| 1. |
- Beskow, Jonas, et al.
(author)
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Project presentation: Spontal : multimodal database of spontaneous dialog
- 2009
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In: Proceedings of Fonetik 2009. - Stockholm : Stockholm University. - 9789163348921 - 9789163348938 ; , s. 190-193
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- We describe the ongoing Swedish speech database project Spontal: Multimodal database of spontaneous speech in dialog (VR 2006-7482). The project takes as its point of departure the fact that both vocal signals and gesture involving the face and body are important in every-day, face-to-face communicative interaction, and that there is a great need for data with which we more precisely measure these.
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| 2. |
- Contardo, Ivonne, et al.
(author)
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Real-time registration of listener reactions to unintelligibility in misarticulated child speech
- 2014
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In: Proceedings from FONETIK 2014. - Stockholm. ; , s. 127-132
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study explores the relation between misarticulations and their impact on intelligibility. 30 listeners (17 clinicians and 13 untrained listeners) were given the task of clicking a button whenever they perceived something unintelligible during playback of misarticulated child speech samples. No differences were found between the clinicians and the untrained listeners regarding clicking frequency. The distribution of listener clicks correlated strongly with the clinical evaluations of the same samples. The distribution of clicks was also related to manually annotated speech errors, allowing examination of links between events in the speech signal and reactions evoked in listeners. Hereby, we demonstrate a viable approach to ranking speech error types with regards to their impact on intelligibility in conversational speech.
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| 3. |
- Dahlgren, Sven-Olof, 1956, et al.
(author)
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Prosodic traits in speech produced by children with autism spectrum disorders – Perceptual and acoustic measurements
- 2018
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In: Autism & Developmental Language Impairments. - : SAGE Publications. - 2396-9415. ; 3, s. 1-10
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Autism spectrum disorder has been associated with atypical voice characteristics and prosody. In the scientific literature, four different aspects of atypical speech production in autism spectrum disorder have been highlighted; voice quality together with the prosodic aspects pitch, duration and intensity. Studies of prosody in autism spectrum disorder have almost exclusively used perceptual methods. Recently, some studies have used acoustic analyses. In these studies, it has been pointed out that the acoustic differences found are not necessarily perceived as atypical by listeners, which is why it is important to let listeners evaluate perceptual correlates to acoustic findings. The aims of this study were to use both perceptual and acoustic analyses to study prosodic production in children with autism spectrum disorder and to examine if voice and speech characteristics could be used as clinical markers for autism spectrum disorder. Method: Eleven children within normal range of intelligence diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 11 children with typical development participated. Every child was recorded telling a story elicited with the expression, reception and recall of narrative instrument. Excerpts of one minute were extracted from the audio files creating the material underlying the perceptual ratings and in the acoustic analysis. An evaluation procedure, partly based on a standardized voice evaluation procedure developed for clinical practice in Sweden, was designed for the perceptual judgments and analysis. To capture critical prosodic variables, aspects of prosody based on characteristic features of Swedish prosody, prosodic features known to cause Swedish children with language impairment particular problems and current research of prosodic impairments in children with autism, were used as rating variables. The acoustic analysis was based on the four variables fundamental frequency (fo) average, fo range, fo variation and speech rate, together with the language production-related variable number of words per utterance. Results: In the acoustic analysis, no differences were found with regards to fo-related variables or speech rate. However, the children in the autism spectrum disorder-group produced significantly more words per utterance than the typically developing children. The perceptual analysis showed no differences between the groups. Only three children with autism spectrum disorder were correctly identified as such. The narrative ability of these children, according to scores on the narrative assessment profile, was poorer than that of the other eight children. They were also more atypical in fluency and in speech rate. Given the small sample, the results should be interpreted with caution. Conclusions and implications: The only difference in prosodic production discovered in the acoustic analysis, namely that children with autism spectrum disorder used more words per utterance than the children in the comparison group, was not detected in the perceptual assessment. This implies that it was not perceived as atypical by expert listeners. The results indicate difficulties in using voice and speech characteristics as markers of autism spectrum disorder in clinical settings. The correct identification of some of the children as having autism spectrum disorder or not also indicates that some children with autism spectrum disorder have a prosodic production sufficiently ‘atypical’ in combination with a limited ability to tell stories to be perceived.
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| 4. |
- Edlund, Jens, et al.
(author)
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Question types and some prosodic correlates in 600 questions in the Spontal database of Swedish dialogues
- 2012
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In: Proceedings Of The 6th International Conference On Speech Prosody, Vols I and II. - Shanghai, China : Tongji Univ Press. - 9787560848693 ; , s. 737-740
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. We present initial steps of a larger project investigating and describing intonational variation in the Spontal database of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish, and testing the hypothesis that the concept of a standard question intonation such as a final pitch rise contrasting a final low declarative intonation is not consistent with the pragmatic use of intonation in dialogue. We report on the extraction of 600 questions from the Spontal corpus, coding and annotation of question typology, and preliminary results concerning some prosodic correlates related to question type.
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| 5. |
- Edlund, Jens, et al.
(author)
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Spontal : a Swedish spontaneous dialogue corpus of audio, video and motion capture
- 2010
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In: Proc. of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10). - 2951740867 ; , s. 2992-2995
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We present the Spontal database of spontaneous Swedish dialogues. 120 dialogues of at least 30 minutes each have been captured in high-quality audio, high-resolution video and with a motion capture system. The corpus is currently being processed and annotated, and will be made available for research at the end of the project.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- House, David, et al.
