LABELS: Laboratoř behaviorálních a lingvistických studií

The Laboratory of Behavioural and Linguistic Studies is a joint project of the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Currently, our laboratory is mainly concerned with vision science, language and speech acquisition in children, language processing in adults and cognition in children and adults in general, but it is also open to to other types of projects.

„Dziecko w skorupie”. Ograniczenia w nabywaniu mowy i języka przez jednostki z zaburzeniami ze spektrum autyzmu

“Child in a shell”. Limitations in the speech and language acquisition of children with autism spectrum disorders. Speech as audible communication is achieved due to the knowledge of a language. Speech acquisition does not always proceed smoothly and without any problems. Deviation from the proper development of speech is seen in the case of children with disorders of the development of speech and language, among whom children with characteristic autism spectrum disorders constitute a considerable group. The inability of using speech for communication is characteristic of this group of children. The article presents limitations in acquiring speech and language by children with autism as well as ways of opening them up to the world through the development of communication. Keywords: language, autism, speech and language development disorders

Individual variation in acquisition of voicing contrasts by classroom learners of French

The present study examines the production of voicing by English-speaking learners of French in a traditional classroom environment, focusing on the juxtaposition between group patterns and individual tendencies. Thirty-one intermediate-level learners completed word-reading production tasks in French and English, and voice onset time was measured in word-initial bilabial stops. At the group level, results demonstrated strong interference from English in participants’ French, especially in the production of voiceless stops. In contrast, voiced stops overall were more target-like, revealing an asymmetry in the acquisition of the two members of the phonological distinction. At the individual level, much variability was observed both in the relative attainment of pronunciation targets and in the alignment between participants first and second language pronunciation patterns, ultimately highlighting the need for future research to consider individual trends in order to understand L2 speech acquisition in a more comprehensive manner.

A rare but treatable inborn error of metabolism: Arginine glycine amidinotransferase (AGAT) deficiency

AGAT deficiency is a rare and treatable autosomal recessive disorder. The symptoms are early-onset developmental mild to moderate intellectual disability, delayed speech acquisition, behavioral problems or proximal muscle weakness. Biochemical screening for creatine, creatinine and urinary guanidinoacetate and genetic tests are used for diagnosis. Electromyography may be normal or may have a myopathic pattern with low amplitude polyphasic waves. Muscle biopsy may show abnormalities including small myocytes. Creatine supplementation can fully prevent the neurological disability, if the treatment is started early in life; the muscular function improves irrespective of the supplementation moment.

Vocal learning in songbirds: the role of syllable order in song recognition

Songbird vocal learning has interesting behavioural and neural parallels with speech acquisition in human infants. Zebra finch males sing one unique song that they imitate from conspecific males, and both sexes learn to recognize their father's song. Although males copy the stereotyped syllable sequence of their father's song, the role of sequential information in recognition remains unclear. Here, we investigated father's song recognition after changing the serial order of syllables (switching the middle syllables, first and last syllables, or playing all syllables in inverse order). Behavioural approach and call responses of adult male and female zebra finches to their father's versus unfamiliar songs in playback tests demonstrated significant recognition of father's song with all syllable-order manipulations. We then measured behavioural responses to normal versus inversed-order father's song. In line with our first results, the subjects did not differentiate between the two. Interestingly, when males' strength of song learning was taken into account, we found a significant correlation between song imitation scores and the approach responses to the father's song. These findings suggest that syllable sequence is not essential for recognition of father's song in zebra finches, but that it does affect responsiveness of males in proportion to the strength of vocal learning. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Vocal learning in animals and humans’.

Automatic Geminate Insertion Algorithm for Japanese Audio Data

Generally, it is quite difficult for Japanese language learners to acquire Japanese special morae, namely, geminate, syllabic nasals and long vowels compared to independent morae. Among these three special morae, geminate is particularly difficult, and it takes much longer to fully acquire both production and perception of it. Especially for learners of Chinese native speakers, previous studies has shown that both production and perception of geminate are difficult in terms of the fact that not only no geminate is found in Chinese language, but also the phonological interaction between Japanese accent and Chinese tones. However, in the field of Japanese speech acquisition, research has not making progress because of a major problem, that is, researchers themselves manually create the acoustic experiment stimuli. Therefore, in this study, as a method to solve this problem, we propose an algorithm that automatically inserts geminate into the audio data used in Japanese speech acquisition research. This algorithm automates the insertion of geminate by performing three processes in order: mora extraction by noise removal, matching of original audio data and extracted mora, and insertion of soundless duration and geminate. The algorithm makes it possible to remove the noise, which is -50 dBFS and continues for 10ms or more, and replace it with soundless duration instead, allowing Japanese native speakers to percept it as geminate. The accuracy was equivalent as a result of comparing the data that was manually modified by a phonology researcher with the data that was generated by the algorithm. The result shows that the algorithm can be a practical solution for the automation of geminate insertion.

LOGOPEDIA W UNIWERSYTECIE WARSZAWSKIM

The paper entitled Logopaedics at the University of Warsaw is composed of two sections. Section one discusses profi les of the following linguists: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Tytus Benni, Witold Doroszewski, Halina Koneczna, and Irena Styczek, whose academic research and organisational activity contributed most to the formation of the research on speech acquisition, development, and disorders at the University of Warsaw. Section two presents the history of establishing institutions training speech therapists at the University of Warsaw: Podyplomowe Studium Ortofonii Szkolnej (Postgraduate Studies of School Orthophony), Podyplomowe (later: Pomagisterskie) Studium Logopedyczne (Postgraduate Studies of Logopaedics), and various organisational forms and frameworks of training speech therapists as part of full-time programmes.

Simulating Speech Error Patterns Across Languages and Different Datasets

Children’s speech acquisition is influenced by universal and language-specific forces. Some speech error patterns (or phonological processes) in children’s speech are observed in many languages, but the same error pattern may have different effects in different languages. We aimed to explore phonological effects of the same speech error patterns across different languages, target audiences and discourse modes, using a novel method for large-scale corpus investigation. As an additional aim, we investigated the face validity of five different phonological effect measures by relating them to subjective ratings of assumed effects on intelligibility, as provided by practicing speech-language pathologists. Six frequently attested speech error patterns were simulated in authentic corpus data: backing, fronting, stopping, /r/-weakening, cluster reduction and weak syllable deletion—each simulation resulting in a “misarticulated” version of the original corpus. Phonological effects were quantified using five separate metrics of phonological complexity and distance from expected target forms. Using Swedish child-speech data as a reference, phonological effects were compared between this reference and a) child speech in Norwegian and English, and b) data representing different modes of discourse (spoken/written) and target audiences (adults/children) in Swedish. Of the speech error patterns, backing—the one atypical pattern of those included—was found to cause the most detrimental effects, across languages as well as across modes and speaker ages. However, none of the measures reflects intuitive rankings as provided by clinicians regarding effects on intelligibility, thus corroborating earlier reports that phonological competence is not translatable into levels of intelligibility.