Speech Communication

Attention! The related software (PANM script) can be downloaded from here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4QKykn2bzqQa0JQRTZtU08yZWs?resourcekey=0-kYz6XS59uRJCKj4YuhaqhQ
Background: This study aimed to introduce a low-cost system measuring nasalance, which can often be performed with high-cost systems, and to present the normative nasalance values for adults using this system.
Materials and Methods: This study included 96 standard native Turkish-speaking literate volunteers who had no hearing and speech problems or nasal obstruction. Nasalance values were measured using the system developed by the principal author, which is called the Praat-Assisted Nasalance Meter, using speech materials and related methods.
Results: The participants were 18-65 (average, 33.7) years old. They were divided into three groups according to their age: 18-25, 26-40, and 41-65. A significant difference was found in the nasalance values between the genders. For nearly all speech materials, higher nasalance values were measured in women than in men.
Conclusion: There is no generally accepted rule to ascertain if a speaker’s resonance is abnormal according to nasalance values. Therefore, the proposed threshold values should not be considered absolute values but should be decided with perceptual evaluation.

Amaç: Bu çalışmanın amacı, genellikle yüksek maliyetli sistemlerle gerçekleştirilebilen nazalans parametresi ölçümü için kullanılabilecek kendi geliştirdiğimiz düşük maliyetli bir sistemi tanıtmak ve bu sistem kullanılarak erişkinler için belirlenen normatif nazalans değerlerini sunmaktır.
Gereç ve Yöntemler: Standart Türkiye Türkçesi konuşan ve okuma yazma bilen 96 gönüllü çalışmaya dahil edildi. Deneklerin işitme ve konuşma problemi, burun tıkanıklığı yapan herhangi bir hastalığının olmamasına dikkat edildi. Birinci yazar tarafından geliştirilen ve Praat Yardımlı Nazalans Ölçer (PYNÖ) adı verilen sistem yardımıyla aşağıda belirtilen konuşma malzemesi ve yöntem kullanılarak nazalans ölçümü yapıldı.
Bulgular: Çalışmaya katılan 96 konuşmacının yaşları 18 ile 65 arasında değişiyordu (ortalama 33,7 yıl). Katılımcılar yaşlarına göre 18-25, 26-40 ve 41-65 şeklinde üç gruba ayrılarak incelendi. Elde edilen değerler cinsiyet grubuna göre karşılaştırıldığında aradaki farkların istatistiksel olarak anlamlı olduğu görüldü. Hemen her konuşma malzemesi için kadınlarda erkeklerden daha yüksek nazalans değerleri elde edildi.
Sonuç: Bir konuşmacı üzerinde ölçülen nazalans ölçüm sonuçlarının anormal olduğunu söylemek için genel kabul gören bir kural yoktur. Bu nedenle, bu çalışmada önerilen eşik değerler mutlak değerler olarak düşünülmemeli, algısal değerlendirmeyle birlikte karar verilmelidir.

Feminist thinkers offer new interpretations of the role of technology in social life. As society has progressed, men have become culture-centered rather than nature-centered, while women have remained nature-centered. Thus, women's devaluation resides in man's desire to control both nature and women. The values of objectivity, progress, rationality, production, and competition are masculine, while nurturance, emotionality, intuition, and cooperation are values traditionally assigned to women. Even so, women have been active creators and innovators throughout history, though most of the knowledge of women's roles as technological developers has been erased. Women will be affected most as new technologies invade the home, the office, and other workplaces. For example, as technology revolutionizes life in third world countries, it has had both positive and negative effects on women's status and situation. Also, the spheres of man and women traditionally have been public...

During the last few years, spoken language technologies have known a big improvement thanks to Deep Learning. However Deep Learning-based algorithms require amounts of data that are often difficult and costly to gather. Particularly, modeling the variability in speech of different speakers, different styles or different emotions with few data remains challenging. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage fine-tuning on a pre-trained Deep Learning-based TTS model to synthesize speech with a small dataset of another speaker. Then we investigate the possibility to adapt this model to have emotional TTS by fine-tuning the neutral TTS model with a small emotional dataset.