(author)
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Self-voice identification in children with phonological impairment
- 2011
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In: Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII. - Hong Kong. ; , s. 886-889
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We report preliminary data from a study of self-voice identification in children with phonological impairment (PI), where results from 13 children with PI are compared to results from a group of children with typical speech. No difference between the two groups was found, suggesting that a phonological impairment does not affect children’s ability to recognize their recorded voices as their own. We conclude that children with PI indeed recognize their own recorded voice and that the use of recordings in therapy can be supported.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Johansson, Kerstin, et al.
(author)
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Perceptual Detection of Subtle Dysphonic Traits in Individuals with Cervical Spinal Cord Injury Using an Audience Response Systems Approach
- 2017
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In: Journal of Voice. - : MOSBY-ELSEVIER. - 0892-1997 .- 1873-4588. ; 31:1
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Objectives. Reduced respiratory function following lower cervical spinal cord injuries (CSCIs) may indirectly result in vocal dysfunction. Although self-reports indicate voice change and limitations following CSCI, earlier efforts using global perceptual ratings to distinguish speakers with CSCI from noninjured speakers have not been very successful. We investigate the use of an audience response system-based approach to distinguish speakers with CSCI from noninjured speakers, and explore whether specific vocal traits can be identified as characteristic for speakers with CSCI. Methods. Fourteen speech-language pathologists participated in a web-based perceptual task, where their overt reactions to vocal dysfunction were registered during the continuous playback of recordings of 36 speakers (18 with CSCI, and 18 matched controls). Dysphonic events were identified through manual perceptual analysis, to allow the exploration of connections between dysphonic events and listener reactions. Results. More dysphonic events, and more listener reactions, were registered for speakers with CSCI than for noninjured speakers. Strain (particularly in phrase-final position) and creak (particularly in nonphrase-final position) distinguish speakers with CSCI from noninjured speakers. Conclusions. For the identification of intermittent and subtle signs of vocal dysfunction, an approach where the temporal distribution of symptoms is registered offers a viable means to distinguish speakers affected by voice dysfunction from non-affected speakers. In speakers with CSCI, clinicians should listen for presence of final strain and nonfinal creak, and pay attention to self-reported voice function and voice problems, to identify individuals in need for clinical assessment and intervention.
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| 11. |
- Lagerberg, Tove B, et al.
(author)
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Intelligibility of children with speech sound disorders evaluated by listeners with Swedish as a second language
- 2019
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In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. - 1092-4388 .- 1558-9102. ; 62:10, s. 3714-3727
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- © 2019 The Authors. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children’s atypical speech in relation to listeners’ language background. Method: Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that was further divided into subgroups based on age of acquisition (early, 0–3 years; intermediate, 4–12 years; and late, > 12 years) and, on the other hand, a monolingual comparison group (n = 19). Results: The monolingual listeners obtained higher intelligibility scores than the multilingual listeners; this difference was statistically significant. Participants who acquired Swedish at an older age (> 4 years) were found to have lower scores than other listeners. The later the age of acquisition, the less of the atypical speech was decoded correctly. A further analysis of the transcriptions also revealed a higher level of nonwords among the incorrect transcriptions of the multilinguals than that of the monolinguals who used more real words, whereas both groups were equally prone to using blanks when they did not perceive a word. Conclusions: This indicates a higher risk of communicative problems between late acquirers of Swedish and children with speech sound disorders. Clinical implications, such as involving communication partners in the intervention process, are discussed as well as possible linguistic explanations to the findings. This study could be seen as a starting point in the field of research regarding the relations between the language background of the listener and the ability to perceive atypical speech.
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| 12. |
- Lagerberg, Tove B, et al.
(author)
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Measuring intelligibility in spontaneous speech using syllables perceived as understood
- 2021
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In: Journal of communication disorders. - : Elsevier BV. - 1873-7994 .- 0021-9924. ; 92
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Intelligibility, the ability to convey a message by speech, is one of the most important variables in speech-language pathology. The assessment of intelligibility is a challenge especially when it comes to spontaneous speech. The aim of the study was to investigate validity and reliability of a method for assessment of intelligibility, syllables perceived as understood (SPU); a method that is more time-efficient than previous methods based on transcription, as it does not require a master transcript for reference.A group of 20 adult listeners transcribed stimuli consisting of spontaneous speech from 16 children (14 with speech sound disorder and two with typical speech and language development, age 4:4 to 8:1, M=6:0). Intelligibility was calculated based on these orthographic transcripts, as a) proportion of syllables perceived as understood (SPU) and b) proportion of syllables correctly understood (SCU), with reference to a master transcript. Validity was checked through investigation of the correlation and difference between these two measures. Reliability was analysed with inter-listener reliability by intra-class correlation.The correlation between SPU and SCU (the gold standard intelligibility score) was strong and statistically significant, with SPU being consistently higher than SCU. Inter-listener reliability for single measures of intra-class correlation of the assessment by syllables perceived as understood was moderate to low, whereas the inter-listener reliability for average measures of intra-class correlation was high.The method based on SPU might be used for assessment of intelligibility if the median from several listeners is used or when comparing results from the same listener over time. The SPU method might therefore be a valuable tool in a clinical and research context as a more valid option than rating scales and a more time-efficient method than the gold standard SCU method. However, it should be noted that the reliability of the SPU is not as high as for the SCU.
