Matching Items (9)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Speech
- Creators: Azuma, Tamiko
- Creators: Department of Speech and Hearing Science
Description
In the noise and commotion of daily life, people achieve effective communication partly because spoken messages are replete with redundant information. Listeners exploit available contextual, linguistic, phonemic, and prosodic cues to decipher degraded speech. When other cues are absent or ambiguous, phonemic and prosodic cues are particularly important because they help identify word boundaries, a process known as lexical segmentation. Individuals vary in the degree to which they rely on phonemic or prosodic cues for lexical segmentation in degraded conditions.
Deafened individuals who use a cochlear implant have diminished access to fine frequency information in the speech signal, and show resulting difficulty perceiving phonemic and prosodic cues. Auditory training on phonemic elements improves word recognition for some listeners. Little is known, however, about the potential benefits of prosodic training, or the degree to which individual differences in cue use affect outcomes.
The present study used simulated cochlear implant stimulation to examine the effects of phonemic and prosodic training on lexical segmentation. Participants completed targeted training with either phonemic or prosodic cues, and received passive exposure to the non-targeted cue. Results show that acuity to the targeted cue improved after training. In addition, both targeted attention and passive exposure to prosodic features led to increased use of these cues for lexical segmentation. Individual differences in degree and source of benefit point to the importance of personalizing clinical intervention to increase flexible use of a range of perceptual strategies for understanding speech.
Deafened individuals who use a cochlear implant have diminished access to fine frequency information in the speech signal, and show resulting difficulty perceiving phonemic and prosodic cues. Auditory training on phonemic elements improves word recognition for some listeners. Little is known, however, about the potential benefits of prosodic training, or the degree to which individual differences in cue use affect outcomes.
The present study used simulated cochlear implant stimulation to examine the effects of phonemic and prosodic training on lexical segmentation. Participants completed targeted training with either phonemic or prosodic cues, and received passive exposure to the non-targeted cue. Results show that acuity to the targeted cue improved after training. In addition, both targeted attention and passive exposure to prosodic features led to increased use of these cues for lexical segmentation. Individual differences in degree and source of benefit point to the importance of personalizing clinical intervention to increase flexible use of a range of perceptual strategies for understanding speech.
ContributorsHelms Tillery, Augusta Katherine (Author) / Liss, Julie M. (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Brown, Christopher A. (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael F. (Committee member) / Utianski, Rene L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Cognitive deficits often accompany language impairments post-stroke. Past research has focused on working memory in aphasia, but attention is largely underexplored. Therefore, this dissertation will first quantify attention deficits post-stroke before investigating whether preserved cognitive abilities, including attention, can improve auditory sentence comprehension post-stroke. In Experiment 1a, three components of attention (alerting, orienting, executive control) were measured in persons with aphasia and matched-controls using visual and auditory versions of the well-studied Attention Network Test. Experiment 1b then explored the neural resources supporting each component of attention in the visual and auditory modalities in chronic stroke participants. The results from Experiment 1a indicate that alerting, orienting, and executive control are uniquely affected by presentation modality. The lesion-symptom mapping results from Experiment 1b associated the left angular gyrus with visual executive control, the left supramarginal gyrus with auditory alerting, and Broca’s area (pars opercularis) with auditory orienting attention post-stroke. Overall, these findings indicate that perceptual modality may impact the lateralization of some aspects of attention, thus auditory attention may be more susceptible to impairment after a left hemisphere stroke.
Prosody, rhythm and pitch changes associated with spoken language may improve spoken language comprehension in persons with aphasia by recruiting intact cognitive abilities (e.g., attention and working memory) and their associated non-lesioned brain regions post-stroke. Therefore, Experiment 2 explored the relationship between cognition, two unique prosody manipulations, lesion location, and auditory sentence comprehension in persons with chronic stroke and matched-controls. The combined results from Experiment 2a and 2b indicate that stroke participants with better auditory orienting attention and a specific left fronto-parietal network intact had greater comprehension of sentences spoken with sentence prosody. For list prosody, participants with deficits in auditory executive control and/or short-term memory and the left angular gyrus and globus pallidus relatively intact, demonstrated better comprehension of sentences spoken with list prosody. Overall, the results from Experiment 2 indicate that following a left hemisphere stroke, individuals need good auditory attention and an intact left fronto-parietal network to benefit from typical sentence prosody, yet when cognitive deficits are present and this fronto-parietal network is damaged, list prosody may be more beneficial.
