How conceptualizing influences fluency in first and second language speech production

This article discusses the perception and production of English speech sounds by Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong and examines the validity of the claims of the Speech Learning Model for explaining second language speech production by Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners. Forty university English majors participated in the study, which included two L2 speech perception tasks, two L1 L2 speech perception tasks, and three L2 speech production tasks. It is found that although the perceived similarity between the L1 and the L2 is inversely related to L2 speech perception, such an inverse relationship between perceived L1 L2 similarity and L2 speech production is not so straightforward and is often mediated by other widespread phonological phenomena such as final obstruent devoicing and final lateral vocalization. Speech perception and speech production, thus, do not bear a strict one-to-one relation, and correct discernment of a target sound does not necessarily lead to correct production. The predictions of the SLM regarding speech production do not seem to be entirely borne out. Further research is needed to investigate the perceptual and production abilities of ESL learners of other linguistic backgrounds.

The current study investigated how aging affects production and self-correction of errors in connected speech elicited via a read aloud task. Thirty-five cognitively healthy older and 56 younger participants read aloud 6 paragraphs in each of three conditions increasing in difficulty: (a) normal, (b) nouns-swapped (in which nouns were shuffled across pairs of sentences in each paragraph), and (c) exchange (in which adjacent words in every two sentences were reversed in order). Reading times and errors increased with task difficulty, but self-correction rates were lowest in the nouns-swapped condition. Older participants read aloud more slowly, and after controlling for aging-related advantages in vocabulary knowledge, produced more speech errors (especially in the normal condition), and self-corrected errors less often than younger participants. Exploratory analysis of error types revealed that aging increased the rate of function word substitution errors (saying the instead of a), whereas younger participants omitted content words more often than did older participants. This pattern of aging deficits reveals powerful effects of vocabulary knowledge on speech production and suggests aging speakers can compensate for aging-related decline in control over speech production with their higher vocabulary knowledge and careful attention to speech planning in more difficult speaking conditions. These results suggest a model of speech production in which planning of speech is relatively automatic, whereas monitoring and self-correction are more attention-demanding, in turn leaving speech production relatively intact in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

In this study, we assessed metacognition in nonnative language speech perception and production. Spanish novice learners of French identified and produced the French vowel contrast /ø/–/œ/ and, on each trial, rated their confidence in their responses. Participants’ confidence in perception predicted their identification accuracy, suggesting that novice learners’ metacognitive skills in nonnative speech perception are efficient at the onset of language learning. However, participants’ confidence in production did not align with a fine‐grained precision measure of their own production (indexed by Mahalanobis distance to the native French target‐vowel space) nor with a categorical measure of production (in terms of being within/outside the native speakers’ zone), indicating that metacognition in nonnative sound production is not yet efficient in novice learners. Overall, confidence ratings were similar and highly correlated between the perception and production tasks, but there was no association between the two domains in task performance or metacognitive ability. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for language learning theories and language teaching strategies as well as for the ongoing debate about the perception–production relationship.

Children with ASD show great variability in their overall linguistic profile. ASD and developmental language disorders (DLD) are seen today as co-morbid conditions. Researchers differentiate between individuals with ASD who have language impairments (ALI-Autism Language Impaired) and those who develop typical language (ALN- Autism Language Normal). This chapter describes the difference between communication, language comprehension, and speech production which together constitute the areas that dictate the linguistic profile of individuals with ASD.

Cochlear Implants in Children Younger Than 6 Months

Individuals with speaking disabilities, particularly people suffering from dysarthria, often use a TTS synthesizer for speech communication. Since users always have to type sound symbols and the synthesizer reads them out in a monotonous style, the use of the current synthesizers usually renders real-time operation and lively communication difficult. This is why dysarthric users often fail to control the flow of conversation. In this paper, we propose a novel speech generation framework which makes use of hand gestures as input. People usually use tongue gesture transitions for speech generation but we develop a special glove, by wearing which, speech sounds are generated from hand gesture transitions. For development, GMM-based voice conversion techniques (mapping techniques) are applied to estimate a mapping function between a space of hand gestures and another space of speech sounds. In this paper, as an initial trial, a mapping between hand gestures and Japanese vowel sounds is estimated so that topological features of the selected gestures in a feature space and those of the five Japanese vowels in a cepstrum space are equalized. Experiments show that the special glove can generate good Japanese vowel transitions with voluntary control of duration and articulation. Index Terms: Dysarthria, speech production, hand motions, media conversion, arrangement of gestures and vowels