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| 13. |
- Lagerberg, Tove B, et al.
(author)
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Parent rating of intelligibility: A discussion of the construct validity of the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) and normative data of the Swedish version of the ICS.
- 2021
-
In: International journal of language & communication disorders. - : Wiley. - 1460-6984 .- 1368-2822. ; 56:4, s. 873-886
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Intelligibility can be defined as the speakers' ability to convey a message to the listener and it is considered the key functional measure of speech. The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a parent rating scale used to assess intelligibility in children.To describe normative and validation data on the ICS in Swedish and to investigate how these are related to age, gender and multilingualism.Two studies were included. Study 1 included ICS forms from 319 Swedish-speaking children (3:2-9:2 years:months). Study 2 included video recordings and ICS forms from 14 children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and two with typical speech. The video recordings were transcribed in the validation process, resulting in intelligibility reference scores to which ICS scores were correlated.Study 1: The mean value of the ICS for the 319 children was 4.73. There were no differences in ICS score related to age or gender. The children in the multilingual group were significantly older than the monolingual group and had significantly lower ICS scores than the group of monolinguals. Study 2: There was a moderate correlation between the ICS score and the transcription-based intelligibility score, with the two children with typical speech excluded; however, this correlation was not significant.We contribute mean scores and percentiles on the ICS for Swedish-speaking children. The finding that the ICS does not provide valid measures of intelligibility for the included children with SSD suggests that the instrument measures a different construct.What is already known on the subject The ICS has been translated to numerous languages and validated against articulation measures in several previous studies. The validity of the Swedish version has been investigated against intelligibility based on transcription of single words. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The study provides normative values of the Swedish version of the ICS for children aged 3-9 years. This is the first study to use a gold standard measure of intelligibility in continuous speech to validate the ICS. The results show a somewhat dubious validity regarding ICS for the group of children with SSD included in the study. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The ICS's suitability as a measure of intelligibility is questionable; however, it might be of use for speech and language pathologists to give an overview of the parents' view of their child's ability to communicate, in order to make a decision on possible further assessment and intervention. The normative values of the Swedish version of the ICS could be of use in this decision process.
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| 14. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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A study of Swedish questions and their prosodic characteristics
- 2012
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In: Proceedings of Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology (IAST). - Dublin, Ireland. ; , s. 61-64
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. This is one of the fundamental observations that formed the VariQ project, a Swedish national project aiming for a deeper insight in how questions work and indeed what constitutes a question. Here, we present some intermediate project results and outline the way ahead. VariQ looks mainly at the Spontal corpus of conversational speech [1], but exploits other data sets to a limited extent for comparative purposes. We report a recent study, in which we selected 600 questions from the Spontal corpus and annotated these in a theory-independent manner. In a subsequent study we compared some prosodic characteristics of these questions with those of the speech used in seven Swedish spoken dialogue systems. The results reveal differences both in the distributions of question types and in prosodic characteristics of the questions in the two different settings.
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| 15. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, 1977-, et al.
(author)
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Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of category goodness of /t/ and /k/ in typical and misarticulated child speech
-
Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The topic of the present investigation is the perceptual and acoustic nature of children’s successful and unsuccessful efforts at producing /t/ and /k/, with a specific aim at exploring perceptual sensitivity to phonetic detail, and the extent to which this sensitivity is reflected in the acoustic domain. Recordings were collected from children with a speech sound disorder (SSD), who misarticulated one of the target plosives. These recordings were compared to correct productions recorded from children with typical speech development (TD). Perceptual responses were registered with regards to a visual-analogue scale, ranging from “clear [t]” to “clear [k]”. Acoustic features were described by means of spectral moments and discrete cosine transformation analysis. The perceptual evaluation showed that “clear substitutions” of [t] for /k/, as well as of [k] for /t/, were rated as being less prototypical than correct productions. Hence, human listeners exhibit perceptual sensitivity to covert contrast. Moreover, even among target-appropriate productions of /t/ and /k/, items produced by children with SSD were rated as less prototypical than those produced by TD peers. Although both acoustic analysis methods discriminated between the gross categories /t/ and /k/, none of them exhibited the same sensitivity to phonetic detail as the human listeners.
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| 16. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of category goodness of /t/ and /k/ in typical and misarticulated children's speech
- 2015
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In: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - : Acoustical Society of America (ASA). - 0001-4966 .- 1520-8524. ; 137:6, s. 3422-3435
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This investigation explores perceptual and acoustic characteristics of children's successful and unsuccessful productions of /t/ and /k/, with a specific aim of exploring perceptual sensitivity to phonetic detail, and the extent to which this sensitivity is reflected in the acoustic domain. Recordings were collected from 4- to 8-year-old children with a speech sound disorder (SSD) who misarticulated one of the target plosives, and compared to productions recorded from peers with typical speech development (TD). Perceptual responses were registered with regards to a visual-analog scale, ranging from "clear [t]" to "clear [k]." Statistical models of prototypical productions were built, based on spectral moments and discrete cosine transform features, and used in the scoring of SSD productions. In the perceptual evaluation, " clear substitutions" were rated as less prototypical than correct productions. Moreover, target-appropriate productions of /t/ and /k/ produced by children with SSD were rated as less prototypical than those produced by TD peers. The acoustical modeling could to a large extent discriminate between the gross categories /t/ and /k/, and scored the SSD utterances on a continuous scale that was largely consistent with the category of production. However, none of the methods exhibited the same sensitivity to phonetic detail as the human listeners.
