Browsing by Person "Lickley, Robin"

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A psycholinguistic exploration of disfluency behavior during the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
(2017-08-18) Drevets, Megan; Lickley, Robin
Acoustic speech markers for tracking changes in hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s Disease
(ICPLA 2023, 2023-07) Murali, Mridhula; Ma, Joan K-Y; Lickley, Robin
Alignment of Phrase Accent Lows in Dutch Falling Rising Questions: Theoretical and Methodological Implications
(Kingston Press Ltd, 2005-06) Lickley, Robin; Schepman, A.; Ladd, D. Robert
In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form Do you live in [place name]? produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of these turning points is affected by the location of a postaccentual secondary stressed syllable if one is present. This is consistent with the findings and analyses of Grice, Ladd, & Arvaniti, 2000 (Phonology 17, 143-185), suggesting that the low turning points are the phonetic reflex of a phrase accent. In the second part of this study, we measured the low turning points in falling-rising questions produced in a task-oriented dialog setting and found that their alignment is affected in the same way as in the read speech data. This suggests that read speech experiments are a valid means of investigating the phonetic details of intonation contours.
Are adults who stammer too sensitive?
(British Stammering Association., 2002-09) Lickley, Robin; Russell, Melanie; Corley, Martin
New research is suggesting that one of the reasons people stammer is that they're overly concerned about speaking fluently - they try too hard to monitor their speech for minor errors and are too strict about what is acceptable.
Articulatory evidence for feedback and competition in speech production
(2009-01) McMillan, Corey; Corley, Martin; Lickley, Robin
We report an experimental investigation of slips of the tongue using a Word Order Competition (WOC) paradigm in which context (entirely non-lexical, mixed) and competitor (whether a possible phoneme substitution would result in a word or not) were crossed. Our primary analysis uses electropalatographic (EPG) records to measure articulatory variation, and reveals that the articulation of onset phonemes is affected by two factors. First, onsets with real word competitors are articulated more similarly to the competitor onset than when the competitor would result in a non-word. Second, onsets produced in a non-lexical context vary more from the intended onset than when the context contains real words. We propose an account for these findings that incorporates feedback between phonological and lexical representations in a cascading model of speech production, and argue that measuring articulatory variation can improve our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in speech production
Bulgarian vowel reduction in unstressed position: An ultrasound and acoustic investigation
(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Dokovova, Marie; Sabev, Mitko; Scobbie, James M.; Lickley, Robin; Cowen, Steve; Calhoun, Sasha; Escudero, Paola; Tabain, Marija; Warren, Paul
Vowel reduction in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) has been variously claimed to involve raising, no change or lowering of the high vowels /iəu/. There is a general agreement that the low vowels /ɛaɔ/ are raised when unstressed. This paper directly measures tongue height using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) and relates this measure to the acoustic correlate F1 at vowel midpoint. The six vowels of CSB were paired with respect to frontness (/ɛ, i/, /a, ə/, /ɔ, u/), and the overlap in height of the unstressed lower vowel in each pair was assessed relative to (a) its stressed counterpart and (b) the stressed and (c) unstressed realisations of the lower vowel. There was no evidence of the higher unstressed vowel in each pair being different from its stressed counterpart. The articulatory and acoustic results are not completely aligned, but both diverge from the traditional model of vowel reduction in CSB.
Children's perception of direct and indirect reported speech
(2003) Hewlett, Nigel; Kelsey, Cherry; Lickley, Robin
This study investigated the abilities of adults and children to distinguish direct reported speech from indirect reported speech in sentences read aloud by a native English speaker. The adults were highly successful, the older children less so and the younger children were relatively unsuccessful. Indirect reported speech appeared to be the default category for the children. Potential prosodic cues were identified and measured from waveforms and pitch contours of the stimulus sentences. Statistical analysis was applied with a view to ascertaining which (combination of) cues best predicted the listener responses. The results suggest that pitch movement and duration both provided important cues to distinguishing the sentence types. The analysis also revealed a learning effect by all groups.
Development of lingual coarticulation and articulatory constraints between childhood and adolescence: an ultrasound study
(ISSP, 2014-05) Zharkova, Natalia; Lickley, Robin; Hardcastle, William J.; Fuchs, Susanne; Grice, M.; Hermes, A.; Lancia, L.; MÃ_cke, D.
