Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of learning to read on developing phonemic awareness. The study was designed to determine whether a relationship exists between the development of the five levels of phonemic awareness identified by Adams (1991), and the phases of reading acquisition described by Biemiller (1970). Data pertaining to phonemic awareness and oral readings were collected in December, February, and April for 71 first grade children. Measures of phonemic awareness included five instruments; one for each level of phonemic awareness. Students were determined to be in one of the three phases of reading acquisition, described by Biemiller (1970), on the basis of their approaches to graphic and contextual cues in text.The analysis of data consisted of two procedures. The first, a series of one-way analyses of variance, examined the relationship between performance on measures of phonemic awareness and membership in one of the three phases of reading acquisition. The second procedure, a series of two-way repeated measures analyses of variance, were computed to examine differences in phonemic awareness between students who experienced a change in phases and those who did not.Results of the one-way analyses found significant group effects for each of the measures except the Rhyming task. However, when means and standard error were examined, it was determined that the Word Analysis task (measuring the ability to manipulate phonemes) was the only instrument that revealed both practically and statistically significant differences. Therefore, the ability to manipulate phonemes appeared to be the distinguishing factor between children in the phases of reading acquisition.Results of the two-way analyses of variance found that only performance on the Word Analysis task revealed significance for group membership. The performance of those students who had changed phases was found to have improved significantly, and at a more rapid pace, than those students who had remained in the same phase throughout the study. The findings indicate that it is during that period of time when children are actively attending to the graphic cues in text that they are also learning to manipulate phonemes. / Department of Elementary Education

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2002. / A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Western Sydney, December 2002. Bibliography : leaves 271-298.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 393-404).

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-03-29Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:55:18Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 goncalves_ss_me_arafcl.pdf: 981054 bytes, checksum: 4bfd77bc9752de7af3b9c7cdaf9b97f7 (MD5) / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / A aprendizagem da escrita requer mais do que a simples transposição dos sons da fala em um outro plano. É preciso tornar-se consciente das estruturas fonológicas da linguagem e compreender o princípio alfabético. A condição para que a criança internalize procedimentos de um sitema alfabético implica a capacidade de lidar com fonemas, de chegar à noção de que as plavras são compostas pro sons e que estes correspondem a letras que se empregam para escrever. Para se alcançar esse saber a respeito das relações estreitas e precisas entre letras e sons, a criança percorre um longo processo de construção de seus conhecimentos no mundo da escrita. Para um estudo mais objetivo e prático da consciência fonêmica, analisamos dados coletados de um jovem que manifesta dificuldades significativas em termos de domínio da escrita. Percebemos que sua consciência acerca dos fonemas evoluiu, no entanto, ele ainda não consegue perceber e representar unidades distintivas em final de sílabas complexas cuja estrutura é CVC. / Learning how to write requires more than the simple transpositions of speech sounds into another plan. It is necessary to be aware of phonological structures of the language and to comprehend the alphabetical principle. The condition for child to grasp the mechanisms of an alphabetical system implies in the ability of dealing with phonemes, of noting that words are composed by sounds, which correspond to letters used to write. In order to reach that knowledge about the close and precise relationship between letters and sounds, a clhild goes through a long construction process of his/her knowledge into the world of writing. In order to perform a more practical and objective survey of the phonemics awareness, data collected from a teenager who presents significant difficulties in the field of writing. The development of his conscience about the phonemes was noted, even though he was not able to note or represent distinctive units at the end of complex syllables endowed with the CVC structure.

Orientador: Sílvia Dinucci Fernandes / Banca: Ademar da Silva / Banca: Letícia Marcondes Rezende / Resumo: A aprendizagem da escrita requer mais do que a simples transposição dos sons da fala em um outro plano. É preciso tornar-se consciente das estruturas fonológicas da linguagem e compreender o princípio alfabético. A condição para que a criança internalize procedimentos de um sitema alfabético implica a capacidade de lidar com fonemas, de chegar à noção de que as plavras são compostas pro sons e que estes correspondem a letras que se empregam para escrever. Para se alcançar esse saber a respeito das relações estreitas e precisas entre letras e sons, a criança percorre um longo processo de construção de seus conhecimentos no mundo da escrita. Para um estudo mais objetivo e prático da consciência fonêmica, analisamos dados coletados de um jovem que manifesta dificuldades significativas em termos de domínio da escrita. Percebemos que sua consciência acerca dos fonemas evoluiu, no entanto, ele ainda não consegue perceber e representar unidades distintivas em final de sílabas complexas cuja estrutura é CVC. / Abstract: Learning how to write requires more than the simple transpositions of speech sounds into another plan. It is necessary to be aware of phonological structures of the language and to comprehend the alphabetical principle. The condition for child to grasp the mechanisms of an alphabetical system implies in the ability of dealing with phonemes, of noting that words are composed by sounds, which correspond to letters used to write. In order to reach that knowledge about the close and precise relationship between letters and sounds, a clhild goes through a long construction process of his/her knowledge into the world of writing. In order to perform a more practical and objective survey of the phonemics awareness, data collected from a teenager who presents significant difficulties in the field of writing. The development of his conscience about the phonemes was noted, even though he was not able to note or represent distinctive units at the end of complex syllables endowed with the CVC structure. / Mestre

