215 research outputs found
Seeing Speech: A Pronunciation Toolkit for Indigenous Language Teaching and Learning
Get PDFPronunciation can present a serious challenge for language teachers and learners (e.g., Munro & Derwing 2015). In the context of Indigenous languages in particular, this can be compounded by a number of factors, including small numbers of speakers and teachers, a paucity of pedagogical resources and clear descriptions of sound systems, and the pressures faced by heritage learners to authentically preserve their ancestral language (Carpenter 1997; Hinton 2011; Hinton & Ahlers 1999). Latent speakers may be inhibited from speaking by perceived concerns over their pronunciation, particularly in the presence of elders (Basham & Fatham 2008), and other learners may face similar social and linguistic challenges. Despite these hurdles, pronunciation is considered by many to be an important aspect of Indigenous language learning, and one which requires creative community-oriented solutions (AUTHOR & Kell 2015; Carpenter 1997). Towards this end, we have developed a pronunciationlearning toolthat incorporates ultrasound technology, giving learners a visual aid to help them learn to articulate challenging or unfamiliar sounds, for example “back of the mouth” consonants (e.g. /k/ vs. /q/). Ultrasound is used to create videos of a model speaker’s tongue movements during speech, which are then overlaid on videos of an external profile view of the model’s head to create ultrasound-enhanced pronunciation videos for individual words or sounds (Abel et al. 2015). A key advantage of these videos is that they allow learners direct access to the articulatory shapes and movements that are involved in pronouncing challenging words or sounds; learners are able see how speech is produced rather than just hear and try to mimic it. Although ultrasound-enhanced videos were originally developed for commonly taught languages such as Japanese and French, there has been widespread interest from Indigenous communities in Western Canada to develop their own customized videos. To date, we have partnered with communities in Alberta and British Columbia to develop videos for four languages: SENĆOŦEN, Secwepemc, Halq’emeylem, and Blackfoot. Community-driven and capacity-building, these projects involved training community members in how to produce customized ultrasound-enhanced videos using our toolkit. The resulting videos will be featured in our presentation, along with demonstrations of how and why to use ultrasound in pronunciation teaching. Our goal is to show that the ultrasound-enhanced videos can help to address some of the challenges of pronunciation learning in Indigenous languages by giving learners a new way to understand pronunciation that focuses on seeing speech. References Abel, J., B. Allen, S. Burton, M. Kazama, M. Noguchi, A. Tsuda, N. Yamane, & AUTHOR. 2015. Ultrasound-Enhanced Multimodal Approaches to Pronunciation Teaching and Learning. Canadian Acoustics 43 (3), 130-131. Basham, C. and A. Fathman. 2008. The latent speaker: Attaining adult fluency in an endangered language. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11: 577-97. AUTHOR and S. Kell. Pronunciation in the context of language revitalization. Paper presented at ICLDC 4, 2015. Carpenter, V. 1997. Teaching Children to "Unlearn" the Sounds of English. In Teaching Indigenous Languages, ed. by Jon Reyhner. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, pp. 31-39. Hinton, L. 2011. Language revitalization and language pedagogy: New teaching and learning strategies. Language and Education 25(4): 307-318, Hinton, L. and J. Ahlers. 1999. The issue of “authenticity” in California language restoration. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30: 56-67. Munro, M. J. & Derwing, T. M. 2015. A prospectus for pronunciation research in the 21st century: A point of view. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 1(1): 11-42
Integrating posture control in speech models
No full textIn this dissertation, I investigated the control of postures in the human vocal tract and integrated these controls into speech models using simulative methods and provided correspondent behavioral evidence. Chapter 1 presents the theoretical background, highlighting that although speech postures behave similarly to other postures, they have only been observed among English speakers and have not been incorporated into any speech motor control models. This chapter then proposes a parallel control model that includes both speech postural control and movement control. The simulated outcomes support the view that speech posture, like body posture, constitutes a necessary and universal substrate for speech (tested in Chapter 2) which is maintained under perturbation (tested in Chapter 3), and that anticipatory postural adjustments should contribute to equilibrium in the context of internal perturbations (tested in Chapter 4). Chapter 2 examines the universality of the lingual bracing posture, observing that it is present across different languages. Chapter 3 investigates the robustness of the lingual posture under external perturbations, finding that the lingual bracing posture is consistently maintained with the presence of external perturbation. Chapter 4 studies the interaction of the smiling posture with internal perturbations, revealing that the posture is also robustly maintained with some anticipatory adjustments. Finally, Chapter 5 reviews the dissertation and summarizes the major findings.Arts, Faculty ofLinguistics, Department ofGraduat
Quantitative analysis of subphonemic flap/tap variation in NAE
No full textExtreme ‘covert’ categorical subphonemic variation has been thought to occur only in rare cases such as American English ‘r ’ [1]. The present study demonstrates that English flaps/taps are produced using up to four distinct kinematic variations: up-flaps, down-flaps, alveolar taps and postalveolar taps. Surface distinctions between up-flaps and down-flaps, and between alveolar taps and post-alveolar taps, have not been previously described for any language. Our research expands on preliminary research by Gick [2,3] to include B/M mode ultrasound measures that capture details of flap kinematics with higher temporal resolution
Speech postures are postures : towards a unified approach to postural control in gross and fine motor skills
