<p>Denna rapport är en del av en longitudinell studie av psykolingvistisk ålder och språkligmedvetenhet hos elever i årskurs 1 på två olika skolor i Vallentuna kommun. I studien harmaterial från de tre senaste projektåren bearbetats. Syftet med undersökningen var attundersöka huruvida fonologisk träning enligt den s.k. Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas tidi 6-årsklass återspeglar sig i ökad språklig medvetenhet och högre psykolingvistisk ålder iårskurs 1. Vidare undersöktes om den fonologiska träningen kan ha påverkat barnensarbetsminne. Två typer av test användes: UMESOL för kartläggning av fonologiskmedvetenhet och ITPA, ett standardiserat test av psykolingvistiska färdigheter. Resultatenvisar att det finns ett klart samband mellan fonologisk träning enligt Bornholmsmodellen iförskolan och elevernas språkliga medvetenhet i grundskolan. Vidare visar resultaten att ävenom minnesträningen i Bornholmsmodellen inte direkt påverkat resultaten vid ITPA, så finnsdet ett starkt samband mellan minnestestet i ITPA och elevernas prestation vid UMESOL.</p>

<p>Four- to eight-month-old infants (n=56) were examined on their ability to acquire verb meaning. In a visual preference procedure they were tested on their ability to form verb-action associations by detecting the correlation between auditory speech stimuli and actions presented in short movie clips on a screen. If associations were formed, they were expected to significantly modify their looking behavior after exposure, looking closer to the target than during baseline. Instead of measuring total looking time as response, distance to target was the chosen measure. Eight-month-olds as well as a reference group of adults acquired the verb-action associations. Thus, eight months is the youngest age at which verb meaning acquisition could be demonstrated so far.</p>

In speech recognition algorithms and certain theories of speech perception the interpretation of the signal is based on " distance scores " for comparisons of the signal with stored references; in these theories, perception is seen as a product of stimulus and experience. The aim of the present thesis is to evaluate such distance measures by investigating the perceptual confusions of the Swedish voiced stops [b,d,q,g] in systematically varied fragments of vowel-consonantvowel stimuli providing 25 vowel contexts for each consonant. To what extent can perceptual identifications be accounted for in terms of the acoustic properties of  the stimuli? Short stimulus segments following stop release, chosen to elicit perceptual confusions, constituted the main material for this investigation. The resulting confusions were shown to form a regular pattern depending mainly on the acute/grave dimension of the following vowel. The acoustic distances calculated were based partly on formant frequencies at the consonant-vowel boundary, partly on filter-band spectra. B oth models provided distance measures which revealed regular patterns related in their essentials to the confusions. However, the predictive capacity of both models was improved by including the dynamic properties of the stimuli in the distance measures. The highest correlation between predicted and observed percent confusions, r=.85, was obtained with the fOlmant-based model. The asymmetries in the listeners' confusions were also shown to be predictable given acoustic data on the following vowel and were included in the calculations. / För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se

This paper describes an experiment where open and directed prompts were alternated when collecting speech data for the deployment of a call-routing application. The experiment tested whether open and directed prompts resulted in any differences with respect to the filled pauses exhibited by the callers, which is interesting in the light of the “many-options” hypothesis of filled pause production. The experiment also investigated the effects of the prompts on utterance form and meaning of the callers.

The goal of this work was to evaluate the performance of a classical method for predicting vocal tract cross-sectional areas from cross-distances, to be implemented in speaker-specific articulatory modelling. The data forming the basis of the evaluation were magnetic resonance images from the vocal tract combined with simultaneous audio and video recordings. These data were collected from one female and one male speaker. The speech materials consisted of extended articulation of each of the nine Swedish long vowels together with two short allophonic qualities. The data acquisition and processing involved, among other things, the development of a method for dental integration in the MR image, and a refined sound recording technique required for the particular experimental conditions. Articulatory measurements were made of cross-distances and cross-sectional areas from the speakers’ larynx, pharynx, oral cavity and lip section, together with estimations on the vocal tract termination points. Acoustic and auditory analyses were made of the sound recordings, including an evaluation of the influence of the noise from the MR machine on the vowel productions. Cross-distance to cross-sectional area conversion rules were established from the articulatory measurements. The evaluation of these rules involved quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions. The articulatory evaluation gave rise to a vowel-dependent extension of the method under investigation, allowing more geometrical freedom for articulatory configurations along the vocal tract. The extended method proved to be more successful in predicting cross-sectional areas, particularly in the velar region. The acoustic evaluation, based on area functions derived from the proposed rules, did however not show significant differences in formant patterns between the classical and the extended method. This was interpreted as evidence for the classic method having higher acoustic than physiological validity on the present materials. For application and extrapolation in articulatory modelling, it is however possible that the extended method will perform better in articulation and acoustics, given its physiologically more fine-tuned foundation. Research funded by the NIH (R01 DC02014) and Stockholm University (SU 617-0230-01). / <p>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se</p>

<p>I en longitudinell studie har elever i årskurs 1 och 2 på två olika skolor i Vallentuna kommunundersökts under tre på varandra följande projektår. Huvudsyftet med denna studie var att undersökahuruvida träning i fonologisk medvetenhet enligt den s.k. Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas tid isexårsklass påverkar deras läs- och skrivinlärning. Tre typer av test användes, under årskurs 1administrerades UMESOL för kartläggning av fonologisk medvetenhet och ITPA, för kartläggning avpsykolingvistiska färdigheter. Under årskurs 2 kartlades elevernas läs- och skrivutveckling medUMESOL, ”läsning och skrivning”. I kontrast med tidigare forskningsresultat som pekade på enfördelaktig användning av Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas förskoleklassår, visade resultaten idenna studie inte på entydiga långsiktiga effekter för de elever som tränats fonologiskt enligtBornholmsmodellen. Istället verkade den avgörande faktorn för elevernas läs- och skrivutveckling varaskoltillhörighet och pedagogisk ledning under dessa första skolår.</p>