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| 17. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Approximating phonotactic input in children’s linguistic environments from orthographic transcripts
- 2017
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In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2017. - : The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). - 9781510848764 ; , s. 2214-2217, s. 2213-2217
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Child-directed spoken data is the ideal source of support for claims about children’s linguistic environments. However, phonological transcriptions of child-directed speech are scarce,compared to sources like adult-directed speech or text data. Acquiring reliable descriptions of children’s phonological environments from more readily accessible sources would mean considerable savings of time and money. The first step towards this goal is to quantify the reliability of descriptions derived from such secondary sources. We investigate how phonological distributions vary across different modalities (spoken vs. written), and across the age of the intended audience (children vs. adults). Using a previously unseen collection of Swedish adult- and child-directed spoken and written data, we combine lexicon look-up and grapheme-to-phonemeconversion to approximate phonological characteristics. The analysis shows distributional differences across datasets both for single phonemes and for longer phoneme sequences. Some of these are predictably attributed to lexical and contextual characteristics of text vs. speech.The generated phonological transcriptions are remarkably reliable. The differences in phonological distributions between child-directed speech and secondary sources highlight a need for compensatory measures when relying on written data or onadult-directed spoken data, and/or for continued collection ofactual child-directed speech in research on children’s language environments.
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| 18. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Children’s perception of their modified speech – preliminary findings
- 2011
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In: Proceedings from Fonetik 2011. ; , s. 117-120
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This report describes an ongoing investigation of 4-6 year-old children’s perception of synthetically modified versions of their own recorded speech. Recordings of the children’s speech production are automatically modified so that the initial consonant is replaced by a different consonant. The task for the children is to judge the phonological accuracy (correct vs. incorrect) and the speaker identity (me vs. someone else) of each stimulus. Preliminary results indicate that children with typical speech generally judge phonological accuracy correctly, ofboth original recordings and synthetically modified recordings. As a first evaluation of the re-synthesis technique with child users, the results are promising,as the children generally accept the intended phonological form, seemingly without detecting the modification.
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| 19. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, 1977-, et al.
(author)
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Children's perception of their synthetically corrected speech production
- 2014
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In: Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. - : Informa Healthcare. - 0269-9206 .- 1464-5076. ; 28:6, s. 373-395
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We explore children's perception of their own speech - in its online form, in its recorded form, and in synthetically modified forms. Children with phonological disorder (PD) and children with typical speech and language development (TD) performed tasks of evaluating accuracy of the different types of speech stimuli, either immediately after having produced the utterance or after a delay. In addition, they performed a task designed to assess their ability to detect synthetic modification. Both groups showed high performance in tasks involving evaluation of other children's speech, whereas in tasks of evaluating one's own speech, the children with PD were less accurate than their TD peers. The children with PD were less sensitive to misproductions in immediate conjunction with their production of an utterance, and more accurate after a delay. Within-category modification often passed undetected, indicating a satisfactory quality of the generated speech. Potential clinical benefits of using corrective re-synthesis are discussed.
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| 20. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Children's recognition of their own recorded voice : influence of age and phonological impairment
- 2013
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In: Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0269-9206 .- 1464-5076. ; 27:1, s. 33-45
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Children with phonological impairment (PI) often have difficulties perceiving insufficiencies in their own speech. The use of recordings has been suggested as a way of directing the child's attention toward his/her own speech, despite a lack of evidence that children actually recognize their recorded voice as their own. We present two studies of children's self-voice identification, one exploring developmental aspects, and one exploring potential effects of having a PI. The results indicate that children from 4 to 8 years recognize their recorded voice well (around 80% accuracy), regardless of whether they have a PI or not. A subtle change in this ability from 4 to 8 years is observed that could be linked to a development in short-term memory. Clinically, one can indeed expect an advantage of using recordings in therapy; this could constitute an intermediate step toward the more challenging task of online self-monitoring.
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| 21. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Children’s recognition of their own voice : influence of phonological impairment
- 2011
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In: INTERSPEECH 2011, 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. - 9781618392701 ; , s. 2205-2208
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study explores the ability to identify the recorded voice as one’s own, in three groups of children: one group of children with phonological impairment (PI) and two groups of children with typical speech and language development; 4-5 year-olds and 7-8 year-olds. High average performance rates in all three groups suggest that these children indeed recognize their recorded voice as their own, with no significant difference between the groups. Signs indicating that children with deviant speech use their speech deviance as a cue to identifying theirown voice are discussed.
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| 22. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Corrective re-synthesis of deviant speech using unit selection
- 2011
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In: Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics. ; , s. 214-217
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This report describes a novel approach to modified re-synthesis, by concatenation of speech from different speakers. The system removes an initial voiceless plosive from one utterance, recorded from a child, and replaces it with another voiceless plosive selected from a database of recordings of other child speakers. Preliminary results from a listener evaluation are reported.
