Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-103). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-84).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Howard Goldstein, Florida State University, College of Communication, Dept. of Communication Disorders. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 2, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Science in Audiology

Few studies have attempted to operationalize metaphor or measure its effect on receivers. This thesis suggests that the language used to frame information has a powerful impact on receivers. The experiment following the literature review shows that the use of a {family, plant, biology} metaphor cluster produces significantly greater donations of money to an organization. Better, though nonsignificant, results on other dependent measures were also obtained using the {family, plant, biology} cluster rather than the {war, machine, death} cluster. Theoretical implications and organizational applications of these findings are discussed and new research directions are proposed.

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This thesis was concerned with coarticulatory patterns across various speech articulators and whether these can be accounted for by similar movement organization principles. Movements of the tongue dorsum, and the upper and lower pharynx, were recorded separately by a computerized ultrasound system during the production of vowel-consonant-vowel sequences. The movement amplitude, duration, and onset (relative to specific acoustic events) were computed for each articulator for a variety of speech gestures. It was shown that both spatial and temporal aspects of the movements varied in a similar manner for the three articulators as a function of the phonological context. The results indicate that spatiotemporal articulatory adjustments for vowels co-occur with the articulation of a consonant. This pattern can be accounted for by the notions of co-production and the 'spatial proximity' hypothesis.

Models of speech production postulate that, in order to facilitate rapid and precise control of articulation, the predicted auditory feedback is sent to the auditory system to be compared with incoming sensory data. If this is so, an 'error' signal may be observed when the predicted auditory feedback and the sensory consequences of vocalization do not match. I used event-related fMRI to look for the neural concomitants of such an error signal. In two conditions volunteers whispered 'ted'. In one of these, voice-gated noise implemented in our real-time processing system was used to mask the auditory feedback, which should result in an error signal. Two other conditions were yoked to the production conditions (either clearly heard or masked), but were listen-only and therefore no error signal would be expected. I acquired whole-brain EPI data from 21 subjects using a fast-sparse design. Activity in the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally was significantly greater for clear than masked speech during the listen-only trials (F(1,20)≥12.84, p<0.002), and significantly higher for masked than for clear speech in the production trials (F(1,20)≥6.68, p<0.02). This crossover interaction indicates that speech production results in corollary discharge in the auditory system and furthermore suggests that this corollary discharge reflects expectations about the sensory concomitants of speech acts. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-26 10:02:35.972

In a reverberant enclosure, acoustic speech signals are degraded by reflections from walls, ceilings, and objects. Restoring speech quality and intelligibility from reverberated speech has received increasing interest over the past few years. Although multiple channel dereverberation methods provide some improvements in speech quality/ intelligibility, single-channel dereverberation remains an open challenge. Two types of advanced single-channel dereverberation methods, namely acoustic domain spectral subtraction and modulation domain filtering, provide small improvement in speech quality and intelligibility. In this thesis, we study single-channel dereverberation algorithms. Firstly, an upper bound of time-frequency masking (TFM) performance for dereverberation is obtained using ideal time-frequency masking (ITFM). ITFM has access to both the clean and reverberated speech signals in estimating the binary-mask matrix. ITFM implements binary masking in the short time Fourier transform (STFT) domain, preserving only those spectral components less corrupted by reverberation. The experiment results show that single-channel ITFM outperforms four existing multi-channel dereverberation methods and suggest that large potential improvements could be obtained using TFM for speech dereverberation. Secondly, a novel modulation domain spectral subtraction method is proposed for dereverberation. This method estimates modulation domain long reverberation spectral variance (LRSV) from time domain LRSV using a statistical room impulse response (RIR) model and implements spectral subtraction in the modulation domain. On one hand, different from acoustic domain spectral subtraction, our method implements spectral subtraction in the modulation domain, which has been shown to play an important role in speech perception. On the other hand, different from modulation domain filtering which uses a time-invariant filter, our method takes the changes of reverberated speech spectral variance along time into account and implements spectral subtraction adaptively. Objective and informal subjective tests show that our proposed method outperforms two existing state-of-the-art single-channel dereverberation algorithms. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-07-20 03:18:30.021

No description available.