Lingual means of the denotation in the Ukrainian language for age development periods of a child in the first year of the life

The names of age periods of the first year of a child’s life were considered in the paper. Traditionally the first year of a child’s life was not clearly divided into shorter stages, and in turn, there were no established names which would correlate with these age periods. In every-day life defining features for a child of the first year of life is the fact of birth itself, which fixes a noun-composite a newly-born, as well as expressive signs associated with feeding a baby and its (his/her) inability to speak, namely, such nouns as a nursling and a baby. A clearly differentiated division of a child’s age period, before reaching the age of one year, is recorded in medicine. Scientific observations of the physiological changes in the development of a child, depending on a lived calendar period, determined the classification of the life into certain stages beginning from the prenatal development; it was expressed in a special terminology, for example, a perinatal period, a zero day. In a medical sphere the division units of a life period before the age of one year are hours, days, months; thus, this temporal vocabulary belongs to the structure of terminological phrases used to denote a certain age stage, the gradation of periods can be done with help of adjectives-qualifiers early, late. In a pedagogical discourse, contrary to a medical sphere, the names of the age periods in a child’s life do not clearly correlate with physiological changes and a calendar duration, and in an every-day life discourse the correlation is seen the least. However a conversational speech is characterized with a larger number of the patterns which form the names of age periods, descriptive nominations, due to a child’s socialization. Thus, a set of nominative units is different for each discourse, but we can come across some scientific terms in mass media, and from there they can be found in a conversational speech. In a pedagogical, medical, every-day life discourse we have the cases when the same nouns are used, for instance, a newly-born, however they differ semantically.

StressDat – Database of speech under stress in Slovak

The paper describes methodology for creating a Slovak database of speech under stress and pilot observations. While the relationship between stress and speech characteristics can be utilized in a wide domain of speech technology applications, its research suffers from the lack of suitable databases, particularly in conversational speech. We propose a novel procedure to record acted speech in the home of actors and using their own smartphones. We describe both the collection of speech material under three levels of stress and the subsequent annotation of stress levels in this material. First observations suggest a reasonable inter-annotator agreement, as well as interesting avenues for the relationship between the intended stress levels and those perceived in speech.

Expansion Points Intervention in Young Children with Speech Sound Disorders: A Multiple Baseline Design

The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the efficacy of expansion points (EXP) intervention with a modified criterion for preschool children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Three preschool-aged children were enrolled in a single-subject multiple baseline intervention study. Intervention took place over 16 sessions. Pre- and post-intervention data are provided. Three outcome measures (generalization to probe words and gains in percent consonants correct, PCC, in words and in conversation) were evaluated to measure the effectiveness of the EXP intervention. All three of the participants demonstrated gains by the end of the intervention phase when measuring PCC in single words. Two of the three participants demonstrated gains in PCC in conversational speech. Progress on individual phonemes was variable across participants. Utilizing the EXP approach, two of the three children showed gains in all three outcome measures. One child showed variable performance in one outcome measure, improvement in one, and a decrease in one. Findings suggest that EXP should be further explored to evaluate intervention efficacy.

Прагматическая функция интертекстем в веб-медиатекстах белорусских и российских интернет-СМИ

The article discusses the features of the functioning of phraseological units and other stable combinations in the headings of the media texts of Belarusian and Russian online newspapers. We analyze the pragmatic function of intertexts and present them as pointers to certain types of speech acts. The intent of the addressee is the most important factor in creating a text. It is usually reflected, directly or indirectly, in every communication product. The main purpose of media texts (or a hint of it) is contained in headings, especially when they are intertextemes, various renewable speech units that we classify according to the types of speech acts: representatives, rogatives,directives, commissives, contactives, declarations and expressives. Such headings are best used to perform a pragmatic function because they retain an emotional and evaluation component that stimulates communication with the mass recipient. These stable units (phraseological locutions, winged expressions and aphorisms, paroemias and compound terms) comprise the background knowledge of the participants in communication and are therefore productive language tools used by journalists in their practice. And very often the intertextemes are transformed or updated. Employees of “BelGazeta” and “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” use both the general phraseological fund of Belarusians and Russians and the national language means in web media texts. The headlines of “BelGazeta” havea distinctive feature, as they mix graphic and lexical systems of different languages (Russian, Belarusian,English and, less frequently, Ukrainian). This fact can be explained, firstly, by the tendency to widely spread the features of the conversational speech of Belarusians, trasyanka, in book speech styles. And, secondly, by the address policy of the publication of the named newspaper, which is aimed at the mass Belarusian reader. Following the use of occasionalisms, updated stable expressions, we also call the above feature a specific method of influencing the addressee.

Phonetic reduction and paradigm uniformity effects in spontaneous speech

Recent work on the acoustic properties of complex words has found that morphological information may influence the phonetic properties of words, e.g. acoustic duration. Paradigm uniformity has been proposed as one mechanism that may cause such effects. In a recent experimental study Seyfarth et al. (2017) found that the stems of English inflected words (e.g. frees) have a longer duration than the same string of segments in a homophonous mono-morphemic word (e.g. freeze), due to the co-activation of the longer articulatory gesture of the bare stem (e.g. free). However, not all effects predicted by paradigm uniformity were found in that study, and the role of frequency-related phonetic reduction remained inconclusive. The present paper tries to replicate the effect using conversational speech data from a different variety of English (i.e. New Zealand English), using the QuakeBox Corpus (Walsh et al. 2013). In the presence of word-form frequency as a predictor, stems of plurals were not found to be significantly longer than the corresponding strings of comparable non-complex words. The analysis revealed, however, a frequency-induced gradient paradigm uniformity effect: plural stems become shorter with increasing frequency of the bare stem.

Phonetic fusion in Chinese conversational speech

This paper presents a corpus-based perspective on the phonetic fusion of disyllabic words in a Chinese conversational speech corpus. Four categorical types that reflect the phonological features of reduction degrees are automatically derived from gradient, acoustic properties. A transcription experiment is conducted with the most common disyllabic words. Both automatic derivation by acoustic signals and human transcription by perceptual judgment refer to the same sound inventory. We have shown that the complete form of fusion occurring in conversation need not be legitimate syllables and it appears consistently in the form of syllable merger that represents a group of phonetic variants.

Corpora compilation for prosody-informed speech processing

Research on speech technologies necessitates spoken data, which is usually obtained through read recorded speech, and specifically adapted to the research needs. When the aim is to deal with the prosody involved in speech, the available data must reflect natural and conversational speech, which is usually costly and difficult to get. This paper presents a machine learning-oriented toolkit for collecting, handling, and visualization of speech data, using prosodic heuristic. We present two corpora resulting from these methodologies: PANTED corpus, containing 250 h of English speech from TED Talks, and Heroes corpus containing 8 h of parallel English and Spanish movie speech. We demonstrate their use in two deep learning-based applications: punctuation restoration and machine translation. The presented corpora are freely available to the research community.