Abstract Background Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a viable surgical treatment method for Parkinson’s disease (PD). It has positive effects on the classical motor symptoms, but effects on speech and voice are not equally beneficial. The speech disorder related to PD is hypokinetic dysarthria, with impaired articulatory precision as a prominent symptom. Studies have shown effects on different aspects of speech due to DBS of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) but the effects of stimulation of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) are less explored. Aims The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of STN-DBS and cZi-DBS on perceptually measured articulatory precision in PD patients. Method Read speech productions were collected from 19 DBS-treated PD patients, ten STN and nine cZi. The recordings were made before surgery and 12 months postoperatively with stimulator on and off. Levodopa medication was always on. From the reading passage, three-syllable words were selected and isolated. Articulatory precision of the words was rated in two different assessments; an overall rating of articulatory precision and an identification of occurring misarticulations. Results The results from the perceptual assessment showed a decrease in articulatory precision after surgery for both groups. The decrease was significant for the cZi group, but not for the STN group. There was no significant difference between the groups. The frequency of observed misarticulations increased as an effect of DBS for both patient groups, with significant increase for the STN group but not for the cZi group. There was no significant difference between the groups. The most commonly observed misarticulation categories were stop-plosive reduced in quality, fricative realized as other fricative and stop-plosive realized as fricative . Conclusions The results obtained in the current study show that STN-DBS and cZi-DBS may have adverse effects on articulatory precision in PD patients. Keywords Articulatory precision, Parkinson’s disease, DBS, STN, cZi

Articulatory synthesis generates speech sounds by simulating the physical phenomena involved in speech production. The accuracy of the physical modelling is expected to affect the naturalness of the synthesis: the more realistic the description is, the greater the naturalness is expected to be. In this work, the accuracy of acoustic wave propagation in the vocal tract was evaluated with two perceptual experiments. Sustained vowels generated using a one-dimensional acoustic model, a three-dimensional acoustic model and an artificial bandwidth extension algorithm (without a physical basis) were compared. Since the difference between the acoustic methods tested affects mainly the frequencies above 4 kHz, we ensured that the low frequency part of the stimuli, up to 4 kHz, was similar. Thus, the participants' responses were based only on the differences at high frequency. The first experiment was a pair comparison, in which the participants had to select the more natural sounding stimuli. In the second experiment, the participants had to rate the naturalness of the stimuli on a linear scale. The results confirmed that a more accurate physical modeling leads to greater naturalness. However, this was limited to the phonemes /o/ and /u/, for which transverse resonances in the anterior vocal tract may play an important role that only a 3D acoustic simulation can accurately represent. It was also found that male stimuli were perceived as significantly more natural than female ones. However, voice quality did not affect naturalness.

Humans make use of more than just the audio signal to perceive speech. Behavioral and neurological research has shown that a person's knowledge of how speech is produced influences what is perceived. With methods for collecting articulatory data becoming more ubiquitous, methods for extracting useful information are needed to make this data useful to speech scientists, and for speech technology applications. This dissertation presents feature extraction methods for ultrasound images of the tongue and for data collected with an Electro-Magnetic Articulograph (EMA). The usefulness of these features is tested in several phoneme classification tasks. Feature extraction methods for ultrasound tongue images presented here consist of automatically tracing the tongue surface contour using a modified Deep Belief Network (DBN) (Hinton et al. 2006), and methods inspired by research in face recognition which use the entire image. The tongue tracing method consists of training a DBN as an autoencoder on concatenated images and traces, and then retraining the first two layers to accept only the image at runtime. This 'translational' DBN (tDBN) method is shown to produce traces comparable to those made by human experts. An iterative bootstrapping procedure is presented for using the tDBN to assist a human expert in labeling a new data set. Tongue contour traces are compared with the Eigentongues method of (Hueber et al. 2007), and a Gabor Jet representation in a 6-class phoneme classification task using Support Vector Classifiers (SVC), with Gabor Jets performing the best. These SVC methods are compared to a tDBN classifier, which extracts features from raw images and classifies them with accuracy only slightly lower than the Gabor Jet SVC method.For EMA data, supervised binary SVC feature detectors are trained for each feature in three versions of Distinctive Feature Theory (DFT): Preliminaries (Jakobson et al. 1954), The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968), and Unified Feature Theory (Clements and Hume 1995). Each of these feature sets, together with a fourth unsupervised feature set learned using Independent Components Analysis (ICA), are compared on their usefulness in a 46-class phoneme recognition task. Phoneme recognition is performed using a linear-chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) (Lafferty et al. 2001), which takes advantage of the temporal nature of speech, by looking at observations adjacent in time. Results of the phoneme recognition task show that Unified Feature Theory performs slightly better than the other versions of DFT. Surprisingly, ICA actually performs worse than running the CRF on raw EMA data.

