decisions for children with speech sound disorders.
Evidence-based intervention approaches—demonstrated in DVD clips—such as: minimal pairs perceptual intervention core vocabulary stimulability treatment intervention for developmental dysarthria the psycholinguistic approach
Interventions for Speech Sound Disorders in Children is a part of the Communication and Language Intervention Series
5
Blank, Sarah Catrin. "Speech comprehension, speech production and recovery of propositional speech following aphasic stroke." Thesis, Imperial College London, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.407772.
Full text
6
Stelle, Elizabeth Leigh. "Visual feedback during speech production." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60236.
Full textAbstract:
The visual speech signal has a well-established influence on speech perception, and there is growing consensus that visual speech also influences speech production. However, relatively little is known about the response to one's own visual speech; that is, when it is presented as speech feedback. Since visual feedback is generated by the same speaking event that generates auditory and somatosensory feedback, it is temporally compatible with these typical sources of feedback; as such, it is predicted to influence speech production in comparable ways. This dissertation uses a perturbation paradigm to test the effect visual feedback has on production. Two delayed auditory feedback experiments tested the effect of different types of visual feedback on two fluency measures: utterance duration and number of speech errors. Visual feedback was predicted to enhance fluency. When the presentation of static and dynamic visual feedback was randomized within a block, utterance duration increased with dynamic visual feedback but there was no change in speech errors. Speech errors were reduced, however, when the different types of visual feedback were presented in separate blocks. This reduction was only observed when dynamic visual feedback was paired with normal auditory feedback, and for those participants who were more verbally proficient. These results suggest that consistent exposure to visual feedback may be necessary for speech enhancement, and also that the time-varying properties of visual speech are important in eliciting changes in speech production. In the bite block experiment, participants produced monosyllabic words in conditions that differed in terms of the presence or absence of visual feedback and a bite block. Acoustic vowel contrast was enhanced and acoustic vowel dispersion was reduced with visual feedback. This effect was strongest at the beginning of the vowel and tended to be stronger during productions without the bite block. For a small subset of participants the magnitude of motion of the lower face increased in response to visual feedback, once again without the bite block. The results of this dissertation provide evidence that visual feedback can enhance speech production, and highlight the multimodal nature of speech processing.Arts, Faculty of
Graduate
7
Houde, John Francis. "Sensorimotor adaptation in speech production." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/10273.
Full text
8
Shuster, Linda Irene. "Speech perception and speech production : between and within modal adaptation /." The Ohio State University, 1986. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148726754698296.
Full text
9
Tremblay, Stéphanie. "Force field adaptation in speech production." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=103014.
Full textAbstract:
Although audition may appear to be the dominant sensory modality in speech production, the capacity for intelligible speech following severe hearing loss suggests that other sensory information - for example, somatosensory feedback - may also contribute to the achievement of speech targets. The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of somatosensory feedback in speech produced by healthy adults.The first study aimed at providing a test of whether somatosensory feedback plays a role in speech production beyond the language acquisition period in early childhood. In order to achieve this goal, we designed a pattern of forces that affects jaw movements during speech production, but at the same time has no measurable acoustic effect. We found that subjects compensated for such a distortion in speech movement trajectories, even though it had no impact on the sounds. In contrast, no adaptation was observed in matched non-speech jaw movements, indicating that this was not an inevitable consequence of exposing the orofacial apparatus to this pattern of forces. This is the first demonstration that somatosensory information on its own drives the achievement of articulator positions in speech.
In study one, it was observed that subjects only adapted to the loads in the opening phase of the jaw movement. In order to elucidate this somewhat unexpected finding, we carried out experiments in which we manipulated the linguistic content of the training utterance. We found that subjects compensated for the perturbations only in portions of the movement that contained a vowel-to-vowel transition. It was suggested that the required kinematic precision during a transition between two vocal tract shapes associated with vowels is higher than during transitions between a consonant and a vowel. It also points to the speech-like nature of the observed adaptation.
The third study aimed at investigating the extent to which speech motor learning generalizes across acoustic contexts. We trained subjects to produce utterances while exposed to a velocity dependent force field. After learning, the subjects were tested with new utterances, matched on dynamics to the ones used in training. Note that even if the acoustic contents of the test and the training utterances were different, the loads had a similar effect on both speech movements. We showed that learning did not transfer to the test utterances; therefore adaptation was restricted to the specific training context. These results point to the specificity of speech motor learning.
10
Barbone, S. K. "On phonetic variability in speech production." Thesis, University of Essex, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.375727.
Full text
11
Prebianca, Gicele Vergine Vieira. "Communication strategies and L2 speech production." Florianópolis, SC, 2004. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/87408.
Full textAbstract:
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteMade available in DSpace on 2012-10-21T19:34:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 207996.pdf: 1550219 bytes, checksum: 393660d89fe1a25e2fedc311156c33f6 (MD5)
This study investigated the relationship between Communication Strategies (CS) use and L2 oral development. In order to reach this goal, three speech samples of each one of 30 L2 learners of English were collected. Participants were divided into three groups of 10 learners each, according to their level of proficiency # pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced. Participants' oral fluency was assessed by means of speech rate (Lenon, 1990). L2 speech production was elicited by means of three narrative tasks in three different sessions. Data analysis revealed a common group of CS across sessions and across proficiency levels. Besides, it indicated that the relationship between CS use and L2 oral fluency, as measured by the speech rate, is not statistically significant. The analyses further showed a significant statistical correlation among speech rate measures in sessions 1, 2 and 3 in the pre-intermediate and intermediate groups, thus indicating a homogeneous oral behavior among these participants across sessions. To explain the few instances of significant statistical correlations between speech rate and types of CS, it is suggested that due to the multitude of factors affecting L2 fluency, other aspects of speech production need to be analysed, such as grammatical accuracy and complexity. In addition, the nature of tasks and their cognitive demands might have contributed to learners' apparently limited oral improvement.
12
Preston, Jonathan. "Phonological processing and speech production in preschoolers with speech sound disorders." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2008. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
Full text
13
Mailend, Marja-Liisa, and Marja-Liisa Mailend. "Speech Motor Planning in Apraxia of Speech and Aphasia." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/625882.