Development of lingual motor control in children and adolescents
(University of Glasgow: Glasgow, 2015-08-10) Zharkova, Natalia; Hardcastle, William J.; Gibbon, Fiona; Lickley, Robin
An important insight into speech motor control development can be gained from analysing coarticulation. Despite a growing number of acoustic and articulatory studies of lingual coarticulation in children, there are conflicting opinions on how the extent of coarticulation changes during childhood. There is also increasing evidence that age-related patterns vary depending on speech sounds involved. The present study employed ultrasound tongue imaging to compare anticipatory V-on-C coarticulation in 13-year-old adolescents and 5-year-old children, using the consonants /p/ and /t/, which differ in the amount of lingual coarticulation in adult speech. For /p/, the two groups had a similar amount of coarticulation. For /t/, both groups had a vowel effect on the extent of tongue bunching, while only adolescents had an effect on the location of tongue bunching. Token-to-token variability in absolute tongue position was larger in the 5-year-olds. We discuss the findings in relation to previous studies and existing theories
Disfluency in typical and stuttered speech
(Officinaventuno, 2017) Lickley, Robin; Bertini, Chiara; Celata, Chiara; Lenoci, Giovanna; Meluzzi, Chiara; Ricci, Irene
This paper discusses what happens when things go wrong in the planning and execution of running speech, comparing disfluency in typical speech with pathological disfluency in stuttering. Spontaneous speech by typical speakers is rarely completely fluent. There are several reasons why fluency can break down in typical speech. Various studies suggest that we produce disfluencies at a rate of around 6 per 100 fluent words, so a significant proportion of our utterances are disfluent in some way. Stuttering can halt the flow of speech at a much higher rate than typical disfluency. While persons who stutter are also prone to the same kinds of disfluency as typical speakers, their impairment results in the production of other forms of disfluency that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from typical forms. In this paper, I give an overview of the causes of disfluency in both typical and stuttered speech and relate these causes to their articulatory and phonetic realisations. I show how typical and stuttered disfluencies differ in both their cause and their realisations.
Disfluency under feedback and time-pressure.
(2003) Lickley, Robin; Bard, E. G.; Nicholson, H.; Anderson, A.; Flecha-Garcia, M.; Kenicer, D.; Smallwood, L.; Mullin, J.; Cheng, Yan
Speakers engaging in dialogue with another conversationalist must create and execute plans with respect to the content of the utterance. An analysis of disfluencies from Map Task monologues shows that a speaker is influenced by the pressure to communicate with a distant listener. Speakers were also subject to time-pressure, thereby increasing the cognitive burden of the overall task at hand. The duress of the speaker, as determined by disfluency rate, was examined across four conditions of variable feedback and timing. A surprising result was found that does not adhere to the predictions of the traditional views concerning collaboration in dialogue.
Effects of the restriction of hand gestures on disfluency.
(University of Gothenburg, Department of Linguistics, Gteborg, SUEDE (1970) (Revue), 2003) Finlayson, Sheena; Forrest, Victoria; Lickley, Robin; Beck, Janet M.
This paper describes an experimental pilot study of disfluency and gesture rates in spontaneous speech where speakers perform a communication task in three conditions: hands free, one arm immobilized, both arms immobilized. Previous work suggests that the restriction of the ability to gesture can have an impact on the fluency of speech. In particular, it has been found that the inability to produce iconic gestures, which depict actions and objects, results in a higher rate of disfluency. Models of speech production account for this by suggesting that gesture and speech production are part of the same integrated system. Such models differ in their interpretation of the location of the gesture planning mechanism in relation to the speech model: some authors suggest that iconic gestures relate closely to lexical access, while others suggest that the link is located around the conceptualization stage. The findings of this study tentatively confirm that there is a relationship between gesture and fluency - overall, disfluency increases as gesture is restricted. But it remains unclear whether the disfluency is more related to lexical access than to conceptualization. Proposals for a larger study are suggested. The work is of interest to psycholinguists focusing on the integration of gesture into models of speech production and to Speech and Language Therapists who need to know about the impact that an impaired ability to produce gestures may have on communication.