This dissertation examines the relationship between phonetic sound and content in Latin poetry, with a focus on Books 1-3 of Horace's Odes. The central argument is that a relationship exists between sound and content in poetry, that this can be analysed and described more thoroughly and systematically than is usually the case, and that the appreciation of poetry can be enhanced by doing so. Part 1 presents a scheme for describing the sound-content relationship, and argues that this accurately reflects the perceptions of poetic audiences and is psychologically valid. The scheme begins with the concept of the 'sonance', defined as any set of sounds that renders a passage sonically noteworthy. Sonances that relate to content are classified either as 'harmonic sonances', which relate to content due to the properties of the relevant sounds, or 'repetitive sonances', which relate to content purely due to the repetition (including patterning or contrasting) of sounds, regardless of their properties. Harmonic sonances, it is argued, may relate to content through four 'harmonies', depending on whether acoustic or articulatory properties are involved and whether the relationship is one of similarity between property and content or a more distant 'metaphor'. Repetitive sonances may relate to content by several different means, or 'modes of repetition'. Part 2 presents a simple method of numerical analysis which may be applied to the text by computer to extract passages that are relatively likely to contain a sonance, and briefly discusses the process of assessing these results, identifying further sonances by more natural means, and relating each sonance to the relevant content. As an essential preliminary to such matters, Latin phonetics and phonology are also discussed in detail. Parts 3 and 4 present the results of applying these resources of assessment and description to the text, to demonstrate the type of poetic appreciation which may thus be gained. Part 3 consists of two catalogues of harmonic and repetitive sonances taken from the whole of Odes 1-3. Part 4 is a specific examination of two entire odes in much greater detail. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Humanities, 2004.

This thesis presents an all-inclusive framework on how the current formant tracking and audio (and/or visual)-to-articulatory inversion algorithms can be improved. The possible improvements are summarized as follows: The first part of the thesis investigates the problem of the formant frequency estimation when the number of formants to be estimated fixed or variable respectively. The fixed number of formant tracking method is based on the assumption that the number of formant frequencies is fixed along the speech utterance. The proposed algorithm is based on the combination of a dynamic programming algorithm and Kalman filtering/smoothing. In this method, the speech signal is divided into voiced and unvoiced segments, and the formant candidates are associated via dynamic programming algorithm for each voiced and unvoiced part separately. Individual adaptive Kalman filtering/smoothing is used to perform the formant frequency estimation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with some algorithms given in the literature. The variable number of formant tracking method considers those formant frequencies which are visible in the spectrogram. Therefore, the number of formant frequencies is not fixed and they can change along the speech waveform. In that case, it is also necessary to estimate the number of formants to track. For this purpose, the proposed algorithm uses extra logic (formant track start/end decision unit). The measurement update of each individual formant trajectories is handled via Kalman filters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by some examples The second part of this thesis is concerned with improving audiovisual to articulatory inversion performance. The related studies can be examined in two parts / Gaussian mixture model (GMM) regression based inversion and Jump Markov Linear System (JMLS) based inversion. GMM regression based inversion method involves modeling audio (and /or visual) and articulatory data as a joint Gaussian mixture model. The conditional expectation of this distribution gives the desired articulatory estimate. In this method, we examine the usefulness of the combination of various acoustic features and effectiveness of various types of fusion techniques in combination with audiovisual features. Also, we propose dynamic smoothing methods to smooth articulatory trajectories. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated and compared with conventional algorithms. JMLS inversion involves tying the acoustic (and/or visual) spaces and articulatory space via multiple state space representations. In this way, the articulatory inversion problem is converted into the state estimation problem where the audiovisual data are considered as measurements and articulatory positions are state variables. The proposed inversion method first learns the parameter set of the state space model via an expectation maximization (EM) based algorithm and the state estimation is handled via interactive multiple model (IMM) filter/smoother.