Communicating through speech is an important part of everyday life, and losing that ability can be devastating. Millions of patients around the globe have lost the ability to hear or speak due to auditory cortex deficits. Doctor’s ability to help these patients has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the speech processing mechanisms in the human auditory cortex. This dissertation focuses on enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of speech encoding in human primary and secondary auditory cortices using two methods of electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocorticography (ECoG). Phonemes are the smallest linguistic elements that can change a word’s meaning. I characterize EEG responses to continuous speech by obtaining the time-locked responses to phoneme instances (phoneme-related potential). I show that responses to different phoneme categories are organized by phonetic features, and each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces multiple distinguishable neural responses occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Comparing the patterns of phoneme similarity in the neural responses and the acoustic signals confirms a repetitive appearance of acoustic distinctions of phonemes in the neural data. Analysis of the phonetic and speaker information in neural activations reveals that different time intervals jointly encode the acoustic similarity of both phonetic and speaker categories. These findings provide evidence for a dynamic neural transformation of low-level speech features as they propagate along the auditory pathway, and form an empirical framework to study the representational changes in learning, attention, and speech disorders. Later in this dissertation, I use ECoG neural recordings to explore mechanisms of speech communication in real-world environments that require adaptation to changing acoustic conditions. I explore how the human auditory cortex adapts as a new noise source appears in or disappears from the acoustic scene. To investigate the mechanisms of adaptation, neural activity in the auditory cortex of six human subjects were measured as they listened to speech with abruptly changing background noises. Rapid and selective suppression of acoustic features of noise in the neural responses are observed. This suppression results in enhanced representation and perception of speech acoustic features. The degree of adaptation to different background noises varies across neural sites and is predictable from the tuning properties and speech specificity of the sites. Moreover, adaptation to background noise is unaffected by the attentional focus of the listener. The convergence of these neural and perceptual effects reveals the intrinsic dynamic mechanisms that enable a listener to filter out irrelevant sound sources in a changing acoustic scene. Finally, in the last chapter, I introduce the Neural Acoustic Processing Library (NAPLib). NAPLib contains a suite of tools that characterize various properties of the neural representation of speech, which can be used for characterizing electrode tuning properties, and their response to phonemes. The library is applicable to both invasive and non-invasive recordings, including electroencephalography (EEG), electrocorticography (ECoG) and magnetoecnephalography (MEG). Together, this dissertation shows new evidence for dynamic and adaptive processing of speech sounds in the auditory pathway, and provides computational tools to study the dynamics of speech encoding in the human brain.

This dissertation presents and evaluates a method to the video indexing problem by investigating a categorization method that transcribes audio content through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) combined with Dynamic Contextualization (DC), Phonetic Disparity Search (PDS) and Metaphone indexation. The suggested approach applies genome pattern matching algorithms with computational summarization to build a database infrastructure that provides an indexed summary of the original audio content. PDS complements the contextual phoneme indexing approach by optimizing topic seek performance and accuracy in large video content structures. A prototype was established to translate news broadcast video into text and phonemes automatically by using ASR utterance conversions. Each phonetic utterance extraction was then categorized, converted to Metaphones, and stored in a repository with contextual topical information attached and indexed for posterior search analysis. Following the original design strategy, a custom parallel interface was built to measure the capabilities of dissimilar phonetic queries and provide an interface for result analysis. The postulated solution provides evidence of a superior topic matching when compared to traditional word and phoneme search methods. Experimental results demonstrate that PDS can be 3.7% better than the same phoneme query, Metaphone search proved to be 154.6% better than the same phoneme seek and 68.1 % better than the equivalent word search.

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