Neuroimaging studies suggest greater involvement of the left parietal lobe in sign language compared to speech production. This stronger activation might be linked to the specific demands of sign encoding and proprioceptive monitoring.In Experiment 1 we investigate hemispheric lateralization during sign and speech generation in hearing native users of English and British Sign Language (BSL). Participants exhibited stronger lateralization during BSL than English production. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether this increased lateralization index could be due exclusively to the higher motoric demands of sign production. Sign naïve participants performed a phonological fluency task in English and a non-sign repetition task. Participants were left lateralized in the phonological fluency task but there was no consistent pattern of lateralization for the non-sign repetition in these hearing non-signers.The current data demonstrate stronger left hemisphere lateralization for producing signs than speech, which was not primarily driven by motoric articulatory demands.

Prosodic development: The view from production

Purpose This retrospective pilot study investigated whether sound-level and speech production errors decreased in confrontation naming following Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) for four participants with acquired apraxia of speech (A-AOS) and aphasia for whom lexical retrieval was previously reported. Specifically, we investigated a potential increase in correct number of syllables per word and posttreatment changes across three domains of speech: segmental production, fluency, and prosody. It was hypothesized that treatment shown to increase lexical retrieval in persons with aphasia and A-AOS could potentially facilitate a reduction in sound-level and speech production errors consistent with dual diagnoses of A-AOS and aphasia. Method Naming responses from four participants with aphasia and A-AOS who previously participated in VNeST studies were investigated for correct number of syllables per word and measures of segmental speech, fluency, and prosody. Results Significant gains in at least one measure of speech production were reported for three of the participants. One participant demonstrated decreased segmental speech errors, two showed significant reduction on syllable segmentation, and two demonstrated a significant reduction on false starts and pauses. Significant gains in production of correct number of syllables were limited to one participant, and one participant did not demonstrate increased accuracy on any measure of speech production. Conclusions While speech production errors consistent with motor speech impairment cannot always be definitively distinguished from the confound of aphasia, two participants produced significantly decreased segmentation of syllables, a characteristic unique to A-AOS. The sound-level and speech production changes recorded may be attributed to a combination of interacting motor and language processes and resource allocation. In addition, specific components of VNeST may have contributed to speech production changes. Future work will focus on a prospective study of effects of language therapy (e.g., VNeST) on measures of speech production with investigation beyond the single-word level.

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech on the one hand, and fluency and accent as rated by native raters on the other hand. For 90 speech fragments from Turkish and English L2 learners of Dutch, several acoustic measures of fluency and accent were calculated. In Experiment 1, 20 native speakers of Dutch rated the L2 Dutch samples on fluency. In Experiment 2, 20 different untrained native speakers of Dutch judged the L2 Dutch samples on accentedness. Regression analyses revealed, first, that acoustic measures of fluency were good predictors of fluency ratings. Second, segmental and suprasegmental measures of accent could predict some variance of accent ratings. Third, perceived fluency and perceived accent were only weakly related. In conclusion, this study shows that fluency and perceived foreign accent can be judged as separate constructs.

Purpose: Recent technological advancements in psychology have yielded multiple unsupervised online tools for measuring cognitive skills. However, these tools do not measure key features of communication abilities in adults, such as productive speech or oral language. To address this gap, we developed the Remote Adult Language Experiment (ReAL-E) using a three-step approach that incorporates domain identification, expert evaluation, and piloting testing. Method: Step 1 focused on domain and task identification by collaborating with experts and reviewing the literature. Step 2 included two rounds of evaluation by content and lay experts to assess the initial tool design, identify areas for refinement, and solicit feedback for desired features. Step 3 involved piloting the tool in a sample of adults recruited online.Results: The ReAL-E tool adapted three speech planning and production tasks and four oral and written language tasks into online versions. Feedback from content and lay experts led to significant improvements, including enhanced task instructions, presentation modifications, and the incorporation of features to address potential confounds. Pilot testing demonstrated that adults perform within expected ranges, and five out of seven tasks had good to excellent preliminary reliability.Conclusion: The development of the ReAL-E tool contributes to the field by offering a scalable, efficient method for assessing a broad range of communication skills in adults, paving the way for future research and clinical applications in developmental communication disorders. Our study underscores the collaborative effort and innovative approach required for creating a digital assessment tool that promises to expand research capabilities and improve diagnostic processes in the discipline.

