CASL
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
Browse
106 results
Search Results
Item The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r/(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Lawson, Eleanor; Leplatre, Gregory; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on tongue shape and tongue-gesture magnitude in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in normalised tongue-gesture magnitude for /r/ and /l/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Variation between onset and coda mean midsagittal tongue surfaces was also quantified using normalised root-mean-square distances, and patterns of articulatory onset-coda allophony were identified. Despite the fact that some speakers in all varieties used tip-up /r/ in syllable-onset position and bunched /r/ in coda position, RMS distance results show greater degrees of similarity between onset and coda /r/ than between onset and coda /l/. Gesture magnitude was significantly reduced for both /l/ and /r/ in coda position. Utterance position had a significant effect on /l/ only.Item Say again? Individual articulatory strategies for producing a clearly-spoken minimal pair wordlist(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Scobbie, James M.; Ma, Joan K-YWe describe articulatory differences (lingual and labial) between two versions (neutral and clear) of a CVC wordlist of 12 targets (V = /ieaɔoʉ/; C_C = /p_p/ or /m_m/). A companion paper describes the background; the participants, materials and tasks; the impressionistic and acoustic results. Labial measures reflect vowel opening (and edge-spreading) and consonant compression using fleshpoint markers captured by head-mounted video. Consonant closure and total word duration are based on visual judgement of complete closure. Ultrasound data provides the absolute area between neutral and clear mid-sagittal tongue-surface splines at the maximum of each vowel target, and a qualitative description of tongue shape and location. Strong and systematic interspeaker variation was evident in how articulation, acoustics and functional clarity were enhanced. Some large phonologically motivated segmental hyperspeech enhancements were observed, but they were not related straightforwardly to the phonological oppositions in the material nor consistently used by all speakers. Differences in utterance initiation are also discussed.Item 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, PaulVowel 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.Item Say again? Individual acoustic strategies for producing a clearly-spoken minimal pair wordlist(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Scobbie, James M.; Ma, Joan K-YPeople make their speech clearer in difficult conversational contexts using global mechanisms (e.g. “Lombard Speech”) and by targeted enhancements of linguistic constituents (“hyperspeech”). We describe production changes observed in four speakers of Scottish English who produced three repetitions of twelve CVC words: V was one of six monophthongs and C_C was either /p_p/ or /m_m/. Thus each word differed (near-) minimally from six others. In a “neutral” condition each participant read aloud from a randomised wordlist. A “clear” condition was an interactive task in which an interlocutor had to repeat back every word correctly, despite their hearing being impaired by headphone-delivered noise. If the speaker was mis-perceived by the interlocutor, the speaker tried again, until the word was correctly repeated. We describe the surprisingly speaker-specific acoustic hyperspeech effects (in vowel F1, vowel space area, and acoustic segment durations) in the clear speech. A companion paper describes the associated articulatory changes.Item Enabling new articulatory gestures in children with persistent speech sound disorders using ultrasound visual biofeedback(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 2019-02-05) Cleland, Joanne; Scobbie, James M.; Roxburgh, Zoe; Heyde, Cornelia J.; Wrench, Alan A.Purpose: This study evaluated ultrasound visual biofeedback treatment for teaching new articulations to children with a wide variety of Speech Sound Disorders. It was hypothesized that motor-based intervention incorporating ultrasound would lead to rapid acquisition of a range of target lingual gestures with generalization to untreated words. Method: Twenty children aged 6-15 with a range of mild to severe speech disorders affecting a variety of lingual targets enrolled in a case series with replication. Of these, fifteen children completed the intervention. All of the children presented with a variety of errors. We therefore employed a target selection strategy to treat the most frequent lingual error. These individual speech targets were treated using ultrasound visual biofeedback as part of 10 to 12 one hour intervention sessions. The primary outcome measure was percentage target segment correct in untreated wordlists. Results: Six children were treated for velar fronting; three for post-alveolar fronting; two for backing alveolars to pharyngeal or glottal place; one for debuccalisation (production of all onsets as [h]); one for vowel merger; and two for lateralised sibilants. Ten achieved the new articulation in the first or second session of intervention despite no children being readily stimulable for their target articulation before intervention. In terms of generalization, effect sizes for percentage target segments correct ranged from no effect (five children); small effect (one child); medium effect (four children) and large effect (five children). Conclusion: Ultrasound visual biofeedback can be used to treat a wide range of lingual errors in children with various speech sound disorders, from mild to severe. Visual feedback may be useful for establishing new articulations; however, generalization is more variable.Item Tongue shape dynamics in swallowing using sagittal ultrasound(Springer, 2018-06-28) Ohkubo, Mai; Scobbie, James M.Ultrasound imaging is simple, repeatable, gives real-time feedback, and its dynamic soft