Full textAbstract:
Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder that poses significant obstacles to a person's ability to communicate and take part in everyday life. Agreement exists between current theories of AOS that the impairment affects the speech motor planning stage, where linguistic representations are transformed into speech movements, but they disagree on the specific nature of the breakdown at this processing level. A more detailed understanding of this impairment is essential for developing targeted, effective treatment approaches and for identifying the appropriate candidates for these treatments. The study of AOS is complicated by the fact that this disorder rarely occurs in isolation but is commonly accompanied by various degrees of aphasia (a language impairment) and/or dysarthria (a neuromuscular impairment of speech motor control). In addition, the behavioral similarities of AOS and its closest clinical neighbor, aphasia with phonemic paraphasias, undermine the usefulness of traditional methods, such as perceptual error analysis, in the study of both disorders.
The purpose of this dissertation was to test three competing hypotheses about the specific nature of the speech motor planning impairment in AOS in a systematic sequence of three reaction time experiments. This research was formulated in the context of a well-established theoretical framework of speech production and it combines psycholinguistic reaction time paradigms with a cognitive neuropsychological approach.
The results of the three experiments provide evidence that one component of the speech motor planning impairment in AOS involves difficulty with selecting the intended motor program for articulation. Furthermore, this difficulty appears to be intensified by simultaneously activated alternative speech motor programs that compete with the target program for selection. These findings may prove useful as a theoretically-motivated basis for improving diagnostic tools and treatment protocols for people with AOS and aphasia, thus enhancing clinical decision-making. Such translational and clinical research aimed at developing sensitive and specific diagnostic tools and improving treatment approaches is the ultimate long-term objective of this research program.
14
Theron, Karin. "Temporal aspects of speech production in bilingual speakers with neurogenic speech disorders." Diss., Pretoria : [s.n.], 2003. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-08072003-152242.
Full text
15
Chow, Tak-yu David. "Lexical tone production in Cantonese alaryngeal speech." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36209612.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1998."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 30, 1998." Also available in print.
16
Lukach, Melanie. "Speech production processing in the second language." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6779.
Full textAbstract:
The phenomenon of foreign accent has long been a topic of linguistic theory. Neufeld proposes that speech production, especially at the phonological level, is hampered by the use of (conscious or unconscious) knowledge that speakers have about the L2--metalinguistic knowledge. Those who begin acquiring an L2 after the age of five focus more on structural correctness than younger learners, and tend to use this metalinguistic knowledge more often. Thus even among balanced bilinguals, on an experiment designed to induce focus on form, older learners should perform more speech errors and dysfluencies than native speakers or early bilinguals, and tend to correct more. This pattern should be even more pronounced in learners who have acquired their L2 in a formal (school) context. An experiment consisting of five tasks was designed to test these three points of Neufeld's Pre- and Post-Articulatory Verification (PAV) model. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
17
Vousden, Janet. "Serial control of phonology in speech production." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3026/.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of this thesis is to further our understanding of the processes which control the sequencing of phonemes as we speak: this is an example of what is commonly known as the serial order problem. Such a process is apparent in normal speech and also from the existence of a class of speech errors known as sound movement errors, where sounds are anticipated (spoken too soon), perseverated (repeated again later), or exchanged (the sounds are transposed). I argue that this process is temporally governed, that is, the serial ordering mechanism is restricted to processing sounds that are close together in time. This is in conflict with frame-based accounts (e.g. Dell, 1986; Lapointe & Dell, 1979), serial buffer accounts (Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1979) and associative chaining theories (Wickelgren, 1969). An analysis of sound movement errors from Harley and MacAndrew's (1995) corpus shows how temporal processing bears on the production of speech sounds by the temporal constraint observed in the pattern of errors, and I suggest an appropriate computational model of this process. Specifically, I show how parallel temporal processing in an oscillator-based model can account for the movement of sounds in speech. Similar predictions were made by the model to the pattern of movement errors actually observed in speech error corpora. This has been demonstrated without recourse to an assumption of frame and slot structures. The OSCillator-based Associative REcall (OSCAR) model, on the other hand, is able to account for these effects and other positional effects, providing support for a temporal based theory of serial control.
18
Blackburn, C. S. "Articulatory methods for speech production and recognition." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.596687.
Full textAbstract:
The past 15 years have seen dramatic improvements in the performance of computer algorithms which attempt to recognise human speech. The falling error rates achieved by the best speech recognition systems on limited tasks have recently enabled the development of a diverse range of applications which promise to have a significant impact on many aspects of society. Examples of these range from dictation systems for personal computers to automated over-the-telephone enquiry services and interactive voice-controlled computing and mobility aids for disabled users. Engineering research into the recognition of acoustic signals has focused on the development of efficient, trainable models which are adapted to specific recognition tasks. While the acoustic signal parameterisations employed are usually chosen to crudely model the behaviour of the human auditory system, little or no use is typically made of knowledge regarding the mechanisms of speech production. Physical and inertial constraints on the movement of articulators in the vocal tract cause variations in the acoustic realisations of sounds according to their phonetic contexts. The difficulty of accurately modelling these contextual variations in the frequency domain represents a fundamental limitation on the performance of existing recognition systems. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of a self-organising articulatory speech production model which attempts to incorporate production-based knowledge into the recognition framework. By using an explicit time-domain articulatory model of the mechanisms of co-articulation, it is hoped to obtain a more accurate model of contextual effects in the acoustic signal, while using less parameters than traditional acoustically-driven approaches. Separate articulatory and acoustic models are provided, and in each case the parameters of the models are automatically optimised over a training data set.
19
McMillan, Corey. "Articulatory evidence for interactivity in speech production." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3280.