Prosody, rhythm and pitch changes associated with spoken language may improve spoken language comprehension in persons with aphasia by recruiting intact cognitive abilities (e.g., attention and working memory) and their associated non-lesioned brain regions post-stroke. Therefore, Experiment 2 explored the relationship between cognition, two unique prosody manipulations, lesion location, and auditory sentence comprehension in persons with chronic stroke and matched-controls. The combined results from Experiment 2a and 2b indicate that stroke participants with better auditory orienting attention and a specific left fronto-parietal network intact had greater comprehension of sentences spoken with sentence prosody. For list prosody, participants with deficits in auditory executive control and/or short-term memory and the left angular gyrus and globus pallidus relatively intact, demonstrated better comprehension of sentences spoken with list prosody. Overall, the results from Experiment 2 indicate that following a left hemisphere stroke, individuals need good auditory attention and an intact left fronto-parietal network to benefit from typical sentence prosody, yet when cognitive deficits are present and this fronto-parietal network is damaged, list prosody may be more beneficial.
ContributorsLaCroix, Arianna (Author) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Braden, B. Blair (Committee member) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This study evaluated whether the Story Champs intervention is effective in bilingual kindergarten children who speak Spanish as their native language. Previous research by Spencer and Slocum (2010) found that monolingual, English-speaking participants made significant gains in narrative retelling after intervention. This study implemented the intervention in two languages and examined its effects after ten sessions. Results indicate that some children benefited from the intervention and there was variability across languages as well.
ContributorsFernandez, Olga E (Author) / Restrepo, Laida (Thesis director) / Mesa, Carol (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The increase of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) cases in recent war history has increased the urgency of research regarding how veterans are affected by TBIs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of TBI on speech recognition in noise. The AzBio Sentence Test was completed for signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) from -10 dB to +15 dB for a control group of ten participants and one US military veteran with history of service-connected TBI. All participants had normal hearing sensitivity defined as thresholds of 20 dB or better at frequencies from 250-8000 Hz in addition to having tympanograms within normal limits. Comparison of the data collected on the control group versus the veteran suggested that the veteran performed worse than the majority of the control group on the AzBio Sentence Test. Further research with more participants would be beneficial to our understanding of how veterans with TBI perform on speech recognition tests in the presence of background noise.
ContributorsCorvasce, Erica Marie (Author) / Peterson, Kathleen (Thesis director) / Williams, Erica (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
In this study, the Bark transform and Lobanov method were used to normalize vowel formants in speech produced by persons with dysarthria. The computer classification accuracy of these normalized data were then compared to the results of human perceptual classification accuracy of the actual vowels. These results were then analyzed to determine if these techniques correlated with the human data.
ContributorsJones, Hanna Vanessa (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis director) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Borrie, Stephanie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Research on /r/ production previously used formant analysis as the primary acoustic analysis, with particular focus on the low third formant in the speech signal. Prior imaging of speech used X-Ray, MRI, and electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer systems. More recently, the signal processing technique of Mel-log spectral plots has been used to study /r/ production in children and female adults. Ultrasound imaging of the tongue also has been used to image the tongue during speech production in both clinical and research settings. The current study attempts to describe /r/ production in three different allophonic contexts; vocalic, prevocalic, and postvocalic positions. Ultrasound analysis, formant analysis, Mel-log spectral plots, and /r/ duration were measured for /r/ production in 29 adult speakers (10 male, 19 female). A possible relationship between these variables was also explored. Results showed that the amount of superior constriction in the postvocalic /r/ allophone was significantly lower than the other /r/ allophones. Formant two was significantly lower and the distance between formant two and three was significantly higher for the prevocalic /r/ allophone. Vocalic /r/ had the longest average duration, while prevocalic /r/ had the shortest duration. Signal processing results revealed candidate Mel-bin values for accurate /r/ production for each allophone of /r/. The results indicate that allophones of /r/ can be distinguished based the different analyses. However, relationships between these analyses are still unclear. Future research is needed in order to gather more data on /r/ acoustics and articulation in order to find possible relationships between the analyses for /r/ production.
