BACKGROUND: Many families of children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) pursue the development of spoken language through the use of advanced hearing technology and intensive, specialized listening and spoken language (LSL) intervention services. LSL practitioners utilize caregiver coaching to transfer knowledge and skills to parents, equipping them to effectively support their child's listening and language development. Caregiver coaching builds parents' capacity to implement intervention strategies within daily routines to maximize learning opportunities to reach this goal. While caregiver coaching is a hallmark of LSL practice, there is a lack of consensus and paucity of evidence to support its use with children who are DHH learning to listen and talk. The purpose of this research was therefore to gain a greater understanding of caregiver coaching practices in LSL services for families of children ages birth-3 who are DHH. OBJECTIVES: 1) to provide a synthesis of the literature and identify gaps in the existing knowledge base regarding coaching in LSL services, 2) to gain insight into practitioners' and caregivers' experiences with coaching in LSL services, and 3) to gain a better understanding of coaching practices in LSL services with families of children who are DHH. METHODOLOGY: The first objective was addressed by performing a scoping review of the literature to synthesize the relevant research and professional practice recommendations and identify gaps in the knowledge base regarding coaching caregivers in LSL practice. The remaining objectives were addressed through qualitative, semi-structured interviews and video observation discussions with LSL practitioners and caregivers to gain insight into caregivers' perspectives and practitioners' perspectives and practices. Interviews were conducted with 14 practitioners and 13 caregivers at three intervention sites in the US and Canada. These sites represent three different service delivery models of LSL intervention for families of children who are DHH. RESULTS: The scoping review findings revealed a lack of consensus in the literature regarding the principles and practices of caregiver coaching in LSL services. We presented the following topics found in the literature: coaching practices, training for coaching, the effectiveness of coaching, and recommendations for coaching. Caregivers reported coaching as a positive experience; however, coaching practices differed among sites and between practitioners, supporting the results of the scoping review. The caregivers indicated factors that contribute to a positive coaching relationship, including practitioner characteristics, establishing explicit expectations, and adapting to caregivers' changing needs over time. The practitioner interviews also supported a lack of consistency in coaching practices between sites and indicated that underlying beliefs impact how practitioners coach and engage caregivers. CONCLUSION: The findings from this dissertation provide practical, actionable steps that LSL practitioners can implement to develop and support the caregiver coaching relationship. These findings have the potential to inform professional preparation and development activities to better equip practitioners to engage caregivers in the intervention process, and ultimately, positively impact the listening and spoken language outcomes of the children they serve.

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment caused by damage in the regions of the brain that support language. The Main Concept Analysis (MCA) is a published formal assessment battery that allows the quantification of the presence, accuracy, completeness, and efficiency of content in spoken discourse produced by persons with aphasia (PWA). It utilizes a sequential picture description task (with four sets of pictures) for language sample elicitation. The MCA results can also be used clinically for targeting appropriate interventions of aphasic output. The purpose of this research is to develop a Spanish adaptation of the MCA by establishing normative data based on native unimpaired speakers of Spanish. In the pilot study, thirty-eight unimpaired Spanish participants were recruited by previous student researchers. Each participant was asked to complete a demographic questionnaire and a short form of the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test was administered to rule out any unidentified language problems. The MCA was then be administered to participants and their oral description was audio recorded for later orthographic transcription. A total of 81 unimpaired participants that consisted of different genders, ages (young, middle-aged, and older groups), levels of education (high versus low), and dialect origins (e.g., Spain, Puerto Rico, Columbia) were recruited in the main study to establish a more balanced set of data. One person with aphasia (PWA) was recruited for this study. Based on the collected normative samples, the essential information was identified for each participant. A dialect-specific scoring criteria including target main concepts and lexicons of the Spanish-MCA were developed. The Spanish-MCA was conducted to test the validity of the assessment battery. In the current study, a preliminary set of data using the MCA scoring criteria has been established. Similar to findings in Kong and Yeh 2015, the results of the Spanish-MCA showed age and education did impact discourse performance. Results from one-way ANOVA revealed statistical differences between age groups and education levels of the unimpaired participants recruited. The groups of participants with a higher education conveyed more AC concepts compared to the other dialect groups. To compare data for PWA, it is suggested that a larger sample size of PWA be recruited to validate the Spanish-MCA.