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| 23. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Correlates to intelligibility in deviant child speech – comparing clinical evaluations to audience response system-based evaluations by untrained listeners
- 2013
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In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2013. - Lyon, France. ; , s. 3684-3688
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The severity of speech impairments can be measured in different ways; whereas some metrics focus on quantifying the specific speech deviations, other focus on the functional effects of the speech impairment, e.g. by rating intelligibility. This report describes the application of a previously untested method to the domain of deviant child speech; an audience response system-based method where listeners’ responses are continuously registered during playback of speech stimuli. 20 adult listeners were given the task of clicking a button whenever they perceived something unintelligible or deviant during playback of child speech stimuli. The untrained listeners’ responses were compared to clinical evaluations of the same speech samples, revealing a strong correlation between the two types of measures. Furthermore, patterns of how listeners’ different experiences influence their clicking responses were explored. Qualitative analysis linking listener clicks to triggering events in the speech samples demonstrates the potential of the click method as an instrument for identification of features in children’s speech that are most detrimental to intelligibility – insights that may have important implications for the selection of speech targets in clinical intervention.
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| 24. |
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| 25. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Development of self-voice recognition in children
- 2009
-
In: Proceedings from Fonetik 2009. ; , s. 136-139
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The ability to recognize the recorded voice as one’s own was explored in two groups of children, one aged 4-5 and the other aged 7-8. The task for the children was to identify which one of four voice samples represented their own voice. The results indicate that 4 to 5 year-old children perform as well as 7 to 8 year-old children when identifying their own recorded voice. Moreover, a time span of 1-2 weeks between recording and identification does not affect the younger children’s performance, while the older children perform significantly worse after this time span. Implications for the use of recordings in speech and language therapy are discussed.
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| 26. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Gradient evaluation of /k/-likeness in typical and misarticulated child speech
- 2014
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In: Proceedings of ICPLA 2014. - Stockholm, Sweden.
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Phonetic transcription is an important instrument in the evaluation of misarticulated speech. However, this instrument is not sensitive to fine acoustic-phonetic detail – information that can provide insight into the processes underlying speech production [1]. An objective and fine-grained measure of children’s efforts at producing a specific speech target would be clinically valuable, both in assessment and when monitoring progress in therapy. Here, we describe the first steps towards such a measure.This study describes the perceptual and acoustic evaluation of children’s successful and inaccurate efforts at producing /k/. A corpus of 2990 recordings of isolated words, beginning with either /tV/ or /kV/, produced by 4-8-year-old children, was used. The recordings were labelled with regards to whether they were a) correct productions, b) clear substitutions (i.e. [t] for /k/, or [k] for /t/), or c) intermediate productions between [t] and [k].In the perceptual evaluation, 10 adult listeners judged 120 typical and misarticulated productions of /t/ and /k/ with regards to a scale from “clear /t/” to “clear /k/”. The listeners utilized the whole scale, thus exhibiting sensitivity to sub-phonemic detail. This finding demonstrates that listeners perceive more detail than is conveyed in phonetic transcription. However, despite their experience of evaluating misarticulated child speech, the listeners did not discriminate between correct productions and clear substitutions, i.e. they did not distinguish successful productions of [t] for /t/ from cases where [t] was a misarticulated production of /k/ (and vice versa).In order to explore the existence of covert contrasts, i.e. sub-perceptual differentiation between correct productions and clear substitutions, acoustic analysis was performed. Here, a frequently described approach [2] to the analysis of voiceless plosives was compared to more recent methods. We report on the performance of the different methods, regarding how well they modelled the human evaluations, and to their sensitivity to covert contrast.
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| 27. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Identifying children’s dialect from isolated words
- 2012
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In: Proceedings of Fonetik 2012. - Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This report describes a pilot study investigating whether adult listeners are able to identify the dialect of child speakers from the recordings of isolated words. The recorded children are either speaking a Stockholm dialect or a Scanian dialect. Despite low agreement between the nine adult listeners, the results show that adult listeners can indeed identify dialect even in isolated short words, and that some features in the word make them more revealing of dialect than others. For example, dialect is identified correctly more often in bisyllabic words than in monosyllabic words, suggesting that intonation is a strong cue to dialect identification.
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| 28. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Interactional patterns in computer-assisted phonological intervention in children
- 2007
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In: Proceedings of Fonetik 2007. ; , s. 69-72
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The focus of this study is interaction during speech and language intervention in children with phonological impairment. Interactional patterns between children and therapists in two different settings are compared; on the one hand ‘tabletop’ phonological intervention and, on the other hand, computer-assisted phonological intervention. The interactions are compared in terms of interactional dominance and coherence. This paper describes work in progress. Background and method will be presented here, but at the time of writing analyses are still ongoing. Preliminary results will be presented at the conference.