Second language acquisition studies can contribute to the body of research on the influence of language on thought by examining cognitive change as a result of second language learning. We conducted a longitudinal study that examined how the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender influences categorization in native English-speaking adults. We asked whether learning the grammatical gender of Spanish affects adult native English speakers' attribution of gender to inanimate objects. College students enrolled in beginning Spanish participated in two tasks repeatedly (four times) throughout one academic year. One task examined their acquisition of grammatical gender. The other examined their categorization of inanimate objects. We began to observe changes in participants' grammatical gender acquisition and in categorization after ten weeks of Spanish instruction. Results indicate that learning a second language as an adult can change the way one categorizes objects. However, t...

-57 discorsi di ringraziamento agli Oscar, dal 1940 al 2021-

L’Academy Award, meglio conosciuto anche come “Premio Oscar” o semplicemente “Oscar”, è probabilmente il premio cinematografico più prestigioso e antico al mondo (fu assegnato per la prima volta il 16 maggio 1929, tre anni prima del nostro Festival di Venezia).

Il volume seleziona e analizza 57 discorsi di ringraziamento (dall’edizione del 1940 a quella del 2021), in italiano e in inglese. Da quello di Hattie McDaniel, prima afroamericana ad essere premiata nel 1940 per Via col vento, a quelli di Frances McDormand e Chloé Zhao nel 2021, passando per Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Roberto Benigni, Ennio Morricone, Sophia Loren e tanti altri grandi protagonisti della cinematografia mondiale.

— An automatic verification of person's identity from its voice is a part of modern telecommunication services. In order to execute a verification task, a speech signal has to be transmitted to a remote server. So, a performance of the verification system can be influenced by various distortions that can occur when transmitting a speech signal through a communication channel. This paper studies an effect of the state of art wideband (WB) speech codecs on a performance of automatic speaker verification in the context of a channel/codec mismatch between enrollment and test utterances. The speaker verification system is developed on GMM-UBM method. The results show that EVS codec provides the best performance over all the investigated scenarios in this study. Moreover, deploying G.729.1 codec in a training process of the verification system provides the best equal error rate in the fully-codec mismatched scenario. Anyhow, differences between the equal error rates reported for all of the codecs involved in this scenario are mostly nonsignificant.

In this paper, the AM–FM modulation model is applied to speech analysis, synthesis and coding. The AM–FM model represents the speech signal as the sum of formant resonance signals each of which contains amplitude and frequency modulation. Multiband filtering and demodulation using the energy separation algorithm are the basic tools used for speech analysis. First, multiband demodulation analysis (MDA) is

‘लोक’ शब्द की उत्पत्ति संस्कृत में ‘लोक दर्शन’ धातु में ‘घञ’ प्रत्यय लगाने से होती है जिसका अर्थ है - देखना। इसका लट् लकार-अन्य पुरूष, एकवचन रूप हुआ - लोकते। इस तरह इसका अर्थ हुआ - देखने वाला। अतः वह जन समूह जो इस क्रिया को करता है लोक कहलाता है।1 संक्षिप्त हिन्दी-अंग्रेजी कोश में लोक का अर्थ - फोक, पीपल, वल्र्ड और पब्लिक दिया है।2 ‘अंग्रेजी-हिन्दी कोश’ में पीपल, पब्लिक शब्द सर्वसाधारण, सामान्य जन एवं प्रजा के लिए प्रयुक्त हुए हैं।3 हिन्दी साहित्य कोश में लोक के लिए दो अर्थ प्राप्त होते हैं

Quiero ser locutor...o locutora. Cuántas veces a lo largo de los años chicos y chicas ilusionadas por la profesión te confiesan este deseo. Quiero ser locutor...pero no sé por dónde empezar. Generalmente son alumnos que ya han tenido contacto con algún medio de comunicación audiovisual y allí han descubierto que el micrófono es lo suyo. A otros les han dicho muchas veces aquello de ‘¡pero qué voz tienes! Y directamente quisieron dedicarse a ello. Unos por su manera de expresarse y otros por su voz han decidido que quieren dedicarse a la locución profesional. Pero, exactamente ¿qué es la locución?

