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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Kosut, Oliver
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
The purpose of this longitudinal study was to predict /r/ acquisition using acoustic signal processing. 19 children, aged 5-7 with inaccurate /r/, were followed until they turned 8 or acquired /r/, whichever came first. Acoustic and descriptive data from 14 participants were analyzed. The remaining 5 children continued to be followed. The study analyzed differences in spectral energy at the baseline acoustic signals of participants who eventually acquired /r/ compared to that of those who did not acquire /r/. Results indicated significant differences between groups in the baseline signals for vocalic and postvocalic /r/, suggesting that the acquisition of certain allophones may be predictable. Participants’ articulatory changes made during the progression of acquisition were also analyzed spectrally. A retrospective analysis described the pattern in which /r/ allophones were acquired, proposing that vocalic /r/ and the postvocalic variant of consonantal /r/ may be acquired prior to prevocalic /r/, and /r/ followed by low vowels may be acquired before /r/ followed by high vowels, although individual variations exist.
Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which is used in most audio and video, reduces transmission time and results in much smaller file sizes. However, this compression can affect quality if it goes too far. The more compression there is on a waveform, the more degradation there is, and once a file is lossy compressed, this process is not reversible. This project will observe the degradation of an audio signal after the application of Singular Value Decomposition compression, a lossy compression that eliminates singular values from a signal’s matrix.