Full textAbstract:
Traditionally, psychologists and linguists have assumed that phonological speech errors result from the substitution of well-formed segments. However, there is growing evidence from acoustic and articulatory analyses of these errors which suggests ac- tivation from competing phonological representations can cascade to articulation. This thesis assumes a cascading model, and investigates further constraints for psy- cholinguistic models of speech production. Two major questions are addressed: whether such a cascading model should include feedback; and whether phonologi- cal representations are still required if articulation is not well-formed. In order to investigate these questions a new method is introduced for the analysis of artic- ulatory data, and its application for analysing EPG and ultrasound recordings is demonstrated. A speech error elicitation experiment is presented in which acoustic and elec- tropalatography (EPG) signals were recorded. A transcription analysis of both data sets tentatively supports a feedback account for the lexical bias effect. Cru- cially, however, the EPG data in conjunction with a perceptual experiment highlight that categorising speech errors is problematic for a cascaded view of production. Therefore, the new analysis technique is used for a reanalysis of the EPG data. This allows us to abandon a view in which each utterance is an error or not. We demon- strate that articulation is more similar to a competing phonological representation when the competitor yields a real word. This pattern firmly establishes evidence for feedback in speech production. Two additional experiments investigate whether phonological representations, in addition to lower-level representations (e.g., features), are required to account for ill-formed speech. In two tongue-twister experiments we demonstrate with both EPG and ultrasound, that articulation is most variable when there is one compet- ing feature, but not when there are two competing features. This pattern is best accounted for in a feedback framework in which feature representations feedback to reinforce phonological representations. Analysing articulation using a technique which does not require the categorisation of responses allows us to investigate the consequences of cascading. It demonstrates that a cascading model of speech production requires feedback between levels of representation and that phonemes should still be represented even if articulation is malformed.
20
Wang, Costello Jingjing. "Comprehending synthetic speech personal and production influences." Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2011. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5077.
Full textAbstract:
With the increasing prevalence of voice-production technology across societies, clear comprehension while listening to synthetic speech is an obvious goal. Common human factors influences include the listener's language familiarity and age. Production factors include the speaking rate and clarity. This study investigated the speaking comprehension performance of younger and older adults who learned English as their first or second language. Presentations varied by the rate of delivery in words per minute (wpm) and in two forms, synthetic or natural speech. The results showed that younger adults had significantly higher comprehension performance than older adults. English as First Language (EFL) participants performed better than English as Second Language (ESL) participants for both younger and older adults, although the performance gap for the older adults was significantly larger than for younger adults. Younger adults performed significantly better than older adults at the slow speech rate (127 wpm), but surprisingly at the medium speech rate (188 wpm), both age groups performed similarly. Both young and older participants had better comprehension when listening to synthetic speech than natural speech. Both theoretical and design implications are provided from these findings. A cognitive diagnostic tool is proposed as a recommendation for future research.ID: 030422764; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-104).
Ph.D.
Doctorate
Psychology
Sciences
21
Scanlan, James Patrick. "Analysis of avian 'speech' : patterns and production." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.362897.
Full text
22
Roweis, Sam T. Hopfield John J. Abu-Mostafa Yaser S. Perona Pietro. "Data driven production models for speech processing /." Diss., Pasadena, Calif. : California Institute of Technology, 1999. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechETD:etd-02272008-093303.
Full text
23
Bailey, Elizabeth Fiona. "Breathing behavior during speech production in hypercapnia." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282812.
Full textAbstract:
This investigation was designed to examine speech production, the motion of the chest wall, and breathing-related perceptions under a condition of heightened respiratory drive. Ten healthy young men were studied during spontaneous breathing and during speaking in three gas conditions: room air, air delivered from a pressurized tank, and a gas mixture high in carbon dioxide (7% CO₂) delivered from a pressurized tank. Magnetometers that transduced diameter changes of the rib cage and abdomen were used to study chest wall motion. Subjects also reported their breathing-related perceptions. Results indicate that chest wall behavior during spontaneous breathing and speaking did not differ between room-air and tank-air conditions, but differed substantially in the high-CO₂ condition. In the high-CO₂ condition, spontaneous breathing and speaking usually were characterized by larger lung volumes, larger rib cage volumes, higher breathing rates, longer expiratory times, and higher expiratory flows than in the two air conditions. Further, speaking in high-CO₂ was characterized by shorter speech duration, fewer syllables per breath group, and greater average lung volume expenditure per syllable compared to speaking in air. In high-CO₂, subjects reported a range of breathing-related percepts including "breathlessness," "effortful breathing," and "gasping for air." Without exception, speaking in high-CO₂ was judged by the subjects to be more difficult than breathing in high-CO₂.
24
Fortkamp, Mailce Borges Mota. "Working memory capacity and L2 speech production." Florianópolis, SC, 2000. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/78287.
Full textAbstract:
Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão.Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-17T12:21:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0Bitstream added on 2014-09-25T16:39:12Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 171813.pdf: 9949219 bytes, checksum: 617ee1d1bffa2a4e19d9251702958c20 (MD5)
Este estudo investiga se há relação entre a capacidade da memória operacional e produção oral em L2 e se esta relação é específica à tarefa de produção da fala ou de natureza geral, independente da tarefa que está sendo desempenhada. Os participantes deste estudo foram 13 alunos de inglês como segunda língua na Universidade de Minnesota. A capacidade de memória operacional foi medida através do speaking span test (Daneman, 1991) e do operation-word span test (Turner & Engle, 1989), ambos aplicados em inglês. Duas tarefas foram usadas para elicitar a produção oral em L2: descrição de uma gravura e narrativa. Quatro aspectos da produção oral foram medidos: fluência, precisão, complexidade e densidade lexical. Análises estatísticas mostram que a capacidade de memória operacional, quando medida pelo speaking span test, se correlaciona de forma positiva com fluência, precisão e complexidade e, de forma negativa, com a densidade lexical, em ambas as tarefas. As análises revelam, também, que o speaking span test pode prever o desempenho oral em L2 nos aspectos de fluência, precisão e complexidade gramatical, explicando parcialmente diferenças de desempenho nestes aspectos. As análises revelam, ainda, que há uma tendência para uma interação entre pausas e hesitações, e entre fluência, precisão, complexidade e densidade lexical durante a produção oral em L2. Por fim, as análises mostram que o operation-word span test sofreu um erro metodológico na sua aplicação, comprometendo, assim, os dados gerados pelo teste. Consequentemente, este estudo não apresenta dados adequados para determinar se a relação entre a capacidade de memória operacional e produção oral em L2 é específica à tarefa em questão ou se é de caráter geral. Para explicar a relação entre a capacidade de memória, quando medida pelo speaking span test, e produção oral em L2, propõe-se que a codificação gramatical é uma sub-tarefa complexa no processo hierárquico de produção da fala que exige o controle e regulação da atenção.
25
Schmitz, Judith 1984. "On the relationship between native and non-native speech perception and speech production." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/456304.