ContributorsHirsch, Megan Elizabeth (Author) / Weinhold, Juliet (Thesis director) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Glottal fry is a vocal register characterized by low frequency and increased signal perturbation, and is perceptually identified by its popping, creaky quality. Recently, the use of the glottal fry vocal register has received growing awareness and attention in popular culture and media in the United States. The creaky quality that was originally associated with vocal pathologies is indeed becoming “trendy,” particularly among young women across the United States. But while existing studies have defined, quantified, and attempted to explain the use of glottal fry in conversational speech, there is currently no explanation for the increasing prevalence of the use of glottal fry amongst American women. This thesis, however, proposes that conversational entrainment—a communication phenomenon which describes the propensity to modify one’s behavior to align more closely with one’s communication partner—may provide a theoretical framework to explain the growing trend in the use of glottal fry amongst college-aged women in the United States. Female participants (n = 30) between the ages of 18 and 29 years (M = 20.6, SD = 2.95) had conversations with two conversation partners, one who used quantifiably more glottal fry than the other. The study utilized perceptual and quantifiable acoustic information to address the following key question: Does the amount of habitual glottal fry in a conversational partner influence one’s use of glottal fry in their own speech? Results yielded the following two findings: (1) according to perceptual annotations, the participants used a greater amount of glottal fry when speaking with the Fry conversation partner than with the Non Fry partner, (2) statistically significant differences were found in the acoustics of the participants’ vocal qualities based on conversation partner. While the current study demonstrates that young women are indeed speaking in glottal fry in everyday conversations, and that its use can be attributed in part to conversational entrainment, we still lack a clear explanation of the deeper motivations for women to speak in a lower vocal register. The current study opens avenues for continued analysis of the sociolinguistic functions of the glottal fry register.
ContributorsDelfino, Christine R (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Borrie, Stephanie A (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Hearing and vision are two senses that most individuals use on a daily basis. The simultaneous presentation of competing visual and auditory stimuli often affects our sensory perception. It is often believed that vision is the more dominant sense over audition in spatial localization tasks. Recent work suggests that visual information can influence auditory localization when the sound is emanating from a physical location or from a phantom location generated through stereophony (the so-called "summing localization"). The present study investigates the role of cross-modal fusion in an auditory localization task. The focuses of the experiments are two-fold: (1) reveal the extent of fusion between auditory and visual stimuli and (2) investigate how fusion is correlated with the amount of visual bias a subject experiences. We found that fusion often occurs when light flash and "summing localization" stimuli were presented from the same hemifield. However, little correlation was observed between the magnitude of visual bias and the extent of perceived fusion between light and sound stimuli. In some cases, subjects reported distinctive locations for light and sound and still experienced visual capture.
ContributorsBalderas, Leslie Ann (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis director) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Previous research has determined that sentence comprehension is affected when taxing an individual’s cognitive resources, such as attentional control and working memory. This can be done by manipulating the prosody of simple and complex sentences, by allowing irregular rhythm and pitch changes to occur within speech. In the present thesis, neurotypical adults were asked to comprehend sentences with normal and monotone prosody in three different versions of a sentence-picture matching task. A no-load version served as a control with the other two taxing cognitive resources in these individuals. In addition, individuals completed four other tasks that are known to reliably measure working memory. Our results indicate a possible relationship between high accuracy in complex sentences spoken in a monotone prosody with working memory when time restraints are placed on individuals. Collectively, these results may lead to a new way of working with individuals in speech therapy who have suffered a stroke by better understanding the cognitive resources that are taxed in different types of sentence comprehension settings.
ContributorsRehwalt, Cassandra Kay (Author) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Thesis director) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Watts College of Public Service & Community Solut (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor, Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05