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| 29. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Is that me? : Self-voice identification in children with deviant speech
- 2012
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In: Proc. of ICPLA 2012. - Cork, Ireland.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In children with deviant speech, a discrepancy between internal and external discrimination is often observed. For example, a child who produces a target word like cat as [tat] might well be able to recognize the same error when someone else produces it (external discrimination), but still fail to perceive the error in his/her own speech (internal discrimination). One focus in speech and language therapy is therefore to strengthen the child’s self-monitoring skills, e.g. through the use of recordings (Hoffman & Norris, 2005). However, it is still not known if children with deviant speech indeed recognize their recorded voice as their own. And if they don’t, we could not expect any advantage from using the child’s own recordings in therapy, as it would merely be another form of external discrimination.The present study aims to explore 1) if children with phonological impairment (PI) recognize their recorded voice as their own on the same level as children with typical speech, and 2) whether the time interval between making a recording and identifying the recording as one’s own influences the children’s performance, and 3) whether the performance of children with PI is dependent on the phonological accuracy of their production.The ability to recognize the recorded voice as one’s own was explored in three groups of children: one group of children with PI (N=18) and two groups of children with typical speech and language development; 4-5 year-olds (N=25) and 7-8 year-olds (N=23). The children with PI all exhibited patterns of velar fronting in their speech production. A recording script of 24 words was used for all children, with half of the words beginning with /tV/. Thus, the children with PI were expected to produce half of the words in error. The task for the children was to identify which of four randomly presented child recordings of a word was their own recording. Self-voice identification was tested on two occasions for each child, the first immediately following the child’s production of the recording, and the second 1-2 weeks later.High average performance rates in all three groups suggest that children indeed recognize their recorded voice as their own, with no significant difference between the groups. A significant drop in performance from immediate playback to delayed playback was found. This drop was most pronounced in the older group of children with typical speech. The children with PI did not perform differently on stimuli produced in error and stimuli produced correctly, suggesting that they do not use their speech deviance as a cue to identifying their own voice. A clinical implication of these findings is that one can indeed expect an advantage of using recordings of the child’s own speech in therapeutic settings, as this would be closer to internal discrimination than external discrimination. We argue that the indications that children with PI do not use their speech deviance as a cue to identifying their own recording from those of other children reflect the difficulties they have to judge their own speech production accurately, and indicate this as an important focus of intervention.
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| 30. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Modified re-synthesis of initial voiceless plosives by concatenation of speech from different speakers
- 2009
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In: Proceedings from Fonetik 2009. ; , s. 198-2001
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper describes a method of re-synthesising utterance-initial voiceless plosives, given an original utterance by one speaker and a speech database of utterances by many other speakers. The system removes an initial voiceless plosive from an utterance and replaces it with another voiceless plosive selected from the speech database. (For example, if the original utterance was /tat/, the re-synthesised utterance could be /k+at/.) In the method described, techniques used in general concatenative speech synthesis were applied in order to find those segments in the speech database that would yield the smoothest concatenation with the original segment. Results from a small listening test reveal that the concatenated samples are most often correctly identified, but that there is room for improvement on naturalness. Some routes to improvement are suggested.
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| 31. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Prosodic measurements and question types in the Spontal corpus of Swedish dialogues
- 2012
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In: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012, Vol 1. - 9781622767595 ; , s. 838-841
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. In this paper, we describe some aspects of prosodic variation in the Spontal corpus of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish. The study is part of ongoing work aimed at extracting a database of 600 questions from the corpus, complete with categorization and prosodic descriptions. We report on coding and annotation of question typology and present results concerning some prosodic correlates related to question type for the 600 questions. A prosodically salient distinction was found between the two categories termed, in our typology, forward and backward looking questions.
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| 32. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Question types and some prosodic correlates in the Spontal corpus of Swedish dialogues
- 2012
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In: Proceedings of Fonetik 2012. - Gothenburg, Sweden.
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We describe some aspects of prosodic variation in the Spontal corpus of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish. Coding and annotation of question typology is described and results are presented concerning prosodic correlates related to question type for well over 400 questions. A prosodically salient distinction was found between the two categories termed, in our typology, forward- and backward-looking questions.
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| 33. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Questions and reported speech in Swedish dialogues
- 2012
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In: Nordic Prosody. - Tartu, Estonia.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Spontal corpus contains 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish, balanced for gender combination and previous acquaintance. From this corpus, over 600 questions have been extracted with a view to investigate and describe prosodic variation and to test the hypothesis that a standard type of question intonation such as a final pitch rise which contrasts to a final low of declarative intonation is not consistent with the pragmatic use of intonation in dialogue [1]. The extracted questions have been labeled with respect to four relatively simple queries, Q1-Q4. Q1 is related to question type, whether the question is best described as a y/n question (Y/N), a wh-question (WH), an alternative question which includes a restricted set of alternative answers (ALT), or other (OTHER). Q2 concerned whether a response was required (REQUIRED), possible (OPTIONAL), or prohibited (PROHIBITED). Q3 was labeled with respect to the question "Does the person asking the question ask for something that has not already been said (FORWARD) or is it more a question of verifying or showing attitude towards what has already been stated (BACKWARD)?". Q4 was to be answered in the positive if the question was a case of reported speech (REPORTED), and in the negative if not (DIRECT). Clustering across the different labels enables the extraction of specific question categories – categories that presumably correspond to different prosodic characteristics. One category of questions that has been relatively underexplored is reported questions. In [2], for example, reported questions were not coded as questions. Here, we present typological, lexical and prosodic characteristics of reported questions in the Spontal corpus. This set of questions is relatively small (N = 48), and statistic analyses were not very revealing; analyses comparing prosodic variation (duration, average pitch, pitch variation and intonation slope) within speakers did not show any differences dependent on whether questions were reported or not. Instead, our prosodic analysis is based on qualitative descriptions of the reported questions – descriptions that apart from prosodic characteristics (pitch level and variation, speed, intensity) involve aspects of voice quality and articulation. We were surprised to find that prosodic marking was not very frequent in the data; around half of the reported questions were not perceived as being prosodically marked. The reported questions were subcategorized by a) whether the question had actually been produced or not, and b) whether the reported question had been produced by the speaker herself or by someone else. Prosodic marking was found to be more common in reported questions that had actually been produced than in hypothetical/rhetorical questions, and also more common in reported questions that had been produced by someone else than by the speaker herself. Regarding the characteristics of the prosodically marked questions, we found that seemingly opposite features can be used to signal reportedness: e.g. either slower or faster speech, higher or lower pitch, stronger or softer speech. Prosodic difference to the preceding context seems to be the key. Apart from the prosodic signaling of reportedness, we also noted lexical signals (where "bara" [ba], Eng. "like:" is the most common) and semantic/pragmatic cues, where the question does not make any sense unless it is a case of reported speech. Regarding the distribution of question types within the group of reported questions, FORWARD-looking YN and WH questions that REQUIRE an answer are the most common type, just as for the non-reported questions in the Spontal corpus.
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| 34. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Ranking severity of speech errors by their phonological impact in context
- 2014
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In: Proceedings of the Annual ConfereProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. ; , s. 1568-1572
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Children with speech disorders often present with systematic speech error patterns. In clinical assessments of speech disorders, evaluating the severity of the disorder is central. Current measures of severity have limited sensitivity to factors like the frequency of the target sounds in the child’s language and the degree of phonological diversity, which are factors that can be assumed to affect intelligibility. By constructing phonological filters to simulate eight speech error patterns often observed in children, and applying these filters to a phonologically transcribed corpus of 350K words, this study explores three quantitative measures of phonological impact: Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC), edit distance, and degree of homonymy. These metrics were related to estimated ratings of severity collected from 34 practicing clinicians. The results show an expected high correlation between the PCC and edit distance metrics, but that none of the three metrics align with clinicians’ ratings. Although these results do not generate definite answers to what phonological factors contribute the most to (un)intelligibility, this study demonstrates a methodology that allows for large-scale investigations of the interplay between phonological errors and their impact on speech in context, within and across languages.
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| 35. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
-
Segmental re-synthesis of child speech using unit selection
- 2011
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In: Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII. ; , s. 1910-1913
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This report describes a novel approach to segmental re-synthesis of child speech, by concatenation of speech from different speakers. The re-synthesis builds upon standard methods of unit selection, but instead of using speech from only one speaker, target segments are selected from a speech database of many child speakers. Results from a listener evaluation suggest that the method can be used to generate intelligible speech that is difficult to distinguish from original recordings.
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| 36. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
-
Self-voice recognition in 4 to 5-year-old children
- 2009
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In: INTERSPEECH 2009. - BAIXAS : ISCA-INST SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC. ; , s. 820-823
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Children's ability to recognize their own recorded voice as their own was explored in a group of 4 to 5-year-old children. The task for the children was to identify which one of four voice samples represented their own voice. The results reveal that children perform well above chance level, and that a time span of 1-2 weeks between the recording and the identification does not affect the children's performance. F0 similarity between the participant's recordings and the reference recordings correlated with a higher error-rate. Implications for the use of recordings in speech and language therapy are discussed.
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| 37. |
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| 38. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia
(author)
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Synthetic correction of deviant speech - children's perception of phonologically modified recordings of their own speech
- 2012
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In: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012, Vol 2. - 9781622767595 ; , s. 1130-1133
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This report describes preliminary data from a study of how children with phonological impairment (PI) perceive automatically corrected versions of their own deviant speech. The results from 8 children with PI are compared to results of a group of 20 children with typical speech and language (nPI). The results indicate group differences only in tasks where the children make judgments of their own recorded (original or modified) speech; here, the children in the nPI group perform significantly better than the children with PI. In tasks where the children judge the phonological accuracy of recordings of other children (original or modified), however, the two groups perform equally well. Furthermore, the results indicate that sub-phonemic modifications of recordings are too subtle for the children in both groups to detect. Technical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
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| 39. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, 1977-
(author)
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The /k/s, the /t/s, and the inbetweens : Novel approaches to examining the perceptual consequences of misarticulated speech
- 2014
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis comprises investigations of the perceptual consequences of children’s misarticulated speech – as perceived by clinicians, by everyday listeners, and by the children themselves. By inviting methods from other areas to the study of speech disorders, this work demonstrates some successful cases of cross-fertilization. The population in focus is children with a phonological disorder (PD), who misarticulate /t/ and /k/. A theoretical assumption underlying this work is that errors in speech production are often paralleled in perception, e.g. that children base their decision on whether a speech sound is a /t/ or a /k/ on other acoustic-phonetic criteria than those employed by proficient language users. This assumption, together with an aim at stimulating self-monitoring in these children, motivated two of the included studies. Through these studies, new insights into children’s perception of their own speech were achieved – insights entailing both clinical and psycholinguistic implications. For example, the finding that children with PD generally recognize themselves as the speaker in recordings of their own utterances lends support to the use of recordings in therapy, to attract children’s attention to their own speech production. Furthermore, through the introduction of a novel method for automatic correction of children’s speech errors, these findings were extended with the observation that children with PD tend to evaluate misarticulated utterances as correct when just having produced them, and to perceive inaccuracies better when time has passed. Another theme in this thesis is the gradual nature of speech perception related to phonological categories, and a concern that perceptual sensitivity is obscured in descriptions based solely on discrete categorical labels. This concern is substantiated by the finding that listeners rate “substitutions” of [t] for /k/ as less /t/-like than correct productions of [t] for intended /t/. Finally, a novel method of registering listener reactions during the continuous playback of misarticulated speech is introduced, demonstrating a viable approach to exploring how different speech errors influence intelligibility and/or acceptability. By integrating such information in the prioritizing of therapeutic targets, intervention may be better directed at those patterns that cause the most problems for the child in his or her everyday life.
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| 40. |
- Strömbergsson, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Timing responses to questions in dialogue
- 2013
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In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2013. - Lyon, France : International Speech and Communication Association. ; , s. 2583-2587
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Questions and answers play an important role in spoken dialogue systems as well as in human-human interaction. A critical concern when responding to a question is the timing of the response. While human response times depend on a wide set of features, dialogue systems generally respond as soon as they can, that is, when the end of the question has been detected and the response is ready to be deployed. This paper presents an analysis of how different semantic and pragmatic features affect the response times to questions in two different data sets of spontaneous human-human dialogues: the Swedish Spontal Corpus and the US English Switchboard corpus. Our analysis shows that contextual features such as question type, response type, and conversation topic influence human response times. Based on these results, we propose that more sophisticated response timing can be achieved in spoken dialogue systems by using these features to automatically and deliberately target system response timing.
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| 41. |
- Wikse Barrow, Carla, 1991-, et al.
(author)
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A multidimensional investigation of covert contrast in Swedish acquiring children's speech - a project description
- 2019
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In: Proceedings from FONETIK 2019 Stockholm, June 10–12, 2019. - Stockholm : Stockholm University. - 9789177979845 ; , s. 79-83
-
Conference paper (pop. science, debate, etc.)abstract
- This paper provides a description of a current PhD project in phonetics at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University. A short background is pro- vided, the intended experiments are pre- sented and the potential contributions of the results are outlined.
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| 42. |
- Wikse Barrow, Carla, et al.
(author)
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A survey of Swedish speech-language pathologists’ practices regarding assessment of speech sound disorders
- 2023
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In: Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1401-5439 .- 1651-2022. ; 48:1, s. 23-34
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Purpose To explore Swedish clinical practice regarding assessment of suspected Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) in children.Methods A web-based questionnaire, regarding assessment of SSD in children 4;6–6;11 (years; months), was distributed to Swedish speech-language pathologists (SLPs) through social media and online forums. The questions concerned the frequency and manner of assessment for seven assessment components, chosen based on a review of international recommendations for SSD assessment.Results A total of 131 SLPs responded to the questionnaire. The results show that Swedish SSD assessment practices vary with regards to the frequency and manner of assessment for many components. Speech output is frequently assessed while speech perception, phonological awareness and oral-motor function are assessed less frequently. A variety of manners of assessment, for example, standardised tests, non-standardised material, and informal assessment procedures, such as observation, are utilized by respondents.Conclusions Swedish SSD assessment practices are variable. The present paper reveals areas for development within SLP practice and education programmes, and provides a new perspective on present praxis with regards to the assessment of suspected SSD in Sweden.
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| 43. |
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| 44. |
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| 45. |
- Wikse Barrow, Carla, et al.
(author)
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Subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition : exploring issues of validity and rater reliability
- 2019
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In: Journal of Child Language. - 0305-0009 .- 1469-7602. ; 46:2, s. 199-213
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora – one of child speech and one of adult speech – specifically exploring whether words over-represented in the child-speech corpus are rated with lower AoA than words characteristic of the adult-speech corpus. The results show that less than one-third of participating informants’ ratings are valid and reliable. However, individuals with high familiarity with preschool-aged children provide more valid and reliable ratings, compared to individuals who do not work with or have children of their own. The results further show a significant, age-adjacent difference in rated AoA for words from the two different corpora, thus strengthening their validity. The study provides AoA data, of high specificity, for 100 child-specific and 100 adult-specific Swedish words.
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| 46. |
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| 47. |
- Öster Cattu Alves, Mirjam, et al.
(author)
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Dealing with the unknown - addressing challenges in evaluating unintelligible speech
- 2020
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In: Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0269-9206 .- 1464-5076. ; 34:1-2, s. 169-184
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- When investigating the interaction between speech production and intelligibility, unintelligible speech portions are often of particular interest. Therefore, the fact that the standard quantification of speech production - the Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) - is only computed on intelligible speech is unsatisfying. Our purpose was to evaluate a new quantification of speech production: the Percentage of Intelligible and Correct Syllables (PICS) designed to address this limitation. A secondary purpose was to explore a task designed to elicit connected speech - concurrent commenting - offering more control of intended speech production compared to free conversation. Nine children with SSD participated in four speech elicitation tasks, varying with respect to ecological validity, and to degree of control: (1) word imitation, (2) picture naming, (3) concurrent commenting of a silent short video, and (4) free conversation. Speech accuracy was analysed in terms of PCC-Revised (PCC-R) and PICS, and intelligibility with regards to the Proportion of Intelligible Syllables (PINTS). A strong correlation was observed between PICS and PCC-R, supporting the construct validity of PICS. Further, a moderate correlation was seen between PICS and PINTS, presumably reflecting that these measures capture different - although related - constructs. No difference was seen between concurrent commenting and free conversation in terms of articulation proficiency or intelligibility; however, this needs further investigation based on more data. Nevertheless, we suggest concurrent commenting as a useful method for eliciting connected speech; in retaining more control over intended target words compared to free conversation, this task may be particularly useful in the context of unintelligible speech.
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