Full textAbstract:
Models of speech perception differ in the nature of the relationship between speech perception and production. Whether speech perception and production processes are based on a common representations ̶ the articulatory gesture ̶ or speech perception fundamentally operates on the acoustic code is highly debated. In three experimental studies, we investigated the nature of the relationship between speech perception and production. In the first study we found an active role of the speech production system in speech perception, even when listening to unfamiliar phonemes. In the second study we found no influence of a somatosensory manipulation applied to an articulator in passive speech perception. In the third study we showed that speech perception and production abilities are tightly related across phonological processes (sub-lexical and lexical) and participants’ languages (native ̶ L1 ̶and second language ̶ L2 ̶). The results suggest that speech perception and production are intimately linked.Los modelos de la percepción del habla difieren sobre la naturaleza de la relación entre la percepción y la producción del habla. El debate se centra en si ambos procesos comparten como representación básica los gestos articulatorios o bien si la percepción del habla se basa en el código auditivo. Investigamos la naturaleza de la relación entre la percepción y producción del habla en tres estudios experimentales. El primer estudio mostró que el sistema de producción del habla participa activamente en la percepción. El segundo estudio no reveló influencias en la percepción pasiva del habla de una manipulación somatosensorial aplicada en un articulador. El tercer estudio mostró una fuerte relación entre las habilidades de la percepción y producción del habla en varios procesos fonológicos (sub-léxicos y léxicos) y lenguas conocidas por los participantes (primera y segunda lenguas). Los resultados sugieren que la percepción y producción del habla están íntimamente relacionadas.
26
Schaefer, Martina Christina Marion. "The interaction between speech perception and speech production: implications for speakers with dysarthria." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Communication Disorders, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/8610.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of the research presented here was to systematically investigate the role of speech perception on speech production in speakers of different ages and those with PD and hypokinetic dysarthria. For this, the experimental designs of auditory perturbation and mimicry were chosen. The initial research phase established that the magnitude of
compensation to auditory vowel perturbation was reduced in 54 speakers of New Zealand English (NZE) when compared to previous studies conducted with speakers of American (AE) and Canadian English (CE). A number of factors were studied to determine possible predictors of compensation and distinguish between potential changes associated with ageing.
However, no predictors of compensation were found for the overall group. Post-hoc analyses established an increased variability in response patterns in NZE when compared to previous studies of AE and CE. Subsequent follow-up analyses focused on the response-dependent categories of (1) big compensators, (2) compensators, (3) big followers, and (4) followers. Linear mixed-effect modelling revealed that in big compensators, the magnitude of compensation was greater in speakers who exhibited larger F1 baseline standard deviation
and greater F1 vowel distances of HEAD relative to HEED and HAD. F1 baseline standard deviation was found to have a similar predictive value for the group of compensators. No
predictors of compensation were found for the other two subgroups. Phase two was set up as a continuation of phase one and examined whether a subset of 16 speakers classified as big compensators adapted to auditory vowel perturbation. Linear mixed-effect modelling revealed that in the absence of auditory feedback alterations, big compensators maintained
their revised speech motor commands for a short period of time until a process of de-adaptation was initiated. No predictors of adaptation were found for the group. Due to the
unexpected results from the first two research phases indicating a dominant weighting of somatosensory feedback in NZE compared to auditory-perceptual influences, a different experimental paradigm was selected for phase three - mimicry. The purpose of this study was to determine whether eight speakers with PD and dysarthria and eight age-matched healthy controls (HC) are able to effectively integrate speech perception and speech production when attempting to match an acoustic target. Results revealed that all speakers were able to modify their speech production to approximate the model speaker but the acoustic dimensions of their speech did not move significantly closer to the target over the three mimicry attempts. Although speakers with moderate levels of dysarthria exhibited greater acoustic distances (except for the dimension of pitch variation), neither the perceptual nor the acoustic analyses found significant differences in mimicry behaviour across the two groups. Overall, these findings were considered preliminary evidence that speech perception and speech production can at least to some extent be effectively integrated to induce error-correction mechanisms and subsequent speech motor learning in these speakers with PD and dysarthria.
27
Speake, Jane. "Children with persisting speech difficulties: exploring speech production and intelligibility across different contexts." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709890.
Full text
28
Singampalli, Veena D. "Statistical identification of articulatory roles in speech production." Thesis, University of Surrey, 2010. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/843403/.
Full textAbstract:
The human speech apparatus is a rich source of information and offers many cues in the speech signal due to its biomechanical constraints and physiological interdependencies. Coarticulation, a direct consequence of these speech production factors, is one of the main problems affecting the performance of speech systems. Incorporation of production knowledge could potentially benefit speech recognisers and synthesisers. Hand coded rules and scores derived from the phonological knowledge used by production oriented models of speech are simple and incomplete representations of the complex speech production process. Statistical models built from measurements of speech articulation fail to identify the cause of constraints. There is a need for building explanatory yet descriptive models of articulation for understanding and modelling the effects of coarticulation. This thesis aims at providing compact descriptive models of realistic speech articulation by identifying and capturing the essential characteristics of human articulators using measurements from electro-magnetic articulography. The constraints on articulators during speech production are identified in the form of critical, dependent and redundant roles using entirely statistical and data-driven methods. The critical role captures the maximally constrained target driven behaviour of an articulator. The dependent role models the partial constraints due to physiological interdependencies. The redundant role reflects the unconstrained behaviour of an articulator which is maximally prone to coarticulation. Statistical target models are also obtained as the by-product of the identified roles. The algorithm for identification of articulatory roles (and estimation of respective model distributions) for each phone is presented and the results are critically evaluated. The identified data-driven constraints obtained are compared with the well known and commonly used constraints derived from the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). The identified critical roles were not only in agreement with the place and manner descriptions of each phone but also provided a phoneme to phone transformation by capturing language and speaker specific behaviour of articulators. The models trained from the identified constraints fitted better to the phone distributions (40% improvement) . The evaluation of the proposed search procedure with respect to an exhaustive search for identification of roles demonstrated that the proposed approach performs equally well for much less computational load. Articulation models built in the planning stage using sparse yet efficient articulatory representations using standard trajectory generation techniques showed some potential in modelling articulatory behaviour. Plenty of scope exists for further developing models of articulation from the proposed framework.
29
Hodgson, Jessica Charlotte. "Cerebral lateralisation of speech production and motor skill." Thesis, University of Lincoln, 2016. http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/24206/.