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Identificar e analisar as demandas de tipo curricular articuladas no discurso do movimento social denominado como Revolução Pinguina, o que luta por uma educação de qualidade, gratuita e equitativa para os chilenos. Utilizo como referencial teórico, com registro pos-estrutural, a teoria do currículo desenvolvida por Alice Casimiro Lopes e Elizabeth Macedo a partir de uma abordagem discursiva e, a teoria do discurso desenvolvida por Ernesto Laclau em parceria com Chantal Mouffe. Entendo que essas demandas se inserem dentro dum conjunto mais amplo de demandas diferenciais que tem por antagonismo o projeto neoliberal do governo, representado pela concertación de partidos por la democracia. Dessa forma existem duas cadeias discursivas, por um lado o discurso dos estudantes, por outro, o discurso do governo, ambos tentam fixar determinados sentidos para o que representa qualidade da educação, desenvolvendo una guerra de representações. Defendo que por essa amplitude da cadeia discursiva a partir da incorporação de novas demandas representativas de diferentes atores sociais, também há um esvaziamento das bandeiras de luta, mas também uma maior força do movimento. Nesse sentido o significante qualidade da educação se transformou num significante vazio que se desprendeu de seus conteúdos concretos e precisos para poder representar provisoriamente a totalidade que a excede, ou seja, deixou de representar apenas um grupo especifico para representar a totalidade do movimento social. Assim, a luta política do movimento estudantil chileno pela educação de qualidade, tem colocado no centro do debate nacional diversas temáticas vinculadas com educação, mobilizando periodicamente á sociedade e conseguindo importantes transformações dentro da estrutura do sistema educativo nacional, significada pelo discurso estudantil como um sistema em crise. / Identify and analyze the articulate curricular demands in the discourse of the social movement known as Penguin Revolution, who struggles in order to achieve a free, egalitarian and quality education for the Chileans. Based on the curricular theory developed by A.Lopes and B.Macedo, and the theory of the discourse developed by Ernesto Laclau in society with Chantal Mouffe. Understanding that these demands are inserted within a broader group of distinguishing demands whose antagonists are the governments neoliberal project, represented by the Concertación de partidos por la democracia. In this way, there are two discursive chain: on one hand, the discourse of the students, on the other hand the discourse of the Chilean government. They both try to establish their own meaning for quality in education, developing a war of representations. I sustain that the broadening of the discourse chain, due to the incorporation of the new demands representing different social actors, has allowed strengthening the movement of the Penguin Revolution, which has permitted the articulation of a chain of equivalences between the demands which has led this discourse to remain hegemonic through time. Precisely thanks to the constant addition of new social demands. In this sense the signifier quality of the education has turned into a empty signifier, unable to represent temporarily the totality of the social movement. This is, the totality of the demands registered in the articulatory chain. In this way, the political struggle of the Chilean student movement for a quality education has put on the national debate the issue of the education, periodically setting in motion the society, and achieving important transformations within the structure of the national education system

In the light of the Theory of Variation and Change and Generative Phonology, in this study, aims to investigate the performance of a segment /R/ in the community of Porto da Rua (in the northern coast of Alagoas). The phonetic environment in which this realization occurs was determined, as well as the influence of extralinguistic factors analysed. The corpus for this research consisted of 48 informants among men and women born in the community. The categorization of data and statistical analysis were done using the package VARBRUL. Data were coded according to linguistic and social groups of factors (GF). The results indicated that the variant under study may be undergoing a process of linguistic change, since those responsible for spreading the informants are not in school and age over 50 years. Data collection was done through recordings with spontaneous narratives. The objective is thus to study the correlation between linguistic phenomena and stratified external variables (gender, age and education). / Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Alagoas / À luz da Teoria da Variação e Mudança e da Fonologia gerativa, pretendeu-se, neste estudo, investigar a realização de um segmento /R/ na comunidade de Porto da Rua (litoral norte de Alagoas). Determinamos o ambiente fonético em que essa realização ocorre e verificamos a influência de fatores extralinguísticos. O corpus para a pesquisa constituiu-se de dados de fala, gravados em áudio, de textos espontâneos produzidos por 48 informantes, homens e mulheres nascidos (e que viveram sempre) na comunidade. A categorização dos dados e a análise estatística foram feitas com a utilização do pacote VARBRUL. Os dados foram codificados de acordo com grupos de fatores (GF) linguísticos e sociais. Objetivou-se, dessa forma, estudar a correlação entre fenômenos linguísticos e variáveis externas estratificadas (sexo, faixa etária e escolarização). Os resultados indicaram que a variante em estudo pode estar passando por um processo de mudança linguística, uma vez que os responsáveis pela sua realização são os informantes não escolarizados e a faixa etária com mais de 50 anos.

