Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This thesis presents thirteen research papers published between 1987-97, and a summary and discussion of their contribution to the field of developmental speech disorders. The publications collectively constitute a body of work with two overarching themes. The first is methodological: all the publications report articulatory data relating to tongue movements recorded using the instrumental technique of electropalatography (EPG). The second is the clinical orientation of the research: the EPG data are interpreted throughout for the purpose of informing the theory and practice of speech pathology. The majority of the publications are original, experimental studies of lingual articulation in children with developmental speech disorders. At the same time the publications cover a broad range of theoretical and clinical issues relating to lingual articulation including: articulation in normal speakers, the clinical applications of EPG, data analysis procedures, articulation in second language learners, and the effect of oral surgery on articulation. The contribution of the publications to the field of developmental speech disorders of unknown origin, also known as phonological impairment or functional articulation disorder, is summarised and discussed. In total, EPG data from fourteen children are reported. The collective results from the publications do not support the cognitive/linguistic explanation of developmental speech disorders. Instead, the EPG findings are marshalled to build the case that specific deficits in speech motor control can account for many of the diverse speech error characteristics identified by perceptual analysis in previous studies. Some of the children studied had speech motor deficits that were relatively discrete, involving, for example, an apparently isolated difficulty with tongue tiplblade groove formation for sibilant targets. Articulatory difficulties of the 'discrete' or specific type are consistent with traditional views of functional lingual articulation in developmental speech disorders articulation disorder. EPG studies of tongue control in normal adults provided insights into a different type of speech motor control deficit observed in the speech of many of the children studied. Unlike the children with discrete articulatory difficulties, others produced abnormal EPG patterns for a wide range of lingual targets. These abnormal gestures were characterised by broad, undifferentiated tongue-palate contact, accompanied by variable approach and release phases. These 'widespread', undifferentiated gestures are interpreted as constituting a previously undescribed form of speech motor deficit, resulting from a difficulty in controlling the tongue tip/blade system independently of the tongue body. Undifferentiated gestures were found to result in variable percepts depending on the target and the timing of the particular gesture, and may manifest as perceptually acceptable productions, phonological substitutions or phonetic distortions. It is suggested that discrete and widespread speech motor deficits reflect different stages along a developmental or severity continuum, rather than distinct subgroups with different underlying deficits. The children studied all manifested speech motor control deficits of varying degrees along this continuum. It is argued that it is the unique anatomical properties of the tongue, combined with the high level of spatial and temporal accuracy required for tongue tiplblade and tongue body co-ordination, that put lingual control specifically at risk in young children. The EPG findings question the validity of assumptions made about the presence/absence of speech motor control deficits, when such assumptions are based entirely on non-instrumental assessment procedures. A novel account of the sequence of acquisition of alveolar stop articulation in children with normal speech development is proposed, based on the EPG data from the children with developmental speech disorders. It is suggested that broad, undifferentiated gestures may occur in young normal children, and that adult-like lingual control develops gradually through the processes of differentiation and integration. Finally, the EPG fmdings are discussed in relation to two recent theoretical frameworks, that of psycho linguistic models and a dynamic systems approach to speech acquisition.

La evaluación en motricidad orofacial considera múltiples criterios, entre ellos, la medida de los tercios faciales y las características del frenillo lingual. El primero, nos permite designar el biotipo facial que presenta el paciente; el cual puede estar asociado a alguna alteración y nos sugiere un esquema básico de tratamiento. El segundo, características del frenillo lingual, es necesario conocer qué tipo de frenillos presenta la población y cómo se relaciona con la producción del habla; dicha relación tiene un sustento teórico y además nos permite corroborar estudios ya realizados acerca del tema. La presente investigación es de tipo exploratoria cuyo objetivo es conocer el tipo facial y las características del frenillo lingual en adolescentes. Para obtener dicha información utilizamos tres instrumentos: a) Protocolo de evaluación miofuncional, b) Protocolo del frenillo lingual y c) Calibrador digital. La muestra está compuesta por 307 estudiantes con edades entre 15 y 18 años; pertenecientes a la Institución Educativa. “Sor Ana de los Ángeles” del Callao. Los hallazgos evidencian que el tipo facial predominante es el mesofacial con 48%, seguido del dolicofacial con 37% y finaliza con 15% correspondiente al tipo braquifacial. Asimismo, hallamos un 12% de la población con alteración en el frenillo lingual, del cual el 11% corresponde a frenillo corto y 1% tiene frenillo anteriorizado; no se hallaron sujetos con alteración de frenillo corto y anteriorizado. El 12% de adolescentes con frenillo alterado son evaluados en habla espontánea y hallamos que, 20 adolescentes presentan dificultades en el habla, con alteración en la producción de fones linguodentales y alveolares. Al presentar la discusión de resultados inferimos que no existe relación entre el tipo facial y el frenillo de lengua alterado. No obstante, si evidenciamos una relación entre el frenillo alterado y la producción de habla. / The present investigation is of the exploratory type which target was to know the facial type and the characteristics of lingual bridle in adolescents. To obtain the above mentioned information we use three instruments: 1. Myofunctional evaluation protocol (section II), 2. Lingual bridle Protocol of language (section IV, V and VI.) and 3. Digital gage. It was 307 students who formed the sample. With ages between 15 and 18 years; belonging to “Sor Ana de los Angeles School” in Callao. The finds demonstrate that the predominant facial type was mesofacial with 48%, followed by the dolichofacial with 37 %, and finally with 15 % is the brachyfacial. Also we find 12 % with alteration in lingual bridle, of which 11 % corresponds to short lingual bridle and 1 % has anterior lingual bridle. There were not finds of people with short anterior lingual bridle. The adolescents with alteration in lingual bridle were evaluated in spontaneous speech; we found that of 37 adolescents, 20 present difficulties in the speech, with alteration in the production of dental and alveolar phonemes. While presenting the results discussions, we infer that there is no relation between the type of face and alteration lingual bridle of language. Nevertheless, we found a relation between the alteration in alteration lingual bridle and the speech production. / Tesis

Lingual ultrasound is emerging as an important tool for providing visual feedback to second language learners. In this study, ultrasound videos were recorded in sagittal plane as it provides an image for the full tongue surface in one scan, unlike the transverse plane which provides an information for small portion of the tongue in a single scan. The data were collected from five Arabic speakers as they pronounced fourteen Arabic sounds in three different vowel contexts. The sounds were repeated three times to form 630 ultrasound videos. The thesis algorithm was characterized by four steps. First: denoising the ultrasound image by using the combined curvelet transform and shock filter. Second: automatic selection of the tongue contour area. Third: tongue contour approximation and missing data estimation. Fourth: tongue contour transformation from image space to full concatenated signal and features extraction. The automatic tongue tracking results were validated by measuring the mean sum of distances between automatic and manual tongue contour tracking to give an accuracy of 0.9558mm. The validation for the feature extraction showed that the average mean squared error between the extracted tongue signature for different sound repetitions was 0.000858mm, which means that the algorithm could extract a unique signature for each sound and across different vowel contexts with a high degree of similarity. Unlike other related works, the algorithm showed an efficient and robust approach that could extract the tongue contour and the significant feature for the dynamic tongue movement on the full video frames, not just on the significant single and static video frame as used in the conventional method. The algorithm did not need any training data and had no limitation for the video size or the frame number. The algorithm did not fail during tongue extraction and did not need any manual re-initialization. Even when the ultrasound image recordings missed some tongue contour information, the thesis approach could estimate the missing data with a high degree of accuracy. The usefulness of the thesis approach as it can help the linguistic researchers to replace the manual tongue tracking by an automated tracking to save the time, then extracts the dynamics features for the full speech behavior to give better understanding of the tongue movement during the speech to develop a language learning tool for the second language learners. / Graduate

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With the emergence and proliferation of Internet services and e-commerce applications, a tremendous amount of information is accessible online, typically as textual documents. To facilitate subsequent access to and leverage from this information, the efficient and effective management¡Xspecifically, text categorization¡Xof the ever-increasing volume of textual documents is essential to organizations and person. Existing text categorization techniques focus mainly on categorizing monolingual documents. However, with the globalization of business environments and advances in Internet technology, an organization or person often retrieves and archives documents in different languages, thus creating the need for cross-lingual text categorization. Motivated by the significance of and need for such a cross-lingual text categorization technique, this thesis designs a technique with two different category assignment methods, namely, individual- and cluster-based. The empirical evaluation results show that the cross-lingual text categorization technique performs well and the cluster-based method outperforms the individual-based method.

Text categorization deals with the automatic learning of a text categorization model from a training set of preclassified documents on the basis of their contents and the assignment of unclassified documents to appropriate categories. Most of existing text categorization techniques deal with monolingual documents (i.e., all documents are written in one language) during the text categorization model learning and category assignment (or prediction). However, with the globalization of business environments and advances in Internet technology, an organization or individual often generates/acquires and subsequently archives documents in different languages, thus creating the need for cross-lingual text categorization (CLTC). Existing studies on CLTC focus on the prediction-corpus translation-based approach that lacks of a systematic mechanism for reducing translation noises; thus, limiting their cross-lingual categorization effectiveness. Motivated by the needs of providing more effective CLTC support, we design a training-corpus translation-based CLTC approach. Using the prediction-corpus translation-based approach as the performance benchmark, our empirical evaluation results show that our proposed CLTC approach achieves significantly better classification effectiveness than the benchmark approach does in both Chinese

Question answering from a corpus of question-answer (QA) pairs accepts a user question in a natural language, and retrieves relevant QA pairs in the corpus. Most of existing question answering techniques are monolingual in nature. That is, the language used for expressing a user question is identical to that for the QA pairs in the corpus. However, with the globalization of business environments and advances in Internet technology, more and more online information and knowledge are stored in the question-answer pair format on the Internet or intranet in different languages. To facilitate users¡¦ access to these QA-pair documents using natural language queries in such a multilingual environment, there is a pressing need for the support of cross-lingual question answering (CLQA). In response, this study designs a thesaurus based CLQA technique. We empirically evaluate our proposed CLQA technique, using a monolingual question answering technique and a machine translation based CLQA technique as performance benchmarks. Our empirical evaluation results show that our proposed CLQA technique achieves a satisfactory effectiveness when using that of the monolingual question answering technique as a performance reference. Moreover, our empirical evaluation results suggest our proposed thesaurus based CLQA technique significantly outperforms the benchmark machine translation based CLQA technique.

With the rapid emergence and proliferation of Internet and the trend of globalization, a tremendous number of textual documents written in different languages are electronically accessible online. Efficiently and effectively managing these textual documents written different languages is essential to organizations and individuals. Although poly-lingual text categorization (PLTC) can be approached as a set of independent monolingual classifiers, this naïve approach employs only the training documents of the same language to construct to construct a monolingual classifier and fails to utilize the opportunity offered by poly-lingual training documents. Motivated by the significance of and need for such a poly-lingual text categorization technique, we propose a PLTC technique that takes into account all training documents of all languages when constructing a monolingual classifier for a specific language. Using the independent monolingual text categorization (MnTC) technique as our performance benchmark, our empirical evaluation results show that our proposed PLTC technique achieves higher classification accuracy than the benchmark technique does in both English and Chinese corpora. In addition, our empirical results also suggest the robustness of the proposed PLTC technique with respect to the range of training sizes investigated.

The present study aims to resolve previous disputes about whether or not non-palatalized consonants exhibit secondary velarization in Russian, and if so what this corresponds to articulatorily. Three questions are asked: 1) are Russian non-palatalized consonants velarized or not? If so, 2) what are the articulatory properties of velarization? and 3) how is the presence or absence of secondary velarization affected by adjacent vowels? To answer these questions, laryngeal and lingual ultrasound investigations were conducted on a range of non-palatalized consonants across different vowel contexts. The results of the study show that 1) Russian non-palatalized consonants are not pharyngealized in the sense of Esling (1996, 1999, 2005), 2) /l/ and /f/ are uvularized, 3) /s/ and /ʂ/ can feature either uvularization or velarization. The study also shows that secondary articulations of Russian non-palatalized consonants are inherent rather than dependent on vowel context. / Graduate / 0290 / natallia@uvic.ca