Whiteside et al. [S.P. Whiteside, A. Hanson, P.E. Cowell, Hormones and temporal components of speech: sex differences and effects of menstrual cyclicity on speech, Neurosci. Lett. 367 (2004) 44-47] documented effects of menstrual cycle phase and sex on voice onset time (VOT) in naturally timed speech using whole words. VOT is a temporal component of speech that plays an important role in production and perception [L.L. Koenig, Laryngeal factors in voiceless consonant production in men, women, and 5-year-olds, J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 43 (2000) 1211-1228; A. Löfqvist, L.L. Koenig, R.S. McGowan, Vocal tract aerodynamics in /aCa/ utterances: measurements, Speech Commun. 16 (1995) 49-66; T.M. Nearey, B. Rochet, Effects of place of articulation and vowel context in VOT production and perception for French and English Stops, J. Int. Phon. Assoc. 24 (1994) 1-18; L.M. Rimol, T. Eichele, K. Hugdahl, The effect of voice-onset-time on dichotic listening with consonant-vowel syllables, Neuropsychologia 44 (2006) 191-196; P.G. Simos, R.L. Diehl, J.I. Breier, M.R. Molis, G. Zouridakis, A.C. Papanicolaou, MEG correlates of categorical perception of a voice onset time continuum in humans, Cogn. Brain Res. 7 (1998) 215-219; S.P. Whiteside, J. Marshall, Developmental trends in voice onset time: some evidence for sex differences, Phonetica 58 (2001) 196-210]. The present study was designed to replicate and expand upon Whiteside et al. [S.P. Whiteside, A. Hanson, P.E. Cowell, Hormones and temporal components of speech: sex differences and effects of menstrual cyclicity on speech, Neurosci. Lett. 367 (2004) 44-47] using a speeded syllable repetition paradigm. VOT measurements for 6 English plosives (/p b t d k g/) were obtained from speech samples of 15 women and 20 men (age 20-25 years). Women were tested across two points in the menstrual cycle (Days 2-5: low estrogen and progesterone/low-EP; Days 18-25: high estrogen and progesterone/high-EP) and men were tested once. Results indicated significant interaction between menstrual cycle phase and voicing (F(1,14)=8.239, P<0.02), whereby the voiced plosives (b, g) displayed shorter VOT values and the voiceless plosives (p, k) displayed longer values at the high-EP phase. Thus, the distinction between the voiced and voiceless plosive was enhanced at high-EP. Significant sex effects (F(1,33)=10.080, P<0.005) were seen with women at high-EP but not the low-EP phase having longer VOT values than men for voiceless plosives. Sex differences between the voiced and voiceless plosives were enhanced at the high-EP phase. This study indicates a role for activational ovarian hormones in regulating temporal features of speech in both whole words and speeded syllable repetition.

The 4MAT system (an eight-step cycle of instruction that combines four learning style types and students' preferences for right-brain or left-brain modes of learning) can guide instructors in planning teaching strategies to meet students' diverse learning needs. Each of the eight steps of the system emphasizes one of the learning types and alternatives from right- to left-mode information processing. The eight steps are: (1) create an experience or connect to past experiences; (2) analyze the experience; (3) integrate reflections into concepts; (4) define concepts; (5) try out concepts; (6) extend learning; (7) have students evaluate their own applications; and (8) integrate application and experience. After a communication instructor used the system to develop teaching strategies for numerous units of study, she noted an increase in student interest and better overall student performance. One such unit teaches students how to prepare effective call-to-action persuasive spee...

With an estimated 11 percent of all undergraduate students (at least two million) having a disability and the numbers of such students increasing (National Council on Disability, 2015), oral communication tutoring centers face an escalating imperative to account for this population in their instructional practices. The Multidimensional Attitudes Scale (MAS) Toward Persons With Disabilities was administered to a demographically diverse sample (n = 149) of communication center student tutors and a control group of undergraduates. Results reveal positive emotions toward PWDs, with proclivity toward avoidance due to shyness and nervousness around PWDs. In the behavioral dimension,
prevalent reactions to PWDs clustered around non-acknowledgment (preferring to read or use their phones, or not initiating any interaction). These findings may reflect the need to more actively stimulate direct personal interactions with people who are unfamiliar or
different, which the current generation of digitally saturated college students often finds challenging.

Purpose This systematic review aimed to determine the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention on speech production in children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified. Method A systematic review methodology was utilized to limit bias in searching, selecting, coding, and synthesizing relevant treatment studies. This involved a multifaceted search for studies written between 1975 and May 2007 using various bibliographic databases, dissertation databases, hand searches of selected journals and published compilations of AAC theses and dissertations, and ancestry searches. To be included, studies had to meet stringent criteria. A coding manual and form facilitated data extraction in terms of participant characteristics, treatment characteristics, design and measurement, and outcomes. Results Nine single-subject experimental design (27 participants) and 2 group studies (98 participants) were included. Results indicated that ...