Effects of vowel length and right context- on the alignment of Dutch nuclear accents
(Elsevier Ltd, 2006-01) Schepman, A.; Lickley, Robin; Ladd, D. Robert
We measured the alignment of f0 landmarks with segmental landmarks in nuclear pointed hat- accents in controlled speech materials in Dutch. We varied the phonological length of the stressed vowel and the right context- (syllable membership of following consonant, presence/absence of stress clash). The nuclear accented word was always followed by an unaccented content word. Based on previous work we expected that the alignment would be substantially affected by vowel length, stress clash and syllable membership, but the only important effect was that of vowel length. We believe this can be explained by the fact that most previous studies have dealt with prenuclear accents and/or with nuclear accents in utterance-final position, whereas we are dealing with nuclear accents that are not in utterance-final position. We also explored the effects of using different quantitative definitions of our dependent and independent variables, and of using Multiple Regression rather than ANOVA, and conclude that our findings are robust regardless of the variables or analysis technique used. An important methodological conclusion from our comparative analyses is that tonal alignment is best expressed relative to a nearby segmental landmark. Proportional measures may also be useful, but need further investigation.
Fluency and Disfluency
(John Wiley & Sons, 2015-06) Lickley, Robin; Redford, Melissa A.
The word 'fluency' is used in many different ways and is a crucial aspect not only of typical speech but also of speech pathology and second language learning. To understand how speech can be produced fluently and what levels of production are important for fluent speech, it is important to consider what can go wrong in the processes that underlie speech production. To this end, this chapter considers how and why speech can become disfluent, referring to levels of processing in a standard model of production. Hesitation and errors can arise at any level of speech production from conceptualization, through syntactic and morpho-phonological encoding, to articulation. In all, it seems necessary to be able to talk about fluency (and therefore disfluency) on at least two levels: planning fluency (referring to smoothness of the internal processes) and surface fluency (referring to smoothness of overt speech).
How fluent is the fluent speech of people who stutter? A new approach to measuring kinematics with ultrasound
(Taylor & Francis, 2015-11-23) Heyde, Cornelia J.; Scobbie, James M.; Lickley, Robin; Drake, Eleanor
We present a new approach to the investigation of dynamic ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) data, applied here to analyse the subtle aspects of the fluency of people who stutter (PWS). Fluent productions of CV syllables (C = /k/; V = /, i, /) from three PWS and three control speakers (PNS) were analysed for duration and peak velocity relative to articulatory movement towards (onset) and away from (offset) the consonantal closure. The objective was to apply a replicable methodology for kinematic investigation to speech of PWS in order to test Wingate's Fault-Line hypothesis. As was hypothesised, results show comparable onset behaviours for both groups. Regarding offsets, groups differ in peak velocity. Results suggest that PWS do not struggle initiating consonantal closure (onset). In transition from consonantal closure into the vowel, however, groups appear to employ different strategies expressed in increased variation (PNS) versus decreased mean peak velocity (PWS).
Intonation of clause-internal filled pauses
(Karger, 1993) Shriberg, E. E.; Lickley, Robin
Clause-internal filled pauses and preceding peak fundamental frequency (F0) values were analyzed to determine whether the intonation of filled pauses is relative to, or independent of, prior prosodic context. Higher peaks were found to be systematically associated with higher filled-pause values, supporting the 'relative' hypothesis. A linear model, in which filled-pause F0 was expressed as an invariant (over speakers) proportion of the distance between preceding peak F0 and a speaker-dependent baseline F0, produced results nearly identical to those of a two-parameter model in which the coefficients of peak and baseline were allowed to vary freely. The model was less appropriate for filled pauses after sentence-initial peaks, but unaffected by temporal variables.
Judgment of disfluency in people who stutter and people who do not stutter : Results from magnitude estimation.