Identificar e analisar as demandas de tipo curricular articuladas no discurso do movimento social denominado como Revolução Pinguina, o que luta por uma educação de qualidade, gratuita e equitativa para os chilenos. Utilizo como referencial teórico, com registro pos-estrutural, a teoria do currículo desenvolvida por Alice Casimiro Lopes e Elizabeth Macedo a partir de uma abordagem discursiva e, a teoria do discurso desenvolvida por Ernesto Laclau em parceria com Chantal Mouffe. Entendo que essas demandas se inserem dentro dum conjunto mais amplo de demandas diferenciais que tem por antagonismo o projeto neoliberal do governo, representado pela concertación de partidos por la democracia. Dessa forma existem duas cadeias discursivas, por um lado o discurso dos estudantes, por outro, o discurso do governo, ambos tentam fixar determinados sentidos para o que representa qualidade da educação, desenvolvendo una guerra de representações. Defendo que por essa amplitude da cadeia discursiva a partir da incorporação de novas demandas representativas de diferentes atores sociais, também há um esvaziamento das bandeiras de luta, mas também uma maior força do movimento. Nesse sentido o significante qualidade da educação se transformou num significante vazio que se desprendeu de seus conteúdos concretos e precisos para poder representar provisoriamente a totalidade que a excede, ou seja, deixou de representar apenas um grupo especifico para representar a totalidade do movimento social. Assim, a luta política do movimento estudantil chileno pela educação de qualidade, tem colocado no centro do debate nacional diversas temáticas vinculadas com educação, mobilizando periodicamente á sociedade e conseguindo importantes transformações dentro da estrutura do sistema educativo nacional, significada pelo discurso estudantil como um sistema em crise. / Identify and analyze the articulate curricular demands in the discourse of the social movement known as Penguin Revolution, who struggles in order to achieve a free, egalitarian and quality education for the Chileans. Based on the curricular theory developed by A.Lopes and B.Macedo, and the theory of the discourse developed by Ernesto Laclau in society with Chantal Mouffe. Understanding that these demands are inserted within a broader group of distinguishing demands whose antagonists are the governments neoliberal project, represented by the Concertación de partidos por la democracia. In this way, there are two discursive chain: on one hand, the discourse of the students, on the other hand the discourse of the Chilean government. They both try to establish their own meaning for quality in education, developing a war of representations. I sustain that the broadening of the discourse chain, due to the incorporation of the new demands representing different social actors, has allowed strengthening the movement of the Penguin Revolution, which has permitted the articulation of a chain of equivalences between the demands which has led this discourse to remain hegemonic through time. Precisely thanks to the constant addition of new social demands. In this sense the signifier quality of the education has turned into a empty signifier, unable to represent temporarily the totality of the social movement. This is, the totality of the demands registered in the articulatory chain. In this way, the political struggle of the Chilean student movement for a quality education has put on the national debate the issue of the education, periodically setting in motion the society, and achieving important transformations within the structure of the national education system

Orientador: Eleonora Cavalcante Albano / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-11T03:04:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rodrigues_LucianaLessa1982-_M.pdf: 2139458 bytes, checksum: 3337b6106de977a088590d68d333e75d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar o processo de aquisição dos róticos por crianças com queixa fonoaudiológica relacionada ao sistema fônico. Foram coletados dados de fala de dois sujeitos com dificuldades de pronúncia de sons róticos. O quadro de referência teórico adotado na análise foi a Fonologia Gestual (Fonologia Articulatória ¿ FAR ¿ proposta por Browman e Goldstein, 1992, na versão denominada Fonologia Acústico-Articulatória ¿ FAAR ¿ proposta por Albano, 2001). Os resultados permitiram observar a presença de contrastes fônicos nas produções de fala dos sujeitos que, por meio de análise de outiva, foram classificadas como: (a) omissão do tap [R]; e (b) substituição tanto do tap [R] quanto da aproximante retroflexa [¿] pela semivogal [j]. Esse achado permitiu confirmar a existência de contrastes fônicos encobertos durante o processo de aquisição do sistema fônico, ou seja, contrastes já em andamento na fala dos sujeitos que ainda não são perceptíveis para o ouvinte. Esses resultados trouxeram, portanto, importantes contribuições para a área de pesquisa sobre Aquisição Fonológica e, conseqüentemente, para a prática clínica relativa a crianças com queixa fonoaudiológica relacionada ao sistema fônico. Tais contribuições foram possíveis devido à metodologia e análise dos dados baseados em princípios da FAAR, que permitiu a observação de fatos fônicos tanto categóricos quanto gradientes / Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate the acquisition of rhotic sounds in children with so called deviant phonological systems. Speech data on two subjects with rhotic pronunciation difficulties were collected. The theoretical frame of reference adopted in the analysis was Gestural Phonology (Articulatory Phonology ¿ AP ¿ proposed by Browman and Goldstein, 1992, in the Acoustic-Articulatory version ¿ AAP ¿ proposed by Albano, 2001). The results showed the presence of covert phone contrasts in the speech productions of the subjects. Such productions had been classified, auditorily, as: (a) omission of the tap [R]; and (b) substitution of the palatal approximant [j] for both the tap [R] and the retroflex approximant [¿]. This finding suggests the existence of covert contrasts during phonological acquisition, i.e., contrasts already in progress in the speech of the subjects which are not yet perceivable for the listener. These results brought, therefore, important contributions to Phonological Acquisition research and, consequently, to the clinical practice with children diagnosed as having deviant phonological systems. Such contributions have been made possible by methodology and analysis based on principles of Gestural Phonology, which allowed for the observation of categorical and gradients phone distinctions / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística