Intelligibility Across a Reading Passage: The Effect of Dysarthria and Cued Speaking Styles

Objective: Reading a passage out loud is a commonly used task in the perceptual assessment of dysarthria. The extent to which perceptual characteristics remain unchanged or stable over the time course of a passage is largely unknown. This study investigated crowdsourced visual analogue scale (VAS) judgments of intelligibility across a reading passage as a function of cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment to maximize intelligibility. Patients and Method: The Hunter passage was read aloud in habitual, slow, loud, and clear speaking styles by 16 speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), 30 speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), and 32 control speakers. VAS judgments of intelligibility from three fragments representing the beginning, middle, and end of the reading passage were obtained from 540 crowdsourced online listeners. Results: Overall passage intelligibility was reduced for the two clinical groups relative to the control group. All speaker groups exhibited intelligibility variation across the reading passage, with trends of increased intelligibility toward the end of the reading passage. For control speakers and speakers with PD, patterns of intelligibility variation across passage reading did not differ with speaking style. For the MS group, intelligibility variation across the passage was dependent on speaking style. Conclusions: The presence of intelligibility variation within a reading passage warrants careful selection of speech materials in research and clinical practice. Results further indicate that the crowdsourced VAS rating paradigm is useful to document intelligibility in a reading passage for different cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment for dysarthria.

Best Prosody for News: A Psychophysiological Study Comparing a Broadcast to a Narrative Speaking Style

Studies in different languages have identified a broadcast speaking style, a particular manner that broadcasters have of reading news. This speaking style is characterized by an emphatic intonation with a fast speech rate easily recognizable by listeners. Some authors have stated that messages in this style are not positively perceived by listeners, as it is repetitive and regular, but there is no empirical data to support this conclusion, nor has the style been analyzed with physiological measures. The physiological approach has some advantages, such as a more objective assessment and real-time evaluation. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the effectiveness, adequacy, and physiological response of this broadcast style compared to a narrative pattern. We combined self-report with physiological measures. Fifty-six participants listened to six news pieces in both styles and with two voices, male and female. They had to rate the effectiveness and adequacy of the news while we measured their physiological responses (heart rate and electrodermal activity). The results showed that news conveyed through the broadcast style elicited less cognitive resource allocation and emotional arousal than the narrative pattern, but there were no significant differences in self-report evaluations.

Paham Radikal dalam Pandangan Tokoh Agama di Banda Aceh

Radicalism is one of the notions that can damage the social order in society, especially when it comes to religion. This study aims to find out specifically about the understanding of Islamic religious leaders in Banda Aceh City about the teachings and movements of religious radicalism, the factors that influence the development of religious radicalism, and the response of Islamic religious leaders in Banda Aceh City in responding to the development of religious radicalism today. This study uses a qualitative approach and the research method is descriptive. Data collection techniques were carried out by interview, documentation, and literature study. The results of this study indicate that the teachings and movements of radicalism are understood by Islamic religious leaders in Banda Aceh City as an understanding that will change the politics of Muslim and social communities through violence, this perspective is contrary to Islamic values and cannot be tolerated, because the characteristics of This movement tends to blame the other party. Attitudes like blasphemy, loud-speaking style, imposing will on others, like to blame and disbelieve in others. Factors causing radicalism include the lack of understanding about Islam and the country. Politically, certain politicians use religion as a tool to promote themselves to gain power. In addition, this research states that there is incitement and bribery to the community to commit violence for a fee. The Islamic religious leaders of Banda Aceh City responded strongly to the teachings and movements of radicalism by showing an attitude of rejection of the existence of the movement because it was considered contrary to the teachings of religion and the state. This movement can harm other people and damage good relations in the life of the nation, religion, and state.AbstrakRadikalisme merupakan paham yang dapat menggoyahkan tatanan sosial dalam masyarakat terutama jika berkaitan dengan agama. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui secara khusus tentang pemahaman tokoh agama Islam Kota Banda Aceh tentang ajaran dan gerakan radikalisme agama, faktor yang mempengaruhi perkembangan radikalisme agama dan respon tokoh agama Islam Kota Banda Aceh dalam menyikapi berkembangnya radikalisme agama dewasa ini. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif, metode penelitian bersifat deskriptif. Teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan wawancara, dokumentasi dan studi kepustakaan. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian diketahui bahwa ajaran dan gerakan radikalisme dipahami oleh tokoh agama Islam Kota Banda Aceh sebagai suatu paham yang ingin mengadakan suatu perubahan baik secara politik maupun sosial melalui jalan kekerasan, dan ini bertentangan dengan nilai-nilai keislaman. Hal ini tidak dapat ditoleril, karena ciri gerakannya bersifat merugikan pihak lain seperti suka menghujat, gaya bicara yang keras, memaksakan kehendak pada orang lain, suka menyalahkan dan mengkafirkan orang. Faktor penyebab terjadinya radikalisme antara lain minimnya pemahaman mengenai agamanya maupun tentang negaranya. Pada faktor politik oleh para politikus tertentu, memakai agama sebagai benteng untuk mempromosikan dirinya demi kepentingan kekuasaan, adanya hasutan dan penyogokan kepada golongan awam dengan cara dibayar. Para tokoh agama Islam Kota Banda Aceh merespon keras ajaran dan gerakan radikalisme yakni dengan menunjukkan sikap penolakan keberadaan gerakan tersebut karena dianggap bertentangan dengan ajaran agama dan negara. Gerakan ini dapat merugikan orang lain serta merusak hubungan baik kehidupan berbangsa, agama dan negara.

