scholarly journals Speech Prosody: The Musical, Magical Quality of Speech

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marita K. Everhardt ◽  
Anastasios Sarampalis ◽  
Matt Coler ◽  
Deniz Başkent ◽  
Wander Lowie

When we speak, we can vary how we use our voices. Our speech can be high or low (pitch), loud or soft (loudness), and fast or slow (duration). This variation in pitch, loudness, and duration is called speech prosody. It is a bit like making music. Varying our voices when we speak can express sarcasm or emotion and can even change the meaning of what we are saying. So, speech prosody is a crucial part of spoken language. But how do speakers produce prosody? How do listeners hear and understand these variations? Is it possible to hear and interpret prosody in other languages? And what about people whose hearing is not so good? Can they hear and understand prosodic patterns at all? Let’s find out!

2020 ◽  
pp. 174569162097820
Author(s):  
Maryanne Garry ◽  
Lorraine Hope ◽  
Rachel Zajac ◽  
Ayesha J. Verrall ◽  
Jamie M. Robertson

In the battle for control of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), we have few weapons. Yet contact tracing is among the most powerful. Contact tracing is the process by which public-health officials identify people, or contacts, who have been exposed to a person infected with a pathogen or another hazard. For all its power, though, contact tracing yields a variable level of success. One reason is that contact tracing’s ability to break the chain of transmission is only as effective as the proportion of contacts who are actually traced. In part, this proportion turns on the quality of the information that infected people provide, which makes human memory a crucial part of the efficacy of contact tracing. Yet the fallibilities of memory, and the challenges associated with gathering reliable information from memory, have been grossly underestimated by those charged with gathering it. We review the research on witnesses and investigative interviewing, identifying interrelated challenges that parallel those in contact tracing, as well as approaches for addressing those challenges.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
pp. 3648
Author(s):  
Casper S. Shikali ◽  
Zhou Sijie ◽  
Liu Qihe ◽  
Refuoe Mokhosi

Deep learning has extensively been used in natural language processing with sub-word representation vectors playing a critical role. However, this cannot be said of Swahili, which is a low resource and widely spoken language in East and Central Africa. This study proposed novel word embeddings from syllable embeddings (WEFSE) for Swahili to address the concern of word representation for agglutinative and syllabic-based languages. Inspired by the learning methodology of Swahili in beginner classes, we encoded respective syllables instead of characters, character n-grams or morphemes of words and generated quality word embeddings using a convolutional neural network. The quality of WEFSE was demonstrated by the state-of-art results in the syllable-aware language model on both the small dataset (31.229 perplexity value) and the medium dataset (45.859 perplexity value), outperforming character-aware language models. We further evaluated the word embeddings using word analogy task. To the best of our knowledge, syllabic alphabets have not been used to compose the word representation vectors. Therefore, the main contributions of the study are a syllabic alphabet, WEFSE, a syllabic-aware language model and a word analogy dataset for Swahili.


1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Barletta

This paper addresses the issues associated with providing quality supervision for school counsellors. The variety of tasks that are required of school counsellors makes it essential that appropriate supervisory support is provided by the employer. Clinical supervision should be carried out by a counsellor who has training in supervision methods and techniques, as well as clinical experience in the tasks being supervised. Administrative supervision can be conducted by a member of the school administrative team. School counsellor competence can be developed in the workplace with the support of a colleague or supervisor until expertise develops.It is accepted that supervision is a crucial part of the professional support for counsellors. Bernard and Goodyear (1992) suggest that supervision serves three basic and important purposes. First, supervision ensures that those entering the profession have appropriate fundamental skills, second, it enhances the functioning of counsellors, and finally, it ensures the quality of service to clients. The supervisor needs to be competent not only in the process of supervision and the specific issues within the educational setting, but also aware of the particular preference of style school counsellors have for supervision, which research has found tends to be quite directive (Usher & Borders, 1993).


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (7) ◽  
pp. 2455-2472
Author(s):  
Jean K. Gordon ◽  
Kim Andersen ◽  
Gabriella Perez ◽  
Eileen Finnegan

Purpose Spoken language serves as a primary means of social interaction, but speech and language skills change with age, a potential source of age-related stereotyping. The goals of this study were to examine how accurately age could be estimated from language samples, to determine which speech and language cues were most informative, and to assess the impact of perceived age on judgments of the speakers' communication skills. Method We analyzed narratives from 84 speakers aged 30–89 years to identify age-related differences and compared these differences to factors affecting perceptions of age and communicative competence. Three groups of raters estimated the speakers' ages and judged the quality of their communication: 44 listeners listened to audio-recorded narratives, 51 readers read transcripts of the narratives, and 24 voice raters listened to 10-s samples of speech extracted from one of the narratives. Results Older speakers spoke more slowly but showed minimal linguistic differences compared to younger speakers. Speakers' ages were estimated quite accurately, even from 10-s samples. Estimates were largely based on cues available in the acoustic signal—speech rate and vocal characteristics—so listeners were more accurate than readers. However, an overreliance on these cues also contributed to overestimates of speakers' ages. Communication ratings were not strongly related to perceived age but were influenced by various aspects of speech and language. In particular, speakers who produced longer narratives and spoke more quickly were judged to be better communicators. Conclusion Speakers tend to be judged on relatively superficial aspects of spoken language, in part because age-related change is most evident at these levels. Implications of these findings for age-related theories of stereotyping and speech-language intervention are discussed.