Research into the role of brain oscillations in basic perceptual and cognitive functions has suggested that the alpha rhythm reflects functional inhibition while the beta rhythm reflects neural ensemble (re)activation. However, little is known regarding the generalization of these proposed fundamental operations to linguistic processes, such as speech comprehension and production. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography in participants performing a novel rule-switching paradigm. Specifically, Dutch native speakers had to produce an alternative exemplar from the same category or a feature of a given target word embedded in spoken sentences (e.g., for the word “tuna”, an exemplar from the same category—“seafood”—would be “shrimp”, and a feature would be “pink”). A cue indicated the task rule—exemplar or feature—either before (pre-cue) or after (retro-cue) listening to the sentence. Alpha power during the working memory delay was lower for retro-cue compared with that for pre-cue in the left hemispheric language-related regions. Critically, alpha power negatively correlated with reaction times, suggestive of alpha facilitating task performance by regulating inhibition in regions linked to lexical retrieval. Furthermore, we observed a different spatiotemporal pattern of beta activity for exemplars versus features in the right temporoparietal regions, in line with the proposed role of beta in recruiting neural networks for the encoding of distinct categories. Overall, our study provides evidence for the generalizability of the role of alpha and beta oscillations from perceptual to more “complex, linguistic processes” and offers a novel task to investigate links between rule-switching, working memory, and word production.

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder frequently associated with subcortical damage. However, the precise roles of the subcortical nuclei, particularly the basal ganglia and thalamus, in the speech production process remain poorly understood. The present study aimed to better understand their roles by mapping neuroimaging, behavioral, and speech data obtained from subacute stroke patients with subcortical lesions. Multivariate lesion-symptom mapping and voxel-based morphometry methods were employed to correlate lesions in the basal ganglia and thalamus with speech production, with emphases on linguistic processing and articulation. The present findings revealed that the left thalamus and putamen are significantly correlated with concept preparation (r = 0.64, p < 0.01) and word retrieval (r = 0.56, p < 0.01). As the difficulty of the behavioral tasks increased, the influence of cognitive factors on early linguistic processing gradually intensified. The globus pallidus and caudate nucleus were found to significantly impact the movements of the larynx (r = 0.63, p < 0.01) and tongue (r = 0.59, p = 0.01). These insights underscore the complex and interconnected roles of the basal ganglia and thalamus in the intricate processes of speech production. The lateralization and hierarchical organization of each nucleus are crucial to their contributions to these speech functions. The present study provides a nuanced understanding of how lesions in the basal ganglia and thalamus impact various stages of speech production, thereby enhancing our understanding of the subcortical neuromechanisms underlying dysarthria. The findings could also contribute to the identification of multimodal assessment indicators, which could aid in the precise evaluation and personalized treatment of speech impairments.

Laryngeal control mainly occurs along two dimensions. One involves the longitudinal tension of the vocal cords and is used for F0 control. Speakers can normally exert very fine‐graded control in this dimension, and it is used extensively for linguistic purposes. The other dimension is that of abduction‐adduction, involved in the control of phonation type, voicing, and aspiration. From published records, it appears that more than two or three distinct degrees of glottal opening are rarely used during speech production in different languages. The present experiment was designed to clarify the control of glottal abduction‐adduction and examines how many degrees of glottal opening speakers can produce consistently under various static and dynamic nonspeech and speech conditions. Glottal opening was monitored simultaneously by a fiberscope and a transillumination system. Preliminary results indicate that without training and visual feedback subjects can only produce gross abduction and adduction gestures and are unable to make finely controlled variations of glottal opening. [Work supported by NINCDS and BRSG.]

This study investigates the effect of the language learner's 'psychotypology', i.e. per-ception of language distance, on the extent to which he or she transfers from a second language (L2) to a third language (L3). Three native speakers of Dutch with additional knowledge of English were interviewed in their L3 French. Subsequently, retrospective comments were elicited. The French oral data was analysed for lexical transfer errors, and by means of the retrospective data lexical transfer 'successes' were also identified. It was found that L2 English outweighed LI Dutch as a transfer source. Considering the formal similarities between the English and French lexicons, this result supports the importance of a psychotypology factor to L2 transfer which was further confirmed by the retro-spective data. The incidence of transfer successes from L2 English could further point to a facilitative role of the psychotypology factor.