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The study investigated the effects of noise, one of the major environmental stressors, on speech perception and spoken word comprehension. Three tasks were employed – listening span, listening comprehension, and shadowing – in order to find out to what extent different types of background noise affected speech perception and encoding into working verbal memory, as well as spoken word comprehension. Six types of maskers were used – (1) single babble masker in English, (2) single babble masker in Mandarin, (3) multi babble masker in Greek and (4) construction site noise, (5) narrow-band speech signal emulating phone effect and (6) reverberated speech signal. These could be categorized as energetic (2, 3, and 4), informational (1) and signal degradation (6 and 7) noise maskers. The study found that general speech perception and specific word comprehension are not equally affected by the different noise maskers – if shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on working memory, word comprehension and semantic inference. The results indicate that informational masking is most detrimental to speech perception, while energetic masking and sound degradation are most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. The results imply that masking categories must be used with caution, since not all maskers belonging to one category had the same effect on performance. Finally, introducing a noise component to any memory task, particularly to speech perception and spoken word recognition tasks, adds another cognitively stimulating real-life dimension to them. This could be beneficial to students training to become interpreters helping them to get accustomed to working in a noisy environment, an inevitable part of this profession. A final study explored the effects of noise on automatic speech recognition. The same types of noise as in the human studies were tested on two automatic speech recognition programs: Otter and Ava. This technology was originally developed as an aid for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, their application has since been extended to a broad range of fields, including education, healthcare and finance. The analysis of the transcripts created by the two programs found speech to text technology to be fairly resilient to the degradation of the speech signal, while mechanical background noise still presented a serious challenge to this technology. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The study investigated the effects of noise, one of the major environmental stressors, on speech perception and spoken word comprehension. Throughout three different tasks (listening span task, in which participants were asked to recall a certain number of items from a list; listening comprehension task, in which listeners needed to demonstrate understanding of the incoming speech; and shadowing, in which listeners were required to listen and simultaneously repeat aloud the incoming speech), various types of background noise were presented in order to find out which ones would cause more disruptions to the two cognitive processes. The study found that general speech perception and specific word comprehension are not equally affected by the different noise maskers – provided that shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on working memory, word comprehension and semantic inference, or the way the listener combines and synthesizes information from different parts of a text (or speech) in order to establish its meaning. The results indicate that understandable background speech is most detrimental to speech perception, while any type of noise, if loud enough, as well as degraded target speech signal are most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. Finally, introducing a noise component to these tasks, adds another cognitively stimulating real-life dimension, which could potentially be beneficial to students of interpreting by getting them accustomed to working in a noisy environment, an inevitable part of this profession. Another field of application is the optimization of speech recognition software. In the last study, the same types of noise as used in the first studies were tested on two automatic speech recognition programs. This technology was originally developed as an aid for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, its application has since been extended to a broad range of fields including education, healthcare and finance. The analysis of the transcripts created by the two programs found speech to text technology to be fairly resilient to a degraded speech signal, while mechanical background noise still presented a serious challenge to this technology.

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Sequence-to-sequence learning led to significant improvements to machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These advancements were first reflected in spoken language translation (SLT) when using a cascade of (at least) ASR and MT with the new "neural" models, then by using sequence-to-sequence learning to directly translate the input audio speech into text in the target language. In this thesis we cover both approaches to the SLT task. First, we show the limits of NMT in terms of robustness to input errors when compared to the previous phrase-based state of the art. We then focus on the NMT component to achieve better translation quality with higher computational efficiency by using a network based on weakly-recurrent units. Our last work involving a cascade explores the effects on the NMT robustness when adding automatic transcripts to the training data. In order to move to the direct speech-to-text approach, we introduce MuST-C, the largest multilingual SLT corpus for training direct translation systems. MuST-C increases significantly the size of publicly available data for this task as well as their language coverage. With such availability of data, we adapted the Transformer architecture to the SLT task for its computational efficiency . Our adaptation, which we call S-Transformer, is meant to better model the audio input, and with it we set a new state of the art for MuST-C. Building on these positive results, we finally use S-Transformer with different data applications: i) one-to-many multilingual translation by training it on MuST-C; ii participation to the IWSLT 19 shared task with data augmentation; and iii) instance-based adaptation for using the training data at test time. The results in this thesis show a steady quality improvement in direct SLT. Our hope is that the presented resources and technological solutions will increase its adoption in the near future, so to make multilingual information access easier in a globalized world.

This work has taken the region of Qwaqwa as a case study. Through this study, the researcher attempted to join in the debate around language varieties that occur as a result of contact between different language groups. To achieve this objective, the factors that have an impact on Sesotho spoken in the Qwaqwa area and, in particular, in schools, have been assessed. The researcher provides a broad and general picture of the language situation and patterns of language use in the Qwaqwa area. A brief overview of the geographical description, historical background and economic development of Qwaqwa is given. Some of the linguistic phenomena that play a role in language variation in this area fall under the spotlight. Language contact, i.e. language and dialect, regional and social dialect, the use of language and the impact of language contact between languages is discussed. Patterns and the extent of language contact and the resultant effects of interference, codeswitching and borrowing as well as the processes and points at which these processes occur are identified. The major similarities and relationships between spoken and written Sesotho, as used by learners in Qwaqwa schools, is highlighted with the discussion focussing on the linguistic description of the similarities and relationships between the two forms. / African Languages / (M.A.(Afican Languages))