(Kingston Press Services, 2005) Lickley, Robin; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Corley, Martin; Russell, Melanie; Nelson, Ruth
Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter werejudged as less fluent, and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as containing disfluency. Additionally, people who stutter tended to perceive utterances as less fluent, independent of who produced these utterances. We argue that these findings are consistent with a view that articulatory differences between the speech of people who stutter and people who do not stutter lead to perceptually relevant vocal differences. We suggest that these differences are detected by the speech self-monitoring system (which uses speech perception) resulting in covert repairs. Our account therefore shares characteristics with the Covert Repair (Postma & Kolk, 1993) and Vicious Circle (Vasic & Wijnen, 2005) hypotheses. It differs from the Covert Repair hypothesis in that it no longer assumes an additional deficit at the phonological planning level. It differs from the Vicious Circle hypothesis in that it no longer attributes hypervigilant monitoring to unknown, external factors. Rather, the self-monitor becomes hypervigilant because the speaker is aware that his/her speech is habitually deviant, even when it is not, strictly speaking, disfluent.
Lingual Coarticulation in Preadolescents and Adults: An Ultrasound Study. ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-4075
(ESRC, 2012) Zharkova, Natalia; Hewlett, Nigel; Lickley, Robin
When people combine sounds to make words, there is overlap in the tongue movements involved in articulating individual sounds, referred to as lingual coarticulation. For example, in adult speech, tongue positions at mid-consonant, in the words she- and shah-, differ because of the influence of the following vowel. The research team's earlier work showed that young children differed from adults in the extent of vowel-on-consonant coarticulation. In this project, for the first time, a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of tongue movements was performed. The project used high-speed ultrasound to measure lingual coarticulation in the syllables she-, shah-, sea- and 'Sah', comparing preadolescent children and adults, fifteen speakers in each age group. In both age groups and both consonants, the tongue position at mid-consonant was affected by the identity of the following vowel. There was no significant effect of age on the size of the vowel-related difference in tongue posture, nor on within-speaker variability in tongue placement. Age-related differences were observed in the onset of coarticulation. While in the adults, the vowel effect was present throughout the consonant for both consonants, in preadolescents the effect was apparent later into the first half of the consonant. The results of the study suggest a near-adult-like achievement in the development of lingual control by preadolescents, with respect to the coarticulation of fricative-vowel sequences. However age-related differences in timing may indicate that preadolescents have still to gain the extent of forward planning in speech production which is possible for a typical adult.
Magnitude estimation of disfluency by stutterers and nonstutterers
(Routledge, 2005-02) Russell, Melanie; Corley, Martin; Lickley, Robin; Bastiaanse, Roelien; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Postma, Albert; Wijnen, Frank
Everyone produces disfluencies when they speak spontaneously. However, whereas most disfluencies pass unnoticed, the repetitions, blocks and prolongations produced by stutterers can have a severely disruptive effect on communication. The causes of stuttering have proven hard to pin down - researchers differ widely in their views on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie it. The present chapter presents initial research which supports a view (Vasic and Wijnen, this volume) that places the emphasis firmly on the self-monitoring system, suggesting that stuttering may be a consequence of over-sensitivity to the types of minor speech error that we all make. Our study also allows us to ask whether the speech of people who stutter is perceived as qualitatively different from that of nonstutterers, when it is fluent and when it contains similar types of minor disfluencies. Our results suggest that for closely matched, naturally occurring segments of speech, listeners rate the speech of stutterers as more disfluent than that of nonstutterers.
Matched-accent processing: Bulgarian-English bilinguals do not have a processing advantage with Bulgarian-accented English over native English speech
(Open Library of Humanities, 2022-06-10) Dokovova, Marie; Scobbie, James M.; Lickley, Robin
The Interlanguage Intelligibility Benefit hypothesis (ISIB) for Talkers suggests that there is a potential benefit when listening to one’s second language when it is produced in the accent of one’s first language (matched-accent processing). This study explores ISIB, considering listener proficiency. According to second language learning theories, the listener’s second language proficiency determines the extent to which they rely on their first language phonetics, hence the magnitude of ISIB may be affected by listener proficiency. The accuracy and reaction times of Bulgarian-English bilinguals living in the UK were recorded in a lexical decision task. The English stimuli were produced by native English speakers and Bulgarian-English bilinguals. Listeners responded more slowly and less accurately to the matched-accent stimuli than the native English stimuli. In addition, they adapted their reaction times faster to new speakers with a native English accent compared to a Bulgarian accent. However, the listeners with the lowest English proficiency had no advantage in reaction times and accuracy for either accent. The results offer mixed support for ISIB for Talkers and are consistent with second language learning theories, according to which listeners rely less on their native language phonology when their proficiency in the second language has increased.