Acoustic Integrity of Speech Production in Children With Moderate and Severe Hearing Impairment

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ryalls ◽  
Annie Larouche

Ten normally hearing and 10 age-matched subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing impairment were recorded producing a protocol of 18 basic syllables [/pi/,/pa/,/pu/; /bi/,/ba/,/bu/; /ti/,/ta/,/tu/; /di/,/da/,/du/; /ki/,/ka/,/ku/; /gi/,/ga/,/gu/] repeated five times. The resulting 90 syllables were digitized and measured for (a) total duration; (b) voice-onset time (VOT) of the initial consonant; (c) fundamental frequency (F 0 ) at midpoint of vowel; and (d) formant frequencies (F 1 , F 2 , F 3 ), also measured at midpoint of vowel. Statistical comparisons were conducted on (a) average values for each syllable, and (b) standard deviations. Although there were numerical differences between normally hearing and hearing-impaired groups, few differences were statistically significant.

1994 ◽  
Vol 95 (5) ◽  
pp. 3012-3012
Author(s):  
Marios Fourakis ◽  
Ann E. Geers ◽  
Emily A. Tobey

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Joseph V. Casillas

Previous studies attest that some early bilinguals produce the sounds of their languages in a manner that is characterized as “compromise” with regard to monolingual speakers. The present study uses meta-analytic techniques and coronal stop data from early bilinguals in order to assess this claim. The goal was to evaluate the cumulative evidence for “compromise” voice-onset time (VOT) in the speech of early bilinguals by providing a comprehensive assessment of the literature and presenting an acoustic analysis of coronal stops from early Spanish–English bilinguals. The studies were coded for linguistic and methodological features, as well as effect sizes, and then analyzed using a cross-classified Bayesian meta-analysis. The pooled effect for “compromise” VOT was negligible (β = −0.13). The acoustic analysis of the coronal stop data showed that the early Spanish–English bilinguals often produced Spanish and English targets with mismatched features from their other language. These performance mismatches presumably occurred as a result of interlingual interactions elicited by the experimental task. Taken together, the results suggest that early bilinguals do not have “compromise” VOT, though their speech involves dynamic phonetic interactions that can surface as performance mismatches during speech production.


1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Robbins ◽  
John Christensen ◽  
Gail Kempster

Voice onset time (VOT) and vowel duration characteristics of speakers following the Singer-Blom technique of tracheoesophageal puncture (1980) were compared to those of traditional esophageal and laryngeal speakers. Fifteen subjects in each of the three speaker groups produced the words /pik/, /kup/, and /kup/ in a carrier phrase while audio recordings were obtained. Broadband spectrograms were made of the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) utterances and vowel duration and VOT were measured. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures revealed that the tracheoesophageal speakers produced significantly shorter VOTs and longer vowel durations than the laryngeal speakers. However, the longer vowel durations for the traeheoesophageal speakers were not completely accounted for by the shorter VOTs found for that group. Spectrographic examination suggests that delayed voice offset time for the tracheoesophageal speakers also contributes to their longer vowel durations. Overall findings indicate that the physical characteristics and motor control properties of the neoglottis, even when driven by pulmonary air as in tracheoesophageal speakers, exert a major influence on alaryngeal voice production.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUE ANN S. LEE ◽  
GREGORY K. IVERSON

The purpose of this study was to conduct an acoustic examination of the obstruent stops produced by Korean–English bilingual children in connection with the question of whether bilinguals establish distinct categories of speech sounds across languages. Stop productions were obtained from ninety children in two age ranges, five and ten years: thirty Korean–English bilinguals, thirty monolingual Koreans and thirty monolingual English speakers. Voice-Onset-Time (VOT) lag at word-initial stop and fundamental frequency (f0) in the following vowel (hereafter vowel-onset f0) were measured. The bilingual children showed different patterns of VOT in comparison to both English and Korean monolinguals, with longer VOT in their production of Korean stop consonants and shorter VOT for English. Moreover, the ten-year-old bilinguals distinguished all stop categories using both VOT and vowel-onset f0,whereas the five-year-olds tended to make stop distinctions based on VOT but not vowel-onset f0. The results of this study suggest that bilingual children at around five years of age do not yet have fully separate stop systems, and that the systems continue to evolve during the developmental period.


2006 ◽  
Vol 82 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 267-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Epstein-Lubow ◽  
Jesse Hochstadt ◽  
Philip Lieberman ◽  
Gary B. Kaplan

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna H. Lowenstein ◽  
Susan Nittrouer

Purpose Child phonologists have long been interested in how tightly speech input constrains the speech production capacities of young children, and the question acquires clinical significance when children with hearing loss are considered. Children with sensorineural hearing loss often show differences in the spectral and temporal structures of their speech production, compared to children with normal hearing. The current study was designed to investigate the extent to which this problem can be explained by signal degradation. Method Ten 5-year-olds with normal hearing were recorded imitating 120 three-syllable nonwords presented in unprocessed form and as noise-vocoded signals. Target segments consisted of fricatives, stops, and vowels. Several measures were made: 2 duration measures (voice onset time and fricative length) and 4 spectral measures involving 2 segments (1st and 3rd moments of fricatives and 1st and 2nd formant frequencies for the point vowels). Results All spectral measures were affected by signal degradation, with vowel production showing the largest effects. Although a change in voice onset time was observed with vocoded signals for /d/, voicing category was not affected. Fricative duration remained constant. Conclusions Results support the hypothesis that quality of the input signal constrains the speech production capacities of young children. Consequently, it can be concluded that the production problems of children with hearing loss—including those with cochlear implants—can be explained to some extent by the degradation in the signal they hear. However, experience with both speech perception and production likely plays a role as well.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khia A. Johnson