Full textAbstract:
The association between praxis and language is longstanding in neuropsychology, with evidence revealing that left hemisphere lesions often lead to combined impairments in motor control and speech (Rasmussen and Milner, 1975; Goldenberg, 2013). Strong left hemisphere asymmetry for language is a robust finding at the population level (e.g. Knecht et al 2000a) and similarly the cortical activation patterns of manual praxis for skilled tasks also reveal a left hemisphere bias (Buxbaum et al, 2005; Haaland et al, 2004). As such, common neural mechanisms are thought to underlie both speech and motor skill, especially actions involving fine motor control of the hands. However, evidence for a clear causal relationship between handedness and speech laterality has proven somewhat weak and inconsistent, due to the wide variation in measurement and classification approaches used (Groen, et al, 2013). A suggestion by Flowers and Hudson (2013) is that motor and speech laterality are related where they involve a common feature of motor output, namely the co-ordination of sequences of movements or utterances to execute a plan or intention so as to achieve a goal; either limb movement or expression of an idea (e.g. Grimme, et al, 2011). The research conducted here investigates speech and motor lateralisation from the hypothesis that sequencing based tasks will be best able to elicit the predicted left hemisphere activation patterns. Five empirical chapters are presented detailing a number of studies involving healthy adults, typically developing children and adults with Developmental Coordination Disorder. The research uses an emerging technique in cognitive neuropsychology; functional Transcranial Doppler (fTCD) sonography, to explore hemispheric laterality of speech and motor skill. Measurements of the degree of activation in each of the hemispheres during language tasks, and the use of a skill-based motor task to determine handedness, are the primary indicators of lateralisation used throughout this thesis. Results from the first 3 chapters 4 reveal that 1) atypical patterns of speech laterality are linked to greater performance differences on motor skill tasks; 2) that whilst hand preference is established early on in childhood the relative performance ability between the non-preferred and preferred hands develops linearly with age; 3) adults with developmental coordination disorder display atypical patterns of laterality of speech networks. The final 2 empirical chapters employ novel neuroimaging paradigms to investigate the mechanisms underlying the links between speech and motor sequencing. Results show that the pegboard task elicits left hemisphere dominant activation regardless of the hand used, unlike other motor tasks with similar properties. Finally a dual task paradigm demonstrates that speech production suffers greater impairments than motor skill when performed simultaneously, providing support for theories proposing a gestural origin to speech. The data are discussed in terms of the specialisation of the left hemisphere for higher order sequential processing, in the context of a lateralised speech-praxis centre model.
30
Bond, Rachel Jacqueline Psychology Faculty of Science UNSW. "Cognates, competition and control in bilingual speech production." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Psychology, 2005. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/22397.
Full textAbstract:
If an individual speaks more than one language, there are always at least two ways of verbalising any thought to be expressed. The bilingual speaker must then have a means of ensuring that their utterances are produced in the desired language. However, prominent models of speech production are based almost exclusively on monolingual considerations and require substantial modification to account for bilingual production. A particularly important feature to be explained is the way bilinguals control the language of speech production: for instance, preventing interference from the unintended language, and switching from one language to another. One recent model draws a parallel between bilinguals??? control of their linguistic system and the control of cognitive tasks more generally. The first two experiments reported in this thesis explore the validity of this model by comparing bilingual language switching with a monolingual switching task, as well as to the broader task-switching literature. Switch costs did not conform to the predictions of the task-set inhibition hypothesis in either experiment, as the ???paradoxical??? asymmetry of switch costs was not replicated and some conditions showed benefits, rather than costs, for switching between languages or tasks. Further experiments combined picture naming with negative priming and semantic competitor priming paradigms to examine the role of inhibitory and competitive processes in bilingual lexical selection. Each experiment was also conducted in a parallel monolingual version. Very little negative priming was evident when speaking the second language, but the effects of interlingual cognate status were pronounced. There were some indications of cross-language competition at the level of lexical selection: participants appeared unable to suppress the irrelevant language, even when doing so would make the task easier. Across all the experiments, there was no evidence for global inhibition of the language-not-in-use during speech production. Overall results were characterised by a remarkable flexibility in the mechanisms of bilingual control. A striking dissociation emerged between the patterns of results for cognate and non-cognate items, which was reflected throughout the series of experiments and implicates qualitative differences in the way these lexical items are represented and interconnected.
31
Jones, Jeffery Alan. "The role of auditory feedback during speech production." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ63426.pdf.
Full text
32
Thomas, T. J. "An articulatory model of speech production including turbulence." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.333125.
Full text
33
Chan, Dominic Sai Fan. "Speech production modelling based on glottal inverse filtering." Thesis, Imperial College London, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307161.
Full text
34
Slifka, Janet Louise Khoenle 1964. "Respiratory constraints on speech production at prosodic boundaries." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9027.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard--Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-137).
This research characterizes the respiratory system dynamics at the initiation and termination of utterances and determines correlations of physiological measures with acoustic cues for these prosodic boundaries. The analysis includes boundaries within a breath as well as boundaries that are aligned with the initiation and termination of exhalation. Simultaneous recordings of the acoustic signal, airflow, esophageal pressure and lung volume were collected during read isolated utterances and short paragraphs. These measures were used to derive estimates of recoil forces of the chest wall, net muscular forces, and the area of the airway constriction. Data are presented from four subjects (two men, two women), all native speakers of American English. Perceptual ratings for initial and final prominent syllables and the locations of pauses within the utterance were also collected. For speech boundaries th.i.t are aligned with breath boundaries, utterance initiation occurs during a rapid transition in muscular effort. Sound begins as soon as conditions permit and these conditions consistently occur during net inspiratory muscular force. Alveolar pressure reaches an initial peak (PpI) that is, in most cases, correlated to the relaxation characteristic of the chest wall. The timing of Pp1 generally coincides with a prominent syllable if that syllable is the first or second syllable in the utterance and precedes later prominences. Pressure at phonation onset is, on average, near 0.3PpI for utterances initiated with a voiced sonorant and is near 0. 8Pp1 for utterances initiated with a voiceless fricative. Phonation termination results from an approximately 3-fold increase in glottal area and a J-3 cm H20 fall in pressure. Irregular fundamental frequency (FO) at the end of voicing, in many cases, does not fit the classical definition of glottalization. Instead, voicing terminates with increasing glottal area, and FO becomes irregular during the increase. In some cases, regular FO resumes as glottal area continues to increase. Distinct respiratory gestures are made at pauses within a breath. The pressure is reduced by 2-3 cm H20, on average, during a period of relatively little volume change. The findings in this research show that the role of the respiratory system in speech production goes beyond a more traditional view of this role as one of simply providing a relatively constant driving pressure during speech.
by Janet Slifka.
Ph.D.
35
Jungers, Melissa Kay. "Prosodic persistence in music performance and speech production." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1060192519.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003.Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 83 p.; also includes graphics. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Caroline Palmer, Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-83).
36
Mota, Mailce Borges. "Working memory capacity and fluent L2 Speech production." reponame:Repositório Institucional da UFSC, 1995. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/76330.
Full textAbstract:
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e ExpressãoMade available in DSpace on 2012-10-16T09:21:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0Bitstream added on 2016-01-08T20:06:10Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 104117.pdf: 5965102 bytes, checksum: 079b8d927dbbce4078d9175da943fe8b (MD5)
O objetivo deste estudo foi verificar se há correlação entre a capacidade individual de memória operacional e a fala fluente em língua estrangeira (L2). Sete experimentos foram aplicados a 16 sujeitos, falantes proficientes em inglês com L2. Os resultados mostram que há uma correlação entre capacidade individual de memória operacional e fluência em L2, mas que esta capacidade é funcional, variando no mesmo indivíduo, de acordo com a sua eficiência na tarefa que desempenha.
37
Silveira, Maria Conceição Klober da. "Effects of task familiarity on L2 speech production." Florianópolis, SC, 2004. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/88052.
Full textAbstract:
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteMade available in DSpace on 2012-10-22T05:09:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 213479.pdf: 2172731 bytes, checksum: 53aab470cbb148a8a6843e24b65f4b02 (MD5)
Este estudo investiga os efeitos da familiaridade com tarefas na produção oral em L2. O termo familiaridade refere-se à idéia de prover o aluno com oportunidades de repetir ou praticar o mesmo tipo de tarefa. Dois tipos de tarefas foram empregados, uma dialógica, i.e., entrevista, e outra monológica, i.e., narração. Três questões foram investigadas: i) os efeitos do tópico da tarefa, ii) os efeitos do tipo de tarefa, e iii) os efeitos da familiaridade com tarefas sobre a produção oral em L2. Os resultados demonstraram que (1) o tópico teve um impacto na produção oral em L2 dos participantes, (2) os diferentes tipos de tarefa geraram diferentes níveis de desempenho, e (3) a familiaridade com a tarefa per se indicou não ter grande impacto no desempenho oral dos participantes. Entretanto, os resultados positivos alcançados pelo grupo dialógico podem ser uma indicação dos efeitos da familiaridade quando associada ao tipo de tarefa. Em outras palavras, possivelmente é a combinação de diferentes condições - familiaridade com tipo de tarefa, por exemplo - que pode proporcionar aos alunos possibilidades reais de aperfeiçoar sua produção oral em L2. Os resultados também sugerem que o tipo de tarefa, bem como o tópico da tarefa, devem ser levados em consideração quando da elaboração de tarefas para fins de desenvolvimento da habilidade oral em L2, seu ensino e avaliação.
38
Bergsleithner, Joara Martin. "Working memory capacity, noticing, and L2 speech production." Florianópolis, SC, 2007. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/90089.
Full textAbstract:
Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteMade available in DSpace on 2012-10-23T06:02:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 246378.pdf: 2967367 bytes, checksum: c67911991eb6a71248794e4f71810675 (MD5)
O presente estudo investigou a relação entre a capacidade de memória de trabalho, o registro cognitivo de aspectos da L2 e a produção oral da L2 em 30 adultos brasileiros aprendizes de inglês como segunda língua ou língua estrangeira, na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. O experimento consistiu de cinco tarefas: (a) uma tarefa teve por objetivo medir a capacidade de memória de trabalho através do Speaking Span Test; (b) três tarefas orais (um pré-teste antes do tratamento e dois pró-testes após o tratamento) tiveram por objetivo medir a acurácia gramatical da performance oral dos sujeitos ao produzirem a estrutura alvo (Questões Indiretas); e (c) uma tarefa teve por objetivo medir o registro cognitivo de aspectos da L2 através de um protocolo oral. Os resultados revelam que existe relação estatisticamente significativa entre a capacidade de memória de trabalho, o registro cognitivo de aspectos da L2 e a produção oral da L2. Indivíduos com a capacidade de memória de trabalho maior registraram melhor os aspectos da estrutura alvo e demonstraram melhor desempenho nas tarefas orais de L2, enquanto que indivíduos com uma capacidade de memória de trabalho menor registraram menos os aspectos formais da L2 e tiveram um desempenho menos preciso ao produzir a estrutura alvo nas tarefas orais. The present study investigated the relationship among working memory capacity, noticing of L2 forms, and L2 oral production by thirty Brazilian adult learners of English as a second or foreign language at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. The experiment consisted of five tasks: (a) one task aimed at measuring working memory capacity through the Speaking Span Test; (b) three oral tasks (one pretest before treatment, and two posttests after treatment) aimed at measuring grammatical accuracy through subjects' oral performance of the target structure (Indirect Questions); and (c) one task aimed at measuring noticing through an oral protocol. The results reveal that there are statistically significant relationships among working memory capacity, noticing of L2 forms, and grammatical accuracy on L2 oral performance. Individuals with a larger working memory capacity noticed more L2 formal aspects of the target structure and demonstrated better performance in L2 oral tasks whereas individuals with smaller working memory capacity notice fewer L2 formal aspects and demonstrated poorer performance of the target structure in L2 oral tasks.
39
Pape, Daniel. "Microprosodic differences in a cross-linguistic vowel comparison of speech production and speech perception." Berlin Weissensee-Verl, 2008. http://d-nb.info/998802557/04.
Full text
40
Caulfield, Anne Jeanette. "In search of isochrony : compensating for durational warping in speech production." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/24587.
Full textAbstract:
The rhythmic organization of speech into regular intervals (i.e. isochrony), is a strong perceptual phenomenon. However, Investigators have been unable to demonstrate the existence of isochrony in production data. It is hypothesized in this study that the intended rhythm of a speaker is in fact isochronous, but that this is obscured by several distorting influences which introduce durational irregularity at the syllable level, e.g. intrinsic duration, stress, position of the syllable in a phrase and number of syllables in a phrase. It is proposed that removing the predictable durational irregularities will yield a more regular signal, reflecting the (hypothesized) Intended Isochronous rhythm of the speaker. The latter two sources of distortion introduce progressive durational irregularity or "warping" which can be readily incorporated into an automated "dewarplng" procedure. A computer program was devised to compensate, at the syllable level for these two sources of distortion. The former two sources are not amenable to such an automated procedure, and were therefore not included. The "dewarping" program was run on the speech amplitude envelopes of two speakers, one French and one English.
The results indicate that, for the French speaker, dewarping does remove some of the durational Irregularity, yielding a more regular amplitude envelope. For the English speaker, no such Improvement in regularity is obtained. This indicates that the dewarping used, which presumes the syllable as "unit" of dewarping, is appropriate for syllable-timed languages such as French, but inappropriate for stress-timed languages such as English. It therefore provides some support for isochrony in French at the syllable level. Finally, the results also give support to the hypothesis that the degree of warping perceived as regular in speech perception studies corresponds to the degree of dewarping which, conversely, yields the most regular speech amplitude envelope; however, further experimentation is necessary to determine the optimum values of the parameters of the dewarping function.Medicine, Faculty of
Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of
Graduate
41
Venkatesh, Lakshmi. "Speech movement characteristics of repetitive syllable production in children with speech disorders of unknown origin /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8264.
Full text
42
Ertas, Figen. "A correlogram approach to speaker identification based on a human auditory model." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390091.
Full text
43
Avello, Pilar. "L2 phonological development in speech production during study abroad." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/128624.
Full textAbstract:
The present study investigates the impact of a 3-month study abroad (SA)
period on second language (L2) phonological development in speech
production by means of acoustic-phonetic measures, as well as listeners’
assessment of perceived foreign accent (FA). Speech samples were
collected from 23 bilingual Spanish/Catalan learners of English before
(Pre-test) and after (Post-test) SA. Acoustic-phonetic measures consisted
of measurements for voice onset time (VOT) in voiceless plosives and for
vowel duration and quality, together with error rate scores resulting from
the computation of pronunciation errors. Perceived FA measures were
obtained from a group of native listeners (n=20) and another group of
non-native listeners (n=37) who performed a rating task. Results failed to
yield a large effect of SA in VOT and vowel measures, although they
indicated a slight decrease in perceived FA and a significant improvement
in error rate scores after SA. High correlations were found between the
acoustic-phonetic measures and the FA ratings.Este estudio investiga el impacto de una estancia de 3 meses en el extranjero (ES) en la producción oral de una segunda lengua (L2) a través de medidas fonético-acústicas y de percepción del acento extranjero. El corpus está constituido por datos orales recogidos de un grupo de 23 aprendices de inglés hablantes nativos de español y catalán. Las muestras de habla fueron recogidas antes (Pre-test) y después (Post-test) de la ES. Las medidas fonético-acústicas incluyen el análisis de la aspiración en oclusivas sordas y de duración y cualidad vocálicas, así como la computación de errores de pronunciación. Las medidas de percepción del acento extranjero fueron proporcionadas por un grupo de oyentes nativos (n=20) y otro grupo de oyentes no nativos (n=37). Los resultados no arrojan mejoras tras la ES en las medidas de producción vocálica y de aspiración, a la vez que indican una ligera mejora en cuanto a la producción de acento extranjero y un descenso significativo en el número de errores de pronunciación. Se hallaron asimismo correlaciones altas entre las medidas fonético-acústicas y las de percepción del acento extranjero.
44
Kwok, Yee-tak Esther. "Phonological working memory and speech production in preschool children." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 1996. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36209284.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1996."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1996." Also available in print.
45
Chandregowda, Adithya. "Neurophysiological Activity Related to Speech Production: An ERP Investigation." Scholar Commons, 2015. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5919.
Full textAbstract:
The event related potential (ERP) technique is enjoying widespread application in neurophysiological research due to its fine temporal resolution. Of relevance to this study are ERPs related to voluntary movements. The precision with which movement related processes could be recorded using the ERP technique was demonstrated by Gilden, Vaughan and Costa (1966) and Kutas and Donchin (1974, 1977, and 1980) who found that the readiness potential (RP) immediately preceding hand movement was larger over the hemisphere contralateral to the responding hand. Given that left hemisphere controls right hand movements and vice versa, their findings confirmed that the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) is an index of motor preparation. It has been well established that electrodes from the left precentral site (C3) and from the right precentral site (C4) can capture LRPs, and that the motor cortex is the major generator of this component. In the speech domain, researchers recording ERPs related to motor preparation have often considered pre-determined electrode sites (e.g., F3, F4, C3, C4, Cz) assuming that their proximity to motor areas on the cortex enables capturing of specific activity from those areas [F3 close to Broca’s area, Cz close to Supplementary motor area (SMA), C3 to left motor strip, C4 to right motor strip]. A consistent finding has been that the RP preceding speech is greatest at the central electrode sites, which has been attributed to SMA and motor cortex activity. Studying speech production related ERPs at predetermined set of electrodes might not suffice for two reasons: (1) unlike simple finger movement, speaking is a fine motor skill requiring coordination of multiple systems (e.g., respiratory system, phonatory system, articulatory system) and muscles, and (2) the far-field nature of the ERP recording technique often results in spatial and temporal overlap of components. To overcome these challenges, this study considered multichannel recordings and principal component analysis (PCA). Twenty three healthy participants completed a simple hand motor task (pressing a button with the right index finger and another button using the left index finger based on the color of a stimulus frame displayed on a computer screen), and a speech task (saying “pool” or withholding the response based on the color of the frame). The purpose of including a hand motor task was to verify that neural activity specific to motor preparation was detectable in participants when a well-established condition for the elicitation of LRPs was utilized. Both stimulus-locked and response-locked ERPs from 21 right handed participants (11 females and 10 males) were studied. Interhemispheric difference wave analysis and PCA revealed left hemisphere lateralization of the potential (i.e., the LRP) immediately preceding right hand movements, similar to previous studies. The LRP specific to left hand movements (non-dominant hand), however, showed bihemispheric distribution. Results from the speech motor task confirmed that overlapping components affect interpretation of ERPs related to speech production if just central electrode sites are considered. Two ERP components emerged from the multichannel PCA as distinguishing between the speaking and no speaking condition: a posterior negative component and a left lateralized positive component. The morphology of the posterior negative component and significant moderate correlation of its amplitude with the mean reaction time suggest that this component is a possible index of speech motor preparation. Further research is required to determine whether the left-lateralized component reflects a process mediated by the speech dominant hemisphere (left). In addition to demonstrating the usefulness of multichannel recordings and PCA in ERP investigations, the study provides several methodological guidelines for capturing ERPs related to speech production.