No full textIn this dissertation, I examine the concept of posture in the vocal tract and compare it to the concept of posture as discussed in gross motor contexts. We begin in chapter 1 by reviewing theoretical conceptions of body posture, and identifying the necessary conditions for a comparison of vocal tract and bodily posture. In subsequent chapters, I lay out experimental work I have conducted alongside coauthors to examine the relationship between speech and non-speech postural control. In chapter 2, we examine the effects of microgravity adaptation on speech postural control and observe postural shifts comparable to gross motor skills. In Chapter 3 we examine the relationship between speech postures and upcoming motor tasks, and find that speech postures account for upcoming motor demands in a similar manner to body postures, reflecting specific properties of upcoming speech movements rather than generalized linguistic properties. In Chapter 4, we examine the neural control of vocal tract posture and movement and find that they are similar to what has been reported in gross motor contexts. In Chapter 5, we review the implications of our findings for a unified model of postural control across gross and fine motor skills, and outline necessary next steps to evaluate this model.Arts, Faculty ofLinguistics, Department ofGraduat
Blackfoot Final Vowels: What Variation and its Absence can Tell us about Communicative Goals
Get PDFThis paper investigates variation in the production of word-final vowels in Blackfoot, an Algonquian language spoken by approximately 3350 people in Southern Alberta and Northern Montana. The Blackfoot community perceives the language as partitioning into varieties, based on the age of the speaker; ‘old Blackfoot’ is richly polysynthetic and spoken by people born in the 1930s and earlier, whereas ‘new Blackfoot’ is thought to be missing certain inflections, and is spoken by people born in the 1940s or later. Final vowels, which encode a morphosyntactic distinction referred to as obviation, are thought to be particularly susceptible to language loss. Gick et al. (2012) document the phonetic properties of one Blackfoot speaker’s final vowels, demonstrating that, for her, final vowels are not absent but instead soundless in some environments, in that there are distinct articulator positions for -a and -i vowels without any corresponding acoustic distinction. We investigate the articulatory, acoustic, and phonological properties of the final vowels of four additional speakers cross-cutting age, dialect, and gender. Using ultrasound, video, and audio recordings, we found that while there is phonetic variation across speakers in the realization of final vowels, not one speaker altogether omits them. In short, there is variation, but of a limited nature. The robustness of the final vowels reflects the fact that they serve an important communicative function in the grammar by encoding obviation
Visual-Tactile Speech Perception and the Autism Quotient
Get PDFMultisensory information is integrated asymmetrically in speech perception: An audio
signal can follow video by 240ms, but can precede video by only 60ms, without
disrupting the sense of synchronicity (Munhall et al., 1996). Similarly, air flow can follow
either audio (Gick et al., 2010) or video (Bicevskis et al., 2016) by a much larger margin
than it can precede either while remaining perceptually synchronous. These asymmetric
windows of integration have been attributed to the physical properties of the signals;
light travels faster than sound (Munhall et al., 1996), and sound travels faster than air
flow (Gick et al., 2010). Perceptual windows of integration narrow during development
(Hillock-Dunn and Wallace, 2012), but remain wider among people with autism (Wallace
and Stevenson, 2014). Here we show that, even among neurotypical adult perceivers,
visual-tactile windows of integration are wider and flatter the higher the participant’s
Autism Quotient (AQ) (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), a self-report measure of autistic traits.
As “pa” is produced with a tiny burst of aspiration (Derrick et al., 2009), we applied
light and inaudible air puffs to participants’ necks while they watched silent videos of
a person saying “ba” or “pa,” with puffs presented both synchronously and at varying
degrees of asynchrony relative to the recorded plosive release burst, which itself is
time-aligned to visible lip opening. All syllables seen along with cutaneous air puffs
were more likely to be perceived as “pa.” Syllables were perceived as “pa” most often
when the air puff occurred 50–100ms after lip opening, with decaying probability as
asynchrony increased. Integration was less dependent on time-alignment the higher the
participant’s AQ. Perceivers integrate event-relevant tactile information in visual speech
perception with greater reliance upon event-related accuracy the more they self-describe
as neurotypical, supporting the Happé and Frith (2006) weak coherence account of
autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
An EPG study of allophonic variation in the gestural magnitude of English lingual consonants
No full text
Data_Sheet_1_Visual-Tactile Speech Perception and the Autism Quotient.ZIP
No full textMultisensory information is integrated asymmetrically in speech perception: An audio signal can follow video by 240 ms, but can precede video by only 60 ms, without disrupting the sense of synchronicity (Munhall et al., 1996). Similarly, air flow can follow either audio (Gick et al., 2010) or video (Bicevskis et al., 2016) by a much larger margin than it can precede either while remaining perceptually synchronous. These asymmetric windows of integration have been attributed to the physical properties of the signals; light travels faster than sound (Munhall et al., 1996), and sound travels faster than air flow (Gick et al., 2010). Perceptual windows of integration narrow during development (Hillock-Dunn and Wallace, 2012), but remain wider among people with autism (Wallace and Stevenson, 2014). Here we show that, even among neurotypical adult perceivers, visual-tactile windows of integration are wider and flatter the higher the participant's Autism Quotient (AQ) (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), a self-report measure of autistic traits. As “pa” is produced with a tiny burst of aspiration (Derrick et al., 2009), we applied light and inaudible air puffs to participants' necks while they watched silent videos of a person saying “ba” or “pa,” with puffs presented both synchronously and at varying degrees of asynchrony relative to the recorded plosive release burst, which itself is time-aligned to visible lip opening. All syllables seen along with cutaneous air puffs were more likely to be perceived as “pa.” Syllables were perceived as “pa” most often when the air puff occurred 50–100 ms after lip opening, with decaying probability as asynchrony increased. Integration was less dependent on time-alignment the higher the participant's AQ. Perceivers integrate event-relevant tactile information in visual speech perception with greater reliance upon event-related accuracy the more they self-describe as neurotypical, supporting the Happé and Frith (2006) weak coherence account of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).</p
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