This study investigates perceptual effects of discharge rate adaptation in the auditory-nerve fibers. Discrimination tests showed that brief synthetic stimuli with stationary formants and periodic source were better discriminated when they had an abrupt as opposed to a gradual onset (non-adapted vs adapted condition). This effect was not observed for corresponding stimuli with noise source. Discrimination among synthetic /da/ stimuli (abrupt onsets) was worse than among /ad/ stimuli when the respective onset and offset frequencies of the second formant (F2) were varied. Similar results were obtained for /ba/ and /ab/. The low discrimination rate in consonant-vowel stimuli (CV) was explained in terms of sensory smearing of spectral information due to rapid formant transitions. Discrimination improved when the smearing effect was reduced by holding the onset formant pattern over a certain period of time of about 1 6ms. The relatively high discrimination score for the VC stimuli was explained by residual masking; extending the VC offset did not improve discrimination. Discrimination of place of articulation in CV syllables was examined in the light of sensory smearing. Two continua of /bu-du/ and /ba-da/ utterances were used in discrimination and identification experiments. It was observed that the discrimination peak for /Cu/ was displaced from the /b/-/d/ boundary, towards a flat F2 transition, suggesting that optimal place discrimination is related to the stability of the auditory representations generated at onset. This result is discussed in relation to current views of categorical perception. / För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se

Measurements of jitter and shimmer are frequently employed to quantify laryngeal control and stability during voice production in patients(1-3). Accurate estimates of jitter and shimmer may be obtained from acoustic recordings of sustained vowels produced by patients using computer software implementing algorithms for their extraction (e.g. Praat(4) or MDVP(5)). The jitter and shimmer algorithms do not, in themselves, exclude non-stable productions and are influenced by the inclusion of silence in the analysed intervals. As a consequence, reliable measurements of jitter and shimmer are made by manually opening each sound file and selecting an interval for the computations.  The current paper proposes an alternative approach to afford a more efficient estimation of jitter and shimmer across a large set of sustained vowel recordings. Using information readily available in the acoustic signal and a combination of algorithms already available within the Praat program, a reliable method for automatic processing of only the sustained vowel in each recording of a large corpus is outlined. The method further affords the acquisition of multiple, repeatable, measurements of jitter and shimmer for sub-intervals of the vowel’s duration (applying more than one algorithm), which additionally provides information concerning the reliability of the jitter or shimmer estimates for a specific vowel  production. Comparisons with manually obtained measurements are made for the purpose of validation of the segmentation method. References 1. Gamboa J, Jiménez-Jiménez FJ, Nieto A, Montojo J, Ortí-Pareja M, Molina JA, et al. Acoustic voice analysis in patients with Parkinson's disease treated with dopaminergic drugs. Journal of Voice. 1997;11(3):314–320.  2. Kent RD, Kim Y-J. Toward an acoustic typology of motor speech disorders. Clin Linguist Phon. 2003;17(6):427–445.  3. Figueiredo ML, de Carvalho APM, Patriani FFA, Suzana BM, Ballalai FH. Acoustic voice assessment in Parkinson's disease patients submitted to posteroventral pallidotomy. Arq. Neuro-Psiquiatr. 2005;63(1):14–19.  4. Boersma P, Weenink D. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]  5. Kay Elemetrics. Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP) [Computer program] / <p>Presented at the 14th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association</p> / En kontrastiv och longitudinell studie gällande effekten av djup hjärnstimulering på Parkinsons-patienters artikulatoriska förmåga. / Intonation and rhythm in speech of patients with Parkinson ́s disease

Attityder till och värderingar om dialekter är vanligt förekommande fenomen, men precis som många andra aspekter av språk, kan även dessa förändras. Denna undersökning syftar till att utreda huruvida animerade filmer, specifikt Disneyklassiker, kan bidra till produktion och reproduktion av attityder till och värderingar om dialekter. Genom registrering av dialektala drag hos karaktärer i ett urval av Disneyklassiker och ett jämförande mellan dessa och karaktärernas egenskaper kan vissa mönster för dialektbruk ses. Bland annat att onda karaktärer enbart kan ses inom de sydsvenska och de östmellansvenska dialektgrupperna och att dialekt främst förekommer i gruppkonstellationer som lever i utanförskap eller utanför den aktuella filmens normsamhälle. För registreringen av dialektala drag har metoden öronfonetik använts. Antal dialektala karaktärer och karaktärer med bryning i Disneyklassikerna har också undersökts över tid och resultatet pekar på ett ökande bruk av dialekt och brytning i filmerna.

<p><p><p>This study aimed to identify some of the strategies students used when pronouncing unfamiliar words. Questionnaires were handed out to 94 students in the 9th grade in a medium-sized Swedish town. In addition, two teachers and 13 students were interviewed. The results indicate that the students had acquired some basic knowledge about the English sound system from phonetic training in their past education. However, there seemed to be a tendency among the students to use the trial-and-error strategy to a larger extent than using tools such as phonetic transcription in order to figure out the pronunciation of a word. The results also show that the teachers did not teach planned lessons on pronunciation, but instead it was more common that they responded to errors made by students. In conclusion, the results show that the students' knowledge in pronunciation in general was limited. In addition, there seemed to be a connection between the way the students and the teachers approached pronunciation and the student's ability to solve pronunciation issues.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p></p></p>