Clinicians and teachers may associate slow speech rate with low language ability during assessment in bilingual children. The goals of this thesis are a) to understand the relationship between speech rate and perceived language ability, and b) to understand the causes of within-utterance pauses and between-utterance pauses. English narratives for 116 Spanish–English bilingual 4–6-year-olds were analyzed for speech rate and pause time. Modifiability scores for each child were obtained. There was a low but significant correlation between speech rate and child responsivity. The distribution of between-utterance pauses was significantly different for children with high speech rates and children with low speech rates. An average of 56.5 wpm was found, confirming speech rates averages found in similar studies. These findings suggest that speech rate is one feature that SLPs attend to when considering the responsiveness of a child. Also, long between-utterance pauses can be used as an indicator of low speech rate. / text

This thesis aims to thoroughly describe the temporal characteristics of spoken Czech by means of phone durations and their changes under the influence of several prosodic and segmental factors, such as position in a higher unit (syllable, word or prosodic phrase), length of the higher unit, segmental environment, structure of the syllable or phrase-final lengthening. The speech material comes from a semi-spontaneous corpus of scripted dialogues comprising 4046 utterances by 34 speakers. The descriptions are afterwards used for the creation of a rule-based temporal model, which provides a baseline for analysing local articulation rate contours and their speaker-specificity. The results indicate, that systematic speaker-specific differences can be found in the segmental domain, as well as in the temporal contours. Moreover, speaker identification potential of articulation rate and global temporal features is also assessed. Keywords: temporal characteristics, temporal modelling, phone duration, speaker identification, Czech

No description available.

This study explored the effects of lecture speech rate and duration on L1 Chinese listeners' listening comprehension of online L2 English lectures on free-recall and cued-recall questions. There are many factors that may affect a Chinese listener's listening comprehension of online English lectures. The current study focused specifically on the effects of speech rate and duration, and explored the possibility of identifying tools that listeners might use to control these factors during online lectures in order to achieve better learning experiences. Using an exploratory quasi-experimental approach, this study explored the research questions in three phases: 1) An initial quasi-experiment was conducted via Qualtrics and applied as a pilot study; 2) The quasi-experiment was revised, with a new link sent out to potential participants from both the United States and China; and 3) Quasi-experiment responses were collected and analyzed. Based on 28 participant responses, the findings from the current study suggest that the interaction between speech rate and duration impacted L1 Chinese listener's comprehension of online L2 English lectures. The findings also suggest that study participants' responses on various types of questions were affected differently by the speech rate and duration of the lectures. / Doctor of Philosophy / It is assumed that the slower and the shorter the listening material is, the better the foreign language learner's listening comprehension will be. Is this true? This study explored how a lecture's speech rate and duration may affect L1 Chinese listeners' listening comprehension of online L2 English lectures on free-recall and cued-recall questions. It discusses the possibility of identifying tools for listeners to control the speech rate and duration of online lectures in order to help listeners achieve better learning experiences. Using an exploratory quasi-experimental approach, this study explored the research questions in three phases: 1) An initial quasi-experiment was conducted via Qualtrics and applied as a pilot study; 2) The quasi-experiment was revised, with a new link sent out to potential participants from both the United States and China; and 3) Quasi-experiment responses were collected and analyzed. Based on 28 participant responses, the findings from the current study suggest that speech rate and duration worked together to impact L1 Chinese listeners' comprehension of online L2 English lectures. The findings also suggest that study participants' responses on various types of questions were affected differently by the speech rate and duration of the lectures.

The present thesis is concerned with the topic of fluency in learner language, more precisely of two types of fluency - perceived and productive. Little is known about L2 fluency, especially about the fluency of Czech learners of English. The main aim of the thesis is to establish whether there is a correlation between productive fluency, represented by speech rate, and perceived fluency, represented by native speakers' evaluations. In addition, it aims at better understanding the process of evaluation of perceived fluency by native speakers of English. The material for the analysis were samples of recordings from the LINDSEI corpus, for which speech rate in WPM was calculated, evaluations of fluency of these samples by native speakers of English on a 7-point scale and the raters' commentaries on the evaluation process. The analysis tries to prove or disprove the hypothesis that speech rate is one of the features which influence perceived fluency. The results show medium correlations for two raters, low or no correlations for the rest of the raters, showing together with the commentaries, that there is a relation between perceived fluency and speech rate, but it is not as strong as previous research suggests. The results show that fluency is a complicated, highly subjective phenomenon, and further...

Tidigare forskning har visat att barn med typisk utveckling går från en visuell strategi till en fonologisk. Huruvida denna utveckling sker hos personer med utvecklingsstörning är oklart. De flesta forskare är överens om att dessa personer har en nedsättning i den fonologiska loopen. Om denna nedsättning beror på strukturella avvikelser eller utvecklingsförsening är forskarna inte eniga om. Det är även oklart var en eventuell strukturnedsättning skulle sitta. Studiens syfte var att undersöka om ungdomar med utvecklingsstörning använder sig av en fonologisk strategi, styrd av den fonologiska loopen, vid visuellt presenterat arbetsminnestest. Ordlängdseffekten, spann på bilder, ordproduktionshastighet samt korrelationen mellan de två sistnämnda undersöktes. Resultaten jämfördes mot en mental kontrollgrupp matchad i mental ålder. Ingen av grupperna uppvisade någon ordlängdseffekt på arbetsminnets kapacitetsnivå (spannivå) men den mental åldersmatchade gruppen uppvisade detta på spannivå plus en enhet.  Båda grupperna visade en positiv korrelation mellan spann och ordproduktionshastighet. Det går att diskutera hurvida testning har skett av ordproduktionshastighet eller benämningshastighet. Det är därför svårt att dra slutsatser utifrån resultaten men de skulle kunna tyda på att ungdomarna med utvecklingsstörning använder sig av en annan minnesstrategi än barnen med typisk utveckling. Möjligtvis använder sig ungdomarna med utvecklingsstörning av en fonologisk strategi men spekultioner om eventuell koppling till långtidsminnet eller användning av en visuell strategi tas upp. En förklaring till att de använder sig av en annan strategi skulle kunna vara att de faktiskt har en strukturell nedsättning i någon del av den fonologiska loopen. / Previous research has found that children with typical development begin with a visual memory strategy and then develop a phonological strategy. Whether this development takes place in individuals with intellectual disabilities is unclear. Most researchers agree that they seem to have a deficiency in the phonological loop. Researchers disagree whether the deficiency is caused by a structural deviation or a developmental delay. What is also unclear is where a possible structural deviation would be located. The purpose of this study was to investigate if adolescents with intellectual disabilities use a phonological memory strategy, controlled by the phonological loop, at a visually presented memory span test. Word length effect, span level on pictures, speech rate and the correlation between the latter two was investigated. The results were compared to a control group, matched for mental age. None of the groups showed any word length effect at their working memory capacity level but the control group showed a word length effect at capacity level plus one unit. Both of the groups showed a positive correlation between speech rate and span. It can be discussed whether speech rate or naming speed is tested. Owing to that it is difficult to draw any conclusions from the results. Regardless of what we have tested the results could indicate that the adolescents with intellectual disability use a different memory strategy than the children with typical development. One possible conclusion is that the adolescents with intellectual disability apply a phonological memory strategy but speculations about the use of long-term memory and a visual strategy are also discussed. One explanation could be that adolescents with intellectual disability have a structural deficiency in the phonological loop.

The aim of this study was to find out whether students participating in a study-abroad program for one and two terms improve their oral proficiency in speech rate and pronunciation of voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. The participants consist of French, German and Spanish speaking students housed in an L3 environment and interacting with primarily L2 and bilingual speakers. This study was conducted by transcribing and analysing several pre-recorded interviews.                       The results did not show any noteworthy progress in either speech rate or pronunciation, other than for the students who had the weakest oral proficiency at arrival. Nevertheless, all of the results are interesting because they indicate that oral proficiency must have many other influencing aspects. Hence, this survey suggests some reasons that partly may explain the results such as the level of previous knowledge, motivation, impact of lingua franca communities and different personality traits i.e. extroversion and introversion. Thus, the insight into how different features can affect acquiring an L2 may lead to improvements of today’s language learning environments.

The present thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of language transfer of fluency in sponteneous speech of advanced learners of English, whose first language is Czech. Particularly, it considers the transfer of speech rate and two selected speech management strategies: filled pauses and repeats. These strategies commonly occur in the speech of native speakers. Non-native speakers, however, tend to overuse these and the difference in distribution as compared to native speech can negatively influence their fluency. The thesis examines the hypothesis that speech rate and the use of filled pauses and repeats are affected by transfer from L1 alongside increased planning pressures, leading to overuse of these strategies in the speech of advanced learners and the differences in distribution. The data for analysis were taken from English and Czech recordings of eight advanced learners.

Higher-level features are considered to be a potential remedy against transmission line and cross-channel degradations, currently some of the biggest problems associated with speaker verification. Phoneme durations in particular are not altered by these factors; thus a robust duration model will be a particularly useful addition to traditional cepstral based speaker verification systems. In this dissertation we investigate the feasibility of phoneme durations as a feature for speaker verification. Simple speaker specific triphone duration models are created to statistically represent the phoneme durations. Durations are obtained from an automatic hidden Markov model (HMM) based automatic speech recognition system and are modeled using single mixture Gaussian distributions. These models are applied in a speaker verification system (trained and tested on the YOHO corpus) and found to be a useful feature, even when used in isolation. When fused with acoustic features, verification performance increases significantly. A novel speech rate normalization technique is developed in order to remove some of the inherent intra-speaker variability (due to differing speech rates). Speech rate variability has a negative impact on both speaker verification and automatic speech recognition. Although the duration modelling seems to benefit only slightly from this procedure, the fused system performance improvement is substantial. Other factors known to influence the duration of phonemes are incorporated into the duration model. Utterance final lengthening is known be a consistent effect and thus “position in sentence” is modeled. “Position in word” is also modeled since triphones do not provide enough contextual information. This is found to improve performance since some vowels’ duration are particularly sensitive to its position in the word. Data scarcity becomes a problem when building speaker specific duration models. By using information from available data, unknown durations can be predicted in an attempt to overcome the data scarcity problem. To this end we develop a novel approach to predict unknown phoneme durations from the values of known phoneme durations for a particular speaker, based on the maximum likelihood criterion. This model is based on the observation that phonemes from the same broad phonetic class tend to co-vary strongly, but that there is also significant cross-class correlations. This approach is tested on the TIMIT corpus and found to be more accurate than using back-off techniques. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

The diploma thesis deals with the issue of speech rate. The theoretical part briefly describes the investigation of speech tempo. It defines the types of tempo examined in this study (articulation rate and modified speaking rate) and factors that influence the tempo of speech. The practical part of the thesis aims to ascertain whether speech rate on the stage has increased and whether it is influenced by the type of text (monologue, dialogue, monological dialogue). The material consists of four theatre productions (Lakomec from 1972 and 2004 and Naši furianti from 1979 and 2006). Therefore we do not investigate gradual changes within the given periods, but instead compare two pairs of productions of the same dramatic text, realized with a time interval of approximately 30 years. A linear mixed-effects model was used as the main method for statistical evaluation of results gathered by measuring the speech rate. The results show that neither articulation rate nor modified speaking rate changed significantly in the observed productions. Differences with some statistical significance were obtained for comparison of tempo in texts of differing type, specifically in texts of different line lengths. The results relate especially to articulation rate, lesser to modified speaking rate.