While crosslinguistic influence is widespread in bilingual speech production, it is less clear which aspects of representation are shared across languages, if any. Most prior work examines phonetically distinct yet phonologically similar sounds, for which phonetic convergence suggests a cross-language link within individuals [1]. Convergence is harder to assess when sounds are already similar, as with English and Cantonese initial long-lag stops. Here, the articulatory uniformity framework [2, 3, 4] is leveraged to assess whether bilinguals share an underlying laryngeal feature across languages, and describe the nature of cross-language links. Using the SpiCE corpus of spontaneous Cantonese-English bilingual speech [5], this paper asks whether Cantonese-English bilinguals exhibit uniform voice-onset time for long-lag stops within and across languages. Results indicate moderate patterns of uniformity within-language—replicating prior work [2, 6]—and weaker patterns across languages. The analysis, however, raises many questions, as correlations were generally lower compared to prior work, and talkers did not adhere to expected ordinal VOT relationships by place of articulation. Talkers also retained clear differences for /t/ and /k/, despite expectations of similarity. Yet at the same time, more of the overall variation seems to derive from individual-specific differences. While many questions remain, the uniformity framework shows promise.


1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Emil Flege ◽  
Murray J. Munro

The purpose of this study, which focused on the wordtacoas spoken in Spanish and English, was to explore the word as a unit in second language (L2) speech acquisition. As expected, acoustic measurements revealed that Spanish and English monolinguals' renditions oftacodiffered systematically. It was also shown that the extent to which Spanish/English bilinguals approximated English phonetic norms for any one segment oftacowas correlated with their approximation for the other three segments, and that early learners differentiated Spanish versus Englishtacomore than did late learners. It also appeared that the bilinguals produced /t/ with less English-like voice onset time (VOT) values in Englishtacothan in other English words without a cognate in Spanish. In a perception experiment, listeners were able to identify the native language of Spanish and English monolinguals on the basis of their production oftaco. The listeners heard larger differences between Spanish and Englishtacotokens spoken by early than late learners of English L2. Two additional perception experiments assessed further the phonetic dimensions that listeners use to determine language identity and to gauge bilinguals' speech production accuracy. Listeners assigned to language identification and goodness rating tasks responded to acoustic information distributed over all four segments intaco, although the VOT of the word-initial /t/ appeared to be the single most important phonetic dimension. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that (a) bilinguals' accuracy in producing the various segments of a second language word may be interrelated and (b) in judging L2 speech, listeners respond to phonetic errors distributed over the entire word.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoonjung Kang ◽  
Naomi Nagy

AbstractKorean has a typologically unusual three-way laryngeal contrast in voiceless stops among aspirated, lenis, and fortis stops. Seoul Korean is undergoing a female-led sound change in which aspirated stops and lenis stops are merging in voice onset time (VOT) and are better distinguished by the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the following vowel than by their VOT, in younger speakers' speech. This paper compares the VOT pattern of Homeland (Seoul) and Heritage (Toronto) Korean speakers and finds that the same change is in progress in both. However, in the heritage variety, younger speakers do not advance the change, unlike their Seoul counterparts. Rather they have leveled off or are perhaps reversing the change, and there is very little sex difference among the younger heritage speakers' patterns. We consider possible accounts of the differences between the Seoul and Toronto patterns, building our understanding of how language-internal variation operates in bilingual speakers, a topic that has received relatively less attention in the variationist literature.


1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen B. Higgins ◽  
Ronald Netsell ◽  
Laura Schulte

The purpose of this investigation was to study the interaction between the supralaryngeal and laryngeal components of the speech mechanism by examining vowel-related effects for a variety of vocal fold articulatory and phonatory measures. Secondary issues were to determine if vowel-related differences were influenced by the nature of the speaking task or gender. Between-vowel differences in estimated subglottal air pressure, peak oral air flow, mean phonatory air flow, air flow near the termination of the vowel, electroglottograph cycle width (EGGW), fundamental frequency, and voice onset time were examined for men and women during syllable repetitions and sentence productions. Significant vowel-related differences were found for all of the measures except mean phonatory air flow, and generally were not influenced by speaking task or gender. Vowel-related effects for estimated subglottal air pressure, peak oral air flow, fundamental frequency, and VOT were consistent with some earlier studies. New findings included vowel-related differences in EGGW and air flow near the termination of the vowel. We propose a model that includes the contribution of mechanical forces, reflexive neural activity, and learned neural activity to explain vowel-related effects. When vowel height is varied, changes in laryngeal cartilage positioning and vocal fold and vocal tract tension appear to influence laryngeal articulatory and phonatory function.


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