tissue imaging may make it superior to other modalities for swallowing research. We tested this hypothesis and measured certain spatial and dynamic aspects of the swallowing to investigate its efficacy. Eleven healthy adults wearing a headset to stabilize the probe participated in the study. Both thickened and thin liquids were used, and liquid bolus volumes of 10 and 25 ml were administered to the subjects by using a cup. The tongue's surface was traced as a spline superimposed on a fan-shaped measurement space for every image from the time at which the tongue blade started moving up toward the palate at the start of swallowing to the time when the entire tongue was in contact with the palate. To measure depression depth, the distance (in mm) was measured along each radial fan line from the location at which the tongue's surface spline intersected the fan line to the point where the hard palate intersected the fan line at each timepoint. There were differences between individual participants in the imageability of the swallow, and so we defined quantitatively "measureable" and "unmeasurable" types. The most common type was measureable, in which we could find a clear bolus depression in the cupped tongue's surface. Indeed, with 10 ml of thin liquids, we were able to find and measure the depression depth for all participants. The average maximum radial distance from the palate to the tongue's surface was 20.9 mm (median) (IQR: 4.3 mm) for swallowing 10 ml of thin liquid compared to 24.6 mm (IQR: 3.3 mm) for 25 ml of thin liquid swallow (p < 0.001). We conclude that it is possible to use ultrasound imaging of the tongue to capture spatial aspects of swallowing.Item UltraSuite: A Repository of Ultrasound and Acoustic Data from Child Speech Therapy Sessions(International Speech Communication Association, 2018-06-17) Eshky, Aciel; Ribeiro, Manuel Sam; Cleland, Joanne; Richmond, Korin; Roxburgh, Zoe; Scobbie, James M.; Wrench, Alan A.We introduce UltraSuite, a curated repository of ultrasound and acoustic data, collected from recordings of child speech therapy sessions. This release includes three data collections, one from typically developing children and two from children with speech sound disorders. In addition, it includes a set of annotations, some manual and some automatically produced, and software tools to process, transform and visualise the data.Item Acquisition of new speech motor plans via articulatory visual biofeedback(Peter Lang, 2019) Scobbie, James M.; Cleland, Joanne; Fuchs, Susanne; Cleland, Joanne; Rochet-Capellan, AmélieThis chapter describes the concept of categorising persistent Speech Sound Disorder in children as a disorder characterised by erroneous motor plans. Different types of articulatory visual biofeedback are described, each of which is designed to allow children to view their articulators moving in real-time and to use this information to establish more accurate motor plans (namely, electropalatography, electromagnetic articulography and ultrasound tongue imaging). An account of how these articulatory biofeedback techniques might lead to acquisition of new motor plans is given, followed by a case study of a child with persistent velar fronting who acquired a new motor plan for velar stops using ultrasound visual biofeedback.Item A single case study of articulatory adaptation during acoustic mimicry(2011-08) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; ESRCThe distribution of fine-grained phonetic variation can be observed in the speech of members of well-defined social groups. It is evident that such variation must somehow be able to propagate through a speech community from speaker to hearer. However, technological barriers have meant that close and direct study of the articulatory links of this speaker-hearer chain has not, to date, been possible. We present the results of a single-case study using an ultrasound-based method to investigate temporal and configurational lingual adaptation during mimicry. Our study focuses on allophonic variants of postvocalic /r/ found in speech from Central Scotland. Our results show that our informant was able to adjust tongue gesture timing towards that of the stimulus, but did not alter tongue configuration.Item Mixed accents: Scottish children with English parents(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015-11-01) Thomas, Sarah; Scobbie, James M.; Mompean, J. A.; Fouz-González, J.We discuss accent mixture and the creation of idiosyncratic phonological systems in acquisition, with a focus on Scottish English. Such mixing is in addition to the relatively stable sociolinguistic systems of variation expected within a speech community, and arises when parents have radically different accents from each other or from the child's peers or other adult models. In terms of traditional geographic dialectology, there are a number of isoglosses around the Scotland/England border, but modern social mobility means that in some Scottish cities there are large numbers of families with at least one non-Scottish adult accent acting as a model for acquisition, which may feed into phonological change. Of particular interest is the influence of Southern British English accents. We exemplify the issues with two short case studies. The first concerns a child with mixed Scottish/English input in the home. His speech patterns do indeed indicate the acquisition of a mixed system. The second focuses on inter-sibling variation, looking at two sibling pairs who exemplify a different mix of accent features from each other. We examine two main diagnostics: monophthongal vs. diphthongal productions of the vowels in FACE and GOAT; and rhoticity. We also describe a parental demographic and accent attitude questionnaire as part of Case Study 2. The results support the need for speaker-by-speaker study of how incompatibility between two target systems is handled. We conclude that descriptions of mixed accents should be more common in the literature and approached on a feature-by-feature basis to help develop models of accent interference.