Author(s):  
Lena Aggestam ◽  
Per Backlund ◽  
Anne Persson

Knowledge forms an important asset in modern organizations. In order to gain and sustain competitive advantage knowledge has to be managed. One aspect of this is to use Electronic Knowledge Repositories (EKR) to enhance knowledge sharing, reuse and learning. The success of an EKR is dependent on the quality of its content. For knowledge to be stored in an EKR, it has to be captured. One crucial part of the capture process is to evaluate whether the identified knowledge should be incorporated in the EKR or not. Therefore, to increase quality in an EKR, the evaluation stage of the capture process must be successfully carried out. Based on an interpretive field study and an extensive literature review, this paper identifies and characterizes Critical Success Factors (CSF) in the evaluation stage and presents guidance aiming to support implementation of the evaluation stage with the purpose to increase the quality of an EKR. In particular, the guidance supports the decision whether identified knowledge should be stored or not and it highlights the importance of performing evaluation addressing correctness, relevance, protection and redundancy. The characterization of the capture process contributes mainly to KM theory, and the guidance to KM practice.


2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 761-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Volkov ◽  
Artem Sedov ◽  
Pavel Chelyshkov ◽  
Ekaterina Kulikova

<p class="p0">Creating a comfortable indoor environment has been one of the mainconcerns when it comes to the design and operation of buildings. Buildings are a crucial part of our daily life, on average people spends 85 % of their time performing activities inside of buildings and therefore the quality of the indoor environment is a critical factor affecting the happiness and productivity of building users.The indoor environmental quality has a strong relationship on the thermal conditions of a space which is directly affected by the amount of heat lost or gained due to the properties of the materials used, the external environmental conditions and the inner sources of heat; In consequence, efforts have to be made to maintain proper thermal conditions by means of using natural and mechanical strategies to provide heating, cooling and ventilation. While the thermal comfort is an important aspect for the average user of a building, it becomes a critical aspect when it comes to population highly sensitive to thermal conditions.</p>


2006 ◽  
Vol 120 (7) ◽  
pp. 521-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
E J M McNeill

Transsexualism is a condition involving a paradoxical feeling of belonging to the opposite sex. Acquiring a sex-appropriate voice is a crucial part of the patient gaining acceptance in their new gender. Speech and language therapists and otolaryngologists play an important role in influencing communication behaviour in transgender patients by altering the fundamental frequency of speech to one acceptable for the patient's sex.Review of the literature suggests that speech and language therapy is successful at creating an acceptable fundamental frequency in transgender patients, as well as influencing other communication behaviours. Laryngeal surgery, such as cricothyroid approximation, has an important role in raising the fundamental frequency in those who do not achieve acceptable voice via non-surgical means. There is little information on patient satisfaction and quality of life measures. Research is currently underway to explore this aspect further.


2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 757-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Volkov ◽  
Artem Sedov ◽  
Pavel Chelyshkov ◽  
Ekaterina Kulikova

<p class="p0">Creating a comfortable indoor environment has been one of the mainconcerns when it comes to the design and operation of buildings. Buildings are a crucial part of our daily life, on average people spends 85 % of their time performing activities inside of buildings and therefore the quality of the indoor environment is a critical factor affecting the happiness and productivity of building users.The indoor environmental quality has a strong relationship on the thermal conditions of a space which is directly affected by the amount of heat lost or gained due to the properties of the materials used, the external environmental conditions and the inner sources of heat; In consequence, efforts have to be made to maintain proper thermal conditions by means of using natural and mechanical strategies to provide heating, cooling and ventilation. While the thermal comfort is an important aspect for the average user of a building, it becomes a critical aspect when it comes to population highly sensitive to thermal conditions.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltán Kolláth ◽  
Anita Dömény

A crucial part of the qualification of international dark sky places (IDSPs) is the objective measurement of night time sky luminance or radiance. Modern digital cameras provide an alternative way to perform all sky imaging either by a fisheye lens or by a mosaic image taken by a wide angle lens. Here we present a method for processing raw camera images to obtain calibrated measurements of sky quality. The comparison of the night sky quality of different European locations is also presented to demonstrate the use of our technique.


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