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Dysarthria associated with hypoglossal nerve palsy and COVID-19
Published in Margaret Walshe, Nick Miller, Clinical Cases in Dysarthria, 2021
Weeks 2–4: In this treatment period, the focus was on skill rather than strength exercises for the tongue, as RF gained more control over lingual movements. As soon as RF started to achieve some tongue movements, passive exercises were discontinued to foster active lingual movements (recruitment). These skill exercises aimed to achieve fine control of the tongue during verbal tasks in order to increase articulation and coarticulation during speech (week 4) (Table 3.3).
Gesture, Signing, and Tracking
Published in Stefano Federici, Marcia J. Scherer, Assistive Technology Assessment Handbook, 2017
Evaluation of SLR can be considered at different levels. At the lowest level, recognition of hand poses, body posture, lip shape and facial expressions are all very challenging pattern recognition problems, which are being approached with a variety of different artificial intelligence methods. As Cooper et al. explain, SLR has some of the characteristics that also make speech recognition a difficult problem, such as coarticulation. Added to this, however, is dealing with the nonsequential aspects of sign production and obscuration between hands or from clothing. The construct of sign languages also provides many challenges. Nonmanual features (facial expression), sign placement, body shift and positional signs (relationships of hand poses to other parts of the body, other people, and objects in the environment), and adverbs that involve the relative speed of gesture are just some of the constructs that a recognizer must be able to deal with. Also, inter-signer differences are large. At the production level, similar to gestures, throughput of sign production and recognition can be computed, and errors are measured by observation or with respect to standard corpuses of different sign languages.
Speech and its perception
Published in Stanley A. Gelfand, Hearing, 2017
Perhaps the most widely known speech perception theory is Liberman's motor theory, the details of which have evolved over the years (Liberman, 1996; Liberman et al., 1967; Liberman and Mattingly, 1985, 1989; Mattingly and Liberman, 1988; Liberman and Whalen, 2000). Recall that coarticulation causes a particular phonetic element to have different acoustical characteristics depending on its context (e.g., different formant transitions for /d/ in /di/ versus /du/). Motor theory proposes that speech perception involves identifying the intended speech gestures (effectively the neuromotor instructions to the articulators) that resulted in the acoustical signal produced by the speaker and heard by the listener. In other words, we perceive the invariant intended phonetic gestures (e.g., release of the alveolar closure in /di/ and /du/) that are encoded in the variable acoustical signals. This perceptual process involves biologically-evolved interactions between the speech perception and production systems, and is accomplished by a specialized speech or phonetic module (mode) in the central nervous system.
Relationship between phoneme-level spectral acoustics and speech intelligibility in healthy speech: a systematic review
Published in Speech, Language and Hearing, 2021
Timothy Pommée, Mathieu Balaguer, Julien Pinquier, Julie Mauclair, Virginie Woisard, Renée Speyer
Just as in vowels, another type of measure that has been used in the retained papers are the dynamic formant transitions, among which the F2 slope. The F2 slope measure, used in glides in A22, is ‘a dynamic measure that reflects the rate at which speech movements can be performed’ (R. D. Kent, Kent, et al., 1989) and is thus related to speaking rate. Van Son and Pols (1999), investigating acoustic correlates of consonant reduction in healthy speech, found that the F2 slope difference (i.e., difference between the F2 slope in the VC- and CV-boundaries in VCV syllables) is lower in spontaneous than in read speech. This reduced F2 slope difference indicated a lower consonant-induced coarticulation in the VCV syllable, thus a reduced consonant articulation. The use of formant transition measures is all the more noteworthy since it has been shown that in healthy ageing a decrease in intelligibility can be partly attributed to slower tongue movements (Kuruvilla-Dugdale et al., 2020).
Assessing speech correction abilities with acoustic analyses: Evidence of preserved online correction in persons with aphasia
Published in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2018
Caroline A. Niziolek, Swathi Kiran
The eight PWA completed a behavioural experiment in which they read aloud monosyllabic words. Participants were seated in a sound booth while their speech was recorded with a head-worn condenser microphone placed ∼2 cm from the corner of the mouth. Recordings had a sampling rate of 44 100 Hz. On each trial, one of three monosyllabic words (“eat”, “Ed” or “add”) was randomly chosen and displayed on the screen. These three words were selected to avoid effects of consonant coarticulation—all words began with a vowel and ended with consonants sharing a place of articulation—and for comparison with past studies using this stimulus set. Visual presentation of target words was chosen for maximal efficiency and for suitability for planned neuroimaging follow-up studies. The presentation rate was automatically adjusted to account for variable response time delays: produced sounds with a duration of at least 150 ms were detected by the custom-developed software as a vocal response (Niziolek & Mandel, 2017), and the following trial was displayed following a 500-ms delay from response offset. Participants completed 600 trials total with an optional break after each block of 30 trials (∼every 60 s), for an average of 200 productions of each word.
Automatic speech recognition: A primer for speech-language pathology researchers
Published in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2018
Words may have multiple correct pronunciations, influenced by factors such as the speaker’s accent, speaking style, and neighbouring words. For example, the word “tomato” may be pronounced as either [t ah m ey t ow] or as [t ah m aa t ow]. In spontaneous and conversational speech, additional factors affect pronunciation, including speaking rate, with an accelerated rate resulting in coarticulation or a reduction in the pronunciation of certain words. For example, the following pronunciations of the word “probably” are found in the Switchboard conversational speech database: [p r aa b iy], [p r aa l iy], [p r ay] and [p ow ih] (Greenberg et al., 1996).