Robots for Foreign Language Learning: Speaking Style Influences Student Performance

Much previous research suggests that teachers’ individual characteristics may affect students’ performance; however, which factors are particularly helpful is as yet unclear and methodologically very difficult to assess. In this paper, we study the effects of robots’ speaking styles when instructing students on a task. 40 participants saw a brief video in which a robot presented its instructions either in a charismatic or a not so charismatic speaking style. Participants’ task was then to produce foreign language sentences on the basis of visualizations of the prosodic properties of these sentences. A subsequent analysis of participants’ productions shows that language learners’ performance was significantly better when the robot had delivered its instructions in a charismatic voice. The results suggest not only that a charismatic speaking style may be crucial for teachers in general and hence one of the factors causing the interpersonal variation between teachers, but also that students can benefit from instructions by robots delivered in a charismatic speaking style.

Effects of Sinusoidal Model on Non-Parallel Voice Conversion with Adversarial Learning

Voice conversion (VC) transforms the speaking style of a source speaker to the speaking style of a target speaker by keeping linguistic information unchanged. Traditional VC techniques rely on parallel recordings of multiple speakers uttering the same sentences. Earlier approaches mainly find a mapping between the given source–target speakers, which contain pairs of similar utterances spoken by different speakers. However, parallel data are computationally expensive and difficult to collect. Non-parallel VC remains an interesting but challenging speech processing task. To address this limitation, we propose a method that allows a non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion by using a generative adversarial network. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, our study is the first one that employs a sinusoidal model with continuous parameters to generate converted speech signals. Our method involves only several minutes of training examples without parallel utterances or time alignment procedures, where the source–target speakers are entirely unseen by the training dataset. Moreover, empirical study is carried out on the publicly available CSTR VCTK corpus. Our conclusions indicate that the proposed method reached the state-of-the-art results in speaker similarity to the utterance produced by the target speaker, while suggesting important structural ones to be further analyzed by experts.

Gender and expletives as discourse markers: Some uses of joder in young women’s interactions in Spanish and Galician

This paper approaches young women’s speaking style by analysing the ways in which the interjection joder is employed in interactions in Spanish and Galician among young females. The analysis identifies several uses of this form at the interactional and discursive level: reinforcement of speech acts, marker of disagreement, marker of complaints, expression of minimal emotional assessments, correcting and stalling. It is concluded that joder has developed multiple functions in interaction as a discursive marker, in contrast to arguments against the inclusion of interjections in this pragmatic category. The findings also suggest that this expletive fulfils a sociolinguistic function as a marker of ‘young femininities’, since it demonstrates how it has been integrated into young women’s speaking style, in contrast to traditional gender rules and broader descriptions of ‘women’s talk’ in Language and Gender studies.