46
Kreysa, Helene. "Coordinating speech-related eye movements between comprehension and production." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5802.
Full textAbstract:
Although language usually occurs in an interactive and world-situated context (Clark, 1996), most research on language use to date has studied comprehension and production in isolation. This thesis combines research on comprehension and production, and explores the links between them. Its main focus is on the coordination of visual attention between speakers and listeners, as well as the influence this has on the language they use and the ease with which they understand it. Experiment 1 compared participants’ eye movements during comprehension and production of similar sentences: in a syntactic priming task, they first heard a confederate describe an image using active or passive voice, and then described the same kind of picture themselves (cf. Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). As expected, the primary influence on eye movements in both tasks was the unfolding sentence structure. In addition, eye movements during target production were affected by the structure of the prime sentence. Eye movements in comprehension were linked more loosely with speech, reflecting the ongoing integration of listeners’ interpretations with the visual context and other conceptual factors. Experiments 2-7 established a novel paradigm to explore how seeing where a speaker was looking during unscripted production would facilitate identification of the objects they were describing in a photographic scene. Visual coordination in these studies was created artificially through an on-screen cursor which reflected the speaker’s original eye movements (cf. Brennan, Chen, Dickinson, Neider, & Zelinsky, 2007). A series of spatial and temporal manipulations of the link between cursor and speech investigated the respective influences of linguistic and visual information at different points in the comprehension process. Implications and potential future applications are discussed, as well as the relevance of this kind of visual cueing to the processing of real gaze in face-to-face interaction.
47
Adams, Anne-Marie. "Phonological working memory and speech production in young children." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.283918.
Full text
48
Fritz, Isabella. "How gesture and speech interact during production and comprehension." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8084/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates the mechanisms that underlie the interaction of gesture and speech during the production and comprehension of language on a temporal and semantic level. The results from the two gesture-speech production experiments provide unambiguous evidence that gestural content is shaped online by the ways in which speakers package information into planning units in speech rather than being influenced by how events are lexicalised. In terms of gesture-speech synchronisation, a meta-analysis of these experiments showed that lexical items which are semantically related to the gesture's content (i.e., semantic affiliates) compete for synchronisation when these affiliates are separated within a sentence. This competition leads to large proportions of gestures not synchronising with any semantic affiliate. These findings demonstrate that gesture onset can be attracted by lexical items that do not co-occur with the gesture. The thesis then tested how listeners process gestures when synchrony is lost and whether preceding discourse related to a gesture's meaning impacts gesture interpretation and processing. Behavioural and ERP results show that gesture interpretation and processing is discourse dependent. Moreover, the ERP experiment demonstrates that when synchronisation between gesture and semantic affiliate is not present the underlying integration processes are different from synchronous gesture-speech combinations.
49
Pollard, A. J. "Speech production, dual-process theory, and the attentive addressee." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2012. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1348544/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis outlines a model of Speaker-Addressee interaction that suggests some answers to two linked problems current in speech production. The first concerns an under-researched issue in psycholinguistics: how are decisions about speech content – conceptualization – carried out? The second, a pragmatics problem, asks how Speakers, working under the heavy time pressures of normal dialogue, achieve optimal relevance often enough for successful communication to take place. Links between these problems are discussed in Chapter 1; Chapter 2 reviews existing research on speech production and dialogue. Chapter 3 presents the central claim of my thesis: that the Addressee exerts a significant influence over the Speaker’s decision-making at a level below the latter’s consciousness. Using evidence drawn from psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and human-computer interaction, Chapter 4 presents evidence to support this claim, demonstrating that a Speaker’s performance can be decisively affected at a preconscious level by the degree of attentiveness shown by the Addressee. Lack of attentiveness, in particular, appears to damage speech production at the conceptualization level. I suggest, therefore, that Speaker and Addressee are linked in a feedback loop: unless a Speaker achieves and maintains relevance to an Addressee, the Addressee’s interest will be lost, and this will impair the Speaker’s production abilities and hence the communication process itself. Chapters 5 and 6 consider some automatic mechanisms that may help Speakers dovetail their productions to Addressee need. These include the neural mechanisms underlying face perception and social rejection; automatic aspects of theory of mind; intuitive memory and inference systems of the type being explored in dual-process theory; and connections between verbal performance and behavioural priming currently being investigated. Chapter 7 summarizes the complete argument, discusses its wider implications, and includes suggestions for further work.
50
Cowley, Camille Margaret. "The Effects of Distracting Background Audio on Speech Production." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2020. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/8522.
Full textAbstract:
This study examined changes in speech production when distracting background audio is present. Forty typically speaking adults completed a repetitive sentence reading task in the presence of 5 different audio conditions (pink noise, movie dialogue, heated debate, classical music, and contemporary music) and a silent condition. Acoustic parameters measured during the study included vowel space area (VSA), vowel articulation index (VAI), formant transition extent, formant transition rate, and diphthong duration for /ɑɪ/ and /ɑʊ/. It was hypothesized that there would be significant increases in vowel space area and vowel articulation index as well as an increase in formant transition measures in the presence of background noise. There were statistically significant decreases in vowel space are and vowel articulation index in the presence of all noise conditions compared to the silent baseline condition. Results also demonstrated a significant decrease in F2 transition extent for both /ɑɪ/, and /ɑʊ/ diphthongs in all noise conditions except the pink noise condition when compared to the silent condition. These findings were contrary to what was originally hypothesized. It is possible that VAI and VSA decreased in the presence of background noise due to an increase in speaking rate. Formant transition measurements were consistent with the VAI and VSA results. More research is needed to accurately determine the acoustic changes a speaker makes in response to distracting background audio.